While you might think this is no big deal, the repercussions could be huge.
For years, climate scientists have said the future of the planet is certain: Earth will become significantly warmer. Moreover, they constantly claim the “science is settled” on the topic of global warming because their massive supercomputers run sophisticated climate models that yield “robust” visions of the future.
In essence, they are saying “we’re scientists, trust us, we have thousands of studies and a big computer behind us.”
Yet, given that global warming has turned into a pseudo-scientific social movement buoyed by huge amounts of government funding, there’s an implicit danger that it’s become beholden to group-think and government funding biases.
The study reveals that a very basic error in climate models’ underlying assumptions could have a very large impact on their future predictions, rendering them much less accurate than anticipated. In other words, the vast majority of climate models overstate the likely extent of future warming.
“Atmospheric black carbon (BC) or soot — formed by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, biofuel and biomass — causes warming by absorbing sunlight and enhancing the direct radiative forcing of the climate. As BC ages, it is coated with material due to gas condensation and collisions with other particles. These processes lead to variation in the composition of BC-containing particles and in the arrangement of their internal components — a mixture of BC and other material — though global climate models do not fully account for these heterogeneities. Instead, BC-containing particles are typically modelled as uniformly coated spheres with identical aerosol composition, and these simplifications lead to overestimated absorption.”In a nutshell, in their zeal to model and “prove” global warming, climate researchers assumed that all carbon black particles ejected into the atmosphere have strong warming qualities that don’t diminish over time. In reality, that’s not the case and it is a huge oversimplification of what actually occurs in nature.
That oversimplification causes climate models to predict more future warming than would actually occur had they properly accounted for variations in black carbon soot size, composition, and aging.
The flaws in existing climate models are equivalent to saying that every grain of sand on the beach is exactly the same size, shape, and composition, or that snowflakes aren’t unique, but all are exactly the same. As even a grade-schooler knows, nature doesn’t work like that. Once again, “climate science” fails the tenets of basic science.
All of this means there’s a huge amount of uncertainty regarding the future warming predicted by climate models. Yet, despite these obvious shortcomings, the models and their faulty predictions continue to be used to form social and public policy, often at great expense and hardship.
It doesn’t matter how big of a supercomputer you have, because if the assumptions programmed into the climate models are wrong, they’ll suffer from that old computer programmer maxim: “Garbage in, garbage out.”
