Note that the unicyclist above is a young male. I figured this
might lift your spirits as we slouch toward another election.
Today I attended a seminar given by the good folks at PCMDI, the
Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison. It was
about Uncertainty Quantification of the Inter-Governmental Panel
on Climate Change (IGPCC) Community Atmospheric Model (CAM).
What that really means is that the CAM has lots of sub-models
inside it - for things like cloud formation, for example. Now
cloud formation is a physical process, but the CAM can't afford
to model the physics of each and every individual cloud on
earth. In order to run in a reasonable time (say 7 hours on a
thousand-processor supercomputer) CAM has to use an approximate
model that says what density of cloudiness will occur in every
2-degree by 2-degree square patch of atmosphere based on the
relative humidity of that patch at each of 26 levels of
altitude. The cloudiness will determine how much sunlight gets
to the ground and how much i