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Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: NJ
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Quote:
Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy View Post
Yup. Do you want to fly on an airplane in which I can accurately predict 50% of a cause and effect relationship?

The entire field of climate science is fuzzy because it's all theory backed by a very small sample size (relative to the entire data set aka the life of the earth). There are relatively few ways to actually test or prove a hypothesis, it is more an attempt to establish links between variables through statistics and extrapolation. We use analysis to do initial airplane sizing and design, then test the hell out of it. More often than not we discover that the analysis was not perfect and drive design changes due to test results. In this case, there is no way to definitively test the analysis. Hell, meteorology struggles to accurately predict yearly temperature and rainfall patterns.
Sure that's all well and good. But because the weather is so damn hard to predict the posted experiment is precisely what is needed to help advance our understanding of the processes. Without such exercises we'll never arrive at a predictive model.
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Old 09-06-2013, 12:37 PM
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