Huge Climate Experiment Starts Friday - All Welcome

Society Religion & Philosophy
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I haven’t really looked into this yet so don’t blame me if they’re flakes.. but I thought I’d pass it on anyway. Maybe someone here will be interested. If you try it, do keep us updated!

Huge Climate Experiment Starts Friday - All Welcome](Yahoo News: Latest and Breaking News, Headlines, Live Updates, and More)

A climate prediction experiment which is expected to involve two million people around the world and produce a probable forecast for the 21st century will be launched on Friday.

Anyone with a personal computer can join the project and will be expected to conduct their own unique version of Britain’s Met Office climate model, simulating several decades of the Earth’s climate at a time.

“Everybody gets their own model so they can do an interesting bit of research on their PC,” Dr Myles Allen, of the University of Oxford, told a British Association science conference on Thursday.

The results of the experiment will be sent via the Internet. The simulations will be used to test different model versions and the results will be collated to predict the 21st century climate.

“We can’t predict which versions of the model will be any good without running these simulations, and there are far too many for us to run them ourselves,” said Allen.

“Together, participants’ results will give us an overall picture of how much human influence has contributed to recent climate change and the range of possible changes in the future,” he added.

Allen said the program, which can be downloaded from www.climateprediction.net, can run on an ordinary desktop or laptop computer. It is easy to operate and does not slow down other tasks on the computer.

The project, which is billed as the world’s largest climate prediction experiment, is a collaboration between the Met Office and several universities including Oxford and Reading.

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Problem is when running such studies with inadequate resources is that they're outdated as soon as they're completed. It makes much more sense in trying to understand one element of climate in isolation and combine elements based on empirical learning before launching off on a global model using millions of PC's.

Modern day climates are a result of a few basic processes which get increasingly complicated when working in conjunction with one another. Elements with major control include, onshore and marine bathymetric topography, lower crust and mantle out-gassing, the Earths tilt, wobble, recession and ice-house, green house cyclicity. Overlaid on this are anthropogenic processes such as C02 emissions and ozone layer depletion, these form minor blips on the curve.

As with all simulation models all possible scenarios are run and you’re left with ranges of data, getting an idea of probability from key case studies areas is where the money is spent.

But it's a good one to get people interested, and cheap. I won’t be allowing this philistine groaning software onto my PC though, as I’m running my own models!

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^ My thoughts exactly (on the science bit). I haven't played with this yet, and don't know if I'll get the time to.. but it is good for two things: it spreads public awareness and encourages participation, even if not wholly accurate; and I'm sure they'll (the researchers) learn something about computing and maybe be able to come out of this with some lessons learned on that aspect :)