Given that scientists moved to round earth models in the 1970s, they would no doubt be quite surprised to learn how they're still supposedly using flat earth models.
From "The Discovery of Global Warming"
General Circulation Models of the Atmosphere
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Meanwhile the community of modelers continued to devise more realistic parameters for various physical processes, and to sharpen their mathematical techniques. A major innovation that spread during the 1970s took a new approach to the basic architecture of models. Some groups, instead of dividing the planet's surface into a grid of thousands of square cells, took to dividing it into a tier of segments hemispheres, quadrants, eighths, sixteenths, etc. ("spherical harmonics"). After doing a calculation on this abstracted system, they could combine and transform the numbers back into a geographical map. This "spectral transform" technique simplified many of the computations, but it was feasible only with the much faster new computers. For decades afterward, physicists who specialized in other fields of fluid dynamics were startled when they saw a climate model that did not divide up the atmosphere into millions of boxes, but used the refined abstraction of spherical harmonics. The method worked only because the Earth's atmosphere has an unusual property for a fluid system it is in fact quite nearly spherical.
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From "The Discovery of Global Warming"
General Circulation Models of the Atmosphere
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Meanwhile the community of modelers continued to devise more realistic parameters for various physical processes, and to sharpen their mathematical techniques. A major innovation that spread during the 1970s took a new approach to the basic architecture of models. Some groups, instead of dividing the planet's surface into a grid of thousands of square cells, took to dividing it into a tier of segments hemispheres, quadrants, eighths, sixteenths, etc. ("spherical harmonics"). After doing a calculation on this abstracted system, they could combine and transform the numbers back into a geographical map. This "spectral transform" technique simplified many of the computations, but it was feasible only with the much faster new computers. For decades afterward, physicists who specialized in other fields of fluid dynamics were startled when they saw a climate model that did not divide up the atmosphere into millions of boxes, but used the refined abstraction of spherical harmonics. The method worked only because the Earth's atmosphere has an unusual property for a fluid system it is in fact quite nearly spherical.
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