Right away you get the feeling that something’s not quite right with these folks when you read their news feed which says:
“Fate of the World” game released
Submitted by cpdn on Tue, 02/11/2010 – 9:08am
Fate of the Word is a computer game where players do battle with climate change, which has been released today. This game contains information from our climate models, for which we would like to thank our crunchers.
Read a review of the “fate of the World game here: Climate Craziness of the Week: Soylent Green Earth Sim
Here’s the current climate weather news on this venture, now coming to your PC much like SETI@home:
weatherathome
“weatherathome” is supported by the Guardian.
Please join this exciting new experiment and help scientists understand in more detail than ever before what may lie ahead for the weather in certain parts of the world.
Watch project scientist Suzanne Rosier describing “weatherathome” here.
You’ve heard of climate change, but what does that actually mean for the weather in the region where you live? Could it be that you are going to see an increase in the number of damaging weather events? Or could the weather actually be getting nicer? You now have the opportunity to help scientists find the answers to questions like these, by taking part in the climateprediction.net “weatherathome” experiment.
Temperature over the Western US – a sample of the sort of information “weatherathome” will return.
Since the launch of climateprediction.net in 2003, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have generously donated their computers’ spare processing power to run state-of-the-art global climate models and help scientists learn more about the range of climates we are most likely to encounter in the twenty-first century. The results have been tremendous – a huge thank you to everyone who has taken part! Scientists continue to pore over the masses of data you have so kindly returned to the project and, indeed, will continue doing so for some time to come.
Cloud cover over Southern Africa – the regional model will give detailed information about clouds at various levels.
Such global models can tell us a lot, but they are still not detailed enough to tell us much about the potential changes to regional and local weather. To learn about these we need to use a model which is so detailed in its coverage that it can only afford to cover a limited area of the globe – a ‘regional climate model’. In this new “weatherathome” experiment, climateprediction.net has partnered with the Met. Office, with support from Microsoft Research, to develop a regional climate model that is available for download and running on personal computers anywhere.
Surface pressure over Europe – regional models such as this are needed to investigate changes to weather systems.
A regional model such as this needs to be supplied with climate information such as temperature, winds and humidity, around its edges, so that it still feels the influence of the weather in other parts of the world. In “weatherathome”, this will be achieved by embedding the regional model within a ‘driving’ global model. So if you choose to take part in “weatherathome” you will essentially be running ‘two models in one’ on your computer.
Surface temperature in the global model – you can watch this progressing as your model runs.
Initially, three target regions are now available for download: the Western US, Southern Africa and Europe. We chose these because the majority of climateprediction.net participants (to date) live in Europe and the US, and because Southern Africa is a region thought to be particularly vulnerable to climate change. We hope, in time, to be able to extend the experiment to many other regions around the globe. Your suggestions will be welcome!
Click the buttons to see some sample pictures from these initial three regions:
You can find details about the planned experiments here.
To accompany the experiment we are putting together some online information packs. Available at climateeducation.net, these are aimed at anyone interested in learning about the basics of climate science, how modelling is done and how to go about interpreting the results of experiments such as climateprediction.net and “weatherathome”.
Please go to our registration page, which will allow you to select your preferred region. Full instructions are available there.
Where in the world are we? The locations of currently active climateprediction.net participants.
Don’t they know that leaving their computer running, to calculate these meaningless statistics, will effectively contribute to more Global Warming, more electricity consumption, etc.?
Ecotretas
The results have been tremendous – a huge thank you to everyone who has taken part! Scientists continue to pore over the masses of data you have so kindly returned to the project and, indeed, will continue doing so for some time to come.
Oh, I like that. Scientist get to pore over all that data “for some time to come” (on whose dime?) because it’s so gosh-darn informative. But not the CRU raw data. Gosh, no. That would be such a waste of time.
