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Climate-change research project by the BBC & Oxford Uni needs lots of help

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Carol Haynes:
The BBC and Oxford University are trying to run the largest project ever mounted on climate-change modelling and need the help of as many people as possible to acheive the goals of the project.

The idea is to run lots of different climate models to find out what differences occur as different variables are altered. Even with the fastest supercomputers this is pretty impossible to acheive currently but lots of people worldwide running one model each and collating the information can acheive more than all the world's supercomputers combined.

Similar in idea to SETI, this is looking at a problem that could have potential short term benefits for strategic emmissions planning with more conclusive evidence to back up recommendations.

If you are interested there are details on this BBC webpage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/

Just click on the link if you want to take part (or click http://bbc.cpdn.org/index.php to go directly to the project page).

You download some software and during installtion you need to register with a valid email address.

The software runs all the time using low impact idle CPU cycles only but you can easily suspend it if you need to or shutdown your computer if you don't like to leave it running. It also comes with a screensaver module (which isn't essential to the running of the project) but shows you how your particular model is progressing in the form of a rotating globe. If you don't want the screen saver you can view the animation from within the software application. Data is reported back to the project via the internet but you don't need a permanent internet connection, so dial-up users can use this too.

The project runs until May.

Interesting fact/comment: There are 4.6 billion people on Earth (at least in the countries listed on http://bbc.cpdn.org/usermap.php) ... that is 1 for every year of the Earth's age. When the Romans arrived in Britain it is estimated that the population of mainland Britain was about 8000, it is now 60 million .... progress?

Carol Haynes:
Stunned silence on this one ...

Anyone giving it a go? If nothing else you get an interesting screen saver (which isn't an essential part of the project software).

If you are worried about it using up clock cycles it does - but that's the point. I haven't noticed it affecting other applications or system speed at all since installing it, and you can suspend or exit the program if you need to run time critical apps (just right click on the tray icon).

Currently there are 104000 participants world wide - it would be good to bump up that number even more.

To whet you appetite here is the world distribution map of participants as of now:



It is nice to see the UK submerged completely - probably the series of related BBC TV programs shown recently - some of which have been really fascinating.

nudone:
count me in. i'll download it later.

Carol Haynes:
Well done - how many more spots can we add ?

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