I've been remiss in blogging, the AGU has been lots of fun so far but I've not had spare time or energy to write about it. It seems to improve the more we attend, as we get better accustomed to the sessions and the city. Still not convinced it is quite as fun as the EGU, but it's well worth attending. Especially assuming Ben Sanderson's calculations are correct, the energy cost of the flights over here is only equivalent to a handful of model runs, so by coming here instead of working we are helping to save the planet :-)
Unfortunately it was too wet this morning to take cameras, so you'lll have to take our word for it, but we did the AGU 5k fun run this morning. The weather was not exactly monsoon quality, but still quite wet enough. My garmin had trouble seeing the satellites and recorded an extra 140m on the 5k course - I don't know if that is correct or not, but my time (and also jules') was certainly slow enough, at least a minute outside our rough goals though jules was still second in her age group. Mind you, we were carrying a few extra pounds of rainwater in our shoes. And delicious though it was, the previous night's dinner in Restaurant Gary Danko might not have been the ideal preparation for a dawn race. Hopefully I'll find time in the next couple of days to enjoy a sunnier morning jog along the Embarcadero. (Ah, based on a quick glance at the previous year's results, it seems that several people who did both events were about a minute slower this time too, so we needn't be too disappointed.)
Rumour has it there's an exciting talk at 4pm tomorrow in one of the paleoclimate sessions. I'll try to be there...
5 comments:
Could Ben Sanderson's calculations be used to infer the climatic impact of, say, the CMIP5 program?
I've heard the primary consideration for where supercomputers are built is local energy cost. I would assume that there is an inverse correlation between energy cost and fraction of energy supplied by coal burning.
The fun runners were indeed wet hens yesterday.
When I lived in that part of the world my idea of how to have fun in SF was to go sailboat racing. And then get drunk.
Paul,
Yes probably, but I suspect the carbon cost is not so large when you consider the overall size/cost of the research programmes. Ben was considering himself running a very large ensemble of a full complexity model (and the highest numbers were for rhetorical effect, not for serious consideration). Most of us using ensembles tend to use reduced cost (eg lower resolution) versions, and for CMIP5 the total ensemble size isn't huge.
The new NCAR computer is just over the border in Wyoming - prime coal mining country. But maybe they've got a solar panel on the roof too :-)
Often speculated that the way to save money on the big iron was to place it in a deep, cool, cavern.
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