Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?
Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.
I don't know, maybe it's that big yellow disk in the sky. But let's read on:
"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."
8 comments:
Cripes, how could climate models be anything but wrong?
In order to model a phenomenon you have to have a thorough understanding of it. Basic climate-related phenomenon are being discovered which means they couldn't very well have been incorporated into computerized climate models and other, more widely appreciated phenomenon are still being investigated so that they're well enough understood to incorporate into climate models.
I really think Global Warming has all the earmarks of a cult. You challenge True Believers on the facts and they become violent. You present them with evidence of the errors and they deny them. You tell them that this is unworkable, expensive and will roll back the industrial age and they ignore you. So I think we need to declare Global Warming a religion (right up there with Elvis Worship)and file suit in federal court for separation of church and state to be invoked. I think this is the only way we can get these people back to reality where they can be deprogrammed. And people thought the Moonies were bad.....
Save the planet and pump all that oily toxic goo out of the ground and recycle it into useful products.
That's a movement I can support!
This goes back to the old gigo, garbage in, garbage out. Computer models depend on feeding in variables to calculate. A model for predicting climates would be, or should be, incredibly complex.
Look how difficult it is for a computer to accurately predict the weather a week of more in advance. If a computer model is fed incorrect values or if there are variables that are not included in the model (which is quite likely) then the results are wrong. Plain and simple. Humans don't know nearly as much as some pretend.
Well, of course the models are wrong when they treat big glowing furnace in the sky as a constant.
Part of the bank meltdown was based on busted computer models. In the case of the big banks, these models were put together by the world's finest mathematicians, and implemented by the world's most highly paid programmers, and they were pumping $trillions through them.
Now, if they couldn't get it right, how can we trust models of far more complex systems than CDS/CDOs and such things, put together by bureaucrats and coded by grad students?
I don't think it takes a computer to see that the correlation coefficient between temperature and carbon dioxide is way higher than that between temperature and sun activity.
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png
And aren't we at a deep solar minimum?
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/deepsolarminimum/ssn_predict_l_strip.gif
I'm all for global warming, 'cuz then climate models will wear less clothing.
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