In the summer of 1988 I testified to the U.S. Senate that the world was getting warmer and that the dominant cause was probably human-made greenhouse gases. The Senate, and the public, wanted to know the cause of parched conditions in the Midwest, where the Mississippi had practically dried up. I said that our numerical climate model indicated a tendency for more frequent and severe droughts as the world became warmer, but a specific drought was a matter of chance, dependent on fluctuating meteorological patterns. Although that testimony increased public awareness of global warming, it was soon evident that I had communicated poorly.
People have a predilection for deterministic explanations of climate fluctuations.
But the science of quantum mechanics, with Einstein a major contributor, proved that uncertainty plays a big role in physics and in the world. One result is chaos in weather and climate. Temperature and precipitation patterns fluctuate in ways unpredictable beyond a few weeks at most. I tried to explain forcings and chaos with colored dice. One die represented normal climate for 1951-1980, with equal chances for warm, average and cool seasons.