Dunno about playstation climate games, but the near reality looks cold here:
http://www.meteogroup.co.uk/uk/home/weather/latest-model-forecasts/gfs-popup/archiv/Europe/t2m/2010111712/nothumb/on/372/ch/b9b7f272d24dae7bc117eba4b4c6f791.html
Forgot to say that if you only let it run, when you run the computer, than you’ll get some local warming also! Might be good in this Winter, though!
Some costs of SETI@home were calculated here: http://utilitycomputing.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/green-computing-and-the-cloud-setihome/
I believe these figures are much higher. These values don’t include all those people that started leaving their PCs running all the time. I’ve known a lot of people in the last years that do it, not imaging what the costs are!
Ecotretas
evan
‘……Oh, I like that. Scientist get to pore over all that data “for some time to come” (on whose dime?) because it’s so gosh-darn informative. But not the CRU raw data. Gosh, no. That would be such a waste of time’.
Perhaps its higher quality data 🙂
Today’s installment of the Cancun Week special is available at
http://ourmaninsichuan.wordpress.com/
It’s an assessment of the political approach by China to Cancun.
Pointman
I was thinking of moving my web hosting package to a new server and came across one I liked until I read: “our servers are carbon neutral” … that narrowed the selection list!
Juraj – thanks for posting that. The model suggests that we in Scotland will escape the extreme cold that Scandinavia and Central Europe will get, which is a little odd, so we shall see. I noticed that Alert was -36C yesterday and temperatures are expected to hit -40C on the Greenland ice sheet in the next 24 hours:
http://www.meteogroup.co.uk/uk/home/weather/latest-model-forecasts/gfs-popup/archiv/Europe/tmin2m/2010111700/nothumb/on/24/ch/527a5940bebcd36cba5398125e1239a4.html
and very cold air is due to cross the Canadian/US border in the next day or so. Ho hum.
Hey, if I sign up to this, will I get to go on the nice all-expenses-paid Jollys to Cancun, Copenhagen, Tahiti, Bali, Korea,…….
Lapogus, tsk, tsk. Don’t you know that those cold temperatures are just weather and colder winters are an expected result from catastrophic anthropogenic global warming,?
I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or throw up.
Amazing what next?
The SIMS 3 add on pack that models population control measures and green activism with eco police that come and take you away if you don’t manage your carbon quota!
‘Could it be that you are going to see an increase in the number of damaging weather events? Or could the weather actually be getting nicer?’
‘nicer’ does that include warmer?or is that not ‘nice’?
I am confused.
This is actually a good way to address chaotic system analysis, break it down into small chunks, but with current level of understanding it would only give a meaningful local picture, of weather, not global climate.
If the climatologists have accurately, or even semi-accurately, successfully predicted the future climate for the next hundred years, then we don’t need climatologists for at least a hundred years.
As the models have no predictive power regarding future climate, this is just another can of CAGW ‘gloss’ which will waste more ‘tax payer’ money.
In the mean-time the sun is still in the doldrums and all indicators are pointing to another severe winter like the one we had last year! Global warming? – bring it on!!!
‘Fate of the World’
Decide how the world will respond to rising temperatures, heaving populations, dwindling resources, crumbling ecosystems and brave opportunities.
I decided to take the thermonuclear war option.
That sorted most of the above problems.
Hmmm.
No computers in the Arctic or Antarctic. I wonder if this will show a warmer planet?
Look at the massive areas not covered…BLANKET SCIENCE!
They claim is more less energy intensive to do it this way than to use main frames, but can provided no evidence to back the claim up .
It has no ability to help with current forecasting, which for the mid and long term time scales certainly needs help , as it does not consider the situation as it is.
It has no variations where temperature decreases, only increases, so offers no information on a whole set of climate variation.
Its a marketing exercise for the AGW viewpoint from an organisation, the Met office , firmly in the camp and who have stopped given mid and long term because they been wrong so often. And yet claim they can tell you what the temperature will be 50 years from now to two decimal places.
None
They’re not experiments (except arguably in the gullibility of participants), they’re funking computer simulations. They’ll return whatever bias the programmers put into the code, no more, no less.
