Home PCs Predict Hotter Earth

31 Jan, 2005 at 11:10pm ET Article published in Tech

Global warming may ramp up average temperatures by 20 degrees Fahrenheit in less than 50 years, according to the first climate prediction experiment relying on the distributed computer power of 90,000 personal computers. The startling results were published this week in the journal Nature.

The PCs, located in 150 countries, allowed British scientists to run more than 50,000 simulations of the future global climate, many more than the “best ever” 128 simulations using supercomputers, said Myles Allen, chief scientist of climateprediction.net and a physicist at Oxford University. A distributed-computing project, climateprediction.net involves several British universities and the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

Prior climate simulations have used “nothing close to the kind of computing power we were able to use in this experiment,” said Allen.

The climateprediction.net experiment was designed to find the range of possible 21st-century climate changes due to global warming. The results were both surprising and “very worrying,” he said.

The team found that global temperatures could rise between 4 degrees and 20 degrees Fahrenheit if greenhouse gases double from pre-industrial levels. At current emission rates, that doubling is expected around 2050. Previous best estimates had set the temperature increase at between 2 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit.

Source: Wired

Comments

1 Feb 2005 ~ 2:20pm Garg Makes me want to move to Atlanta and get a H2. Let's make it 25 by 2050! We can do it!
2 Feb 2005 ~ 7:44am deicist hmmm,I'm sure there's a prescot joke waiting to be made here.....
2 Feb 2005 ~ 12:08pm Linc Read "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton and see what you think of the theory of "global warming" afterwards.
11 Feb 2005 ~ 4:03pm Garg [thread revival? yeah...]

Crichton suggests that there are monetary and political motivations behind the majority scientific opinion that global warming is real, and is being accelerated by human activity. While there may be exaggerations, it is much more dangerous to the future to believe the oppossite view that global warming is nothing to be concerned about than to believe the exaggerated claims themselves.

The model outputs of this study show that in a worst-case scenario, the Atlanta area could be around 10*C hotter. We could kiss our overclocks goodbye, unless liquified Nitrogen gas become more affordable.