Fractals, Weather, and Climate

I'll stop boring my Keystone state friends with Colorado weather reports, though I'll give a quiet shout out to a Nebraska reader who may be seeing our storm today.

That last foot we were supposed to get today is now predicted to be 2-4" and I doubt we'll get that (always look at the first differential of the forecast -- if they're backing off grab the swim trunks, if they're increasing, fill the car with gas). It seems a puff of air from out West will keep the storm from the mountains and prevent the "upslope" pattern where a storm gets pushed against the hills and drops its load. My toy car will be beached a few more days, but what the TV newscasters call "The Blizzard of 2006: II" has moved out to the eastern plains.

I will aggravate the climate change faithful with this observation, but hear me out. Being a math geek, I remember James Gleick's Chaos. Of the three pop math books I can think of, Chaos was the biggest seller. It introduced much of America to fractals, chaos theory, and the butterfly effect.

Old Chris what's-his-name on Fox31 weather is a smart fellow with a lot of shiny equipment. He was convinced that we were in store for another foot-plus today. One little breeze from the West and it's not to be. The fact is there are too many variables to predict weather. This is obvious to anybody who lives in front of the mountains. They create a chaotic interstice for moving weather that precludes prediction.

"But that is weather, jk. Weather is capricious. Climate is not," the dissenter points out. This is fair although the next sentence about "You #%$^%^ink stupid Republicans!" goes too far.

But what if climate is just as capricious? The really interesting thing about fractals is their repeatability at different scales. Trace a foot of coastline and a mile of coastline and they look the same. A friend had a record of nature sounds which sounded exactly the same at 16, 33 1/3, or 45 RPM. I could never figure that out until I read the Gleick book.

I posit that climate is equally and similarly capricious to weather, if you change the scale of the graph from days to millennia. A moth only lives for a day -- don't you figure the VP Al Gore moths worry about "global darking" when night falls?

Deleterious Anthropogenic Warming of the Globe Posted by jk at December 30, 2006 12:25 PM