Could the best climate models — the ones used to predict global warming — all be wrong?

Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience.  The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

~ USA Today “Science Fair” Blog

Notes James Taranto (emphasis mine):

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a left-wing advocacy group, put out a press release claiming that the study shows “the potential consequences of global warming are likely worse than what scientists are predicting”—as if carbon is the only thing that can cause warming.

So first the global warmists insist that the question is settled beyond debate, then, when it turns out not to be, they insist that uncertainly can only mean their theory is even more true than they had thought. This just is not how real science operates.