“Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.” - Mark Twain

Climate change is widely recognized as the most serious environmental threat to our planet, and if we ignore it, it could have an increasing effect on weather patterns on a global scale.

The scientists studying these issues have become increasingly convinced that human actions are changing the world’s climate. As the demand for power in our homes and work increases, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into our atmosphere also rises - carbon dioxide is the main gas responsible for climate change.

Now, I’m sure that most of you know what a screen saver is. But what most of you are probably not aware of is the fact that a Windows PC running a screensaver consumes more energy than a Windows PC in “Sleep” mode - according to a statement from Dean DeWhitt, director of Microsoft’s Windows Kernel team. If that isn’t news material for you, then hear this: a screensaver-running PC consumes the same amount of electricity as a 100-watt lightbulb left on around the clock for one year. That is about $80 in power that releases about 1,350 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere (according to Microsoft). Not too friendly for the environment, is it?

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should turn off your screen saver. No! You could use the idle time time of your PC to help scientists investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. What is a climate model and how do these investigations help?

“Climate models are numerical representations of various parts of the Earth’s climate system.

By running the model thousands of times (a ‘large ensemble’) we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.”

What can you do? Download a small piece of software used by many distributed computing projects - BOINC - and then go to climateprediction.net and read the participation instructions. Instructions for running the BOINC software can be found by visiting this page.

The minimum requirements that your computer must meet are very low: 800Mhz CPU, 128MB RAM, 600MB free space, any type of internet connection; so anyone can participate.

Donating computing power, along with following the many other climate saving practices that are available, will have a very positive impact on the future look of the planet. I know this may seem a bit off the topic of self improvement, but what use is to improve ourselves if we destroy our planet?

The best part in donating computing power: it’s simple and doesn’t require any changes to be made in your lifestyle. Everyone’s invited!

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