Slashdot Mirror

Long range weather forecast is still an open research topic. There is a weather simulation project called ClimatePrediction.net where your computer simulate 15 years of the earth climate while you get a cool looking screen saver with the simulated weather.

Their goal is to have the most accurate weather forecast model around. This should lower the uncertainty and clear up this question of CO2 and how much it contributes to global warming They are calibrating with simulation of past weather. With the calibrated models they will then forecast the next 50 years and hopefully this will tell us if hurricanes become more likely.

Join in numbers and help clear up doubt about the future climate.

Many of you are familiar with Seti@Home to look at ET. They moved to their new infrastructure called BOINC. Boinc supports multiple concurrent project.

Well there is a weather simulation project called ClimatePrediction.net where your computer simulate 15 years of the earth climate while you get a cool looking screen saver with the simulated weather. They are calibrating with simulation of past weather. With the calibrated models they will then forecast the next 50 years and hopefully have a best model of global warming.

Join in numbers and help clear up doubt about the future climate. You can share the same machine with SETI@Home if you want.

"a task that needed 60,000 years, the computer scientists devised a couple of tricks to reduce the amount of computations"

OR

60,000 Computers all running accrros the globe in a simulated computing project.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Now i know theres problems with this. They were using a more powerful computer than any of us have in our homes, plus the problems with simulations going wrong but overall its possible i think.

http://climateprediction.net/ manage to predict the the weather (well, we think they have!).

Currently available projects are...

SETI@home
Predictor-Protein structure prediction

Coming soon....

climateprediction.net
Folding@home

Farther in the future (i.e. pending funding)...
Einstein@home -- a search for gravitational waves.

In the conceptual stage, since sometime last week...
neuralnet.net -- studies of the nature of intelligence using neural nets and genetic algorithms

I've heard that one of the big drivers for the development of more powerful computing hardware is games. Like it or not, with games constantly pushing the envelope of what users demand from machines we are left with rapidly accelerating development of powerful personal computing hardware. One beneficial side effect is that we have ridiculous computing power that is only beginning to be tapped by United Devices, Folding at Home, climate prediction not to mention SETI and all the other distributed projects out there.

So in its way, games forcing the development of PC hardware is contributing to the advancement of science. If fully realized, all that computing power could change the world.

BOINC doesn't run multiple projects at the same time. It runs one project at a time, but it divides its time between projects according to percentages that you choose.

There are no active, public projects besides SETI@home yet. Predictor@home is running a public alpha test of its client that anyone can participate in. climateprediction.net began a private alpha test of its client today, and plans to begin a public beta test next month. Folding@home is developing a client, but has not announced any alpha or beta testing for it yet. BOINC Beta Test is still beta testing the BOINC client and may create an Astropulse project based on the client. Einstein@Home may be developing a client based on BOINC for its project which begins in 2005.

I am writing this on a Sony Vaio with the AMD Athlon 1Ghz cpu, supposedly with "power-stepping" technology. Ok, if its not in use it drops down to maybe 600Mhz, but since the day I got it, (in November 2001) I have never had a battery life of more than 1 hour !

In fact, these days, I would be lucky to get 40 minutes from a full charge.
I guess I need a new battery, but as its a mobile desktop replacement, and I use it for video capture and conversion, it spends a whole lot of its life plugged in to the mains anyway.

But, a nice 1.4 Ghz machine running with lower power would definitely be better.

I am currently running the Climateprediction.net modelling software as a service, and the fan has been running constantly for around 12 hours now !

SETI is bunk. do something useful with your free CPU cycles instead.

SETI@home has been getting dissed a lot lately. "Why are you wasting your cycles on this useless project?" some geeks ask. "Why aren't you spending them predicting climate change, fighting AIDS or curing Alzheimer's? You could be saving people from anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, or SARS."

These are all noble goals, worth pursuing. But SETI has a noble goal that doesn't get talked about very much.

Most SETI research so far has been focused on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. (Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a message of our own, someday.)

"So what happens if you listen and you don't hear anything?" you ask. Well, even if we drain the Water Hole and find nothing, we'll still have learned a great deal from the process. We'll know there likely aren't any civilizations remotely like us in our galaxy. We'll know that previous civilizations, if there were any, were not able to sustain themselves. We'll know that intelligent life is fleeting and precious in the universe. And this should make us think hard about our own civilization.

If we're ever forced to acknowledge that there are no intelligent radio signals in the universe, then we must also acknowledge that the odds of our own survival just became much bleaker. Knowing that space is quiet means it's more important for us to be careful than we thought. The longer we search without finding any intelligent signals, the more likely it becomes that intelligent civilization isn't some pretty 4th of July sparkler; it's nitroglycerin, waiting to explode. This is incredibly valuable knowledge, life or death knowledge that's worth going after.

