Essay by Eric Worrall
… making good decisions about Australia’s future requires us to be self-sufficient …
Australia’s supercomputers are falling behind – and it’s hurting our ability to adapt to climate change
Published: December 9, 2025 10.12am AED
Christian Jakob
Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century, Monash UniversityAs Earth continues to warm, Australia faces some important decisions.
…
Deciding on the best path forward depends on having reliable and detailed information about about how wind, water and sunlight will behave in our future. …
Running these models requires the most powerful computers available …
But right now, Australia’s supercomputers are falling behind the rest of the world – and this constitutes a serious risk to our ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
…
This puts Australia at a major disadvantage when it comes to planning for the future.
But why can’t we just use the more advanced models and supercomputers developed elsewhere?
First, apart from our own ACCESS global model, all climate models are built in the Northern Hemisphere. This means they are calibrated to do well there, with limited attention paid to our region.
Second, making good decisions about Australia’s future requires us to be self-sufficient when it comes to simulating the climate system using scenarios defined by us and relevant to our region.
This has recently been brought into sharp focus with recent cuts to climate science in the US.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/australias-supercomputers-are-falling-behind-and-its-hurting-our-ability-to-adapt-to-climate-change-267628
I’m shocked Aussie climate scientists are demanding their own energy guzzling supercomputer, given Australia’s difficulties with supplying low carbon electricity to data centers.
Surely it makes more sense for Australia to buy climate friendly supercomputer time from China. Granted Chinese supercomputers are mostly powered by coal plants, which emit a lot of CO2, but Chinese companies emit good communist CO2. As an officially designated developing country, Chinese CO2 emissions are sanctioned by the Paris Agreement.
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“First, apart from our own ACCESS global model, all climate models are built in the Northern Hemisphere. This means they are calibrated to do well there, with limited attention paid to our region.” And all this time I thought the Northern Hemisphere shared the world’s atmosphere.
I was going to ask that. Do these “scientists” plan to concentrate their modeling on Australia and ignore the rest of the world?
So they’re saying the global models are not really global and their SH projections are worthless? Well they’re half right, the projections for both hemispheres are worthless.
Let’s get to the nub of this climate nonsense, all models that rely on High ECS->2C meaning CO2 is an important modern climate driver, are essentially bullshit!
All GCMs that ignore natural climate cycles, the dominant role of in incoming solar energy and the hydrological cycle in controlling ocean and atmospheric warming,
are doomed to fail- no matter what computing power is applied to resolve climate trends.
Maybe the real reason for their demands is that that such a device will enable them to dredge up more trivialities that can be used as “incontrovertible” proof that carbon emissions from human activities are what’s really driving climate change.
Aren’t the Northern hemisphere-based supercomputers generating a GLOBAL ‘climate’ which includes the Southern hemisphere?
If they are ‘calibrated’ to Northern atmospherics and ignore the Southern half which is a net sink of CO2/NH4/etc (according to the CSIRO Cape Grim data), then the Northern models are sadly lacking and incompetent (as if often claimed)
A comment on the title art – they just don’t look Aussie to me. I’m thinking more northeastern US types. Or perhaps mediterranean European.
I’ll ask OpenAI to add someone cooking sausages on a Bunsen Burner next time 🙂
With a big sandy beard!
HAHAHA!
I’ve seen that done.. also using a laboratory hot plate and a frying pan.
Eric, just make sure you show halal sausages being cooked.
And definitely no pork snags.
They need to be divining the future using sheep entrails. That would be for more accurate than supercomputer models, and then they can roast the mutton over the lab hot plates.
Laboratories are good for all sorts of food preparation, including freezing and smashing bananas.
Leonard Is Too Clingy | The Big Bang Theory
I thought they were “snags.”
Great image none the less .
LOL, they forget to mention the CSIRO climate game simulation.
GIGO + super computer = very fast GIGO !!
I responded similarly on The Conversation yesterday to the author.;)
“and relevant to our region.”
Australia is a net carbon sink… is that what they mean ?
(not that CO2 should be any part of any realist climate model)
CO2 as a “forcing function” definitely not part of a realistic climate simulation.
“Deciding on the best path forward depends on having reliable and detailed information about about how wind, water and sunlight will behave in our future.”
