Calling all computers
For northerners, climate change is a hard issue to ignore. From warmer winters to melting permafrost, the signs of a warming world just keep piling up.
So what's a concerned northerner to do? There are lots of ways to take action on an individual level and reduce your own energy use.
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This map shows the locations of computers already hooked into the climateprediction.net virtual supercomputer in North America.
(map courtesy of climateprediction.net)
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As well you can now easily contribute to a global scientific effort to look into the future of climate change; all you have to do is sign up your home computer to help with the job.
The only way to figure out just how much the climate might warm over the next century is to run myriads of elaborate climate models that require huge amounts of computing power.
No single computer in the world is powerful enough to accomplish this task, but now personal computers located around the globe can be linked together to create a virtual supercomputer that is capable of running the complex models needed to predict climate change.
The concept is both simple and fantastic. A climate model runs in the background on your computer so it does not interfere with other tasks; donate a little computer downtime, and you could contribute to an important scientific undertaking.
A British group of researchers launched the climateprediction.net experiment in September, 2003. It is similar to a research program called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which is based at the University of California at Berkeley.
SETI is looking for signs of intelligent life outside Earth, and well over three million people have signed up their home computers to analyze radio telescope data and listen for artificial radio signals coming from other stars.
The climate project is collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Reading and a number of other British institutions, including the Open University which is using the project to teach students about climate science.
While there is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth is likely to warm during this century, the estimates of how much temperatures might increase vary hugely. Part of the difficulty with climate modeling can be summed up in a word: chaos.
Simple climate models try to boil all the possible variables that affect the climate into a set of mathematical equations. More complex models try to account for everything -- everything -- that could affect the climate in the future.
Called General Circulation Models, they try to simulate factors including incoming and outgoing radiation, the way the air moves, the way clouds form and precipitation falls, and the way the ice sheets grow or shrink.
The ocean has a huge influence on climate. Changing vegetation can also have an impact. And all of these different factors can affect each other.
The chaos theory was first recognized by Ed Lorenz in the 1960s when he famously observed that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest might just possibly cause a tornado over Texas.
The project web page which can be found at www.climateprediction.net, uses the analogy of dropping a stick in the river. Everything from the way it is dropped, to the rocks and vegetation in the water to the currents themselves will affect the progress of the stick. There is always some uncertainty, so there are many possible scenarios for its journey down the river.
The bottom line is that climate is not unpredictable, it is just chaotic, but volunteering for this experiment could help tidy up a few details, and maybe even lead to major breakthroughs.
So far about 20,000 computers in Europe and almost 8,000 in North America are helping run climate models, and the researchers hope that eventually millions of home computers will be part of the experiment. A map of the participants shows very few computers in northern Canada are part of the project at this early stage.
It takes about half an hour to download the program; the only requirement is that you must leave your computer on all the time. (The organizers even explain exactly how much energy, and how much greenhouse gas, this extra use will generate.) The projects are long-term; the one running on this writer's computer has completed jut over one percent of phase one of a climate model in the space of two days.
After you log on to the project's web page, just follow the links to the download section. There you'll find clear information on how to participate and the technical requirements needed in various computers to run the programs.
