Unless your spaceship just landed on this planet, like, uh, yesterday, or something, you're probably aware that climate change deniers constantly cry, moan, wail, and wet their diapers whenever computer simulations DO NOT PRECISELY MATCH OBSERVATION.
My, oh, my, how these infantile twits can carry on worse than a two year-old who wants out of the crib.
Strangely, though they demand perfection, they especially hate it when the data or algorithms upon which the models are based get adjusted/updated and results improve, even though near-exhaustive explanations for the changes are often provided. No, really, if you're not as childish and intellectually-lazy as Anthony Watts and Steven Goddard, you can find rather pedestrian reasons and clarifications after like five seconds of searching the Web.
Maybe strangest of all is the fact that when you ask these screwballs for an alternative future-climate predictor to replace the computer models they hate so much, this is the deafening response:
Yeah, I know. I can't figure these denier wingnuts out either.
You and I, dear reader, both know there's no comparison, but because deniers can't understand climate models or how they work at all, they look at them like, say, a really bad sweater that Grandma bought them. For some bizarre reason, they'll go ahead and wear an article of clothing they hate, rather than letting Grandma know what they really want for the holidays or their birthday next time, or just simply returning it and getting something different. If their ignorant, unhelpful reactions to models which include no descriptions of what they would prefer we use to make climatic forecasts are any guide, they have to think doing nothing but moaning and groaning out loud about Grandma's horrific gift to anyone within range of their voice will somehow magically make a situation they find untenable better. How I don't know.
So much to my surprise, deniers didn't make a single, solitary peep when this study was released recently, declaring that, by changing a critical assumption made by basically every scientist in the field and re-running the computer simulations over again, the results began matching observation much, much more closely.
Apparently, if you assume dark matter only has gravitational effects, and does not interact at all with light, your computer models spit out something that does not reflect reality and that looks like this with many unobserved dwarf galaxies orbiting larger galaxies like our own Milky Way:
Now, if you tweak the computer models just a wee-bit, and let the simulated dark matter interact ever so slightly with radiation like photons and neutrinos, you get something that looks a lot more like what we actually see when we look out at our galactic neighborhood which has very few dwarf companions:
Man, how did that modeling fudge and flip-flop escape climate change deniers' notice, not produce a flurry of puerile tantrums, and—?
Wait, wait, right, never mind. My bad. I forgot. Climatology is the only field of scholarly inquiry that deniers would prohibit from using and refining computer models. Everybody else, including cosmologists and astrophysicists, can do whatever they like with their digital simulations, and deniers won't care a lick or shed a single tear over the alterations. Nope, not one vicious accusation of hypocrisy or professional misconduct will be made. No email accounts hacked. No public misinformation campaigns funded and initiated by think tanks dedicated to science denial. Miraculously, none of that will go down as long as the scientists in question aren't climate experts. Sheesh, how did I let that absurd state of denier affairs slip my mind? Well, in my own defense, I guess that's what can happen when you don't obsess irrationally over one area of study, and instead you treat all scientists and their research, regardless of discipline, in the same democratic, levelheaded manner.
Note: Dark matter study analysis and pictures courtesy of Brian Koberlein.
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