This reminds me of some research years ago that was estimating some effect. The researchers had an uncertain scaling factor in the estimation equation, which they called alpha. The alpha parameter was assumed to be “of order unity” … i.e., approximately equal to 1, likely to be some value between 0 and 1. Well, hundreds of research papers were written based on this estimated model, with all sorts of consequences. But, after many years, someone completed a full study of the fundamental equations and found that alpha was indeed between 0 and 1 … however, it was not nearly equal to 1, but more like 10 to the power of -9 => 0.000000001. That “correction” to the original estimate was HUGELY ENORMOUS and essentially invalidated the hundreds of follow-on research papers because their estimated impact of the studied effect was billions(!) of times too large. I have a sense that these authors may have inadvertently introduced a similarly mistaken estimator in their calculations, thus vastly over-estimating the real carbon footprint of a few billion calculations that my laptop can complete in a few hours… Hardly consuming more than several kWh of energy.
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