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NASA Releases Free Global Climate Model Software
ink_polaroid writes "NASA has released its Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM) for high school and university desktop computers. The software incorporates a 3-D climate model developed at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York. It wraps complex computer modeling programs with a graphical interface familiar to most PC users."
> Latest science says fossil fuels are good and protect against global warming.
No, it says the emission of fossil fuel by-products limit the effects of CO2-emissions. Stopping the emission of those by-products will release the full effect of the CO2 emission.
So, does that mean fossil fuels are good and protect us from global warming, like you concluded?
No, it means that some by-products are good and momentarily soften the effect of the consumption of fossil fuel.
It's like saying taking crack is good, because it prevents the signs of withdrawal.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
In fact, it's much easier to look at the system as a whole than try to go for extreme detail such as cloud-cover on a very small area, such as a city. We can forecast cloud-covers in a larger scale very accurately. As an analogy, neither do we need to know where every strain of sand is in order to draw a map.
"Climate is what we expect, wheather is what we get."
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
To back up the parent poster, consider the following:
We are unable to predict the electron density at a specific point in a a metal wire, at a given time.
Yet, we _are_ able to predict the total behaviour of electricty in a wire. Given that electricity is motion of electrons, how does this arise?
Well, this is a common situation, where models of behaviour at different scales are related only through a very small number of parameters.
For example, we can predict the magnetic behaviour of a system from just two parameters (for an binary antiferromagnet), yet to calculate the behaviour of the electrons (which cause said magnetism) takes of the order of 100 or so (and about 15 orders of magnitude longer).
So for practical calculations on magnatic things, you don't need to do the quantum mechanical calculations, just the much simpler ones.
Sure, technically these are inaccurate. In my experience, we're off by 0.001%, and by about 3-5% in the second derivative. That's so accurate, that there are very many additional cases where the calculations show two possible results, and the experiments arn't accurate enough to tell these apart. Or, in plain terms, good enough.
I use magnetism and electricity as examples here, because if these agrregate models didn't work, then the computer that you are using to read these works also wouldn't work. That's a pretty solid argument for the usefulness of these types of models.
Brining this back to weather and climate, the weather researchers call 'weather' individual and specific data points, like cloud cover, rainfall on a day, and so on. 'Climate' is things like total rainfall per year, average temperature in a month - much broader, less specific information.