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The Climate of Middle-Earth
sciencehabit writes "One does not simply model the climate of Mordor; unless, of course, you are the University of Bristol's Dan Lunt, who has created a climate simulation of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Using supercomputers and a model originally developed by the U.K. Met Office, his study compares Middle-earth's climate with those of our (modern) and the dinosaur's (Late Cretaceous) worlds. The Middle-earth model reveals that the Shire — home to the Hobbits — would enjoy weather much like England's East Midlands, with an average temperature of 7C and about 61 cm of rainfall each year. An epic journey to Mount Doom, however, would see a shift in climate, with the subtropical Mordor region being more like Los Angeles or western Texas."
The full academic paper is available in English, Elvish, and Dwarfish.
... that's not even badly transliterated. Without even looking at it closely, you can tell the entire text lacks vowel diacritics. They probably selected the text and changed the font, which works about as well with Tengwar as it would with Arabic or Hebrew.
"Mordor is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume"
So how's that different from LA?
No, but it is full of Orcs.
Why yes, I suspect they were done "on the supercomputer's spare time." That's what "nice -n 20" is for. Most university compute clusters aren't running at 100% capacity 100% of the time --- there are gaps between intense clusters of jobs queued up by researchers. Without strong proof otherwise, I'd highly doubt that any other researchers had their schedules set behind waiting for Middle Earth simulations.
As for the electricity cost --- sure, someone may have spent a few tens of dollars there. For a result with high visibility and outreach potential, encouraging public attention to (and potential future participation in, via motivated youngsters) science. If you're so miserly that you don't think such expense is worthwhile, even just for putting a smile on many people's faces, then please fuck off; you're a miserable burden to humanity that would rather see everyone's life gray and miserable than dare spending 0.00000001% of tax money on anything you don't personally want.
Mordor has a much better public transit system.