Cloudy with a Chance of Confusion

The saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 150 times, you must be a weatherman.”

Meteorology is a well-established science that has only gotten more reliable with direct satellite observation and supercomputers. So why are weathermen still the butt of jokes?

Today, forecasts may be accurate up to 10 days, but they are still limited. A recent study tried to test those limits. The problem is that chaotic turbulence builds up in the atmosphere until it reaches a point of complete unpredictability—the so-called butterfly effect. So at what point is it impossible to make a prediction, even if we know everything about current conditions?

Forecasters decided to recreate two well-documented weather events over 20 days: a 2015 cold snap in Europe and a series of downpours in China in 2016. Within two weeks, the models had diverged so much from the actual events that they seemed completely unrelated. If the study is a good indicator, accurate forecasts beyond two weeks will never be possible.

Weather forecasting is a good reminder of the limits of science. It is a useful tool, but it is bound by human finiteness and fallibility. We put some trust in the latest forecast, but we still carry an umbrella just in case.

So why don’t we apply this same healthy skepticism to other branches of science? Practically everyone recognizes the limits of weather forecasts, yet many speculate that current physical processes (such as colliding earth plates and radiometric decay) can be extended back into the unimaginably distant past to prove what the earth would have looked like if it existed millions of years ago. Such speculation contradicts what we already know from God’s Word.

Only God knows what the weather will be in a month or two, and only God saw the creation of the universe 6,000 years ago. We can trust the eyewitness account of someone who is all-knowing and truthful and exists outside of time.