climate change experiment.

[petticoatlane]

Your computer can perform billions of calculations a second. Donate the potential you're not using, and take part in the world's largest climate experiment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/aboutexperiment1.shtml

We need thousands

Comments

[petticoatlane]

Yeah, it will no doubt have some impact, though it should be minimal from what I understand, and it'll depend how much stuff you have going on... don't know how it'll do with me with my hundred & one windows open. ;p

Basically it's calculating all sorts of possible earth temperatures (& other stuff? I can't quite remember now :p) for the future depending on different variants or, I imagine, events... they want to get a big selection of possible ways it could go depending on current information of how things impact on temperature (the effect of greenhouse gases etc) and within that big sample, there should be a lot that home in on one small area and that should give them a better and more detailed idea of what's going to happen. It's just that you need lots of computer power to work it out, and their own computers, which are massive, aren't even vaguely big enough to do what they want to try and find out.

I don't think that made sense, and I don't know why I'm explaining it when I've just found what looks like a better explanation here http://bbc.cpdn.org/help.php#expt