IT and Climate change.

 Sea levels are predicted to rise anywhere from 500 cm to 1 metre over this century according to recent reports. With 13 of the world’s largest cities including New York City and Ho Chi Minh situated on the coast, these projected sea level rises could have a catastrophic effect on both their populations and on the world’ssea trade.
The recent news is that the arctic ice caps are melting faster than previously thoughtso obviously these predicted levels are now wrong. Since satellites monitoring began in 1979, scientists are reporting that this year’s ice cover is 463,000 square miles less than the 1979-2000 average of 6.12 million square miles.
Much of the new data has come from GRACE – NASA’s weather satellite – which was launched in 2002 and uses satellite altimetry. Data is also collected using coastal tide gauges. Climate data from satellite altimetry is proving much more accurate than traditional methods and in recent days the French space agency, CNES, has announced that the Franco-American Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite is scheduled for launch in 2019 after a grant of 170 million euros.
With these new huge leaps in collecting accurate data on our world’s eco system, we can only hope that computer modeling can keep pace with these. Traditionally climate modeling has been done using super computers but over the years this has now meant that climate change models can take months to run and require climatologists to keep accurate records of exactly what version of the code was used for each experiment.
Even now in the USA a RENCI supercomputer is being employed to investigate the effects of rising sea levels on the California coast, running around 2,000 individual storm simulations in six different climate set ups. Such future predictions are essential in helping to analyse future coastal risks in planning housing and future community needs.
A century-long climate simulation can still take months to run limiting climatologists to running models on the next 2 decades which can take a few weeks only to run.New research is now focused on Earth System Sciencewhich considers the complex interactions between all the Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, ice sheets and the biosphere.
This will prove a challenge to the world of software research. With recent criticisms of how such software should be open sourced and accountable, for example Professor Mann’s report on global warming which took over 5 years for him to release the code used, the code used in environmental modeling is set to become big business and will need to be less messy if it’s to be made available alongside any findings.
The new challenge to IT, which at present makes up only 2% of global greenhouse gases, is to embrace a greener world by using the tools at its disposal to analyse our planet’s future climate as well as applying clever IT solutions to existing human activities.