Climate modelling is metaphysical enough without Dominionist and evangelical critics doing violence to reality by calling it a religion.

A recent article points instead to the structural resemblance between 'Stay@home' climate computer networking efforts, and the cultural phenomenon of MORG's, Multi-player Online Role-playing Games.

Scientific American reports climate activist and Planetary Society president Bill Nye, The Science Guy has diverted thousands of home computers linked in the society's search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence into the virtual world of climate model intercomparison.

Citing Myles Allen of Oxford and U.K. Met Office head Peter Stott, SciAm says of the antrthropogenic weather attribution initiative :

"The only thing needed to run it is people with a modicum of nerdiness who compete with each other to analyze the most signals and track their contributions on leaderboards...

Kevin Trenberth, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research...says, and some scientists agree, that attribution studies that use climate models do not work well for weather events that are local and dynamic—...

"The issue always is, how good is the model, how realistic is the model compared with the real world?" he said. "With some of the work that is being done in the U.S., especially with regard to NOAA, a lot of the stuff which is being done is too heavily oriented toward the model, and the model isn’t good enough. As a result, the statements are not reliable for the real world."
Attribution scientists are aware of the limitations, of course. They choose their models carefully, layer different approaches and stress the limits of their knowledge. They often emphasize caveats with statements like, "It is a single model, or a single methodology." But sometimes, they don’t.

The general public probably does not understand the nuance, acknowledged Stephanie Herring, an attribution scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

Back when supercomputers where rare and expensive and networking idle PC's made excellent sense, my late physics mentor Phil Morrison was happy to let SETI run on his own home computer. But in the decades since, Moore's Law has driven the cost of number crunching down by a factor of a million. Bill Nye might ask himself if PC disaster fishing is intellectually serious, or an exercise in performance art.