Climate models

An essay

How far should we trust scientific models? – Jon Turney – Aeon

It does not cover anything we have not considered here before, but I thought it was well written. So, there.

Imperfect models. How to use them better? Basically that's the story.

Before my fingers freeze up completely I'll tell a new story. New to PC anyway. There is this thing in decomposition research called priming. Give the microbes a bit of sugar and they speed up their work. Sebastian Fontaine (SF) got his paper into Nature (highest impact factor journal) by suggesting that priming can reduce the amount of soil organic carbon. This is a big deal, because there is about 4 times more C in (organic) soils than in the atmosphere.

but here's the thing. SF did not complete his calculations. Fortunately the tables and graphs contained enough info so that I could. In short, the carbon balance was positive because not all the sugar decomposed to CO2 (actually he used cellulose, but that is simply a sugar polymer that most microbes can use). So, we went to the literature and found that in most cases, the carbon balance was positive in priming experiments. The motivation for that was a student's research results that needed to get into a journal. In that experiment C balance was also positive.

So, a misconception about priming was afoot, our new paper in Global Change Biology seeks to correct it. Soil carbon balance is OK. This may ruffle some feathers, but the point is science is self correcting.

Not really 'self', somebody has to write it etc. But now that part is done and we are moving on to the next misconception. They are not few in number, I assure you. But they don't correct themselves

The neat part of this next is that now we can suggest a way to get microbial activity into global carbon cycle models. Now of course, models are just models (see the first) but in this case we can test their local predictions and it promises to be all sorts of fun.

If I can keep from freezing (ironically)