Climate Change Seminar

April 24, 2009 – 3:32 pm

This semester, I’ve been attending a fun seminar on the effects of climate change on ecosystems run by Professor Nichole Barger. We have covered a range of fun topics from species distribution models (which I presented with my classmate Brian) to climate change and invasive species to the societal effects of climate change on mangrove ecosystems.

For our final class, we are read a couple articles discussing institute of climate change science and its future directions. Specifically, these articles were dissenting on the scientific consensus that we need bigger better modeling efforts to understand climate change, an interesting perspective. These papers brought up some interesting points.

The first one we read was from the journal Eos and argued that the cost of new supercomputers to run climate models was not worth it because of the irreducible complexities that the authors argue would render these models useless. Also, they said, we don’t need more climate models because we already understand the range of possible risks with climate change. They cite that such a supercomputing facility could cost up to $1 billion, which indeed is a lot of money. In general, I was pretty unconvinced by their argument. While I agree that there may in fact be better ways to spend a billion science dollars, I think it would only be for opportunity cost, not because the models are doomed to fail. On the contrary, I think this sounds like a worthwhile project.

I think the authors of the paper were missing a fundamental fact about the sociology of progress in science. Frequently, it is the means not the end that are important for a research endeavor. The serendipitous discoveries, unexpected results, useful technological spinoffs, and the collaborative spirit that can develop behind a common research goal are all way more important for the success of science as an institution than whether these supercomputers can actually produce spot-on climate predictions. To quote author Mike Hulme (from our other reading), “[These large modeling endeavors] have a heuristic rather than predictive function.”

This was one of many interesting issues we discussed in the seminar. I felt like we had a great group in this class and it was fun to hear the perspectives of my fellow grad students as well as several non-scientists who participated in our seminar. Cheers to all participants and to Nichole for organizing.

  1. 2 Responses to “Climate Change Seminar”

  2. I haven’t read the articles you’ve read so I can’t make any constructive comments about them, but I was thinking about the carbon footprint that $1 billion supercomputer facility would be. (Some what of a catch-22.) Well actually, we just need computer scientists to come up with more efficient and better parallel and distributive processing schemes so that we can utilize all those idle computers around the world over the Internet (e.g. BONIC projects). This should eliminate the need for another supercomputer center, yet still give it a try for running those huge complex models.

    By Brian on May 4, 2009

  3. Yeah, really interesting point Brian. Apparently computing facilities are starting to account for a substantial fraction of our total energy usage. I’d be curious to hear what the boosters for the supercomputer facilities would have to say about the argument that they could do the same thing with a distributed network.

    By Anthony on May 4, 2009

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