Most of the “science” behind the left and the media’s constant drumbeat about the future environmental threats from climate change is based on climate models.
Calls to “believe THE SCIENCE” really amount to “believe the climate models.”
Actually, so-called “climate change deniers” are often just “climate model skeptics.”
Fortunately, a new Wall Street Journal news story highlights the challenges climate modelers face.
The article is titled “Climate Scientists Encounter Computer Models’ Limits, Bedeliving Policy.” Indeed.
It explains that “an international consortium of scientists” has spent five years trying to account for the role of clouds in climate models. “They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements.”
The story continues, “The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.”
You see, water vapor is by far the most abundant greenhouse gas. As Yale’s Climate Connections explains, water vapor “represents around 80 percent of total greenhouse gas mass in the atmosphere and 90 percent of greenhouse gas volume.”
Now, other greenhouse gasses—e.g., carbon dioxide and methane—may have a more pronounced and longterm greenhouse impact. But water vapor—clouds—plays a major role, and climate scientists have struggled for years to understand its impact on the climate.
Clouds can reflect the sun, having a cooling effect—as anyone who’s thankful for some clouds on a hot summer’s day knows. So a warming earth might see more water evaporation, creating more clouds, which might have a cooling impact.
But clouds can also create a type of blanket, keeping warmer air on the ground from escaping into the atmosphere.
And while clouds may cover a major portion of the earth at any given moment, they are often fleeting.
Climate scientists are optimistic they are improving their understanding and ability to model the climate. And yet, “Still, models remain prone to technical glitches and hampered by an incomplete understanding of the variables that control how our planet responds to heat-trapping gases.”
It’s important to get the impact of clouds right. As the story points out, “As world leaders consider how to limit greenhouse gases, they depend heavily on what computer climate models predict.”
Yes they do! And many of them want to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars fighting climate change based on climate models whose creators concede are still a work in progress.