Sweet irony
For the Met Office the forecast is considerable embarrassment. It has spent £33m on a new supercomputer to calculate how climate change will affect Britain – only to find the new machine has a giant carbon footprint of its own.
“The new supercomputer, which will become operational later this year, will emit 14,400 tonnes of CO2 a year,” said Dave Britton, the Met Office’s chief press officer. This is equivalent to the CO2 emitted by 2,400 homes – generating an average of six tonnes each a year.
Maybe this is part of the feedback loop the scientists talk about. Predictions are dire, but lacking desired details. The dire predictions justify more computational horsepower, but the new computer compounds the “global warming” problem, making the predictions even more dire. The increasingly dire predictions justify more computational…
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