Week 4

Reflections on Week 4

This week's sessions were about better understanding the physics and mathematical elements of climate models, and gaining an appreciation of  several geoengineering schemes for Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) as well as assessing the value of these schemes.

I successfully download the BOINC climate modelling client to my Linux laptop, but encountered difficulties connecting it to www.climateprediction.net via Gridrepublic. The client seemed to report there was no data to process on the tasks I selected.

Downloading the ZEMB spreadsheet was more successful, I completed 60% of the exercises before running out of time. However I did enough to understand the tipping points which might have caused the ancient climate to shift between "snowball earth" and ice-free conditions.

I find working with simulation models and spreadsheets extremely helpful to understand how models work and the role of different variables.

Wikipedia helped me find the number of "boxes" in HADCM3, and what is meant by "Ocean sulfur cycle enhancement". Pleased again to achieve 15/15.

The website at earthobservatory.nasa.gov has a fantastic collection of images, and useful articles on many aspects of climate change which we have already covered.

John Englart's Climate Citizen blog has an alarming article (http://goo.gl/zCTpkh) about very recent decisions by the Australian Government to develop coal mining at the Galilee basin in Central Queensland, coupled with destruction of part of the Great Barrier Reef to enable coal shipments. I am shocked that so few organisations are having such a huge impact, and would like to know about any campaigns to stop them.