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...opics/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?
