I have a supercomputer at my house. It contains an Nvidia Tesla card capable of doing over one trillion calculations per second. Twenty years ago it would have been the most powerful computer on Earth.
Many climate scientists seem to be under the impression that having very powerful hardware somehow overcomes a lack of understanding of the climate system. Joe D’Aleo sent this over.
Supercomputers may help predict climate changes locally
CALVERTON, Md. — Even a century ago, scientists working out equations on paper understood that gases in the atmosphere absorbed and emitted energy, keeping Earth from being a ball of ice. Today they use supercomputers to make increasingly refined predictions about how the Earth’s climate will change.
The new efforts take the question from global to local scale. Nations, states and communities have lots of climate-related questions: Should they divert water from one area to another? Build higher sea walls? Store and manage water the way Israel does today? Plan for many more 100-degree days in future summers?
“We can’t answer those questions with the capabilities we have today. That’s why we’re using supercomputers to push the limits of what we understand and how well we can predict,” said James Kinter. He’s a professor in the climate dynamics Ph.D. program at George Mason University in Virginia and the director of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies.
My supercomputer can’t accurately predict the weather in seven days, much less the climate in 100 years. Why? Because the system is chaotic and very poorly understood. Clueless climate scientists keep making the same mistake over and over again. They think that having a powerful computer which generates pretty high-precision maps means that they are doing something useful.
The output of a computer program is certainly no better than the input, and the iterative nature of climate models causes them to compound errors to the point where they are much worse than a random number generator. Garbage in, garbage out.
They’ve pushed the limits so much, they’ve passed their own tipping point!!
That stuff just pisses me off! Are they really that comptarded that they believe the computer will think for them? Using a supercomputer only makes them wrong quicker and more often. What kind of moron believes a faster computer will render a more correct answer?
I have become completely convinced that this is precisely what they believe. I see this very same behavior on a daily basis from coworkers, family members, pretty much anyone that doesn’t have the basic knowledge of the fundamental processes that make computers work (computation, 1+1). They just don’t get it and see all of our nifty electronic devices as “magical” and somehow equate that to intelligence and cognition. And I must say, in many cases the devices truly are more intelligent than those that use them.
Yes, this pisses me off as well…
Somewhere at a technology convention, engineers from IBM, Cray and NEC are clinking glasses under a big banner that reads: Mission Accomplished.
Can you believe the bean counters at the Met Office actually bought that thing?
Yep. Every single climate department wants one.
(all singing) We’re in the Money …
In climate science, GIGO stands for Garbage In, Gospel Out.
It would be cool to get the grid scale small enough that you can the eddy currents produced as a puff of wind blows off a lake and is forced around the trees in the woods on shore. If they could scale that model up into a convection model that produces a thunderstorm, complete with lightning and thunder, and the occasional tornado, I would be truly impressed.
Speed does get you a smaller grid, all other things being equal. But not much smaller per unit speed.
“Garbage In, Gospel Out”
Awesome .. hehe .. well said!
I believe it was 1991 or so that Maxis released SimEarth. I played it for a few days and then went back to more realistic games like Doom & Tetris. I strongly doubt (from browsing through HARRY_READ_ME.txt, et al) that the actual state-of-the-art has progressed much.
The thing about computer models is that they are programmed based upon assumptions of how a system works. So it makes no sense to use the model to verify those same assumptions, because invariably it will.
Every super computer has gotten Emily/91L wrong so far……
….yet, the bloggers that are just using their heads, got it spot on right
They think that having a powerful computer which generates pretty high-precision maps means that they are doing something useful.
If you don’t at least look like you are doing something useful, you might not get any more grant money!
A faster computer just puts more lipstick on the pig! It does not make the pig a Supermodel!
GIGO Rules!!!!!!
Come to think, those guys are just consistent with themselves. Just like they use statistics without much knowledge of what statistics is, they use computers without a hint of understanding about what computers can and can’t do.
How true.
So, you built a new machine for Battlefield 3, eh?
I’m not sure if Tesla is much use for games
Perhaps not, but pretty saaaweeeeet none the less … I’ll take one to go please….
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/43395/NV-DS-Tesla-S2050-june10-final-LORES.pdf
The computer is just the “cack-a-lator”. The brain is still the software. Until we understand the climate, we will not be able to write software that models it or predicts it accurately. We are doing good with weather as 3 day forecasts are very accurate (but not 100% as we got rain on a day where they listed 0% chance), but have far to go with climate.
I do not even give them accuracy on weather 2 hours out. They do beat their drums claiming how much better they are but they have a long way to go. Wildly scattered showers is not a storm that covers 4 counties and drops an inch of drought while passing
Especially this time of year.
The Weather Channel ‘Local on the 8’s’ thingie is downright embarrasing this summer.