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.
Oops
Diesel.
DaveE.
I also saw the BBC news story/ad, standing by a ice flow fault line saying “it could go at any minute!” , so explain to me to me this? How can they have a news story about the heating at the south pole with reporters, reporting from the south pole with green grass behind them for effect, on the same day they report the tempatures are all wrong, been adjusted, and NOW it’s getting warmer by a whole whooping average of .17C
Boy, BBC is just right on top of things in the world to their credit…….. riiight.
Well, they did have one of those video shots looking up at the person talking to add more dramatic effect, okok a little zooming in and out effect would of given it that “scary” feel for sure, but who am I to judge? :p
D Werme (13:07:22) :
Getting back to climate science, it is a common perception that petroleum geologists are skeptics because they are paid by oil companies. In most cases I know of, their skepticism stems from their familiarity with paleoclimate, and their mistrust of attempts to model of complex natural phenomenon, a mistrust developed through seeing so much failure.
As a petroleum geologist, I can say you are spot on. In exploring for new reserves, failure is a way of life. If you are good, you are right 1 in 3 times and wrong 2 out of 3 times. Modeling climate / predicting weather / predicting where to drill for new reserves are surprising similar processes. All have highly under-constrained & noisy datasets + gross simplifications of physical processes needed out of necessity to get an answer in a reasonable period of time. It leads to errors routinely – in all 3 fields mentioned. As geologists, we are more accutely aware of this than most professions. Almost everyone I know in the business is skeptical for this reason. It is ironic that we be can cast as having a conflict of interest when we have unique qualifications to judge the science. Of course, there’s no conflict of interest between “big green” & the alarmist crowd ….. yeah, right.
Roger Sowell, et al,
Perhaps the most important aspect of massively parallel supercomputers in petroleum exploration is the ability to process the incredible amounts of seismic data that it takes to make up a 3D picture of the subsurface. For an idea of how much data, a large 3D survey records data at the rate of 10’s of megabytes per second -more or less continually – for months. The processing is also quite complicated to make a depth image out of those terabytes. Seismic processing it one of the most compute-intense industries around
The results are a high resolution and quite accurate map of subsurface structures where oil and gas accumulations can be reliably targeted. Just 20 years (or so) ago, 2D seismic could only tell you a general picture and drilling was hit or miss (like 8 or 9 misses to one hit). Those numbers have been reversed.
Geologists have known that oil accumulates in pockets since the early days but they had to drill in a pattern to find them. To use your fruity analogy – they drilled for watermelons and found a few grapes. Now they drill directly for the grapes, because they know where the little suckers are.
“14,400 tonnes of CO2 a year” That’s one very dirty computer.
Antarctic warming? Lots of comments on this thread.
Take a look at the data.
Did it warm? Yes. Has it warmed in recent years? No. Does the referenced paper cherry-pick the years? Yes.
Lower troposphere temperature:
http://i39.tinypic.com/2d0i2hu.jpg
You’d really have to massage the data to get any warming out of that graph.
And here’s a blurb from my post on Surface Temperature By Continent:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/01/land-surface-temperature-comparison-by_07.html
“ANTARCTIC
“We’re often told that the Antarctic has a high rate of warming over the past fifty years. In numerous prior posts, I’ve illustrated that the claims are not consistent with SST data, since SSTs for the Southern Ocean flattened in the 1980s and has been dropping like a stone since the 1990s. The ERSST.v3 and ERSST.v3b versions of the Southern Ocean SST data also show a significant drop in SST since 1880. Looking at the LST anomaly data for the Antarctic, Figure 7, reveals something else. There was a significant drop in LST anomalies in the late 1950s, so choosing 1960 as a starting date for Antarctic LST data could be described as cherry-picking. (I left the years covered by the Antarctic graph the same as the others for those who like to fix on specific years with their cursors and scroll down through the graphs.)
http://i39.tinypic.com/33nkxfc.jpg
“Figure 7”
And the capper that seems to contradict their claim that the recent Antarctic cooling is a result of the change in ozone, blah, blah. How did man vary ozone in the early period of this graph to cause that drop in temperature from 1880 to 1920? Looks more like the recent cooling is part if a 60-year cycle to me.
http://i44.tinypic.com/2uen29u.jpg
One of the authors of the Nature paper, Eric Steig, made an appearance at Lucia’s website and had a discussion with Roger Pielke Jr that’s worth reading. I, of course, had to throw a few graphs into the conversation.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/who-expects-a-tropical-tropospheric-hot-spot-from-any-and-all-sources-of-warming/#comments
Regards.
I’m surprised that there is no mention of this at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/ or at http://www.top500.org/
The Met Office press release says the initial configuration will be “only” 125 Teraflops, one eighth of the final system. So it will be only 4X the speed of the current systems, and the extra computes could be completely used up by doubling the the X and Y dimensions of the compute grid. The full system would allow an extra doubling of the three dimensions. If you want to add more physics to the model (they need it!) then you won’t be able to use as much of a finer grid.
The CPUs of the system are likely to be Xeons (used in some PCs) and PowerXCell (used in some video game platforms), so nothing too mystical. Just lots and lots motherboards with lots of RAM and some very fast communications.
