Simulate "The Day After Tomorrow" On Your PC

kpearson writes "climateprediction.net, a distributed computing project to predict Earth's climate 50 years from now, has a new add-on project to study THC slowdown (how climate might change as CO2 changes in the event of a decrease in the strength of the thermohaline circulation). This kind of rapid, extreme climate change is shown in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which New York City is treated to a 10,000-year-long ski season. Anyone can download the project's client software and participate in the simulation. climateprediction.net was previously mentioned in the September 13, 2003 article Distributed Computing and Climate Change." Clients are available for various varieties of Microsoft Windows, but none are listed for other OSes.

Comments

I you have to wonder that

[Ckwop]

.. if back at the time of the dinosaurs all this carbon was in the air.. then how can be releasing it be the end of "life as we know it".. The Dinosaurs did quite well :)

Personally, It's my opinion that the earth is a pretty robust system and our climate models will be rather wrong.

Simon.

Re:I you have to wonder that

[richie2000]

"life as we know it".. The Dinosaurs did quite well :)

I for one welcome our new/old dinosaur overlords!

Joking aside, the argument that the earth has been experiencing major differences in temperatures in the past and that this is normal and all is very fascinating except for one small fact: We're humans. We don't like having volcanoes in our back yards, ferns all over our lawns, hurricanes ripping our houses to shreds and brontosaurs trampling our offspring. We're kinda picky that way.

Re:I you have to wonder that

[nmoog]

I agree that the earth has a pretty robust system. Once it can kill off all those pesky humans it will take no time to bring itself back to good health, and enjoy the good life for another few million years.

Re:I you have to wonder that

[kd4evr]

Hmm...

Earth may have a self-regulating system we do not yet (fully) understand. When you say its a robust system, you are right. Our climate models may well be worth squat, right again.

Dinosaurs did quite well for quite a long time, until they could...

However, the issue is not whether human interventions can fully derail earth's climate or only tackle the parameters a bit.
The point is, that the changes in the weather we as a civilisation started will most certainly affect our way of life as we know it. Human is considered the most adaptable species, present in all kinds of environments. I cannot argue whether we are going to drive ourselves into extinction or not by what we did to the climate, but surely life (and survival) in either dry deserts, frozen glaciers or stormy swamps has little to do with the current trends in economy. There is a vast difference between a habitable and comfortable climate, you see...

Dont start the IPO on that dino-breeding company just yet ;-)

Re:I you have to wonder that

[Decaff]

The earth and life are robust, but we aren't. Most of human civilisation has occurred within a 10,000 year period since the last glaciation in which ice sheets covered much of the Northern hemisphere. The climate has been particularly and unusually stable for the past millenium. This is not going to last. If (as is very likely) the ice returns, or if global warming stirs up the climate, millions could die and many more will be forced to migrate. In terms of life as a whole on our planet, what we do matters little in the long term, but we could, and probably will, make things very unpleasant for ourselves.

Re:I you have to wonder that

[Epistax]

What I'd like to know is which animal on this planet will (would have) evolve into the next "Big Thing"? If it weren't for our timely sentience, many species we've killed over the years would still be around (mammoth, anyone?). My point is: is this planet at an evolutionary dead end until a disaster strikes, or is there a contender to be top eater? Could humanity be considered the natural disaster that they need?

Re:I you have to wonder that

[richie2000]

Roaches. They're hardy, breed easily and eats almost anything. When we're gone, they'll take over. Single-cells, fish, dinos, mammals, insects. I dunno what comes after the insects, though. Bacteria, maybe. Or MS Blaster. ;-)

Re:I you have to wonder that

[SEWilco]

The facts are that the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are way higher now than they were a hundred years ago.
Which greenhouse gases increased, and by how much? Has the major greenhouse gas (it's not CO2) increased? Does CO2 affect temperature, or does temperature affect CO2 levels? (For example, warmth encourages fermentation in swamps rather than burial of carbon)

The atmosphere is also warming at a rate unheard of since we started measuring these things
That would be the warming during the past 100 years, the period when we've had thermometers. Look at that graph and how much warming happened before 1945, when we had little fossil fuels in use. After 1945...cooling for 30 years while we burned more fuels. How much has the rate of increase changed during warming periods?

and at a rate not found in any ice samples from the last several hundred thousand years.
Look again. Start around 15,000 years ago and see if there was a rapid change back then.

