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Global Warming-Fighting Computer Turns Out to Be Polluter


When the U.K.'s Met Office for weather research fired up the nation's largest supercomputer in May, the Daily Mail celebrated the enormous weather predictor by saying it would "help save millions of lives by predicting long-term patterns in global warming and forecasting extreme weather events such as typhoons and hurricanes."

The Daily Mail reports that the almost $50 million IBM machine, which houses 15 million megabytes of memory and requires 1.2 megawatts of energy to operate, is one of Great Britain's most egregious polluters. According to a report from the Department of Communities and Local Government, the machine, which is designed to eventually perform 1,000 billion calculations per second and uses enough energy to power 1,000 homes, contributes 75-percent of the Met Office's annual 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Those numbers qualify the weather center as one of the U.K.'s worst polluters.

While it may seem ironic that a machine designed to help people understand and predict global warming could possibly be contributing to said phenomenon, it gets worse. The machine might not even be accurate. Researchers earlier predicted a dry "BBQ summer" in England based on the computer's calculations, but those predictions turned out to be overwhelmingly wrong.

But, since the machine did take two months to boot up, and it won't actually reach peak performance until 2011, the Met Office crew will hopefully have plenty of time to work out the bugs before a catastrophic weather event occurs. These criticisms and condemnations will disappear and be forgotten, if the machine does in fact "save millions of lives." [From: The Daily Mail]

Tags: energy, global warming, GlobalWarming, green, ibm, met office, met office supercomputer, MetOffice, MetOfficeSupercomputer, pollution

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