The original press release from the Met Office that started this story is here. There’s no mention of a carbon footprint in it, but they did manage to provide a photo of it with a green halo, shown below. When such a machine is powered up, does it make a “giant sucking sound’? In other news, Obama inauguration sets new record for private jet use. – Anthony
Met Office forecasts a supercomputer embarrassment
A new £33m machine purchased to calculate how climate change will affect Britain, has a giant carbon footprint of its own
For the Met Office the forecast is considerable embarrassment. It has spent £33m on a new supercomputer to calculate how climate change will affect Britain – only to find the new machine has a giant carbon footprint of its own.
“The new supercomputer, which will become operational later this year, will emit 14,400 tonnes of CO2 a year,” said Dave Britton, the Met Office’s chief press officer. This is equivalent to the CO2 emitted by 2,400 homes – generating an average of six tonnes each a year.
The Met Office recently published some of its most drastic predictions for future climate change. It warned: “If no action is taken to curb global warming temperatures are likely to rise by 5.5ºC and could rise as much as 7ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Early and rapid reductions in CO2 emissions are required to avoid significant impacts of climate change.”
However, when it came to buying a new supercomputer, the Met Office decided not to heed its own warnings. The ironic problem was that it needed the extra computing power to improve the accuracy of its own climate predictions as well as its short-term weather forecasting. The machine will also improve its ability to predict extreme events such as fierce localised storms, cloudbursts and so on.
Alan Dickinson, Met Office Director of Science and Technology, said: “We recognise that running such massive computers consumes huge amounts of power and that our actions in weather and climate prediction, like all our actions, have an impact on the environment. We will be taking actions to minimise this impact.”
Dickinson believes, however, that the new computer will actually help Britain cut carbon emissions on a far greater scale than those it emits. He said: “Our next supercomputer will bring an acceleration in action on climate change through climate mitigation and adaptation measures as a consequence of a clearer understanding of risk. Ultimately this will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”
Machines like the Met Office’s new computer are important tools in the battle to slow climate change. They are the only way to assess the potential impact of rising CO2 levels over the coming years and decades.
This is because producing even a short-range weather forecast requires billions of calculations, something that would take weeks to do by hand. Computers enable forecasts to be generated in time to be useful.
Dickinson said: “Our existing supercomputer and its associated hardware produce 10,000 tonnes of CO2 each year, but this is a fraction of the CO2 emissions we save through our work. We estimate that for the European aviation industry alone our forecasts save emissions close to 3m tonnes by improving efficiency.
“Our next supercomputer will bring an acceleration in action on climate change through climate mitigation and adaptation measures as a consequence of a clearer understanding of risk. Ultimately this will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”
When it is finally completed, around 2011 the Met Office machine will be the second most powerful machine in Britain with a total peak performance approaching 1 PetaFlop — equivalent to over 100,000 PCs and over 30 times more powerful than what is in place today.
However, supercomputers and data centres require vast amounts of power – a problem that increasingly confronts the global information technology industry. Last week Google admitted its systems generate 0.2g of CO2 per search, even though each one lasts just 0.2 seconds.
The left doesn’t care … their rules only apply to others. Plus they’ll rationalize everything and eventually it will become George Bush’s fault.
Maybe the anti-climate changers should act like the environuts and barge in and destroy the supercomputing monstrosity … they could plead they were only doing it to save the polar bears.
I find it interesting that part of their justification for the CO2 emitted by this computer’s operation is that it will “accelerate action on climate” (reducing CO2, in turn) as a consequence of the better data it produces.
If they already KNOW that these newer, better models are going to produce results that generally confirm their existing dire predictions, why build it and produce all that CO2 in the first place?
Ah, the old saying “Do as I say, not as I do” in full swing there…
Could this be the reason that the MET are forcasting a warmer 2009? Lol!
Would that be “carbon black”?
Just on a bet, I’d like to see that office do “billions of calculations” by hand in any reasonable number of weeks.
So they’ve got a new computer to make calculations using the current models at a faster pace. Have they improved the models or are we just making the same errors more rapidly?
On the positive side, in two years there will be that much more data to look at. Heck, they might just use the current computer to predict those two years and see how close they get.
Heh! No problem.
For another £33 million they could build a windmill farm to power it and take the fould polluting monster off grid.
I think they should be challenged to do just that to see what the response is.
A Super-computer used to calculate a no-problem… great!!!
Maybe they should add a link to WUWT in the computer and just find out the truth.
Or maybe they should have just use a few Playstation 3 to do the calculations instead of this useless behemoth.
As you see, there is a lot of money involved in the AGW business. How could they now say that CO2 is not the problem and that the earth will not warm up?
This is neat having a whole PetaFlop to play with. They will be able to run models that assume a constant solar output and constant relative humidity really fast. They will be able to ignore more measured data and create more errors per second than has ever been computed before. Hello, Guinness Book of World Records.
Steve McIntyre said it best. Ooga in, Chaka out; and at one PetaFlop, thats a lotta Chaka
From Reason Magazine today:
“While there might be a moratorium on new coal-fired plants in the U.S., the rest of the world will not be joining it. The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2008 projects that fossil fuels will still account for 80 percent of the world’s primary energy production in 2030. Nearly 90 percent of the increase in world electricity demand will be driven by the economic growth of developing countries, especially that of China and India. In other words, coal will still be fueling civilization for the next couple of generations. ”
This suggests that there will be no net reduction in emitted CO2 levels for at least another two decades. At best the rate of increase will be slowed. No matter what happens there will still be a lot of carbon being pumped out all the way until 2050. Hansen has stated that Obama has 4 years to save the world from the “tipping point”. How? By asking the UN to mandate the shut down of every Coal fired plant in the world? It’s clear CO2 PPM will scream right past 450 while the world will wonder how to keep warm as temperatures fall and crops begin to fail due to shorter growing seasons. In the future, will Climatologists still use GCM’s to forecast constantly falling temperatures down to absolute zero i.e. a reverse hockey stick?
