The PC way to fight climate change (From Gazette & Herald)

The PC way to fight climate change

THE public has been invited to take part in a major examination of climate change - through their personal computers.

It's a project that has just been announced by Oxford University and anyone can participate by installing a small programme onto their home, school or business computer. It will run in the background and report its findings back to scientists at Oxford.

The ultimate aim is to produce a detailed 50-year forecast for human-induced climate change.

In introducing this project, the scientists point out that predicting the earth's future climate is extremely difficult because of the wealth of detail that must be analysed.

A technique called the 'Monte Carlo' simulation is needed and the problem is too great for modern supercomputer power.

"As a result," say the researcher, "we do not yet have an objective estimate of how good individual climate change predictions are."

Hence the appeal to the public at large to join in this project with their personal computers to form a kind of grid so they are linked together as a single 'virtual server'.

To take part, go to www.climateprediction.net.

Anyone interested in climate change can also find interesting articles prepared by the University of Oxford Environmental Change Institute at www.eci.ox.ac.uk.

Updated: 15:17 Wednesday, October 01, 2003