It's a handy subject to plug conversational pauses with, but as the saying goes: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Well, now you can. Or rather, you can help scientists predict what the weather's likely to do in the future, when it's increasingly likely to be a serious talking point. A new initiative called Weatherathome lets home PC users participate in a mass experiment by using their spare processing power to document regional weather changes. This information is analysed to help determine whether extreme events will become more or less frequent as the world's temperature rises.
It builds on the Climateprediction.net project, started in 2003, which uses distributed computing to formulate predictions about the earth's climate for decades to come. When you're working on your PC, but not using it at full capacity, a climate model runs automatically as a background process, and the information is sent back to be processed via the Internet.
The idea behind Weatherathome is to focus on changes in specific regions, as previous Climateprediction.net models were good at producing global forecasts, but not detailed enough to reveal potential variations in local weather.
At first, this sounds like just another helpful project; a clever way of doing one's bit for climate change, but it goes further than mere do-gooder zeal. It reveals a growing focus on what temperature trends or rainfall patterns actually mean to you, where you live.
Take SA, for example, how much of what is reported about climate change actually makes a significant impact on your personal life or surroundings? The focus of Weatherathome then, is telling: it will initially explore three areas in detail - Europe, the western US, and southern Africa. While the first two are included because most Climateprediction.net participants live in Europe and the US, the southern part of our continent joins the group for a slightly more worrying reason - it's a region that's been identified as particularly vulnerable to climate change.
According to a Guardian report, weather in southern Africa is particularly variable, and we're likely to see hotter temperatures and changes in rainfall, says participating climatologist from UCT, Bruce Hewitson. The changes in precipitation in the south-west Cape, for example, will affect more than just umbrella sales. Important industries like wine production and apple farming will be impacted, says Hewitson, which means something for almost all of us, whether it be a smaller selection on the wine list, or your very source of income.
Carrying on with business as usual becomes a very difficult position to justify.
Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor, ITWeb
The Weatherathome initiative is one of many projects revealing a shift in the way people perceive their environment. There's a growing here-and-now relevancy when it comes to climate change, which was often seen as a debate around global polices, detached from daily life. It has now moved from the debating bench to the backyard, as changes begin to affect people's livelihoods.
This was a year packed with “extreme” weather events, including droughts in Russia, heat waves across Europe, flooding in Pakistan and torrential rains in China. While it's difficult to link these events directly to climate change, some scientists say it's worsening the intensity of weather disasters, which could increase in frequency as global warming ramps up. Given the massive consequences for human life and stability, and beyond to the macro economy (wheat prices in Russia soared along with temperatures), the message is slowly hitting home.
Another aim of the project is to determine how much the greenhouse gases emitted by humans have contributed to recent weather trends. There's a long road of number-crunching and analysis ahead before any definitive conclusions emerge, but it does bring our culpability in causing more extreme weather under the spotlight.
If these events are found to be increasing in frequency, and caused by changes directly linked to human activities, then carrying on with business as usual becomes a very difficult position to justify. Take this one step further, and verify a link between today's energy-guzzling and tomorrow's hurricane-at-home, and the argument for doing nothing becomes virtually impossible.
Inside information
Initiatives such as Weatherathome also create more openness around global warming and climate change data in general. It's been just over a year since the “climategate” debacle, which saw thousands of e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia made public, creating a furore over whether scientists had manipulated or withheld data, whether review processes were followed, and the accuracy of climate science altogether.
While the parties were eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, the episode put a serious dent in the perception of global warming as a real and growing, scientifically observable threat.
Despite its negative spin-offs, the event also brought a greater emphasis on the need for transparency and information sharing. Greater insight into how scientific measurements are conducted and what they mean are imperative for an issue that will affect the majority of the world's people. It's also vital as we chart a way forward, armed with enough scientifically accepted truths to require action, while also facing many uncertainties regarding how to execute changes.
What Weatherathome.net does is demonstrate people's growing involvement in things they see likely to impact them, in there space, in their time. While the actual analysis may still be up to the experts, hundreds of credible sites and services now provide information on climate science and modelling, and some like Climateprediction.net allow the public to form part of the process. Because of its far-reaching and significant impacts, climate science is open to broader, public scrutiny, whether it likes it or not. And as people realise the possible implications, they're participating in collecting data that can be used to plan around these changes, and gain some sense of control over how their lives will look in future.
As Dr Myles Allen, principal investigator for Climateprediction.net, says in the Guardian: “This is not about whether climate change is happening, or why it is happening: it is happening, so what does this mean for us?"
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