Look outside. What you see is what you get. Any reason to think wind, water, and sunlight will undergo a behavior crisis? No. There is no good scientific reason to expect so, considering how dynamic energy conversion massively overwhelms the minor “warming” tendency from continuing emissions of CO2 – assuming that is a concern.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDurP-4gVrY
And for that matter, your new supercomputer will simply step a bit faster through the iterated computations to produce an unreliable result from the rapid buildup of unresolvable uncertainty.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/24/10328448/#comment-4110125
Thank you for patience in this matter.
With a big-ass new computer, maybe the BoM’s climate team could contemplate including the temperature sets from pre-1910.
You know, where that 1886 blast-furnace continent-wide heatwave that lasted a couple of weeks killed 437 Aussies. It was in all the papers – hard to ignore.
in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days. The maximum at or above 102 degrees F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight.
https://joannenova.com.au/2012/11/extreme-heat-in-1896-panic-stricken-people-fled-the-outback-on-special-trains-as-hundreds-die/
1896 was the year Svante Arrhenius published his flawed paper on CO2 & a climate model ( the one all the catastrophists like to quote).
In 1906, he published a revised paper ( the one almost nobody quotes ), apologising for the errors in the 1st paper, & states that water is the dominant gas.
https://www.scribd.com/document/457024604/Arrhenius-1906-final
Correction –
1896
Just curious but how well did the aborigines do during that 1886 heat wave? How did they cope? They’ve been there for eons, must be used to it by now.
They weren’t wearing 3-piece woolen suits all day long, or toiling through siesta time.
At least in parts of the PRC, electricity costs 0.35 RMB per kWh. That’s under 5 US cents. It would be much cheaper for scientists in OZ to rent AI time on PRC data centers. I would guess that electricity in OZ costs roughly what we pay in California (over $0.30 /kWh).
No it’s free here according to Nick … we just haven’t paid enough to get our free everywhere in Australia.
I doubt that super computers or A.I. will help us understand the weather, there is too much randomness and unpredictability in it, there is an event horizon beyond which nothing can see. It is cycles upon cycles plus random zigs and zags, it is incalculable.
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
“No Warming in Adelaide Since 1857”
Shown in the chart (See below) is a plot of average annual temperature in Adelaide since 1857. In 1857 the concentration of CO2 in the air was ca. 280 ppmv (0.55 g CO2/cu. m. of air), and by 1999, it had increased to ca. 368 ppmv (0.72 g CO2/cu. m. of air), but there was no warming of the air. Instead there was a slight cooling of the air in this port city. From the chart, the average annual temperature (Tavg) was 16.7° C in 1999. This chart falsify the claim by the IPCC that the increasing concentration of CO2 in air causes warming of air.
The chart was taken from the late John L. Daly website: “Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at http://www.john-daly.com. From the home page, page down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on “Australia”. This displays a list stations. Finally, click on
“Adelaide”. To return to the list of stations, click on the back arrow. Clicking on the back arrow again displays the “World Map”. John Daly obtain temperature data from the GISS and CRU data bases. He found over 200 weather stations that showed no warming up to 2002.
To obtain recent temperature data for Adelaide, I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/adelaide/average-temperature-by-year. The Tmax and Tmin data from 1887 to 2025 are displayed in a long table. Here is the Tmax, Tmin and Tavg data from 1999 to 2025:
Year—–Tmax—–Tmin—–Tavg Temperatures are ° C
2025—–20.0——11.0——15.5.
2024—–22.6——12.2——17.4
2023—–21.7——12.1——16.7
2022—–21.3——12.5——16.9
2021—–21.5——11.8——16.6
2020—–21.6——11.8——16.7
1999—–21.7——12.1——16.9
Weather Station1956-2025: Adelaide Airport.
The temperature data shows little variation from 2020 to 2024 which probably due to Adelaide being a port city. Note the diurnal temperature difference (Tmax-Tmin) of only ca. 10° C from 2020 to 2024.
The Tmax and Tmin temperatures for 2025 are a big surprise. In 2025 at the MLO, the concentration of CO2 was 425 ppmv (0.83 g of CO2 g/cu. m. of the air) up from 368 ppmv (0.72 g of CO2/ cu. m. of air) in 1999. The temperature data from Adelaide show that CO2 has no influence on air temperature.
