Climate Change

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Climate Change

• Tim

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What is Climate Change?

• The climate of the Earth is always changing.
• In the past it has altered as a result of natural
  causes.
• Nowadays, however, the changes we've seen over
  recent years and those which are predicted over
  the next 80 years are thought to be mainly as a
  result of human behavior.

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Impact

• Water
• Sea level rises
• Flooding
• Global Warming
• Agricultural
• Wildlife

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What can we do?

• Use renewable energy
• Solar power, wind power, water power
• You can also
• Help scientists predict climate change!
• How?

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Predict Climate Change

• Trying to predict climate change is hard.
• Factors involved
• air temperature, sea temperature and cloud cover
  all play a part as do dozens of other
  variables.
• A huge number of calculations involved

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A Big Experiment

• The BBC have teamed up with Oxford University to
  conduct the world's most ambitious climate
  modeling experiment.
• How to do better than the world's supercomputers?

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Idea

• Distributed Computing
• Modern home computers are powerful.
• Most of the time, the computer is lying idle.

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What to do?

• Download a small program and install it.
• The program will use the spare processing power
  as a background process.
• Two phases
• Climate model is checked by running it from 1920
  to 2000 .
• If the result of phase one is reasonable, it will
  run forward to predict up to 2080. Once the final
  result is done, it will be sent to Oxford
  University immediately.

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Some requirements

• A broadband connection to the Internet
• 600 megabytes of free space on hard disk drive
• In total at least as 512 MB of RAM
• A processor at least as powerful as 1.6Hz

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Bonus

• A screensaver
• A spinning globe will appear reflecting the
  climate your computer has calculated for your
  Earth, somewhere between the year 1920 and 2080.

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Map of All Participants

• 155 countries, 184,097 hosts
• Most of the hosts are from UK.(142,841)
• Taiwan has 104 machines in this project
  currently, and NS Lab has one of them now.

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News

• 28th FEBRUARY 2006
• When Dr Myles Allen and his team launched the
  climate change experiment last week, he was
  hoping that at least 10,000 people would sign up.
  Two weeks later, and we have over ten times that.
  
• 10th MARCH 2006
• Three weeks in, the fastest participants are
  making their way through the 1960s.

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Give Me More Information

• http//www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/
• Any Question?