Climate modelers grapple with their own carbon emissions

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By PAUL VOOSEN, Science. 

Excerpt: Over the decades, supercomputer simulations of Earth’s climate have yielded unprecedented insights into how the interplay of atmosphere, ocean, and land shapes the planet’s response to rising levels of greenhouse gases. But as these climate models have grown in complexity, researchers have started to worry the simulations have a substantial climate footprint of their own. Running them can take weeks or longer on a supercomputer, consuming megawatts of electric power—some of it likely from fossil fuels. ...Nearly 50 modeling centers worldwide contributed to the last round of [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project], which ended in 2022, simulating hundreds of thousands of years and creating 40 petabytes of data. ...centers accounted for nearly 1700 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released to the atmosphere, according to a study published this month in Geoscientific Model Development led by Mario Acosta, a climate modeler at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.... 

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