How to Model Global Climate Change on your 1991 PC Junior
A recent scientific paper published in the peer-reviewed Chinese "Science Journal" purports to debunk the theory of Global Climate Change. This paper, entitled "Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model" was authored by four well known opponents of the idea that the Earth is undergoing global warming in response to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere.
While I applaud the thread of independent thinking that these four exhibit in going against the vast majority of scientists on the global warming question, unfortunately their paper reveals that these four scientists have a very poor understanding of the climate system of the earth.
The "irreducibly simple" climate model they rely upon is nothing new---it is what is commonly known as a "black box" model and similar models have been used for decades in Freshman Physics and Meteorology courses at universities. There are even dozens of PC and video games that incorporate the same kind of simple model. The first computer game with a black box model of climate was called "Sim Earth" --- it came out in 1990. It ran on a PC Junior and the original Macintosh, and it produced the same kind of results that these authors are relying upon.
I don't know if the four authors actually based their simple model on the 35 year old Sim Earth video game or not, but its basically the same model. Black box models assume that earth is a big black box filled with air, that solar heating of the atmosphere is constant, and that as more CO2 accumulates in the earth's atmosphere the atmospheric temperature rises in response to the Greenhouse Effect. So far so good. They then calculate a "sensitivity factor" showing how much the Earth's temperature rises in response to given increments in atmospheric CO2 ---- and thats where they go wildly wrong.
The authors conclusions can only make sense if the Earth actually did consist of nothing but some atmosphere gases in a planet-sized black box. But of course the earth also has oceans and ice sheets, and these huge features have much different "sensitivity factors" to solar heating then the atmosphere does.
Anyone who has ever visited the seashore has experienced this for themselves. When the sun comes up and the beach gets hot, you cool off by swimming in the ocean and catching the cool sea-breeze. And people who have gone hiking in the mountains know that even on hot sunny days snowfields and glaciers remain icy cold.
Oceans and glaciers don't warm up in response to solar energy as rapidly as the atmosphere does. The earth's temperature is being buffered by its oceans and glaciers. Study after scientific study have shown that Greenhouse Warming is not only warming the atmosphere, it is also heating up the oceans and melting glaciers and ice sheets all over the earth, and the atmosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere are interacting together in complex ways in response to global warming. It may be difficult for some simple minds to grasp, but the complexity of the earth's climate system cannot be successfully modeled with an "irreducibly simple climate model" that is a dead ringer for an old video game that ran on a 1991 8-bit PC junior.
| The authors of the paper Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model Christopher Monckton1, Willie W.-H. Soon2, David R. Legates3, William M. Briggs4 |
| 1. Science and Public Policy Institute, Haymarket, VA 20169, USA; 2. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; 3. Department of Geography, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA; 4. New York, NY 10021, USA |
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