"Weather simulations have even more data; they are less accurate for other reasons."<p>I doubt anyone can beat particle physics for sheer information quantity. I seriously doubt that we have petabytes of <i>real weather information</i> to feed our simulations. I can find some references online to petabyte stores for weather simulation results online, but that's ultimately just cache, not information (in the information theoretic sense).<p>This is part of what I mean when I talk about the information theory, and how you can't get more information in the information-theoretic sense than the sum total of the simulation and the original data. Weather simulations may chew through terabytes or petabytes of RAM in the simulation phase, but they are not fed that much data. If the people involved mistake it for real information, then this is also part of what I mean when I say that once you get into using computers in a big way my training does indeed start giving me standing to complain again by even the most rigid "stay out of my science" standards.<p>Secondly, your assumption that running the simulation again is useless in a world where you can casually assume that you have all the data and the simulation and can have the contempt bred of familiarity for the whole process. In the real world, if you can't replicate the results, how can you criticize the model? I think there's still some "the computer said it, it must be right" underlying your answer; you <i>can't assume</i> the computer model is worth anything, it must be proved and debated and peer reviewed, which is not possible if you can't even get it to run and get the same results. The model is still subject to scientific inquiry, it can't be given a free pass.<p>Independent replication of results is also desirable, but you need both. In a world where nobody can replicate the results and it's hard to verify the simulation against the real world, it's too damned easy to end up with the Feynman electron mass situation where the selection effects from the researchers dominate the putative results of the simulations. The researcher summaries of the results of some runs of some models you can't see or execute and some data you can't get at happen to align... what does it mean? Frankly, who knows?