Tax dollars at work. Now this is the kind of development that would make me want to vote back in all the warmers that got booted out in the House. Not. If you want my vote back, cut spending here first. But wait. There’s more. For me, it won’t be enough to clean up our own house of these pests.
Just to make my point, any government sponsored AGW pinhead getting tax dollars in ANOTHER country, and doing (cough cough) AGW scientific work in THAT country, will keep me from voting for the pinheads here in mine.
So in a nuthouse shell, if you are an AGW government sponsored scientist, or an AGW political candidate or office holder, it sucks to be you.
I can see absolutely no merit in this venture. Before becoming sceptical some time ago, I did actually contribute to the previous BBC climate experiment – and I recall the fact that it was all rebooted after several months due to code errors. In any event, upon actually looking at the parameters being modelled and my later found scepticism it becames clear that it was nothing more than a public relations excercise to try and drum up enthusiasm for AGW! I suspect, this venture is no different?
Maybe this is my tinfoil pyramid hat pinging, but the part that caught me was “Since the launch of climateprediction.net in 2003, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have generously donated their computers’ spare processing power…”.
Sounds almost like those bandits that tap into your home network to run spam programs, or worse. Downloads go both ways, don’t they?
(OT, but I have been catching up after a lapse, and thank you Mr. Watts for those threads updating on your wife’s health. All the very best to both of you, and I keep you in my prayers.)
They already have the prediction of Global warming, now they are seeking validation through public participation and games. And it is aimed at the youth.
The whole thing is rigged to promote climate change theory. You had might as well be using a slot machine where the house always wins. At least there you can get a shot of whiskey to ease the pain. Wait, you pay for that too.
What amazed me when I started to look into the global warming hysterical movement was how much people seem to trust the computer predictions of doom by the computer modelers.
Having worked with computer models of physical processes, the thought of accurately compute the climate is for me ridiculous. Unless of course you know many things in detail which as of now is unknown such as the weather systems under water, the correct values of Earth’s albedo, the true physics of clouds including heat transportation from convections of clouds. This list can go on and on.
Whereas it makes sense to simulate the aerodynamics of a new airplanes using powerful supercomputers, doing something similar with the climate is worthless.
If you have a large number of unknown components which you ignore and make assumptions of others, then what you get garbage.
To realize that the computer models impressed people took me some time to do understand.
Some of this work has actually undermined the credibility of the IPCC’s official models, which the IPCC terms an “ensemble of opportunity”. By randomly choosing parameters that describe how clouds behave from within the range that fits observation, climateprediction.net showed that climate models capable of properly representing current climate can be produced by models with climate sensitivities ranging form 11 degK for 2X CO2. This work suggests that the IPCC’s models – all of which show a much narrower range and reproduce 20th century warming equally well – are likely the product of groupthink and “convergent evolution” during model optimization based on “knowing the right answer”. (After all, a valid climate model that doesn’t reproduce 20th century warming isn’t going to continue to get funding, even though that warming could contain a substantial component from UHI.) This work proved that the full range of uncertainty inherent in climate models is far greater than the spread of results reported by the official IPCC models.
No IPCC climate model is currently able to reproduce the conditions that permitted a “green Sahara” desert 6000 years ago. If climate models can’t reproduce the known desertification of the “green Sahara” in the past, there is little reason to expect that predictions of such disasters in the future are meaningful. Climateprediction.net could discover such models by chance.
The current IPCC models make contradictory projections about future regional climate change. Is the Amazon going to get more rain (most models), less rain, or so much less rain that the rainforest will disappear by 2050 (one model)? The IPCC’s next big push is to somehow provide “useful” (ie scary consensus predictions about your neighborhood that will create political will for legislation) projections of regional climate change for AR5. Results from climateprediction.net could show how uncertain these projections are.
