Does the Fossil Record Imply Errors in Climate Models?
Last week the New Scientist web site published a brief summary of researcher being conducted around the world looking at fossils. The results of the fossil analysis seems to contradict current computer models of the Earth’s climate.
Researchers from the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Russia and Sweden examined fossilized leaves from the Late Cretaceous period (95 million years ago) to estimate temperatures at various parts of the world at that time. They then turned to some of the world’s best climate models to project what the temperatures of the Late Cretaceous period might have been like.
The problem was that the temperature range produced by the computer models were off wildly compared to the temperature estimates obtained from the fossilized leaves. New Scientist quoted climate modeler Paul Valdes saying, “We’re talking about an error on the order of 20 degrees Celsius, so it’s not small — not by any means.”
What could this mean for computer models that attempt to predict the future trend of global climate, and are often used as evidence that human beings are fundamentally altering the average temperature of the planet? According to Valdes, it means they could be off “easily by 5 degrees Celsius.”
It should be noted that in this case the temperatures in the Late Cretaceous were actually warmer than the climate model predicted, but the likely flaw in the models comes back to a longstanding problem with climate models: the continuing inability of such models to model cloud cover.
Yet more indications that computer models are still a long way from being accurate enough to predict something as complex as global weather patterns a century into the future. There’s simply too much the models do not include to warrant the sort of massive changes that would be required to retool societies to avert their projections.
Source:
Fossils leaves reveal climate error models. Nicola Jones, New Scientist, July 9, 2001.
Tags: Uncategorized