This article in the otherwise excellent The Register puts the blame on a lot of innocent machines:
Computing network warns of massive climate change
The world could be as much as 11°C hotter inside 50 years, according to the first results from climateprediction.net, an experimental distributed computing network set up to simulate climate change.
The researchers ran more than 50,000 simulations of the potential future climate, based on a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels. What they found has surprised them. David Stainforth, from Oxford University, explains that carbon dioxide levels could have a much greater impact on global temperature than previously thought. Excuse me -- it is not the computing network that is making this claim. It is the application being run on the computing network that is making this claim and the majority of climatologists say that this application is based on a bad model. The militant environmentalists are gearing up for another round of fund-raising and they need to generate scare-headlines to out-shout the people who are doing real work. If you visit the site (here) you will see that they are doing a distributed computing model similar to SETI@home only in this case, each computer is (from their website:
The climateprediction.net experiment should help to "improve methods to quantify uncertainties of climate projections and scenarios, including long-term ensemble simulations using complex models", identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 as a high priority. Hopefully, the experiment will give decision makers a better scientific basis for addressing one of the biggest potential global problems of the 21st century. The results from climateprediction.net experiment will be fed into the work of the Quantifying Uncertainty in Model Predictions (QUMP) team at the Met Office and will form part of the UK contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. This project's purpose is to fine tune their model.
This project is not for generating predictions. Why is the prediction being trumpeted in a headline? Hey Register editors? Wake up and get back to work!
