Something Drives Global Warming - But It's Not Carbon

I've always wondered about using computer models to predict the future because when models are run in reverse, they are unable predict what has already happened.

And today we have proof of that in a new report published in the journal Nature Geoscience:

About 55 million years ago global surface temperatures increased by 5 to 9 °C within a few thousand years, following a pulse of carbon released to the atmosphere. Analysis of existing data with a carbon cycle model indicates that this carbon pulse was too small to cause the full amount of warming at accepted values for climate sensitivity.

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

So, in other words, using modern modeling techniques and current assumptions about the role of carbon in global warming, scientists are unable to model the warming that we know has already happened.

The report concludes something besides carbon drove the temperature up 55 million years ago and that that something needs to be discovered and its potential to drive climate change has to be accounted for in any future models.

We might therefore conclude that the computer models which support the theory of human-induced global warming via carbon emissions are unreliable. Yet rely on them we will.