Friday, November 25, 2011

The sky is warming.

"CO2 may not warm the planet as much as thought" is the title of an article in New Scientist magazine. Groovy, I like it, maybe we can get off this economy killing war on carbon. I was going to post a link to the article but Blogger is feeling ugly this morning and won't make the link. You can get to it from Instapundit.
Of course, there are a few caveats:

"Schmittner plugged the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations that existed during the Last Glacial Maximum into a climate model and tried to recreate the global temperature patterns. He found that he had to assume a relatively small climate sensitivity of 2.4 °C if the model was to give the best fit."

And how do we know what the CO2 levels were during the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago? There has been some work done testing bubbles of air trapped in Greenland glacier ice, but I never heard of an ice core going back 10,000 years. Best I ever heard of was a core going back 5000 years. And we are sure that a few tiny air samples are representative, and haven't changed over the millennia.

And he plugged questionable data into a computer model. Computer models are nothing special, they are just computer programs, and as such, subject to all the problems of computer programs, like bugs. Plus, when a computer model fails to give the desired answer, it gets reprogrammed until it does. You cannot trust computer models. Especially models written by someone else.

So here we have a fairly reputable magazine reporting a scientist feeding questionable data into an equally questionable computer program and thinking the result is meaningful.

GIGO, Garbage in Garbage out. Old computer business acronym.

No comments: