Slashdot Mirror
Distributed Computing and Climate Change
GraWil writes "The BBC are reporting the launch of climateprediction.net. The aim of the project is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models which frequently give rise to inconclusive predictions. More info on the current state of climate modeling is given by the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report which highlights the need to quantify uncertainties of climate projections. So now, in addition to finding ET or curing cancer, your PC can now contribute to our understanding of climate change."
No Linux version for "months." How about folding at home for those of you disappointed masses.
The heat from running these distributed computing apps causes climate change inside my apartment.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
I submitted this yesterday, but, whatever.
They claim it doesn't affect your own power - obviously it does - otherwise what are they gaining from it?
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
I'm not really sure what this has to do with climate prediction...lol.
however, I know you're fully aware that it says "total hostname and active sites," not webservers. The reason for that is that squatters (and that's all the increase is) tend to be MS kids - probably because squatting doesn't fit the OS community too well.
but I'm just a zombie due to it being 9am and me just getting home...you're just trolling and won't ever see this. lol
man, i did'nt know that distributed computing would cause climate change!
-- SouNerd.com
Here are some other ditributed computng projects.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
> Your PC can now contribute to our understanding of climate change.
And you can contribute to climate change itself too. Let's accelerate global warming by using 100% CPU at any time.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
I'm a SETI and Folding user, but I have to say that I find this project very compelling. We know that cancer is serious, and there are big businesses looking to find answers. The question of climate change is potentially more serious, in my opinion. But we need to find out for sure
- Working Group I - IPCC Report on Climate Change, 2001
Regardless of the data, a lot of people will only see this issue through the prism of their preconceived political agendas. I'm not against good data, far from it, but this is such a highly charged subject I'd like to know if they are going to be completely open about the data and the methods applied to it. That MIGHT help.
When it comes to "studies" about climate change, the first thing one should ask is what is the political agenda behind those conducting the "study". Climate studies are highly charged with politics. Some studies have been rigged to exhibit a predetermined outcome. Before you waste your CPUs and BTUs, try to verify that the study is honest and objective, and without political slant one way or the other. You want to contribute to science, not propoganda.
or are you just glad to be calling in a forecast?
be careful the enemIE doesn't locate you/US, & revoke yOUR liesense.
dark daze ahead. followed by a light/unlimited power, such as has never been known to humankind.
get ready to see the light. bring yOUR family/friends.
yeah, right, accuse US of screwing things up, even the weather. you must be some kind of terrorist sympathizer, or something even worse.
if you don't want to volunteer some forecasts, then take your sniveling whining complaints somewhere else.
just kidding.
they allready have come to the conclusion that there is a climate change
Maybe that is because Climate Change is real. You are either ignorant or ill informed. I suggest you address this.
I think half of their servers are slashdotted. I've downloaded okay, registered okay (even though it said I didn't) but my machine does not want to believe I've registered.
:-( (obligatory ST:V quote here)
I've tried 9 times now, and the webpage thinks that my machine is 9 of the same name
I don't think they anticipated the load...
During all of this, the "check you can connect to our servers" test has been running fine.
UNDERSTANDING climate change will hurt our industry? So you're against knowledge? This explains so much about republicans.
There is climate change. It happens from year to year, decade to decade, and so on. The ice age ended, didn't it?
Understanding it includes finding out if industry is causing it or if it's occuring naturally.
And the computers produce that heat if they're on, period.
And you end it all off with 'somebody please think of the children'. Priceless troll.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Wake up and smell the coffee. There is climate change, and it is very, very likely to have been caused by human intervention. Check out for yourself what the IPCC has to say on this: 2001 climate change report summary for policy makers. The question now is: how big will the changes be, and what will the consequences be? Calculating this takes a lot of CPU cycles.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Not that it would accomplish much besides the nostalgia factor.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Please join the cancer project instead!!!
..my local weatherman is accurate most of the time in his 2 day forecast which is enough for me to decide to take the umbrella to work or not).
We need to cure cancer.
We'll worry about the weather later (we have decent tools already anyway
We need to cure cancer.
Offtopic, eh? Don't you just love Moderators who set their Threshold to +1? Try reading the Parent post smarty-pants...
Climate change has a much wider affect than Cancer ever will. Droughts, heat waves, extreme temperature changes...All create disasters which far exceed the amount of people who die of cancer. France and parts of Europe is a prime example of this; they are having intense climate change. The U.S. is experiencing it with extreme drought in the west. Things are changing, and it's way beyond our comprehension. That's partly why it's so easy for some people to just shrug of climate change, and trust to God. Well, let me tell you, God isn't going to step in on this one. If we're stupid enough to create a global catastrophe, there's no one but ourselves who are going to have to save our asses (If that's even possible).
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?
Yes they did.It's kind of like knowing that you have a 60% chance of rain tomorrow, and knowing that the rain will be as heavy showers and will blow through between 1:30 and 4:45 PM. The latter information is far more useful for planning your day than the former.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I BELIEVE he said "Won't somebody please think of the children". That just about settles it, and clearly outweighs any so called 'facts' you can come up with.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
As the Earth spins smoothly through outer space, the balance of raw weight determines rotation speed.
Now dam up the rivers all over the planet, such as the largest dam on Earth in China, and the hundreds of thousands of randomly placed dams all over the round globe-the balance alteration is causing the Earths rotation to literaly become out of balance.
Like a wobbly tire we hurl around the sun - wopwopwop.
Accordingly the climate readjusts and causes bizarre weather changes simply because of the correction process.
It may take a long time to balance itself out, in the meantime nations are unpredicatably affected.
If I find out the name of this waco water conspircy theorist commy liberal for even thinking such a far fetched unproven anti-semitic theory, I'll post it up.
Dave
Yeah! Linux zealot power all the way baby!
It looked good until I saw the filesize of the app. 7.5MB. Now, a lot of home users have fast computers but only have slow internet connections. A huge chunk of the potential market has already been lost because of the large filesize. Unfortunate, but true.
Master. Of. Climate. Control.
Wake up! Look at what the scientists are saying. They are not stupid. Contrary to what the right-wing media would have us all believe, a MAJORITY of scientists believe climate change and global warming are a very important issue. How do you explain the heat drought in France? Oh yes, I'm sure you'd say "HAHA the damn frogs died haha they deserved it for not supporting the Iraq war."
Give me ONE non-biased example of a report which says a majority of scientists believe global warming/climate change is not happening, and perhaps you will have some credibility. And no, Rush Limbaugh quotes don't count.
I've been running climateprediction.net as a beta tester for the last couple of months. My experiences with it so far have been good, running it on a PIII-733 and a AMD 1GHz Duron laptop. No major crashes or faults.
Compared to SETI each work unit takes forever. None of this one unit every 8 hours business, when they say it takes a committment they mean it, 90 days of 24/7 operation to finish one unit on the Duron, so I guess there is unlikely to be anyone hitting the 100,000 unit mark any time soon!
A bit about the program - The work unit itself is broken down into 3 segments. There's an upload of results so far at the end of each one and a daily connection to confirm how much cpu time you've used in the last day and what checkpoint you've reached. If you don't do this it doesn't ask, it just checks if you have a connection and if not waits until you do. The program check points every couple of minuutes but can roll back a bit if you reboot (not a huge amount but its not as frequent as SETI).
Overall I've had no problems with it apart from it crashing out of virtual memory once when I'd left it running without a network connection for 2 weeks.
please be aware that this is a commercial project
p
http://www.climateprediction.net/misc/sponsors.ph
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.
Only 35 comments, and already the registration system is Slashdotted. Their loss. Not mine.
World's tallest building rises in the desert
Well--- if cow farts can cause global heating....why couldn't Amber(not her real name).
Don't confuse Climate Change with Global Warming. One is a proven fact, the other is still a theory inspiring heated debates among scientists. I know because I get to hear them arguing at work.
World's tallest building rises in the desert
My take on all this is that I will contribute my CPU time to a project that is not receiving a great deal of funding and that will not make one large corporation rich. I would like to see cancer defeated as much as the next person, but there is plenty of money and research in that field.
I was just wondering if you can run two of these applications side-by-side? I briefly tried it out with SETI & Folding, and it seems that one runs at the expense of the other. Anyone try this out?
Either a bug in the registration process, or /. has hit hard again...
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
There is climate change, and it is very, very likely to have been caused by human intervention.
Stringing the word very together a lot of times does not equal perfect scientific proof. Yes, there are higher reported amounts of greenhouse gasses. Yes, there are climate changes (always have been). Whether A=>B has not been proven without the shadow of doubt. The models in use are somewhat controversial: Google for "stefan-boltzmann" AND "global warming".
and they still can't tell me if it's going to rain today....
When China, India, Brazil, and other such "developing" countries are held to the same standards that America and other "developed" coutries are supposed to be held to by the Kyoto Treaty, when the pretentious Europeans actually meet those standards themselves, and when the environmentalists figure out that nuclear power would do wonders for reducing CO2 emissions (not to mention sulfer, etc), then maybe I'll believe that the climate change activists are serious and not just out to throw a millstone around America's neck. Meanwhile, I'll note that climate change has been happening for all of recorded history and will continue to happen regardless of anything humans do.
Wake me up when they come up with a mathematical model that you can feed data up to 30 years old to and have it predict what temperatures actually are today and the past few years. AFAIK no one has ever been able to do that.
Gotta love it. Just another way of saying environmental science is the alchemy of the 22nd Century. Another way of saying it is: those models don't work becuase they are based on unscientific factors and a socialist agenda.
Dawn of the Dead
I thought everyone already just absolutely knew (because Al Gore said so) that big time global warming was a fact and we have to do something NOW, except those mean nasty Republicans who are bought and paid for by the oil companies.
and was baffled as to why it was rejected.
I suppose now it will be duped?
Don't confuse Climate Change with Global Warming
I don't. We know the Earth's climate has changed many times before human beings even existed. However, it is true you may be able to point to scientists who are not convinced the current Client Change we are experiencing is caused by human activity. Well, that's how science works. Some physicists dispute that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant. The important point here is the vast majority of scientists believe Global Warming is happening right now. Only a fool would not act on this because a minority of scientists (some with very dubious political/business connections) take a different view.
Why not? Wait months until they finish the client... And again for a Mac client... Sounds stupid, doesn't it?
millstone around America's neck
Wow, that's almost funny. Don't you get it? This is not a zero-sum game. If Global Warming destroys China, Brazil etc it will also destroy the US.
when the pretentious Europeans actually meet those standards
You are propagating nonsense. Go and study the subject and you will discover the Europeans are taking serious steps to cut back on CO2 emissions.
I predict the chance of inconclusive predictions today is 60%
Has anyone come up with a decent client program for any of these projects? I've been running distributed.net's RC5 client for years. Of all the projects I've tried, it's the only good program I've come across. It actually runs as a service with 0 priority, so it really does use unused cycles, unlike the screensavers which only work when you're away from your PC (and if you use a screensaver). Have the other programs gotten better, or are they the same as when I looked at them way back?
I care very much about climate change, but is this particular experiment worthwhile?
Is it well designed? Will the data be useful? Are the experimenters competent to make good use of the data?
More importantly, will this data be publicly available to other scientists, or am I donating to their private endeavor?
No offense to the experimenters -- it sounds like a great idea, but just because someone has a great idea and sets up a website doesn't mean they know what they're doing. I don't know anything about their sponsors, either (though I'm not in that business).
There are nearly 18,000 signatures from scientists worldwide on a petition called The Oregon Petition which says that there is no evidence for man-made global warming theory nor for any impact from mankind's activities on climate. Rebuttal?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
And at this rate of speed, it will finish the whole simulation in about ten days. Not bad for a 2.2 Ghz Athlon XP. Each person runs the entire simulation, not in parts, so it's the frequency of the simulation and the probabilities that they're after. Kinda neat.
A blog like any other.
See, all those jokes about overclocked Athlons contributing to global warming are now coming true.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"Parallel and Distributed Programming Using C++ provides an up-close look at how to build software that can take advantage of multiprocessor computers. Simple approaches for programming parallel virtual machines are presented, and the basics of cluster application development are explained. Through an easy-to-understand overview of multithreaded programming, this book also shows you how to write software components that work together over a network to solve problems and do work." - Amazon
--Your Friendly Neighborhood Product Placement Troll
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
I call 18,000 a minority.
Elucidate please? I can't find any pointers to serious peer-reviewed scientific work in your google link.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
Didn't Wolfram conclude this was impossible in his big fat tome?
[o]_O
Yes, there is climate change, and no one has any real clue as to whether it is natural or human-caused. I'm inclined to believe mostly natural, with a bit of human-ingeniuty in there somewhere. Anyway, the data will be able to be used by other people, so yeah, I think it's a good idea.
Did someone imagine a distributed cluster all around the planet heating atmosphere to the point no one lives on the earth anymore?
What do you need to cool it? Oceans?
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
And you don't think the fact that Venus is MUCH closer to the Sun has anything to do with its hotter temperatures? If the distance from the Sun to the Earth were to change by only a few percent either way we'd become a desert planet or we'd be an ice ball, and the activities of Man would have nothing to do with the outcome.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
While there may be nearly 18,000 signatures on The Oregon Petition, they're not all scientists. It's been pointed out that some of the signatories are Geri Haliwell of the Spice Girls, TV Personalities, newscasters, and the obligatory dead people. This page has some details:/ ClimateChange.htm a rming/page.cfm?pageID=498
http://www.transport2000.org.uk/activistbriefings
If you prefer a source that doesn't have the word "activist" in its title (it puts people off for some reason) You can try:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_w
Now, the Oregon Institute claims that the bogus names were inserted by "enviro-pranksters", but if the petition is open to such "pranking" you have to wonder about the validity of the petition as a whole.
Beyond this, you also have to look at the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, http://www.oism.org which is the group that originate the petition. Their faculty has absolutely nobody who has specialized in studying environmental issues or climate issues. Instead, you have electrical engineers, surgeons, and chemists. Nothing wrong with that, but when they say one thing, and the specialists in the field say another, I'd prefer to trust the specialists.
We can also look at the other publications of the OISM, including their handbook "Nuclear War Survival Skills", and the "Fighting Chance Civil Defense" series.. things all originated by their founder, and supported and sold solely by their society. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of this stuff, but looking at it and you see a group that has a very solid 1980s or early 1990s mindset - a mindset that saw environmentalism as a "radical" issue.
For the same sort of take on the group, but with much more detail, you can check out these folks:
http://www.prwatch.org/improp/oism.html
Now, because global warming has been so politicized, it's impossible to find a source that doesn't appear to have bias one way or the other. Of course, perhaps the bias is because one side is right, but that's difficult to tell for us laymen.
My choice then, is to side with the people who say that we should be taking steps to prevent a cataclysm, just in case they're right. Kind of like putting on seat-belts.. I may think that I'll never be in an accident, but that doesn't help me much if I wind up getting thrown through my windshield.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
No, because in 2033 (when the Earth becomes uninhabitable), Americans will be on their way to their new home: Mars, or Marsmerica as it will then be known.
I used to work at a computer center
where we ran a lot of weather and
climate models. The state of
modelling is far more primitive
than most people think, even
people in the computing business.
We found that even slight changes to
initial conditions or, say, a 14th
decimal position difference (maybe
1 bit in a 64-bit floating-point
number) in calculations
caused the model to veer off
and produce completely different
outcomes.
It is unwise to rely on computer models
completely. A lot of different approaches
help, where a human integrates many
results and tries to come to a
conclusion.
Remember that programmers and
scientists can be lazy. They often use
the same code kernels over and over,
adding their own science to
the calculations.
mmh, I think you're wrong. with linux you can have the same performances as windows with less hardware power, which can be translated into less energy consumed. also remeber that we have and Ecology-HOWTO . The energy sukers are winzoz users, 'cause to open notepad needs to change their pc every 6 monts, 'cause winzoz needs every day (and every program u install) more power to do the same things...
I was there.
Rumours on the forum are that it can be run under WineX or some such things, as well, of course, as VMWare.
There is no problem with running the model on Linux though, the model itself will run under any operating system with enough power, it was originally written for a Cray and is still used at the Met Office on Cray-like machines (specifically a a T3E, I think).
The model will (and does) currently run on Linux, quite happily, the problem with running CP.net on Linux is that the program used to control the model is currently windows only, as is the visualisation software.
As for running the model without the control program, there are two problems, the first is that the interface is....not good. It uses Fortran namelists for most of the non-compiled variables and input files with specifications that were dreamt up by Satan on LSD (It's always a good sign when the program itself doesn't follow the file specifications). The CP.net team have created a "virtual grad-student" (their words) which will look after your model and redo any calculations it needs, as well as deciding when to report back to CP.net and take a coffee break. Having sat waiting for the model to run/crash I wish I had a toy like that, even if I did have to make the coffee.
The second problem is that the model is balanced on a knife edge. There is a continuous battle between realistic physics (more complicated functions, shorter integration timesteps, slower model) and getting some work done (longer timesteps, simple physics, etc.). A part of this project will be to find out which parameters can be changed in such a way as to make the model fall over and become an ice planet or any of the other non physical but numerically feasible solutions.
It will take a long time to run each model, as the website says, but this is pretty much the simplest model which would produce a useful result, even on a 2.6Ghz Athlon you won't get more than about a day every six minutes (3 minutes for the atmosphere, 3 minutes for the ocean) for the full model, 50 years is 360*6*50 = 108000 minutes (75 days) on 24/7, luckily (?) a good portion of the models will fail before then, some will take longer as the results are checked if they look extreme. The real physical differences produced will only be a subset of the results from the experiment.
The model can go faster, e.g. a variation has been developed by the MetOffice where the Ocean model can runs upto 10 times faster than in the CP model, the main reason for this speed up? Iceland was deleted from the map :) (in terms of size, I think Ireland and the UK are next)
The data which will result in this project will hopefully be able to give a quantitative prediction of how bad things might get if we (say) double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it can tell us (=scientists) how likely it is that New York will be flooded or El Nino will shutdown. Whether or not the data will be 'open' is anybody's guess. Checking the sponsers, at least one of them is an insurance company that insures based on weather forecasts (good crop weather, flooding, etc.), I have little doubt about the commercial value of the data (c.f Cancer research programs).
As for the people who want access to the model source (and the source for the visualisation programs I guess). Are you completely out of your mind :) It's half a million lines of Fortran which has been written by many many people over about 10 years. Having access to the source in this case would benefit nobody. It only does 1 thing, model the climate. The atmosphere model has about 50 different options for the physics schemes, 10 different dynamical schemes and noise filtering options, all of which need to be set up properly to have any chance of working. The 'simple' ocean model has another load of options, then the 'complex' ocean model has another load of options, then there are multiple way to couple the atmosphere and ocean together. (Also, *shock horror*, it has bugs in it.)
I normaly budget 200W for a PC /wo a monster GPU. If I had modern hardware, I'd be budgeting a lot more, prob'ly in the neighborhood of 400W. I use the highest PC maximum plus uncertainty for budgeting. This is not the same as average PC maximum, but still, 50W/PC is awfull low. Using my method, plus a little uncertainty would result in:
100,000 PC would add less then 0.001 % to the anual CO2 production.
Even if the figures they mention are accurate, They do not include the amount of heat that is created by your CPU running 100% of the time. After running your CPU full throttle for 24 hours, put your hand behind the exhaust fan of you case and feel how warm the air is. Then realize how much harder your Air Conditioner is running, in order to keep your house cool.
Also, most PC's were never designed to be run 24/7 with 100% CPU utilization. I used to run the distribute.net's DES client and I lost of few hard drives because the internal case temperature was always hot.
I am not saying that you should not run these programs, but realize that your "FREE" cpu time does cost money in the long run.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
Rebuttal one:
That's not what the petition says. It says there's not evidence of CATASTROPHIC change, and that such change might be good for us, anyway. Signing the petition does not necessarily indicate a belief that there's no evidence for man-made global warming (though it is cleverly worded to convince folks like you that it does).
Rebuttal two:
The opinion of scientists outside a particular technical field's not that relevant. What is relevant is that even leading skeptics like John Christy have come 'round to having to say that climate change is real, and at least partially due to human activities. He was on the NAS committee, drawn up at Bush's request to (he hoped) say "global warming's not real", and signed the unanimous statement to the contrary the committee put forth.
Rebuttal three:
Not all the signatories are scientists. Even a casual scan shows a lot of MDs, who may or may not be doing research. There are lots of PhD's, of course, but they're not tagged with the holder's academic field (why would I care what a PhD in Forestry thinks about climate change? I want to know what climatologists think about it)
Not to mention the petition was circulated with somewhat misleading collateral material:
"The Oregon Petition, sponsored by the OISM, was circulated in April 1998 in a bulk mailing to tens of thousands of U.S. scientists. In addition to the petition, the mailing included what appeared to be a reprint of a scientific paper. Authored by OISM's Arthur B. Robinson and three other people, the paper was titled "Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" and was printed in the same typeface and format as the official Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A cover note from Frederick Seitz, who had served as president of the NAS in the 1960s, added to the impression that Robinson's paper was an official publication of the academy's peer-reviewed journal."
Not really true. The moon, for instance, is the same distance from the sun as the earth and somewhat cooler, if you haven't noticed.
That's because there's a considerable difference between the atmosphere of earth and the atmosphere of the moon.
And there's a considerable difference between the atmosphere of venus and earth's, and venus is hotter than one expects simply due to its nearer distance to the sun.
More on the The Oregon Petition:
When questioned in 1998, OISM's Arthur Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, "and of those the greatest number are physicists." The names of the signers are available on the OISM's website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all. When the Oregon Petition first circulated, in fact, environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of "Dr. Red Wine," and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Halliwell's field of scientific specialization was listed as "biology."
Climate change prediction looks too far into the future to cause ruined crops.
Also, most of the farming in developing countries are done for short term benefit (short enough for reelection). So predicting that eventually central africa will be desert won't do shit.
Socialist policies prevent these farms from being sold to private corporations who would be much more efficient at farming and producing food. And btw, farmers in developing countries are dirt poor and would gladly sell their farms and go into some other business like garments or small scale manufacturing but their govt.'s policies prohibit it.
It's possible that he/she wanted you to find the Sierra Times article on the greenhouse effect. Whose conclusion is...
Perhaps we would be better served by accepting that changes in the temperature of the Earth do occur and they are not under our control. Then we can get on with business.
Just before pointing out that General Relativity might be wrong.
To 2pac's body! That sure changed his climate!
This is not a zero-sum game. If Global Warming destroys China, Brazil etc it will also destroy the US.
,,!,, to whoever modded down my last post. Damn leftist censors.
You're still assuming that humans are responsible for global climate change. I say that charge is a ruse designed to hobble America. Global temps will rise and fall regardless of what we do.
Go and study the subject and you will discover the Europeans are taking serious steps to cut back on CO2 emissions.
Which is easier for them with their much higher population densities and less productive economies, but even then they still aren't making the grade.
I'm all in favor of replacing coal-fired power plants with nuclear, THAT would do wonders for reducing air polution in general, but the enviros will never allow it.
And a big
I frankly fail to see the value in using disributed
computing in this domain as the real value in accurate
change models lay in the fact that you have to have
"good" algorithms and applications for predicting
with any degree of certainty what changes will take
place and when. Modeling is still inmature and just
throwing more cycles at the problem will not help to
overcome fundamental problems of scale, chemistry
and physics. I won't even talk about good software
engineering, which to most climate people is speaking
latin backwards.
Typical ignorant american rant. Hint: CO2 stays one century in the atmosphere. US is responsible for maybe 20%-40% of the total additionnal CO2 released in the atmosphere by man right now, and "developped world" is responsible for 80-95% of it - China, India, Brazil much less. Why should they pay the same price to solve the problem Western Countries and US created in the first place (i.e. excess CO2, whether or not this changes climate) ?
when the pretentious Europeans actually meet those standards themselves
They do.
the environmentalists figure out that nuclear power would do wonders for reducing CO2 emissions
Nuclear power is responsible for 75% of electricity in France - it is still a major hazard, and wastes are a major storage and "pollution" problem.
Meanwhile, I'll note that climate change has been happening for all of recorded history and will continue to happen regardless of anything humans do.
Non-sense. Human beings had to basically suffer silently diseases for all recorded history - except the past century, leading to life expectancy explosion. Things change. Here, there is no record of a temperature change that has been as fast as in the past century.
Wake me up when they come up with a mathematical model that you can feed data up to 30 years old to and have it predict what temperatures actually are today and the past few years. AFAIK no one has ever been able to do that.
AFAIK, no one was able to model accuratly the airplanes when the first started to be designed... that didn't prevent them to fly.
Just because you blind yourself when facing a possible problem, doesn't prevent the problem to exist. The only question is: "is closing one's eyes to make the problem disappear" a rational choice?
Why are they gonna do all that stuff when a butterfly in california can change all the predictions?
Just out of wondering, but wouldn't this be a good use for Kazaa? Those computers with good internet connections might serve far better as communications hubs than as brute force processors.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I know that there is an impression that a butterfly can change the predictions; that is due to a failure in our ability to model partial differential equations, combined with instability in local weather patterns.
That said, (1) We've come up with some major advances in our numeric PDE solutions and (2) Climate is not the same as local weather. Climate is quite possible stable, whereas local weather is instable.
Or in other words, we didn't get an ice age last year because my parrot squawked 3 years ago.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You can see this kind of effect more directly with laptops running on batteries. I used to run the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search on my work laptops, back when I was also commuting by train, and I had to turn it off during my commute or I'd run out of power. It also gradually killed the batteries' charge-holding capacity, and you could really tell that the machines weren't thermally designed for long-term continuous CPU usage.
Now, if you really want to heat up a room, a Vax 780 will work really well, and so will the tower models of Sun-3 :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Another poster: And you don't think the fact that Venus is MUCH closer to the Sun has anything to do with its hotter temperatures? If the distance from the Sun to the Earth were to change by only a few percent either way we'd become a desert planet or we'd be an ice ball, and the activities of Man would have nothing to do with the outcome.
Not as much effect as you think. As you can see here, Venus is 30% closer to the Sun than the Earth is. A simple application of the blackbody equation to calculate the surface temperature of a planet shows that one would expect Venus to have a surface temperature of about 22 deg C. In fact it has a temperature of 464 deg C. The difference is entirely due to the greenhouse effect. So yes, the greenhouse effect is very real and can have tremendous impact on the surface temperature of a planet. I should also point out that without the greenhouse effect, the Earth itself would be rather cold: about -22 deg C. Given that the presence of a tiny amount of CO2 and water vapor is enough to change the mean surface temperature of the Earth by 40 deg C, it is not unreasonable to think that an increase in the CO2 concentration by 50-100% might raise surface temperatures.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Watts is Watts is Watts is Watts. P = I * E. A loaded 100W PS in the US will use twice the current as a loaded 100W PS in the UK. Don't they teach basic electronics any more?
No, it isn't a commercial project.
The fact that public research can be funded with private funds is news to noone.
And in the Cancer grid experiment, do you think pharmaceutical companies are going to give the new medecines for free ?
This petition has been debunked by the US NAS on their website.
Also, Scientific American tried to contact 25 names chosen at random in the list. Only one of them was a scientist who was working in the field and two others had "relevant expertise". All the others, either refused to respond, had changed their opinion, or simply didn't exist.
"
We fuck the world !
We fuck the children !
We fuck the world but we don't care !
"
A famous american right-wing song.
It's a 7.5MB download, a 300byte "trickle" of stats per day (or whenver you're online) just to update where you're at in the model, and about a 6-7MB upload at the end of each experiment (say every 4 weeks).
Does the open source community have available, or the expertise to slap together an enormous climate model that has been used & verified for years? It would be nice, but I don't see one. The UK Met Office has allowed the use of their model, which has been developed & tested over years by many scientists; so that's the best game in town right now.
PS -- there's no "profit" out of this, the data will be available to scientists to use.