And Supercomputing Could Save Us All

Climate change is something that may not resonate for many of us, because it's hard to comprehend what it all means. Saying that temperatures will slowly increase and ocean levels will rise means something in the abstract, sure, but it's hard to visualize how it will actually affect the planet.

Al Gore tried to give a face to climate change with his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, but that relied to a large degree on a PowerPoint presentation. Today, nearly four years later, the former vice president wants to get more powerful computing involved in the pursuit of educating others about the Earth's potentially dire future.

According to this Computerworld article, Gore, who spoke at the SC09 conference (a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore.), was quoted as saying, "Supercomputing has given us the most powerful tool in the history of civilization." That's because, as Gore put it, what's needed are "improved simulations of what is actually happening in the world and how those changes are unfolding" so that climate change can be taken out of the abstract and become much more real to people, and supercomputers may be able to do just that.

Being able to see what could actually happen when the ocean levels rise as the Earth warms and how it will affect civilization can be a powerful tool. I can say that watching the show Earth 2100 on ABC this summer certainly had an effect on me, and I'm guessing the animation the show used will pale in comparison to what these supercomputers can come up with.

While the manner in which the human race has advanced, including all this technology, probably had quite a bit to do with climate change, it's refreshing to think that technology might also be able to better spur people into action and turn things around.

Photo courtesy of lewishandreamer, via Flickr