The biggest reason to look for a signal in the first place isn't to commune with E.T., but out of pure self-interest. Any number of systems failures could wipe us out as a species, from a single well-designed terrorist plague to GMOs with unforeseen environmental consequences. How do we as a society learn to play nice with technology? Has anyone else in the universe done it? If we found evidence that someone out there had, it would stand as a beacon, showing that we can probably do it, too. And if we don't find a signal, it means a bell is probably tolling our end somewhere, and we'd better think long and hard how to change that.

So feel good about SETI. It's not just about searching for aliens, it's about searching for a cure for extinction.

In that way we hopefully can make some really good predictions for the decades to come.

Note: no, I'm not related to this project in any way. It is just a very good cause!

Plan my real estate purchases by figuring out how much global warming and coastal flooding we'll have in 2050.

I've contributed over 5000 work units to SETI and even found one of those "interesting" signals. I stopped a while ago. Why? a few reasons:

1. I realized that the amount of time a civilization would use anything recognizable over radio waves would probably be pretty short. From the invention of radio until every signal is compressed and/or encrypted would probably be a few hundred years at best. compressed and encrypted data would just look like noise and probably wouldn't stand out. So it's either no-radio or unintelligible radio signals for billions of years with a small "hearable" window. not too promising that we'd be able to catch that.

2. There are better or at least more interesting causes out there for CPU donators. Folding@home has the potential to contribute to a nanotechnological or medical revolution. United Devices is a project to test cancer drugs and the results go to Oxford in case you're wondering about the for-profit nature of the company behind it. Finaly, the climate prediction project is contributing to a better understanding of planetary climate dynamics.

My side interest is Mars exploration and terraformation which is a pretty much just consists of reading literature on the subject. However, with contributing to nanotech, cancer drugs and climate prediction, I am making a small dent in the effort to adapt both ourselves and technology to making a new world.
I realize that last part was a bit offtopic but I thought I'd at least give a little reasoning behind why I choose to run those ones.

You could also help out with the evaluation of climate models "Climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. There is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth is likely to warm over the coming century, but estimates of how much vary hugely. By taking part in the climateprediction.net experiment you can help to improve scientific forecasts of 21st century climate."

Because climate models matter, if we care about whether global warming is really happening or not:

• climateprediction.net

As mentioned before, there is a distributed project called climateprediction.net
for those who want to participate themselves. It is run by the University of Oxford in the UK, it is not affiliated with . So far only a windows client, but a Linux one is in the works. It is very CPU intensive, so if you have less than an 800mhz processor you shouldn't bother, it would take months to finish a single unit of work.

Hey, do you find it suprising that the nation that knows the least about climate science is the one that is most skeptical about global warming?

"In little more than a decade, the United States has fallen significantly behind other countries in its ability to simulate and predict long-term shifts in climate, according to a wide range of scientists and recent federal studies."
"During the Clinton administration, the lack of American modeling leadership did not have a discernible impact on climate policy, various experts said. But it did prevent the United States from playing a more central role in writing critical sections of the Intergovernmental Panel's report -- particularly the part assessing the extent of human influence on the warming trend of recent decades.

In computing power, Dr. Sarachik said, "our top two centers together don't amount to one-fifth of the European effort."

In that article from the New York Times is from two years ago! It mentions the japanese plans to build the Earth Simulator.

Meanwhile, just use one of the plenty of distributed computing programs that already exist for scientific research, if ever you got bored by SETI@home...
Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group
evolution@home
eOn
Climate Prediction
Distributed Particle Accelerator Design
LifeMapper
etc...

The graph doesn't show what you think it does, no correlation is being made between the level of CO2 and the temperature change since pre-industrial times.

It is undeniable that CO2 levels have increased since pre-industrial times, this has been measure by direct sampling of the atmosphere as well as by proxy measurement of the Icelandic and Greenland ice sheets.

"To state that the increase in CO2 is undeniably causing the increase in temperature" is bad science, but only because you provided no context. There is strong evidence that CO2 absorbs strongly in the infra red and weakly in the visible. Incoming radiation from the Sun is allowed in, outgoing is absorbed and causes the CO2 and surrounding gases to heat up.

Further, if we take the two other terrestrial planets as "test Earths" for extreme climates, both Mars and Venus have 90 % CO2, as such their not in the same regime as the Earth, however, Mars should be approximately 20K cooler than has been measured, this is due to the heat absorbed the the atmosphere.

