Climate Supercomputers

AAAS: "Climate modelers grapple with their own carbon emissions." In recent decades, supercomputer computation have created key insights into the interactions between atmosphere, ocean + land from the rising levels of greenhouse gases. To their credit, climate modelers have started to worry the simulations have a substantial climate footprint of their own. One computer run takes weeks or longer, consuming megawatts-hours [MWh] of electric power. Depending on location, the power may be coming from fossil fuels. “We are all aware that in everything we do we make a contribution to climate change,” says Helene Hewitt, a climate scientist at the United Kingdom’s Met Office and co-chair of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which coordinates global climate modeling. Models divide the entire atmosphere into thousands of boxes + use fluid dynamics equations to calculate how mass + energy move between them. Tracking data in all the boxes produces 'reams of data' even though the individual calculations are mathematically not that complex, but multiply this effort by short time intervals over an interval of as much as 500 yrs. "Nearly 50 modeling centers worldwide contributed to the last round of CMIP, which ended in 2022, simulating hundreds of thousands of years and creating 40 petabytes [PB] of data." Petabytes? Not treats for your pet but rather a number with 15 zeroes or 1,000,000,000,000,000 for one PB. Fewer than a dozen centers tracked + shared the 'computing + energy resources used to run their experiments, only 8 provided enough to estimate a carbon footprint, including staff travel time. "Together those centers accounted for nearly 1700 tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) released to the atmosphere, according to a study published this month in Geoscientific Model Development led by Mario Acosta, a climate modeler at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center." While only the equivalent of what 200 average Americans emit in a yr, while cryptocurrency mining emits millions of tons of CO2 per yr. Climate modeling " is small beer, on the other hand, we may not need to do as much small beer.” Crypto is the extraordinary energy glutton. Greedy porkers.