Rick Monteverde wrote:
On the other hand, there is no evidence whatsoever that humans have the ability in either measurement or computation to correctly take into account the dynamics of the vast paramater set of an ENTIRE PLANET (geez, how obvious can this be anyway???).
That does not seem obvious to me. The weather system of ENTIRE PLANET is a complex system of course, but it is not more complex than, say, an E. coli bacteria. It is infinitely less complex than the human body and brain, or the ecosystem of the Serengeti, or my back yard, for that matter. Biology beats all other subjects when it comes to complexity. The number of possible permutations of human DNA far exceeds the number of electrons in the universe. Yet despite the unimaginable complexity of biological systems we do have a handle on them. Of course it is impossible to know everything about them! We will never be able to predict behavior of individual E. coli or humans with any assurance, but we can generalize about them with confidence.
This assertion is rather like saying that because we will not fully understand E. coli in the rest of human history (probably true -- assuming people survive a few hundred million years into the future) we cannot possibly know or predict anything about E. coli today (manifestly false).
We can observe the of the entire planet as one discrete weather system with weather satellites, and the details up close with individual sensors at ground level. We can model the weather with far more ease than we can model, say, the folding of a complex protein. The most computation intense projects these days are in biology, not weather.
- Jed
