Depending on who you talk to, the earth has been cooling since either circa 1998 or for the past couple of years. And guess what? The computer climate models didn't predict it. As the Wall Street Journal explains (sub probably required):
[T]he cooling wasn't predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.
"There is a lot of room for improvement" in the models, says Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany and co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again -- a long-term trend he attributes to greenhouse-gas emissions. "You need to know what you can believe and can't believe from the models."
Hmmmmm. I know what I don't believe from the models. I believe they are a perfect example of GIGO: Garbage In Garbage Out.
The models are only as good as the information they are fed. One big uncertainty is ocean temperature. Oceans trap huge amounts of heat, and the process by which they release it over time affects the temperature of the planet. But there isn't a lot of actual data, because the vastness of the oceans makes gathering temperature data costly and arduous.
So assumptions are made. And those assumption drive the models to predict global warming even in the face of a decade of cooling. But we are basing expensive policies on these computer models that don't work.
And that should scare you more than what a computer predicts about the future.


