Earth System Modeling Must Become More Energy Efficient

https://eos.org/opinions/earth-system-modeling-must-become-more-energy-efficient

Source:  By Richard Loft, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: Recently, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where I serve as director of technology development in the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, conducted a carbon footprint analysis. The organization was quite pleased with the results, until it realized that the analysis neglected to account for carbon dioxide emissions related to the lab’s modeling activities. When these emissions were included, the overall picture looked considerably less green. ...In his book How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, Mike Berners-Lee estimates that the energy required to transmit a typical email generates 4 grams of carbon dioxide equivalents. That number may give pause to some, while for others it may represent an acceptable cost of doing business in the modern world. Regardless, unlike a gasoline-powered car with an exhaust pipe, there’s nothing about the act of sending an email that makes it obvious that we’re causing carbon dioxide emissions, so the environmental cost is easy to overlook. With the continuing growth of cloud computing and the Internet of Things, more emissions, like those from computing and the communication of data, will be further virtualized. ... Switching to renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and biogas must be part of the solution to mitigate climate change, and we should laud and try to emulate organizations that do so. It is worth considering, however, that the environmental side effects of a future decarbonized energy portfolio are not well understood [Luderer et al., 2019], and switching to renewable energy sources often means buying credits, which can be traded, thereby obfuscating the actual source of the energy powering a computing facility. In the meantime, one way to address the problem without creating more problems or sacrificing transparency is to improve the efficiency of the modeling enterprise. This idea is perhaps best expressed by the Japanese expression “mottainai,” often interpreted to mean “waste not, want not.”...