Keeping high policy uninformed
2008-05-15 — Dave BathJust published (2008-05-15) in Nature (doi:10.1038/453257a) is The Next Big Climate Challenge, which argues that significant funding is needed for climate modellers. Indeed that climate modelling and the supercomputing grunt it requires should be considered as international "big science", with projects funded internationally in the same manner (although hopefully more effective) than CERN’s hadron smasher and space telescopes.
Policy cannot be informed without information. Localized climate policy requires localized models. This means big computers and big bucks, given that current models and the computers they run on are limited to "cells" of about 100km, enough to be certain there is a problem, but not good enough to inform hard practical policy decisions.
And even higher resolutions — a kilometre or less, say — may well be needed to handle such critical issues as cloud formation realistically. Hence the need for computers a couple of
generations beyond the current state of the art.
Didn’t see any of this in Penny Wong’s 2008-05-14 Media Statement about $2.3B in four years to tackle climate change, did we?
There’s money to "adapt", but adapt to what? How will agriculture be affected, and in what areas? What do we do if a metropolis will get more rainfall than productive land (farmland and water catchments) a hundred kilometres away?
The Nature article points to the need for public purses to put climate modelling on the best computers in the world, which are now often limited for use…
in areas of national security such as communications intelligence or nuclear weapons design. And climate prediction is a national security issue if ever there was one.
It smells like the budget money is all about scoring political points for "doing something", rather than figuring out what are the right things to do.
See Also:
- "They say they want a revolution" Nature Online (2008-05-14) doi:10.1038/453268a
Climate scientists call for major new modelling facility.
- "Warming world altering thousands of natural systems" Nature Online (2008-05-14) doi:10.1038/news.2008.823
Analysis shows effects of climate change on almost 30,000 biological and physical phenomena.
- "The Next Big Climate Challenge" Nature (2008-05-14) doi:10.1038/453257a


