The irony of climate change models
Now, anyone who knows me will probably have endured one of my many rants about sustainability, recycling, needless power consumption, road congestion etc. Let’s just say, I think that our western habit of ruthless and uncompromising consumption in the name or economic growth and so called personal choice is something that constantly annoys and worries me (in equal parts).
There are some things about my lifestyle choices (my vegetarianism, microwave phobia etc) that I tend not to lecture people about – although when pushed will often find myself soap boxing before I realise it (this normally follows the weekly occurrence of a meat eater asking me why I don’t eat meat when I am prepared to wear leather shoes. These people deliver their killer argument and then sit back smugly, presumably waiting for me to renounce my vegetarianism and go and tuck into a veal kebab in the face of such inescapable logic).
There are some things, however, that I feel people should change about the way they live their lives – mainly because it affects me. This list of things includes;
• Trying to kill me with cars
• Not recycling rubbish (why not? It’s so easy in Lewisham – they even provide a green box and collect it from you doorstep – not sorting your rubbish is like littering)
• Smoking in restaurants and bars and
• Carol Vordeman
So it won’t come as any surprise to find out that I am a little worried at the effect of humanity’s activities on climate change.
The BBC are running an experiment to predict the effects of climate change using a network of home PC’s (a little like the SETI program you can download). Users install the application onto their computers and when they are not using their machines (mostly at night) the application runs endless variations of climate change data, displaying some nice graphics on the screen while it does so. The results are then uploaded to some central computer that then does all kinds of statistical analysis on the collated results.
Early data indicates that, yes, by using huge amounts of fossil fuels, human beings are going to increase the temperature of the planet from between 2 to 10 degrees over the next 200 years. The Greenland ice sheet will melt and the earth fill become a bit like that crappy movie with Kevin Costner in it. And not the one where he pretends to be an Native American.
Here’s my problem with this.
Surely, by running this application on our otherwise turned off computers, are we not making things worse? Does the climate change software actually account for the extra CO2 produced when powering all these extra PCs? And if it does account for the extra fossil fuel effect, won’t that just create a feedback loop that will make the computers work even harder trying to incorporate the extra data from the effect they are having on the situation, until the computers themselves become the single biggest polluters simply from the extra processor power required to calculate their effect?
My advice to the BBC: Get people to download an application that turns off the PC when it isn’t being used, displaying a shut down message saying: “Now go and take your TV and Video off standby.”
Written by exmonkey on July 17th, 2006 with
8 comments.
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Ally
#1. July 19th, 2006, at 12:37 PM.
That was my reason for not doing the SETI thing. The new village we’ve moved to has *fantastic* recycling facilities. Plastics as well. So much more organised than the city we’ve come from.