[ExI] oh no, not this again...

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat
...

>...I suspect that all the water vapor still in the stratosphere from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022 is largely
responsible:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/tonga-eruption-blasted-unprecedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere

Ja Stuart perhaps there is a great deal of humidity up there however...

>...All that humidity is the atmosphere is unprecedented and is probably equilibrating ocean and air temperatures to a certain degree, prevent cyclones...

...that would be a compelling theory except that Atlantic sea surface temperatures this fall are not cooler, they are warmer.  This in theory should have be a very active hurricane season according to long-accepted theory.

All of this is what caused me to think of Kalman filtering with respect to weather prediction.  If a correlation is discovered between two measurable metrics, such as sea surface temperature and hurricane activity, we humans immediately think of cause and effect.  Perhaps increased carbon dioxide is causing increased sea surface temperature which caused increase accumulated cyclonic energy.

However... correlation coefficients do not tell us what caused what.  Those coefficients don't know or care which came first, only that the chicken and the egg are associated with each other.  This year, the correlation between sea surface temperature and storm activity is going down.  There will still be a correlation, but it will be lower than before 2022.

>...Although BillK fanning himself to keep cool across the Atlantic might also be contributing via the butterfly effect. ;)  Stuart LaForge
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Eh Stuart, do think over what the notion of the butterfly effect has done to our collective reasoning.  It is a fun mental picture, memorable in its way, but the way it is stated causes us to misunderstand what it really means.  The butterfly effect is about how a seemingly minor event has ever-larger implications as time goes on, so that a butterfly today can influence the future 1000 years from now.

But if you ask a bunch of proles what the butterfly effect means, you will see why it causes me to squirm a bit.

spike