Should all of us sign up for this screensaver? See http://bbc.cpdn.org/ per the BBC article below:

Join New Climate Project

Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:19:26 -0800

BBC links to huge climate project

The BBC is inviting viewers to join the world's biggest online climate
prediction project.

Climateprediction.net has already been running for two years and has
generated forecasts on the likely extent of climate change.

Participants download software onto their personal computers which run
the program when the machine is idle.

Its newest, most sophisticated computer model is being launched on
Tuesday in conjunction with BBC Four in the UK.

"The main change in this model is that it uses a fully dynamic ocean,"
said the project's chief scientist David Stainforth from Oxford
University.

"Previous versions used a very simplified ocean, whereas this one
allows us to see how the atmosphere and the ocean interact," he told
the BBC News website.

The upgraded design should provide a more accurate representation of
the real world, where heat and gases are continuously exchanged between
the atmosphere and the ocean, and should produce more realistic
projections of future climate.

Spreading intelligence

Climateprediction.net was established more than two years ago and uses
the "distributed computing" approach.

ather than running programs on one supercomputer, it uses the combined
power of numerous PCs, each running a slightly different computer
simulation.

No two simulations produce exactly the same results; overall, the
project produces a picture of the possible range of outcomes given the
present state of scientific knowledge.

Last year climateprediction.net released results from its existing
model suggesting that a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of
carbon dioxide would increase the global average temperature by between
2C and 11C.

Distributed computing has been used before, notably by the Search for
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or Seti, where several million people
have downloaded software enabling them to analyse data from
observations of distant stars for signs of alien life.

Personal contribution

The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project is
also a tool to spread awareness and understanding of climate change.

The link to BBC television may, they believe, help with this angle of
their project as well as recruiting more users.

They hope to have initial results from the new model about three months
after it is launched.

Frances McNamara, the BBC's producer for the experiment, said the
project would give people a chance to be part of efforts to tackle a
warming world.

"We wanted to use the BBC's web and interactive services to help the
audience to make a personal contribution - not only to the climate
change season of programming, but also to genuinely new science."

At the end of the BBC Four programme Meltdown, viewers will be asked to
log in, download, and set their PCs to the task of predicting the
climate of the future.

Meltdown, part of the Climate Chaos Season, will be broadcast on BBC
Four on Monday 20 February 2006 at 21:00GMT.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4702636.stm

Published: 2006/02/14 12:00:06 GMT