  Earth's magnetic field is generated by processes in the electrically
conducting, liquid outer core, subsumed under the term `geodynamo'. In the last
decades, great effort has been put into the numerical simulation of core
dynamics following from the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations. However, the
numerical simulations are far from Earth's core in terms of several control
parameters. Different scaling analyses found simple scaling laws for quantities
like heat transport, flow velocity, magnetic field strength and magnetic
dissipation time.
  We use an extensive dataset of 116 numerical dynamo models compiled by
Christensen and co-workers to analyse these scalings from a rigorous model
selection point of view. Our method of choice is leave-one-out cross-validation
which rates models according to their predictive abilities. In contrast to
earlier results, we find that diffusive processes are not negligible for the
flow velocity and magnetic field strength in the numerical dynamos. Also the
scaling of the magnetic dissipation time turns out to be more complex than
previously suggested. Assuming that the processes relevant in the numerical
models are the same as in Earth's core, we use this scaling to estimate an
Ohmic dissipation of 3-8 TW for the core. This appears to be consistent with
recent high CMB heat flux scenarios.
