Jay Currie

Global climate models are missing a good chunk of plant information that could significantly alter long-term climate change predictions. A new technique for modeling phytoplankton—microscopic plants in the upper layers of the Earth’s waters—could reveal a much more accurate picture. wired

Phytoplankton are more important than the world’s forests when it comes to CO2 processes and they dwarf human CO2 emissions. Until now they were just one more fudge factor jammed into climate models, one more variable for which the values were no more than guesses.

My unbounded scepticism about global warming, climate change and man’s contribution to either rests on the absence of very much good science on questions like this. (And on the exclusion of China and India from any reduction targets.) The point being that we have had four IPCC reports without any serious model of phytoplankton action. The work at MIT does not determine if phytoplankton are adding or subtracting from the CO2 burden. Rather it is a better model for assessing the interacting effects of climate change and the oceans.

As such, the MIT model reduces the uncertainty of the overall climate change models. The trouble is that while this is a step forward there are still huge holes in those models. Here are two: water vapor and the nature of clouds. Neither is effectively included in the IPCC modeling and both have significant impacts on any attempt to predict the course and consequences of climate change.

Making policy, banning lightbulbs, taxing emissions with a model which is so utterly uncertain is nothing more than pandering to a panicked middle class.