https://chanc.ee/20210315-climate-models-and-fortran.htmlOne night I decided to go see what climate models actually are. Turns out they’re often massive batch jobs that run on supercomputers and spit out numbers. No buttons to click, no spinny globes or toggle switches. They’re artifacts from the deep, mainframe world of computing. When you hear about a climate model predicting awful Earth stuff, they’re talking about hundreds of Fortran files, with comments at the top like “The subroutines in this file determine the potential temperature at which seawater freezes.” They’re not meant to be run by any random nerd on a home computer.