this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026

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Unpopular Opinion

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Weather forecasts are more powerful witchcraft than airplanes. (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by jeffep@lemmy.world to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

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Sure, planes can do a flying, but we see birds do the same thing and have sort of done it for centuries with catapults (although with much smaller durations and less comfortable landings).

But weather forecasts. Crazy. We take this for granted these days, because every phone has an app for it. But it's insane. We just know how the future is going to be like, down to specific degrees, whether it's going to rain or not etc.

Personal note: No drugs involved because in this country this will get me prison. But dude. Weather forecasts.

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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 4 points 7 months ago

Huh.

You know, I think I agree.

The physics of flight are way easier to grasp than weather, if only due to the scale of the system.

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[–] buttmasterflex@piefed.social 2 points 7 months ago

In college, I was in the Earth Sciences department, composed of geology (my major), oceanography, and meteorology. The meteorology students had to use available models to forecast the weather as homework. They were wrong over half the time and complained about all of the difficulties with it. It's not black magic, it's statistical models that have so many variables that the butterfly effect (butterfly flapping its wings causes a hurricane on the other side of the world) actually sounds like a more reasonable way to forecast weather. I'm also a bit salty because they had a state of the art 1 million USD mobile storm chasing lab, and we geology students had equipment and teaching supplies stamped "Made in West Germany".

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[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 1 point 7 months ago*

Jumping spiders are smarter than the first electronic computers.

See ENIAC...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

And the ENIAC was used, at least partly, to predict the weather.

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