How can the temperature data from Adelaide be used to convince Premier Anthony A. and the Canberra Climate Cartel to abandon their draconian climate agenda and the Net Zero goal by 2050 before the country eventually descends into bad economic times?
NB: If you click on the chart, it will expand and become clear. Click on the “X” in the circle to return to the comment text.
For a more detailed study of Adelaide, please read this from an Aussie Physical Chemist.
Geoff S
https://www.geoffstuff.com/adelt.docx
Well just cover more nature with cheaper solar panels and less transmission lines than wind-
AEMO slashes forecasts for wind farms as falling costs fuel solar and batteries
If you can get the NIMBYs you trained so well to agree of course greenies.
Lol. You’re headed for a world of hurt chaps.
Whatever would we do without the very model of a major modern modeller?
LOL 🙂 – I’d love to see what Gilbert and Sullivan would make of today’s world!
Eric Idle as Koko in the Mikado gives us a very big hint. Look in particular for the reference to Australia.
The Mikado – The List (Eric Idle).avi
Observa, excellent. Maybe you could go even further ” . . . the very major model of a major modern modeller . . .”. I’ll stop before the next obvious step . . .
The discussion appears to be about a future climate while the need for a supercomputer is suggestive of weather prediction – like “We need tomorrow’s forecast now!”
For 2070 or 2100 they could get by with a Commodore 64.
Easier and cheaper to ask me to predict the future for a small fee. I guarantee to be at least as accurate as any supercomputer, and a lot cheaper. If you prefer something more sciency, ending in -ology, then astrology might suit. If you want “scenarios” rather than “predictions”, then I can provide as many as you like, tailored to your desires.
Is there no end to the ignorance and gullibility of “climate scientists”? That’s a rhetorical question, of course.
Australian climate scientists are worse off than I thought. Let me help them. Since your wind and solar farms are so powerful and cheap you should build your super computer next to them, you will have lots of cheap power. As for the rest of Australia fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Offer your climate scientists a sale price for all of your wind and solar outfits, they are going to need them for their super computer.
I bet the electricity generator home trainer bikes used by the climate scientists on the picture will be very soon power assisted.
If these experts can’t accurately predict Australia’s local weather with over a century of data, and all their modern widgets, gizmos, and satellites, then how on Earth are we supposed to trust them to forecast climate?
“Running these models requires the most powerful computers available …”
What fools- focusing on the power of the computers without realizing their models aren’t very good. So how is a super duper computer going to make a bad model give good results?
It will not. It will give the bad results faster and with more decimal places (violation of scientific notation).
All getting newer, more advanced supercomputers will benefit the programmers is:
Wrong answers faster.
Increased credibility due to an augmented appeal to authority.
It’s not the computer. It’s the software, the models, with their identified (and not validated) assumptions, their unintentional biases, and their embedded (hidden) assumptions.
From the above article’s last paragraph:
“Surely it makes more sense for Australia to buy climate friendly supercomputer time from China.”
Hey! . . . don’t rule out just buying two slightly used, nearly-new supercomputers from the USA for your very own use.
Since June 2022, NOAA has been using two tens-of-millions-of-dollar-per-year Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS) supercomputers, each operating at 14.5 petaflops. (source: https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-completes-upgrade-to-weather-and-climate-supercomputer-system ).
The current government contract award to General Dynamics Information Technology for the WCOSS supercomputers and their designs, deployments, and management is stated to be $505 million over a potential 10-year period. (ref: https://www.gdit.com/about-gdit/press-releases/noaa-awards-general-dynamics-high-performance-computing-contract ).
Of course, the quality of the output from supercomputer modeling of weather and “climate”, particularly tropical storms, is only as good as the “science” that goes into programming them and the “data” they are fed. In this case, in terms of practical results in weather and tropical storm forecasting—reference the NOAA forecast for the Atlantic hurricane season just ended—it appears that those NOAA supercomputer outputs are pretty much equivalent to running a Excel statistical analysis of accumulated past data on a $500 laptop computer.
So go ahead, make a bid . . . and have fun with these play toys.
That is just funny! Climate scientists should be required to live the life they wish to impose on us peasants.