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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (779118)	4/8/2014 8:37:31 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1574046

In comparison, the number of variables affecting the climate of an entire planet is nearly infinite. Each variable, when taken by itself, is easily understood (i.e. air currents, solar radiation, micro-climates, greenhouse gases), but when you take all of them together, not even the most powerful supercomputers can take even a small fraction of these variables into account. The only "clever" way to deal with these variables is the time-honored tradition of abstracting them away, but no one knows how the abstraction process affects the accuracy of the models they use. Hence the understanding of global warming is on a whole different level of complexity than that which led to the Higgs boson. I don't know about any more about this stuff than Koan does -- which isn't very much -- but that sounds like a totally sensible answer to his claim, to me.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (779118)

4/8/2014 9:45:44 PM

From: koan

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1574046

You made my point in that post. Read it carefully:

<<

Koan,

Gobal warming at the highest levels of understanding is the same complexity.

No it isn't.

Despite how tough it was to discover the Higgs boson, the number of variables that had to be peeled away was still finite. The trick was to (a) identify them, and (b) figure out clever ways to deal with them in the path to discovery.

In comparison, the number of variables affecting the climate of an entire planet is nearly infinite. Each variable, when taken by itself, is easily understood (i.e. air currents, solar radiation, micro-climates, greenhouse gases), but when you take all of them together, not even the most powerful supercomputers can take even a small fraction of these variables into account. The only "clever" way to deal with these variables is the time-honored tradition of abstracting them away, but no one knows how the abstraction process affects the accuracy of the models they use.

Hence the understanding of global warming is on a whole different level of complexity than that which led to the Higgs boson.

Tenchusatsu