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.
Look on the Met side of things. They will be able to correct their predictions at giga-flop speed.
On a side note, it would appear the EU is reducing their carbon footprint drastically, courtesy of Russia and the Ukraine. But who gets the credit thereby enabling them to emit more CO2? The EU, Russia or Ukraine?
Thanks for the ‘snip’…it was probably the right thing to do..I was a little ‘fired-up’ when I made the first post! 🙂
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CookevilleWeatherGuy (10:08:46) :
Bet some of those Hollywood [snip] ’stars’ that believe in AGW flew in on their private jets…
HYPOCRITS!
G I G O£ I G O
It’s now a race between the Met office and AlGore to see who can tell the biggest lie and look the stupidest!
Tim F (10:42:22) :
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?
I have to say, I’ve seen many a theory on what humans produce, but the truth is, we don’t really, really know. We can guess by using predictions and maths but not until we can tag each particle with “Human” or “Nature” lables will we ever really find out.
Remember the BBCs computer model predictions
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/whattheymean/theuk.shtml
2020 I wish
“New evidence on Antarctic warming”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7843186.stm
Garbage and Pounds Sterling in, Garbage and CO2 out
It is amazing how thoroughly the malignant fallacy that energy is an inherent evil has suffused human discourse. A machine that brings a 30X improvement in performance must be chided because it uses 40% more energy. This highlights the unrecognized damage inflicted on the world by the warmist propaganda efforts. If, as I suspect, the next few years do finally bring public recognition of the falsification of warmist theories, I fear the anti-CO2 prejudice has become so deeply rooted in human consciousness that it may take another decade for decisions to begin to be made without its’ pernicious influence. Since every unit of energy introduced into our society yields a significant multiple of wealth to our collective coffers and does so for other places about the globe to a greater or lesser extent, continuing to limit the development and deployment of energy resources will inevitably limit the growth of wealth in the world. A society’s ability to deal with the vagaries of climate and natural disaster has been shown to be directly related to its’ relative level of wealth, so limiting the world’s ability to create wealth will inevitably lead to more people in the developing world suffering and dying as a result of weather disasters than has been envisioned in the worst case warmist nightmares.
OT (I wish there was an separate place for this sort of thing??)
Hi
Any comments on this story in Nature as reported in the Australian saying the Antarctic is melting after all and not getting colder?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24946572-12377,00.html
Michael
I’m not sure what you wanted above for the website so left it blank. Anyway, I’ve been reading and following this site for several months. On my Reuters News site (get it as a part of a commodity info site), an article was posted today by one of their correspondents that was titled ” Antarctica is warming, not cooling – study shows”. The author was Eric Steig of the Univ of Washington in Seattle. I’m guessing you’ve already read. Just wanted your or other’s thoughts regarding it.
So this is what the Met office would call good science ??? – as they seem to have the conclusion in hand ( drastic warming) before the machine is even hooked up & the models run. Absolutely no consideration to an alternative outcome. Astounding ! Do they have any idea how stupid that makes them look? Do they realize how this completely supports what the skeptics have been saying all along (that AGW is about politics, not science) ? I guess I shouldnt be surprised given the alarmists track record, but it is still very disappointing as a scientist to see such conduct.
If they just got the computer which calculates carbon effects, how do they know their effects upon aviation? And wasn’t the carbon budget already fully understood so they already knew human effects?
When your computer model runs faster, you get to have more runs in the same amount of time, thereby enabling you to incrementally improve the tuning of your data and/or model towards the desired results. These models are too complex for simple one-time faking of data towards specific desired results.
Many years ago, in the late 1970’s I think, the first non-governmental Cray supercomputer was to be alloted to a university through a competition based on the good that would result from having the Cray at that university. The University of Texas at Austin won, beating competition from Stanford, MIT, and Cal Tech among others.
UT used the Cray for three primary tasks: oil field simulations, nuclear fusion simulations, and underwater acoustics (submarine technology, we were told).
The oil field simulations were successful, the nuclear fusion simulations were frustrating, and apparently the underwater acoustics went pretty well but nobody was talking.
The benefit from oil field simulations was the cost to find oil went down dramatically. The lay-language used was that before that, oil formations were thought to be like a watermelon, just find the rock with the oil, poke a hole in it and the oil would flow. The Cray results showed oil formations were more like a bunch of grapes, and required poking a hole in each one to produce more oil.
Or so we were told. Perhaps others have more accurate information on that first Cray outside of government.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
All animals are equal, and some animals are more equal than others.
An ancient document (1991) re Supercomputer usage. (includes the oil reservoir reference)
http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Gov/GAO-Tech/REPORT8
All we have to do is spread the word:
Increased CO2 and warmth = better pot crops
Boom! All the 60s hippies will be on board… oddly enough, that probably includes the majority of warmist evangelists…
Let’s rename it Carbon Black
Jeff L,
“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.”
Not just a foregone conclusion, but apparently a plan to produce ever-worsening predictions, in order to cause “an acceleration in action …” as they say above.
“Do they realize how this …?” Well, given politician’s and the media’s track records, they know can likely afford to be brazen and blatant.
…and people are stupid. When my daughter’s incompetent German teacher departed for Germany for a years-long teacher exchange, I warned him of some of the fact-free antiamericanism he was likely to encounter. Response: “well, some of it is deserved. Since Bush rejected Kyoto in 1996 …” I cut him off right there and pointed out the impossibility, but few people take a correction like that as a trigger to question their worldview and the sources of their “knowledge”.
Alan the Brit.
That was a quick posting! I too heard that newsitem on the BBC and was equally surprised by their statement that there was “no proof” of AGW but that “some scientists believe” there is. Had it not been for the evident joy with which the newscaster announced “scientific proof of global warming in Antartica” as the leadin to the story, one could be forgiven for thinking that the BBC was rowing back from their position of total belief and apostacy of climate change to one of unbiased reporting. On the other hand……..
Jeff L makes a very valid point, the met office seem to be saying they want this new system to ‘verify their own predetermined position’ NOT to actually find whether there is a problem.
This does seem to be the equivolent of the Giant North Korean speakers overlooking the DMZ, look at our shiny new toy it agrees with us, quelle surprise!
BTW by the time this beast is hooked up and shaken down it will be obsolete!.
“Eventually it will become George bush’s fault.” How true. And as it should be. Here’s a guy who fires all the legitimate scientists but leaves Hansen.
OT – Micheal Mann has written a paper or something that states the Antartic has been warming for the past 50 years. The I found it at http://www.livescience.com/environment/090121-antarctica-warming.html.
Is this the same Micheal Mann who drew the discredited “Hockey Stick” temperature graph? Could somebody with more expertise than I check his math? I don’t trust the guy myself but I am not in a position to refute his claims.
OT
Antarctica Warming – Seth Boringstein:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2009-01-21-antarctica-warming_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
According to Svensmark’s theory, a warming Antarctica would actually confirm his theory that cosmic rays cause cloudiness and cool the globe while warming Antarctica.
Certainly coincides with our current solar activity.
Computers do not ’emit carbon’ unless they are burning.
Why are they burning up a ~$50 million dollar computer system?