Artificial Natural Democratizing Climate Science

Artificial Natural
The fourth session of the Ethics and Sustainability course featured another lecture on global climate change but instead of watching Al Gore in a feature film we watched Professor Bob Spicer in person about democratizing climate science. As the director for the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research at the Open University he is a key player in the science of climate modelling and prediction. He is also an ex tutor of Goldsmiths which is perhaps why we were so honoured to benefit from his expertise in person. His message is essentially the same as that of Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth that the global climate is getting warmer due to the activities of humans.
Climate modelling is incredibly important for the future of government policy regarding the causes of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change base many of its conclusions on the findings of the modelling process. The IPCC had just published its latest findings a matter of days before the lecture saying that global mean temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4 degrees Centigrade and that there is a %90 chance that this rise has a human cause, in other words ‘very likely’. A political point was made that the USA were attempting to undermine these findings by offering a reward to scientists that could show flaws in the scientific process of the modelling. In fact climate modelling is much more accurate today than it has ever been due to the climateprediction.net programme in which millions of years worth of scenarios are tested using spare processing power on personal desktop computers via the internet. In 2001 the IPCC highlighted concerns that ever more complex climate models were generating unusual results due to parameterization where climate conditions are approximated. The processing power of individual computers at that time made accurate modelling very expensive and time consuming so this technique of using ‘distributed computing’ developed in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence in the 1990’s has revolutionised climate modelling to such an extent that they now feel able to take on the climate of Mars.

www.open2.net/sciencetechnologynature/worldaroundus/grassroots.html
www.climateprediction.net/