No, though at CMU we discovered that the vacuum motors in our tape drives were
high-priced versions of a motor used in some residential vacuum cleaners. So we used them the next time the motors wore out. The tape drives then sounded like vacuum cleaners. Fortunately, those didn’t last long and we went back to the high-priced versions.
The CPU for that system had a pair of discrete transistor circuit board racks, each about five feet wide and tall, and half a foot thick. Cooling was a long blower at the bottom. When that started, it sounded like a jet engine coming up to speed at first, but then the siren sound would fade away and there would just be a lot of fan noise.
The current generation of supercomputers typically use very densely packed circuit boards and probably use lots of small fans moving a lot of air. Not as loud a one spot as a hair dryer, but you may need to raise your voice. A lot of the noise will come from the air conditioning units.
Smokey (16:34:56) :
That, my friend, was an incredible post! I think you have summed up the situation brilliantly.
wow antarctica has been warming due to re-hashed old data from 50 years can’t believe Nature has stooped so low
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
http://www.nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/s_plot.html
There all just too compromised….LOL
In the BBC article on Antarctic warming it gives figures of 0.1 and 0.17C for warming across a decade. The graph embedded in the article (through a link) shows the confidence limits for any temp reading to be about +/-1C. Wouldn’t this mean that the only claim for warming would be 0C +/-1C, ie. how do they get to an accuracy of a tenth and one-hundredth of a Centigrade?
It seems a valid trend would be a horizontal line of delta=0C through the confidence limits?
BBC Article referenced in previous comment is:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7843186.stm
Smokey (16:34:56) :
WRT Status – very interesting and plausible comment.
Cheers G
I guess the South Pole is warming now….
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/science/earth/22climate.html?hp
Ban all CO2 asap and save the planet, man is a virus that must be eliminated.
All of these people are so smart but yet so ignorant
And for those interested in the TLT of the Antarctic Peninsula, here’s a graph of it compared to scaled NINO3.4 SST anomalies and to Sato Index data. The anomalous dip in 1986 appears to be the cause of the positive trend in Antarctic Peninsula Lower Troposphere Temperature.
http://i41.tinypic.com/rt43ns.jpg
I should be posting the rest of Antarctic data in a day or two at my website.
Oh there no ice down there now, it’s all melted due to SUV’s and Coal Fired Power Plants. We are all doomed! I fear for my life just like in the days of JFK and the Cuban missle crisis!
Ground all jets, stop all trains, shut off the tractors, ban a autos…
Doomed, doomed, doomed!
The real question about the Antarctic fear piece pretending to be science is this:
Why?
It is misleading, it is old, it is cherrypicked.
Yet it leads the news.
Smokey — “Money is not the motivator for socialism; status is.”
I thought this was a climate blog.
REPLY: one comment does not a paradigm shift make. – Anthony
Hope someone will graph the Climate Change during the Bush Administration.
Did the world undergo Global Cooling during his 8 years?
Good grief… Now they are saying the Antarctic is warming, http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24947265-662,00.html
So record sea ice means warming in the world of AGW….. Science has become so compromised as to be almost meaningless I’m afraid to say.
The Media has become so uncritical, their objectivity non existent, that they are less than useless in civilized company…. Lives and livelihoods are being sacrificed so that educated elites can extort money through fear mongering and exaggerations….. Only ill can come of this.
Antarctic Melt is all the rage at inhofe.
http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=fc7db6ad-802a-23ad-43d1-2651eb2297d6&Issue_id=
I do believe that approx 4 months ago many on this site were predicting a shift in media focus from Arctic Melt to Antarctic Melt in line with “Summer” in the Southern Hemisphere.
It’s just Media… They can’t seem to help themselves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/science/earth/22climate.html?_r=1&hp
“Some regions of Antarctica, ,,, have warmed,,,,but others,,, have recorded a cooling trend. That ran counter to the forecasts of computer climate models, and global warming skeptics have pointed to Antarctica in questioning the reliability of the models.
In the new study, scientists took into account satellite measurements to interpolate temperatures in the vast areas between the sparse weather stations.
Which one of these definitions of interpolate works best?
in⋅ter⋅po⋅late [in-tur-puh-leyt]
1. to introduce (something additional or extraneous) between other things or parts; interject; interpose; intercalate.
2. Mathematics. to insert, estimate, or find an intermediate term in (a sequence).
3. to alter (a text) by the insertion of new matter, esp. deceptively or without authorization.
4. to insert (new or spurious matter) in this manner.
I like 3.
Today (22nd Jan 2009) in the Telegraph (UK)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/4307829/Antarctica-is-warming-faster-according-to-scientists.html
Te final quote is the most interesting to me “There is significant warming in Antarctica expected in the future and it will in the next 100 years or less become more serious…”
This suggests it is yet another article about projections into the future not trends based upon current data.
Sorry to say that I agree completely with your essay, and for this I despair for the future of our civilization.
Fortunately (?) for me, I am getting along in years and will most likely not be around to see the consequences stated or implied.
Gigagarbage in . . .
evanjones
and this just means the gigagarbage will just be processed faster.