A distributed computing project to model the earth's atmosphere
has ended, yielding a prediction that the temperature of the
atmosphere will rise between 1.4C and 3C by 2050.
The study included an individual climate simulation (supplied by
the UK Met Office) run on almost 10,000 home computers, under the
auspices of the BBC's Climate Change Experiment at climateprediction.net.
Like the infamous butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane, tiny inaccuracies in the measurement of the initial
conditions can magnify into vast changes as a simulation
progresses. However, by running multiple climate forecasts, each
with slightly different initial conditions, it's possible to work
out which broad trends are likely to persist and which just arise
from hiccups in the imprecise data fed in.
The process, known as ensemble forecasting, has been used in
regular weather forecasting for many years, but its use in climate
forecasting is still rare. The results suggest that the world will
warm by between 1.4C and 3C by the middle of the century, even
under a mid-range emissions scenario, where some cuts are enacted.
That rate is somewhat faster than that predicted by other climate models.
"It's only by running such a large number of simulations -- with
model versions deliberately chosen to display a range of behaviour
-- that you can get a handle on the uncertainty present in a
complex system such as our climate," said Dan Rowlands of Oxford
University's Department of Physics, lead author of a paper
describing the research in Nature Geoscience. "Our work
was only possible because thousands of people donated their home
computer time to run these simulations."
Myles Allen of the School of Geography and Environment and
Department of Physics, Oxford University, an author of the paper
and principal investigator of the climateprediction.net project,
told Wired.co.uk: "Most forecasts of global warming are based on
the range of results that different groups around the world happen
to contribute to a model comparison. These groups don't set out to
explore the full range of uncertainty, which is why studies like
ours are needed."
You can find out more about the project over at climateprediction.net.
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