More supercomputers!

3 January, 2011 by

Steam computing at the Met Office?

All that’s standing between the UK Met Office and better forecasts is bigger and more expensive supercomputers. So says chief scientist Julia Slingo, in an interview in Nature:

What’s the biggest obstacle to creating better, hazard-relevant weather forecasts?

Access to supercomputers. The science is well ahead of our ability to implement it. It’s quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job — tomorrow — in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It’s so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We’re talking just 10 or 20 million a year — dollars or pounds — which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters. Yet it’s a difficult argument to win. You just think: why is this so hard? (source)

So here’s a report from the BBC in May 2009 which the Met Office would probably like to stay posted down the memory hole:

One of the most powerful computers to predict the weather in the UK is being tested in Devon.

The giant IBM machine fills two special halls, said to be about the size of two football pitches, at the Met Office headquarters in Exeter.

By 2011, the computer should have a peak performance of about one PetaFlop – equivalent to more than 100,000 PCs.

It is 30 times more powerful than what is currently in place and will give more accurate and detailed forecasts.

The Met Office “supercomputer” will offer 15 million megabytes of memory and requires 1.2 megawatts of energy to run.

The system, which is expected to be fully up and running by August, will also be used for research on climate change and its impacts on society and the economy.

Met Office chief executive John Hirst said the new computer was an important step.

“In a world where the effect of extreme weather events is becoming more severe and the potential impact of global warming is becoming ever more apparent, the Met Office plays an increasingly vital role in researching and forecasting these events,” he said. (source)

And getting them spectacularly wrong. It doesn’t matter how many Petaflops your supercomputer can crunch through, if the models suck (which they do, since they have been warm-mongerized to minimise natural climatic forces and maximise the effect of anthropogenic CO2) then the output will suck too. And here’s another from the UK Telegraph in 2007:

The Met Office wants to buy a super computer costing as much as £200m to make its forecasts more accurate.

It said a bigger and more sophisticated computer was a key element of being able to predict severe weather events – such as the Great Storm of 1987 – earlier and more accurately.

In a briefing to mark the 20th anniversary of the storm on October 15 the Met Office said the use of satellite imagery and modelling by computers meant the mistakes made then would not be repeated. [Ha, ha, my aching sides – Ed]

Much of the country was unaware of the huge storm that was to sweep across the southern half of the country on the night of October 15/16.

Although the Met Office had been warning of severe weather in the days before they “lost sight” of the severity and path of the storm in the final few hours. (source)

And another, from 2004:

The Met Office is celebrating 150 years by unveiling a new supercomputer which they predict will put them at the forefront of weather forecasting.

It will allow meteorologists to provide more accurate advice to the government and the public in the face of increasingly extreme weather patterns.

The Met Office made the announcement at the British Association’s Festival of Science at the University of Exeter.

The new system is one of the most sophisticated in Europe.

It allows forecasters to track weather patterns across the world – from a massive dust storm to a single cloud.

Such technology makes it easy to forget how far forecasting has come, the Met Office says. (source)

The list goes on. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. You’d get better forecasts on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum if the models actually represented the climate system realistically. Autonomous Mind asked what kind of supercomputers Piers Corbyn and Joe Bastardi use… and got a reply from both.

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What does "in history" mean?

2 January, 2011 by

The Age-of-Earth Ruler, where 1cm = 150 million years

This is a short post about time. Like distances in the universe, be they large (like the distance to the nearest star – 4 light years, or 40 trillion kilometers), or small (like the width of an average atom – a few hundred picometres, or less than a billionth of a metre), most people cannot comprehend the sheer enormousness of time. Climate alarmists and the media play on this understandable ignorance (especially at this time of year) by continually using terms like “in history” or “on record”, which are calculated to make people believe that a particular climate record has some great historical significance, and that therefore it carries weight in the argument about whether current climate conditions are unusual or “unprecedented”. Such weight is then used to justify drastic action to “tackle climate change” and tax our Western economies out of existence.

Climate records generally extend back 150 years or so, with the longest being the Central England Temperature record, which dates back to the mid-1600s. So I thought it would be interesting to put this in some kind of geological context. The earth is considered to have been formed about 4.5 billion years ago, so let’s make that period of time equal to a standard 30cm ruler – let’s call it the Age-of-Earth Ruler. How much is 150 years on that scale?

  • 1cm = 150 million years
  • 1mm = 15 million years
  • 1 micron (0.001mm) = 15,000 years
  • 10 nanometres (0.00001mm) = 150 years

So on that scale, 150 years equates to 10 nanometres, or 10 billionths of a metre. So “in history” or “on record” actually refers to a distance of about 50 atoms across at the very end of the ruler, yet we are constantly reminded by climate scientists, governments and media that this year or that year is the “warmest year in history” or “the warmest year on record”. A little perspective on these superficial statements is therefore essential when we are dealing with politicians who, like the public, have no understanding of scale – climate scientists however, should know better, but it is often only geologists who have that necessary comprehension of universal timescales.

Don Easterbrook, writing on Watts Up With That, shows a graph of a Greenland ice core derived temperatures for the last 10,000 years, which shows that the majority of that period was warmer than today (2010 ranks about 9000th):

Greenland ice core temperatures

But even this period is less than a thousandth of a millimetre on our Age-of-Earth ruler, and still cannot be regarded as significant.

Moral of the Story: be sceptical when anyone uses the terms “in history” or “on record”. Ask yourself, what does it really mean? Often the answer will be a big, fat NOTHING.

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Chairman of UK Met Office awarded CBE

1 January, 2011 by

Once proud organisation

For “public service” – Robert Napier is the head of the UK’s Met Office, you know, the one that couldn’t predict the outcome of a one-horse race, the “barbecue summer” Met Office, the “warmer winters” Met Office that somehow missed the coldest UK winter in 300 years (possibly longer). It is an organisation so blinded by global warming theology that it now spectacularly fails to do what it is supposed to do: forecast the weather. It’s the Meteorological Office after all.

As commenter Froggy UK reminded me a few days ago, Napier is an eco-fruitcake, totally conflicted out of his role at the Met Office, as is evident from his appointments:

  • Chairman of the Green Fiscal Trust
  • Chairman of the trustees of the World Centre of Monitoring of Conservation
  • a director of the Carbon Disclosure Project
  • a director of the Carbon Group
  • Chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund UK

He clearly has an environmentalist agenda to push, which, sadly he is doing very well, at the expense of timely and accurate weather forecasting. The Met Office’s flawed advice to the government, which as a result failed to prepare adequately for the extreme cold, has resulted in the unnecessary suffering of millions of people in the UK. And on top of all that, he is handed a gong in the New Year’s Honours List. Someone is playing a very sick joke on the British public.

(h/t Richard North)

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