The outcome will probably be similar to the SETI project. How many signs of extraterrestrial intelligence did that one find? 😀
BS Footprint says:
November 18, 2010 at 7:35 am
The outcome will probably be similar to the SETI project. How many signs of extraterrestrial intelligence did that one find? 😀
#
Not quite true, with SETI@home, any hit is verified and validated against actual physical measurements, i.e. reality. That is why they still have an empty bag. But this sca…project has no need for validation with reality. They will end up with a 10lb bag full of … data.
Martin Brumby says: “Hey, if I sign up to this, will I get to go on the nice all-expenses-paid Jollys to Cancun, Copenhagen, Tahiti, Bali, Korea,……”
No, Martin, such excursions are reserved for the episcopate and higher. If you sign on as an acolyte now, you might make it to monsignor before 2020.
Sad state of game development 🙁
I’ve always thought this should be made into a game
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
All the real and imagined “END’O’DA’WORLD” scenarios all in one place.
“Exit Mundi” even has a nice game like ring to it.
The results for the UK
HOT DRY SUMMERS
MILD WET WINTERS
BBC did the same thing in 2006
Climate change experiment
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/
Juraj V. says:
November 18, 2010 at 1:33 am
Dunno about playstation climate games, but the near reality looks cold here:
http://www.meteogroup.co.uk/uk/home/weather/latest-model-forecasts/gfs-popup/archiv/Europe/t2m/2010111712/nothumb/on/372/ch/b9b7f272d24dae7bc117eba4b4c6f791.html
Heh, runtime +372 hours. = 3rd december.
😉
tallbloke says:
November 18, 2010 at 11:42 am
There was a time, long, long ago, when in the UK there was a big super computer that made correct forecasts, it was called Stonehenge…then it came the Kali Yuga (*), the age of darkness and so all became blind and deaf. Now, this era has ended, but we have to wait until generations awake…
(*)Kali Yuga (Devanāgarī: कलियुग [kəli juɡə], lit. “age of (the male demon) Kali”, or “age of vice”)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga
I just got sprung from a mental hospital yesterday; gives one a whole new perspective on the climate gig.
Living in Nashville and seeing Opryland rise from the depths of the 500 year flood, I can only say buy country music – they ain’t makin’ any more of it; seriously though, they just can’t carry a tune no more.
Opry Mills is a-fussin’ with the ‘nsurance folk and except for Bass Pro Shop, most of them stores a-sittin’ MT!
Now, that’s what I call the ill-effects of EXTREME Weather.
I really was in a mental ward; bunch of really messed up people there too.
I dreamed I died while there; took a ride on The River of No Return; forgot to check the weather but the climate sucked.
I learned something lately; there’s a lot more chance of getting agreement on warming on the other side.
My body’s got to figure out how to pay for my brain’s vacation now, maybe I’ll go into used cars, minor water damage.
I heard that Soylent Green is now mostly made of filler :(.
As expected from anything to do with the Guardian: patronising, amateurish dross.
The presenter, whose name escaped me immediately, cannot be bothered to even acknowledge that climate changes without any interference from the likes of her, or her readers. Or any of us.
Baaaaaaah!!! I’m off for a stiff drink and talk about some other potential catastrophe.
It looks like the ‘S’-word is slowly creeping into the vocabulary of KHB60, the automated weather radio for the Puget area. Here are some of the animated ‘MM5’ loop forecasts available at the University of Washington Pacific Northwest Environmental Forecasts and Observations site:
UW MM5-NAM, 36 km, 72 Hr.
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/loops/wxloop.cgi?mm5d1_e_slp+//72/3
UW WRF-GFS, 36 km, 72 Hr.
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/loops/wxloop.cgi?mm5d1_slp+//72/3
On occasion, these plots may be unavailable or incomplete for an hour or so at times when a new computer-run is in progress.
These forecast maps run from about 85 to 185 deg West longitude and 25 to 65 deg north latitude and they give a good view of conditions far out over the East Pacific as well as the western third of the U.S and Canada.