chaos

There's a story on wattsupwiththat about the UK MET office's hot new computer. The headline of the story is:

Met Office supercomputer: A megawatt, here, a megawatt there, and pretty soon we’re talking real carbon pollution

Of course Anthony Watts is saying that tongue in cheek, because carbon dioxide is plant food, not pollution. So the truth is the MET office has one of the GREENEST buildings in the UK. CO2 is nutrient. We should be glad of that small bounty as they go about proving the uselessness of their forecasts.

Here's the facts about numerical modelling: chaos principles guarantee that within a relatively short time the results are nonsense. No amount of speed or computer memory can change that. It's a mathematical fact. Three weeks out is probably the best possible, no matter what computing resources you throw at it.