The Hindu : National : Largest-ever experiment predicts rise in global temperatures

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Friday, Jan 28, 2005

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National

Largest-ever experiment predicts rise in global temperatures

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, JAN. 27. The first results of the most ambitious, collaborative experiment to study the earth's climate change are "bleak." The findings, reported in the January 27 issue of the journal Nature, suggest that temperatures could go up by as much as 11 degree Celsius by around 2050, even if we manage to limit carbon dioxide to just twice the levels that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century.

Behind this finding, is one of the biggest ever, cooperative efforts of Internet users worldwide, who, since September 2003, have donated spare time and space on their connected PCs to form a huge computing grid to create a global climate model. More than 95,000 individuals in 150 countries responded to the appeal by the www.climateprediction.net project, anchored at Oxford University in the U.K., by downloading the free software and allowing their machines to churn away in the background — effectively donating 8,000 years of computing time.

Documentation released today by the project at this website, reveals that 131 of these volunteers were based in India.

The result has already begun to cause waves across the scientific community because it is way ahead of nearly a dozen earlier predictions of global warming caused by greenhouse gases. The most authoritative of these, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggested a rise of 4.5 degree Celsius or less.

How it was done

The project head and lead author of the paper in Nature, David Stainforth, explains that the climateprediction.net project divided the earth's surface into boxes — hundreds of kilometres-square — and then studied 29 parameters that govern weather within these squares. The models were farmed out to thousands of volunteers who ran them on their home PCs. Then carbon dioxide levels were simulated for today and projected 45 years ahead.

The suggestion that the world is sitting on an ecological time bomb has come at a critical point in global efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Next month sees the launch of a pilot programme by many nations to address the limits set by the Kyoto Accord — an international agreement to which the U.S. is a conspicuous dissenter.

("Uncertainty in predictions of the climate response to rising levels of greenhouse gases" — D.A. Stainforth, et al., Nature vol. 433 p. 403, January 27, 2005)

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