I reject “Green Inventions” like “carbon footprint” which is nothing more but a cheap tool from the propaganda machinery of the Global Warming Doctrine demonizing CO2.
Recently an article was published stating the worldwide use of the internet produced more CO2 than the entire aviation industry.
From this perspective “Deep Black’s” emissions is nothing but a cow fart in the wind.
However, if we take a close look at the energy consumption of processors and the cooling equipment we see a constant reduction in energy use.
In a few years “Deep Black” will be scrapped, recycled and replaced by a more powerful super computer that probably will use 40% less energy.
It’s the best proof that the Green objective to cripple the western economies in order to save the planet is the most stupid and devastating idea in human history.
From the “do as we say, not as we do” department?
Anthony, Anthony, Anthony….it’s off to the re-education camp with you!
/sarc
In regard to the increasing use of private jets I can only say that I am a big fan of individual transport.
The manufacturing of aircraft is a pillar of the high tech industry.
Development of aircraft is an important source of income for many universities and provides a constant push for innovation.
At this moment we experience a revolution in the field of avionics, navigation and flight management, applied materials, aerodynamics and engine development.
Humanity can’t afford to hold these developments in the name of Gaia.
Mirror mirror on the wall? The met office spending vast sums on a computer which cannot work as expected unless it is fed with selective data which is then ‘adjusted’ to find the required answers, rubbish in and rubbish out.
One wonders what the AGW/MMCC believers will do should their beloved models not give them the answers they require, hide the data/fix the data/ignore the data/ask for a refund/kick the computer/phone the helpline!
‘Computer sez no'(British joke) and I wonder if after months of grinding and churning the computer chucks out the number 42(another British joke) sorry but ya gotta laugh at the hubris and stupidity of people.
Bet some of those Hollywood [snip] ‘stars’ that believe in AGW flew in on their private jets…
HYPOCRITS!
http://www.cookevilleweatherguy.com
“When it is finally completed, around 2011 the Met Office machine will be the second most powerful machine in Britain…”
When switched on, and given the task of finding the answer to Global Warming, it will probably ponder for many years, and then give the result: “42”. It will then be up to the most powerful computer in the land to calculate the question to the answer…
My own answer to Global Warming is “Don’t panic” (preferably written in large, friendly letters.) :o)
So you think these scientists are expected to live like us regular old peasants. Think of Castro to get an idea. Why do you think David Suzuki so loves Castro and his oxen based farming system?
It would seem the met office isn’t a great believer in the Precautionary Principle after all…..
So if you need something that produces CO2, just buy it. Everyone has just as good a reason as them for doing things…. Or are Bureaucracies somehow different and more important than us simple folk in the ranks of the great unwashed???
So a Google search emits 0.2 grams of CO2 footprint.
How much CO2 footprint is generated by getting into your car, and driving over to the Stanford, or Santa Clara, or San Jose University Library, and searching on foot to find that information stored on dead tree?
Just asking !
George
The Met Office should be more embarrassed about their rotten predictions. The UK was supposed to have “Hotter, drier summers and wetter winters”. Oddly, the exact OPPOSITE has happened since goreball warming began in the late 1970s http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Monthly/EWP_seasonal1.gif
Trust the MetO to buy a coal-fired computer. They could have got a wood-burner for half the price.
Some years ago I sat in on a presentation by a guy from the Met Office about AGW. At the end he told us that their two supercomputers were nicknamed “The Kray Twins.”
The real “Kray Twins” were a pair of gangsters running an extortion racket in London!
Nothing changes.
How many tons of CO2 does the average person emit in a year?
How many tons of CO2 are produced annually from all sources? What percentage of this total is economic/industrial?
How many total tons of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Too bad their forecasts (or ANY weather/climate forecasting) aren’t worth the chips used to process them.
Cassandra King:-)
The Met Office is spending our taxes, not its own money! They have to justify there own existence as much as possible in these hard times to stop the cash tap from turned off or at least the flow reduced, which it no doubt will be.
Guess what everyone, the good ol BEEB has just released a new story on the 6:00pm news, (an old one by this site’s standards). It’s about “proof” that Antarctica is actually warming, they highlighted the peninsula all nice & red with the rest all white, with just a casual mention that some other parts have cooled only slightly, but that the warming was as usual unprecedented. Funnily enough, they seemed to say that there is no proof that man-made greenhouse gases are responsible, but that “some scientists believe they are!” I think this was put out in Science or Nature journals a few weeks or even months ago. They must want to spice things up now President Obama is in office I suspect in the belief he will take the AGW torch all the way to the precipice!
Curiously there was no evidence of it on their website, so I suspect they do a trade off with mix ‘n match stories so that they pick here & there what environment stories they want to tell. Doesn’t sound that professional to me! What they did manage to do, was wonderfully manage to link into a story that the same reporter followed scientists to the region 8 years ago so that the same recycled news can be trotted out. Oh I’m getting far too cynical these days.