Freaking Hillarous, via Instapundit:

“(Other) modelers have populated their oceans with three or four kinds of plants, said Mick Follows, a researcher in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate. “We’ve represented a much more diverse community, and allowed it to have interactions that regulate it more naturally.”

Phytoplankton populations are constantly changing, which makes them difficult to predict. So the MIT researchers developed an algorithm using evolutionary principles to more accurately represent the microscopic plants. A more precise count is important because phytoplankton process carbon dioxide — a significant contributor to global warming.

Extremely intelligent experts using their extensive knowledge of tea leaves have divined the evolutionary pressures that will accurately predict the mutations that phytoplankton will undergo over the next trillion years. All their intellectual heft is now being used to calculate our new found certainty about phytoplankton transformation to determine the precise impact on global climate over the next 23 billion years down to the eighth decimal point.

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