Over at Watts Up With That blog they posted an article, Pocket-calculator climate model outperforms billion-dollar brains, that reminded me how I tried to solve engineering problems in college. Before attempting a rigorous solution to a complex engineering problem, I was taught to quickly estimate the answer first. This estimate was used as a guide to make sure the more rigorous and time consuming solution was going in the right direction. It was really hard to argue with professors for partial credit if you did not check your work. So it is no surprise to me that earlier this year four scientists developed a simplified climate model that can be run on a pocket calculator and it did a good job of predicting the current climate conditions. Despite its greater accuracy the climate alarmists complained that the simplified model was not back tested. So the four scientists took up the challenge, plugged in historical data, and found that the pocket calculator model was more accurate than the current climate models. Now they have written a paper about their findings. Hmm… all of this complicated, time consuming climate modeling work and you can get better results from a model that can be run a pocket calculator. As my engineering professors would undoubtedly say, “You should have checked your work!”