Climate Models – the Strange Case of Missing Hardware September 9, 2016 By Leo Goldstein at Defeat Climate Alarmism
The General Circulation Models (GCM), alleged by IPCC to forecast climate, are computationally intensive computer programs that repetitively perform the same task: integrating specific sets of differential equations, such as the primitive equations of weather. In such situations, a normal practice is developing specialized hardware for performing that task. One example is video encoding hardware, which evolved from big boxes, making grainy and jumpy 640×480 moving pictures, to the tiny circuits inside of the CPUs of modern cell phone, producing smooth 1920×1080 full motion video.
Even more relevant example is development of specialized Bitcoin mining hardware. Bitcoin was invented in 2009. Initially, Bitcoin miners used conventional desktops, equipped with CPUs and GPUs. Within few years, multiple generations of Bitcoin-mining FPGAs and ASICs were developed and manufactured. In 2015, specialized Bitcoin-mining computer boards were millions of times faster and possessed millions of times better performance/price ratio than the best contemporary GPUs. All this development was done by small startups, operating in complete financial, legal, and competitive uncertainty, and probably spending most of their meager resources on marketing, sales, and fund raising, in less time than one IPCC paper report.
“Climate modeling” with the GCMs is even more amenable to specialized hardware development because calculations are done in parallel on a very large number of grid points. But after 30 years of “research”, Billions of dollars spent on the GCMs alone, and Trillions of dollars coveted by the climate activists, the IPCC-aligned “climate modeling community” failed to develop any specialized “climate modeling” hardware. Either these “climate modelers” are extremely incompetent, or fully aware that they participate in a fraud, or both.
This orgy of obscurantism and fraud happens in what used to be the best Universities and National Laboratories, the institutions that invented electronic computers, moved them from the vacuum tubes to the transistors then to the integrated schemes, and created Internet. The “climate modeling” is still done on computers, consisting of CPUs and GPUs, just like in 1992. Then Al Gore came to power, saw that science disagreed with his global warming ideas, and put kibosh on the science! The book Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking (2003) provides a glimpse into how that happened.