Monday, July 14, 2008

Weather Models

Frequently, news articles covering global warming cite weather models that predict the Earth's climate will warm in the coming decades. The articles never mention whether said models have accurately predicted past meteorological trends given historical data. Sometimes articles explicitly claim the models have not. In all cases, the expectation for a model to explain the past is categorically ignored.

I'd like to propose what appears to be an equally valid weather model:


printf("Earth's climate will be hotter 100 years from now.\n");


This clearly achieves the modern standard of rigor for getting the model published. It was cheap to develop, and as a bonus, it accurately confirms what we already know about the future of our planet!

Surely you don't disagree with overwhelming popular opinion on the subject...

1 comment:

sstc said...

I love how you mention the margin of error in your model also!

Did you calibrate it with data from the last 50 years only?

Bad models shouldn't prevent us from conserving entropy, but we need to understand the limitations of such models.