Climate Future Results Show Sweltering Britain
UK: January 19, 2007
LONDON - Britain will regularly be crippled by heatwaves and floods
this century, the first results of the world's biggest climate
prediction experiment show.
The experiment by the BBC and Oxford University began in February last
year with an appeal for people to download a climate prediction
programme which would run in the background when their computers were
idle.
About 200,000 people from across the world signed up and 50,000 have
now run the programme -- which plots the global climate from 1920 to
2080 -- long enough for the results to be statistically significant.
Each programme was slightly different, so that a very broad range of
possible outcomes was covered.
"People need to understand this is not a worst-case scenario. This is
what we are increasingly confident will happen in the absence of
substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions," said project
co-ordinator Nick Faull of Oxford University.
The initial results will be presented by renowned wildlife broadcaster
David Attenborough in a BBC programme -- Climate Change: Britain Under
Threat -- on Sunday, giving snapshots of Britain in 2020, 2050 and 2080.
They show flooding will become widespread and regular and that
heatwaves like the one which struck Europe in 2003 killing thousands
of people will become the norm, making conditions in millions of homes
and London's creaking underground system unbearable.
"By using the computers of many tens of thousands of people around the
world, all of whom will be affected by climate change in some way or
another, we have created the largest "virtual" supercomputer dedicated
to climate change that the world has ever seen," said Bob Spicer,
chief academic for the programme.
"We have been able to do calculations that even on a normal
supercomputer would have taken decades to complete," he added.
Most scientists agree temperatures will rise by between 2 and 6
degrees Celsius this century, mainly because of carbon emissions from
burning fossil fuels for power and transport, putting millions of
lives at risk from flood and famine.
Story by Jeremy Lovell
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
From a warm, wet wild winter's day in New Scotland,
Ross Mayhew.
posted to ClimateConcern
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.