Well, yeah, I do NOT believe we can predict the climate in 100 years. But I do not believe in the basis for this argument either.

It is September 17, 1944. After the huge gains of August, the whole line has stabilized. Monty has failed to clear the Scheldte. Patton is stalled before Metz. Market Graden is just underway.

No one can predict what the next 5 days of war will bring. (Horrible news for the allies on the Western Front, as it turns out!) But can one predict who will win the war?

You bet.

By 1944, the Germans were toast, and had been since at least the previous July, if not 6 months earlier. The outcome of, say, WWI, was undeterminable until near the very end. Yet Axis chances of winning WWII a year before its end were approaching zero. And that was fairly obvious to even the most hardbitten Victory Skeptics at the time.

Likewise, I can (and do) predict with a great degree reliability that when the next orbital eccentricity cycle clicks in the world will endure another ice age. But can I predict the weather in the next 5 days?

Therefore, it is quite clear to me that it is illogical to conflate inability to predict a given matter in the short term with either ability or inability to predict long-term. They are often unrelated intellectual problems.

This can even be true if the base factors are the same: If I toss 1000 “equal” coins, I can predict with reasonable reliability that roughly 500 or so will come up heads. (With a hat-tip to the base concept of oversampling.) But can I predict what the next 5 flips will yield? Not on your nellie!

We must abandon the 5-day Vs 100-year volitility argument. It doesn’t hold water. it doesn’t feed the bulldog. It is in fact a false argument.

I don’t care HOW effect propaganda it makes–to indulge thus is to bring the debate down to the level of the worst of our opponents, and will surely return to bite us in the ass–mark my words.

NO, I DO NOT think we can predict climate a century down the road! But that has nothing, nothing, NOTHING to do with our ability or inability to predict the weather 5 days ahead.

Noel dumped alot of rain in a little time period here!

http://cache1.intelliweather.net/imagery/KPAY/sat_atlantic_640x480.jpg

Has the analysis of the “Sites visited versus the sites
NOT YET VISITED” been posted yet?

Have a look at the stuff I posted.

1. on CRN5 versus everything else.
2. MMTS versus LIG

Another thing for your readers. My analysis of the Sites visited versus the sites
NOT YET VISITED, indcates that there is some substantial warming in the 800 or so sites that we havent surveyed.

Let me share my West Coast perspective. We get Tonapah (cut off) Lows that retrograde out over the semi tropical to tropical Pacific, then come back on shore as rain makers. We’ve had a few teasers this fall along these lines. None are ever named. Why are systems like this names in NATL? Sreiously. How can one justify different op defs in different basins regarding what even constitutes a “tropical cyclone?” I know this seems a bit over the top from the NATL perspective, force of habit and all that (e.g. the “home grown” storm idea). But it needs to be questioned if people are going to count storms as evidence of “something.”