Clouds, very important. And at the moment almost impossible to model.
So the climate modelers pretty much ignored them.
And when someone like Denmark's Henrik Svensmark proposed a novel theory of cloud nucleation by cosmic rays and opened up the can of worms on the effects of clouds on global warming, he was attacked in ways strikingly similar to the way the scientists who argued against covid lockdowns were.
With his latest work on supernovae and cosmic rays seeding life on earth we may be in the same position that Alfred Wegener was in for decades after he proposed "continental drift", now known as plate tectonics, in 1912. Not only was Wegener's idea disputed and dimissed but he was personally disparaged.
And now we nonchalantly act as if "Plate tectonics? Yeah, knew it all along"
On supercomputers we noted in 2016 that the computer the Swiss let CERN use was being upgraded:
CERN Will Be Using NVIDIA Graphics Processors to Accelerate Their Supercomputer (NVDA)Our standard NVDA boilerplate: We don't do much with individual stocks on the blog but this one is special.$36.28 last, passing the stock's old all time high from 2007, $36.00.
In 2017 Oak Ridge National Laboratory is scheduled to complete their newest supercomputer powered by NVIDIA Graphics Processing Unit chips and retake the title of World's Fastest Computer for the United States.
In the meantime NVDA is powering AI deep learning and autonomous vehicles and virtual reality and some other stuff....
With the NVDA GPU's being used as accelerators Piz Daint got to the #3 spot on the Top500 list of the world's fastest computers, though it has since been pushed lower in the rankings by other newer 'puters, most of which (7 of top 10) are also using GPU's to speed things up.
By-the-bye, we started pitching NVDA in the mid-$20's. Accounting for the 4:1 split it is at $1005.00. Heck of a run.
In 2019 we had CERN: "A new run of the CLOUD experiment examines the direct effect of cosmic rays on clouds" which very coyly, so as not to disrupt the climate poobahs, said "ahem, there's something to this stuff"
And from the Wall Street Journal, February 6:
Supercomputer simulations are running up against the complex physics of programming thousands of weather variables such as the extensive impact of clouds
BOULDER, Colo.—For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming?
They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again.
The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.
When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth’s atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared—perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy.
“We thought this was really strange,” said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. “If that number was correct, that was really bad news.”
At least 20 older, simpler global-climate models disagreed with the new one at NCAR, an open-source model called the Community Earth System Model 2, or CESM2, funded mainly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and arguably the world’s most influential climate program. Then, one by one, a dozen climate-modeling groups around the world produced similar forecasts. “It was not just us,” Dr. Danabasoglu said.
The scientists soon concluded their new calculations had been thrown off kilter by the physics of clouds in a warming world, which may amplify or damp climate change. “The old way is just wrong, we know that,” said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. “I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It’s probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another.”....
*****
....Computing clouds
Then there is the cloud conundrum.
Because clouds can both reflect solar radiation into space and trap heat from Earth’s surface, they are among the biggest challenges for scientists honing climate models.
At any given time, clouds cover more than two-thirds of the planet. Their impact on climate depends on how reflective they are, how high they rise and whether it is day or night. They can accelerate warming or cool it down. They operate at a scale as broad as the ocean, as small as a hair’s width. Their behavior can be affected, studies show, by factors ranging from cosmic rays to ocean microbes, which emit sulfur particles that become the nuclei of water droplets or ice crystals.
“If you don’t get clouds right, everything is out of whack.” said Tapio Schneider, an atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology and the Climate Modeling Alliance, which is developing an experimental model. “Clouds are crucially important for regulating Earth’s energy balance.”....
....MUCH MORE
HT on the very extensive WSJ story: MishTalk
