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An Introduction to weather system
Ted's Diner was a historic diner at 67 Main Street in Milford, MassachusettsAre people who claim global warming is causing hurricanes, 'science deniers'? of weather system
"From Roger Pielke:Of course, I have no doubts that claims will still be made associating floods, drought, hurricanes and tornadoes with human-caused climate change -- Zombie science -- but I am declaring victory in this debate."
Well, if that is all you have to do, I am declaring victory in this debate. OK, that is it. Everybody can go home now. ... That includes you, Roger.
What climate science tells us is that for a 1C of warming of the atmosphere, the potential for the atmosphere to hold water vapor increases by 10%. Anyone, with any knowledge of the subject, will tell you that water vapor is the energy needed for weather systems. The more energy available, the more potent a weather system can be. This, by no means, will tell us where or when any weather system will occur or if it will be beyond the climatological norms. What it does say is that the potential for more extreme weather events will exist and are more likely to occur.
Are ordinary desktop computers complex systems? of weather system
I think this question is not particularly to do with Physics. Here are a couple of answers nonetheless.(Note that this is a heavily revised version of my original answer, which talked about simulating brains: this version is intended to not require any AI-related philosophical arguments.)The weak point in this argument, for weather systems anyway, is (3), and there are two arguments against it, both of which I will now address and dismiss.We know that weather exhibits dynamical chaos, and thus we could naively claim that, in fact, a computer program can't simulate a weather system to 'any required degree of accuracy': because tiny differences in initial conditions will cause the simulation to diverge rapidly from the real system.This is to misunderstand what I mean by 'simulate': it is not necessary to copy a particular weather system, it is merely necessary to run a simulation which is as good as you like a siulation of some weather system.
At the point where the simulation is accurately modelling individual raindrops it does not really matter whether they are the same raindrops as in the real world or indeed whether it is raining at all in the real world: the simulation is good enough (or if it is not, pile more computing power into it until it is).The requirement should be that you can't tell if the system you are observing is simulated or real, not that the simulation accurately follows the evolution of a particular real system.This is easier to dismiss: obviously it it true, but uninteresting.
While the simulation does not halt, the computation of each timestep in the simulation both does halt, and requires only bounded resource: the program that computes the state vector of the system $S(tdelta t)$ as a function of $S(t)$ does halt and requires only bounded resource (in particular: can be implemented by a finite state machine, since it halts).Since a quantum computer is not properly more powerful (can not compute anything a conventional TM can not compute) then the argument that only quantum computers are complex would need to rely on the speedup that quantum computers can achieve.So any argument that a quantum computer is needed would require it somehow not to be possible to run a simulation of a weather system at constant time per step.
But obviously you can do this, so long as you are happy for your simulation to be merely realistic rather than for its evolution to correspond to a particular physical weather system, as I said above.The reason you can do this is simple: if you can model a single step in constant time, then you just restart the model with the new state as its initial conditions, and you can therefore model the next step in the same constant time. So there is at most a constant factor slowdown over the real system.
(The reason you might need a quantum computer if you want your model's evolution to follow the real evolution of the system is that you need more and more precision as time goes on. I suspect in fact that a quantum computer does not help with this, but it's beside the point here.)I'm now going to vote for this question to be closed as off-topic (yes, I am being inconsistent here).