Great Britain has a supercomputer with 15 million megabytes of memory. It can do 1,000 billion, or a trillion, calculations a second. They use it to predict the weather, and it’s considered one of the most valuable tools in the fight against climate change.
It also uses enough energy to power 1,000 homes, making it one of the biggest polluters in Great Britain:
The machine was hailed as the ‘future of weather prediction’ with the ability to produce more accurate forecasts and produce climate change modelling.
However the Met Office’s HQ has now been named as one of the worst buildings in Britain for pollution – responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
It says 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer meaning the machine is officially one of the country’s least green machines.
Green campaigners say it is ‘ironic’ that a computer designed to help stave-off climate change is responsible for such high levels of pollution.
But Met Office spokesman Barry Grommett said the computer was ‘vital’ to British meteorology and to help predict weather and environmental change.
He said: ‘We recognise that it is big but it is also necessary. We couldn’t do what we do without it.
‘We would be throwing ourselves back into the dark ages of weather forecasting if we withdrew our reliance on supercomputing, it’s as simple as that.’
But, but, but…I though there was nothing as important as curbing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. I thought we only had a few years and then we were all as dead as disco. I guess it’s all relative. If you make the electricity, you are evil. If you use it for climate change propaganda, it’s all good.
Google and Yahoo contribute heavily to the carbon output also. From Neatorama:
Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
But don’t worry, Google has goats taking care of its landscape. Yep…that’ll do it.
I was quoted very much out of context in the Times article that your secondary sources cite. That article was subsequently discredited, and they themselves backpedaled on much of what was printed in the original version.
http://eetd.lbl.gov/emills/commentary/tempest.html
I was quoted very much out of context in the Times article that your secondary sources cite. That article was subsequently discredited, and they themselves backpedaled on much of what was printed in the original version.
http://eetd.lbl.gov/emills/commentary/tempest.html
Hmm, nothing like a little irony to brighten up the day. Interesting point about the complexity of global warming issue. Great post.
Hmm, nothing like a little irony to brighten up the day. Interesting point about the complexity of global warming issue. Great post.