CNN reports that The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is installing a new IBM supercomputer in order to accelerate research into climate change. The supercomputer, known as a Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, is the first in a highly energy-efficient class of machines to be shipped anywhere in the world, with a peak speed of more than 76 teraflops. Does that mean you can call it a “huge flop”?

UK Telegraph reports: “Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said. Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged. This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.”

The UK Telegraph article by reporter Charles Clover noted the significant deficiencies in UN climate models: “The IPCC currently does not include in its models actual records of such events as the strength of the Gulf Stream and the El Nino cyclical warming event in the Pacific, which are known to have been behind the warmest year ever recorded in 1998.”

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

But if natural variations are able to offset the man-made warming, is then our contribution to climate change significant? Also, if nature now (temporarily) cools the Earth, why shouldn’t the recent warming be natural as well?

I think that Al Gore should plan for an alternative occupation.

Bob Spicer et al, from Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, who has examined fern leaves from Central Siberia, says that this today rather unfriendly place 65 million years ago was a lot like modern-day Florida, with lush ferns and lots of rain.

Climate models for the same area had indicated temperatures around zero degrees Celsius (32° F). But Bob Spencer and his colleagues doubt model temperatures match reality. In the age of dinos the world was so different that the models we use for today’s atmosphere cannot mimic it. Go figure. Who said computer models are more reliable than observations?

Read the whole story in New Scientist. Or ask a dinosaur.