(UK SMH) Climate-Proofing Impossible Without Better Models And Super-Computing

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Investments worth trillions of dollars to help protect people and assets in a warming world could be wasted without more powerful computer models to predict exposure to climate change.

The UK’s Royal Society on Wednesday issued a call for an international centre to develop next-generation climate models that would develop and share predictions for how the climate and extreme weather will change down to one-kilometre resolutions.

How Australia’s ACCESS-G weather model predicted the Fujiwhara effect playing out when Tropical Cyclone Seroja nears a tropical low off the WA coast. Credit: Weatherzone

The information generated would help identify areas that would become increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather and sea-level change. These include where events combine, such as heatwaves and bushfires, or hail and flooding.

“The scale of the potential investments in adaptation and the increasing vulnerability of societies across the world, together, place a very high value on more detailed and precise information about how weather and climate, and especially extreme weather hazards, are likely to change over the next decades and beyond,” the Royal Society’s briefing said.

“Detailed, location-specific climate information can safeguard the trillions of dollars’ worth of investment in infrastructure projects made over the coming decades by ensuring they are resilient to the projected impacts of climate change in terms of their location, construction and management.”

A firefighter is assisted seconds after being hit in thick smoke as fire roared through Bilpin in the Blue Mountains in December 2019. Credit: Nick Moir

The briefing noted 10 times more computing power is typically needed each time the precision of model predictions halves. Optimal resolution will require computing capable of conducting one billion billion calculations per second, a scale that will only be achieved by an international effort.

Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes [CLEX] has backed the Royal Society’s call, noting governments have supported other global science projects, such as CERN and the Giant Magellan Telescope. Each cost more than $1 billion.

“The size of the necessary super-computing will be eye-watering,” Andy Pitman, head of CLEX, said. “It’s vastly beyond what any individual nation can do.”

From floods to bushfires and cyclones to heatwaves, the effects of climate change are predicted to get worse, increasing the need for accurate predictions. Credit: Wolter Peeters

Professor Pitman noted the federal government’s recent commitment to a national disaster recovery agency aimed at building resilience and also the decision by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority to release guidance on managing financial risks in a warming world.

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“How the hell are businesses going to assess their vulnerability to something that science is still working on?” he said.

Better knowledge, for instance, could help determine whether a billion-dollar dam being considered for inland Australia would likely ever get filled.

Australian involvement in any international effort could help reverse what Professor Pitman described as a dramatic decline in the country’s fundament modelling capability compared with other nations. “I’d like to see Australia not sitting back and watching it happen,” he said.

The Royal Society said improved computer modelling would also help nations understand the consequences of failing to achieve the necessary reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

“Only with the best possible climate models can we show what is at stake, what might be lost,
and what the future climate damage and costs of inaction will be,” it said.

A gigantic, powerhouse winter storm in 2017 that stirred up the North Atlantic and funnelled unusually warm air into the high Arctic. Credit: NERC Satellite Receiving Station, Dundee University, Scotland

Other Royal Society climate briefings included how to scale-up new technologies such as hydrogen, improving energy efficiency and better ways to manage food systems as the population heads towards 10 billion people.

Links

• The Royal Society - Climate change: science and solutions 
• The Royal Society - Next generation climate models: a step change for net zero and climate adaptation (pdf)
• The Royal Society - Nourishing ten billion sustainably: resilient food production in a time of climate change (pdf)
• The Royal Society - Climate change and batteries: the search for future power storage solutions (pdf)
• The Royal Society - Climate change and land: the science of working with nature towards net zero (pdf)
• The Royal Society - Healthy planet, healthy people: climate change and health (pdf)