Large chunks of very old ice is melting in Antarctica
Check when that began melting, and compare the ages of ice. Melting is not new.

and there are island nations that will soon cease to exist due to rising ocean waters.
Those reports have been studied in several ways, look at them again. Also check their tectonic base, such as whether they're in the large area west of Australia which is sinking.

Can we afford to ignore the possibility of a causal link? I believe we can't.
Spend your money how you wish. Can you afford to ignore the possibility of a warmer Sun, secret misuse of alien technology, or a meteor destroying your ISP? Better prepare...better safe than sorry.

Concerning the movie "The Day after Tomorrow"

[Peden]

That movie is expected to draw furhter focus on the environment and specifically global warming. This is both good and bad, as too much focus on the environment can draw focus from other points of interesets. Danish Scientist "Bjorn Lomborg" (one of Time Magazines top 100 important persons) has been warning politicians to not forget other points of importance, such as healthcare and clean water. I hope this does not distort the vision of politicians around the globe, lets not forget how er priotitize.

Re:Concerning the movie "The Day after Tomorrow"

[Hektor_Troy]

Danish Scientist "Bjorn Lomborg"

You placed the "" the wrong place. It should be

Danish "Scientist" Bjørn Lomborg

He's in statistics, and judging by some of the critisism he's gotten from other people in that area, not a very good one either.

Re:Concerning the movie "The Day after Tomorrow"

[BRSQUIRRL]

I don't think anyone should forget that this "environmentally focused" movie is based in part on the book The Coming Global Superstorm, written by Whitley Strieber and Art Bell, not exactly the paragons of scientific objectivity.

One question...

[beacher]

Does it come with media fearmongering "THE WORLD ENDS TOMORROW. DETAILS AT 8" addons? Seriously. Every single damn weather event is a showstopper. If my team blew everything out of proportion like the media did, I'd sack em. Also speaking of weather... They can't even get the 3 days forecast even close much less years out.

Interested in weather, love/hate to watch tornados and hurricanes.. trouble is the news makes it out like "The Perfect Storm" is about to happen ..
-B

GIGO?

[pesc]

So if the computer is big enough, the garbage-in, garbage-out problem disappears?

We can't predict the weather for the next week, but doing it for the next 50 years might work if we only can get a computer big enough?

Re:Attempting to model the real world on this scal

[zopu]

True, but isn't that a different problem?

I admit I'm a bit clueless here, but AFAIK climate modelling deals with overall changes at a high level e.g. "It's going to be colder in the north atlantic by about 2 degrees on average in a few decades" and the like.
As opposed to weather prediction which says "It will rain in this spot on this day"

Just because we can't predict the 'noise' in the short term doesn't mean we can't determine overall changes long term.

On global warming.

[ForestGrump]

"There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine . . . been
here 4 1/2 billion years. We've been here, what, a 100,000 years, maybe
200,000. And we've only been engaged in heavy industry a little over 200
years. 200 years versus 4 1/2 billion. And we have the conceit to think
that somehow we're a threat? The planet isn't going away. We are."
-George Carlin

Not gonna work

[bigHairyDog]

I did a climate modeling project for my dissertation at university. These guys have a good idea - throw massive computing power at it - but it's not that simple. Compared to SETI or protein folding, climate modeling is not as highly parallelisable. Plus what's holding back the state of the art right now is the quality of the algorithms we're using - they loose accuracy pretty fast as the result of feedback between multiple iterations of a process that introduces quantisation noise each time.

IMHO this project will produce the same quantisation noise-ruined results we have now, just more finely ovesampled

Still, they might get some useful insights into how to tackle the problems of parallel dynamic system simulation

What good are all the computers in the world...

[Walkiry]

when you don't know all the variables involved?

Re:Foolishness

[Eivind]

There's a difference between weather and climate.

A bit simplified, climate is average weather.

It's a bit like while it is impossible to predict which days will get rain in Bergen, Norway this november, it's pretty easy to predict the average temperature, the annual rainfall and how many days it'll rain.