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So let me get this straight - science can't currently beat flipping a coin in terms of predicting the weather more than 2 days in advance, but he can accurately simulate space weather for many years and how it will affect other planets?

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We don't need to simulate the weather, we just need to know the long running average and deviations to estimate how much of that we need to block. Short time of high activity won't blow the atmosphere off.

This is the difference between weather and climate. I can't tell you what will be precise weather in one year, but I can tell you that January will be probably cold.

There is weather, and there is climate. The latter we have very good models for, the former is notoriously difficult to predict.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_we...

I'm not convinced that we have a good model for climate, either. I think we do not have any clue about large-scale cycles in the climate. Nobody predicted the long drought in California, but the Southwest has had a bunch of cyclical droughts over the past 1000 years. This year was supposed to be a La Nina year for California, but instead something else happened and there has been three years' worth of rain in northern California instead.

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