Venus, which also has global cloud coverage has a heat increase of over 400 K compared to what it "should" be (under reasonable black body assumptions). This was agreed on as early as the 60's (proposed by Sagan in 60/62), there are no other plausible reasons for such a huge increase in heat, the clouds on Venus block out 95% of the incoming light from the surface, yet it's hot enough to melt lead.

We have experiments to back up the scientific conclusions that have been made, numerical models (CPDN for example) have performed numerous experiments where concentrations of CO2 and other GhG are increased over a period, the mean temperature increase is positive even when no other conditions are explicitely changed. Theoretical chemistry can calculate pretty well how different gases will react under given conditions. When Chapman devised the Ozone balance, it turned out it wasn't quite right, until CFC and OH/NO radicals were included. Models of CO2 and other GhG are simple enough, they absorb IR, they don't absorb Visible, there aren't many conclusions that can be drawn from that.

I'm not entirely sure which four in you list you refer to,but...

• The heat balance of the earth is measured in numbers much bigger than the heat output of fuel burning, one second of solar input is 0.7 kW per square metre average over the entire Earth,compared to an estimated 0.01 Kw/m^2 for the total power output, that's 1% of the total (that's current day values).
• Is the Earth going through a warmer part of the what now? The galaxy/ Universe is slightly bigger than the Earth, and it has a mean value of 2.7 K
• How would this Earth core heating manifest itself? more volcanos I guess? Also regular Earthquakes as the mantle reconfigures to a more stable state, neither of these have been seen to my knowledge.
• We can measure the output form the Sun pretty accurtaly, either by, you know, looking at it, which we have been doing (wrt Ozone) since 1920. Proxy measurements from sedimentiary rocks and ice sheets extend this to at least a billion or two years. The paleoclimatalogical solar constant was about 7% lower than the present day value, the Earth was covered in ice, even to the equator.
• The total area covered by satellites is so depressingly small that they probably won't even register on the millikelvin instruments used to measure absolute zero. The satellites which absorb significant amount of heat (most of them) rotate in order the face cold space to radiate the heat away from the Sun, this is the "barbecue roll" theat they talk about in Apollo 13 just before the explosion. The moon is huge, satellites small, no effect here, move on.
• Aliens, deat

I'm giving up on debating global warming on Slashdot, it seems just about everyone is convinced its bunk. With the weather getting more and more extreme, could you at least understand why we are worried?

Well, I just wanted to make everyone aware of the new distributed project - www.climateprediction.net.
Whether you agree with the theory of human caused global warming or not, with this you can help getting the world scientific community more accurate climate models.

Unfortunately only a Windows client available at the moment, but a Linux one is in development. Personally I think this project and the
Folding at Home distributed project are much more deserving of peoples' clock cycles than Seti or distributed.net.

Cheers,
Lars

MEDIA KIT: Debunking Pseudo-Scholarship: Things a journalist should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist

please be aware that this is a commercial project

http://www.climateprediction.net/misc/sponsors.php

all of those companies SELL services based on this data, so iam sure they would very much like the public to do their work while they sit back and reap all this lovely free data, even the UK Goverments Met Office isn't free and if you would like weather data (like what its like in your area) you have to pay for it (unlike the USA which offers access to its data streams/imaging for free)

so go ahead if you want to donate your CPU to companies such as
" Risk Management Solutions (RMS) is the world's leading provider of products and services for the quantification and management of natural hazard risks."

then go right ahead, Me ? ill just keep looking for aliens thanks, at least mankind will benefit instead of a few shareholders in a faceless corporation.

Thanks but the correct link is here. Would mod you up if I could.

Won't all those computers left on for 24 hours a day have a detrimental impact on the climate system?

Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the climateprediction.net project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of electrical energy.

That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Let's use a tiny bit of physics to do it. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the climateprediction.net project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea!

Is five and a half million cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council, some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!!!

Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the climateprediction.net project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.

Assuming you are convinced this experiment needs to be done, there are basically two options: to buy a hangar-full of PCs and run it ourselves (not even an option right now, since the climate research community doesn't have the resources); or to recycle spare CPU out in the community, as we propose to do under the climateprediction.net experiment. Since the main environmental impact of a PC is in manufacture and disposal, not the power consumed in running it (never mind the air-conditioning costs and visual impact of that hangar on some innocent rural community), environmentalists will, we hope, approve of our strategy.

Why would I want to donate may expensive cpu-cycles to this?

To help find the most accurate climate model. With that model, the argument about whether the climate change is happening or not, can be solved.

And what about the environmental impact of running tens of thousands of computers for this prohect? Did they think about that?

Maybe you should do a little research before spouting off about how there are no useful distributed computing projects out there.