[at-l] Sew...win eye lift

[Jim Bullard]

Our local TV weather guy makes no bones about the fact that there are
several "models" for predicting which way storms will move, how fast, how
much rain will fall, etc. and he always hedges his bets by saying his
forecast is what he "thinks is most likely to happen". When it comes to
weather, our high tech tools can show us where it is raining 'right now',
but it is still just an educated guess what will happen an hour from now or
a day from now. That said those guesses are generally better than 20-30
years ago. It was Thomas Jefferson who first started keeping weather records
and Ben Franklin who first realized that storms travel when he compared
notes with a correspondent in Boston and learned that a snow storm that hit
Philadelphia didn't get to Boston until the next day. There's a lot we don't
know but we know more than we did.

Jim Bullard
http://jims-ramblings.blogspot.com/
http://members.photoportfolios.net/Jim_Bullard


On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 4:04 PM, David Addleton <dfaddleton at gmail.com> wrote:

> i think that some humans think that chaos theory can describe something
> about how weather behaves; and i think weather and climate care nothing for
> any of our theories . . .; and I think we should hear the climate and
> weather folks when they say how little we actually know about chaos,
> climate, and weather, the sun, the oceans, etc etc etc . . . and it should
> send a chill down anyone's spine, that description of our ignorance, because
> when we know we don't know something it doesn't make much sense to make
> predictions premised upon our ignorance. For example, since I don't know
> which plants and shrooms are edible and which are down right poisonous, I
> think I'll predict this one is edible and have a meal . . . shall we
> so indulge our ignorance ? really? Now, we haven't started yet talking about
> the stuff we don't know we don't know . . . ya' I know that's a rumsfeldian,
> but if we think the stuff we know we don't know is dangerous, imagine how
> safe is the stuff we don't know we don't know . . .
>
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