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

THC slowdown

[quigonn]

I always experience THC slowdown after I smoked some good pot. No need for a simulation here, absolutely not.

Re:THC slowdown

[Brendan Byrd]

Same thoughts here. In fact, everybody's thoughts. One would think that the planet would benefit from increased levels of THC :)

Re:THC slowdown

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes my friend, you're missing something. The "pollen" that your friendly hashman refers to is most likely polm. The finest morrocan hashes are polm. I am unsure as to the genesis of the word, but it could be related to palm, or else is an indigenous north african word.

There are varieties of hash called pollen I believe, but they are "brand names" much like "northern lights" or "silver pearl" are to skunk herb.

Your dealer is either using the name in this way, or has bastardised polm. It seems to be a commonish error. But, now you know...

The reason why 100% female plants are preferred to males is that they are much stronger and more productive. The ladies give us concentrated trichomes containing high levels of THC/CBD, whereas the males contain little of the active ingredients and give us a headache and a weak buzz.

So, spread the word brother.! No more pollen. Polm!

THC Slowdown

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have had first post, if it wasn't for THC Slowdown!

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

[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

[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.

Here's how the simulation works:

[Anonymous Coward]

We all leave our computers on
- running this software,
- thereby using more electricity,
- creating more greenhouse gases and the like,
- increasing global warming...
and therefore getting a very accurate answer much sooner.

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"

[JasonAWallwork]

The Abrupt Climate Change FAQ from the Union of Concerned Scientists, has a lot to say on the subject and the movie:

Can what happens in The Day After Tomorrow happen in real life?

No. The dramatic, virtually instantaneous and widespread cooling envisioned in the film is fiction. But like all good science fiction, the film is premised on several important scientific facts. We know with great certainty that the Earth is already warming, largely because as we burn fossil fuels and clear forests we are releasing carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. This warming is expected to continue in the coming decades, accompanied by changes in rainfall patterns and rising sea levels. The possibility of an abrupt shift in the climate system is only one feature of a changing climate that is expected to become more erratic, with extreme weather events like droughts, torrential rainfall, and extreme heat becoming more common. We can slow down global warming and reduce the likelihood of future abrupt climate changes by reducing our emissions of heat-trapping gases.

The other interesting thing it mentions is that Abrupt Climage Change refers to changes that happen over years to decades as opposed to climate change that is happening now over decades and centuries. Make no mistake, we have changed our climate more in the last hundred years than in the previous thousand years.

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?

Foolishness

[Yonkeltron]

Lorenze proved that weather was non-deterministic about 40 years ago. It seems foolish to believe we can predict weather to such a degree even with today's technology. I'll be saving my cycles for Seti@Home

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.

Looks like it will be a bad film

[QuasiRob]

Just from watching the trailers it looks like it will be another contender for inclusion on various bad movie websites.

How much of the public will be mislead into thinking thats how it really happens? I still cringe whenever Armageddon is on.

Wine / CrossOver?

[cerberusss]

Has anyone gotten the client running with Wine or CodeWeaver'sCrossOver? It installs and starts alright, but on the console, a bunch of warnings is printed:
CLOSE: WARNING: Unit 60 Not Opened
CLOSE: WARNING: Unit 62 Not Opened
CLOSE: WARNING: Unit 63 Not Opened
CLOSE: WARNING: Unit 64 Not Opened
CLOSE: WARNING: Unit 65 Not Opened
CLOSE: WARNING: Unit 66 Not Opened
CLOSE: WARNING: Unit 67 Not Opened
It doesn't seem to continue further...

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

"Simulate "The Day After Tomorrow" On Your PC"

[NineteenSixtyNine]

Windows ME?

Ski in NY

[Roland Piquepaille]

in which New York City is treated to a 10,000-year-long ski season If this is to happen, I hope there's a massive earthquake crust movement to tilt the city a bit...

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

Re:Not gonna work

[dave_frame]

We're not running a parallelised model across lots of computers, we're farming out a run to each of several thousand machines. And the purpose of the experiment is precisely to look into the feedback processes that govern how climate changes. You say: "what's holding back the state of the art right now is the quality of the algorithms we're using" and this - on climate timescales - is what we're looking to explore. Basically, the models that we have these days (IPCC TAR, for instance) lack any sort of quantitative measure of uncertainty. We're looking to find "error bars" for these sorts of predictions. See http://www.climateprediction.net/science/strategy_ adv.php for details of the experimental strategy. [We (& friends overseas) have submitted bids in recent EU Framework 6 and NSF rounds, to try to do something similar with very different models. This will help us conduct a convergence/verification process.] We have recently submitted a "first results" paper and are awaiting the reviewers' comments. So far, things seem to be going pretty well (though we'd love some more participants!). Cheers, Dave Frame climateprediction.net coordinator

Re:Attempting to model the real world on this scal

[dave_frame]

Exactly. Although in a chaotic system predictability due to initial conditions washes out over time (in the atmosphere initial condition predictability washes out over about 2 weeks) predictability due to changes in the boundary conditions of the system emerges over time. Imagine a choppy and complicated lake which is fed by a river. The river's flow is getting bigger and bigger (perhaps due to some earthworks in the upstream catchment area). You take a snapshot of the lake, and use your model + initial conditions to predict the surface in thirty second's time. You do okay. But (say) you do a lousy job of predicting the surface in a day's time. BUT, you might do an okay job of predicting the *average level* of the surface in a month's time, not by knowing the initial conditions very well, but by knowing the rate of change of the river's flow. So though we can't predict the exact state (the weather) on longer timescales, we can (we hope, models and data permitting) do a reasonable job of predicting the average state (the climate) of the system on longer timescales. Dave Frame climateprediction.net coordinator

Re:MODS: THIS IS _NOT_ OFF-TOPIC

[dave_frame]

We're in the process of moving the software to BOINC, which will make us much more platform neutral. We reckon this ought to be done in a few weeks (it's been quite a big job). We'll be having a public beta test, so if you want to get involved (on your Mac or linux box) keep an eye on http://www.climateprediction.net

Cheers

Dave Frame

climateprediction.net coordinator

Who wrote the script?

[randomErr]

Um guys.... the movie was written by Art Bell. The guy who had a late night radio show for decades where he talked about aliens, astro projection, and psychic pets. For that reason alone I can't take this movie too seriously.