Just as climate change will touch many aspects of our daily lives, the science of climate change requires a broad assemblage of the physical, biological and social sciences. Climate change is also a global phenomena with research often requiring observations on a geographically large scale, and resources often beyond individual scientists or organizations. Thus there are multiple opportunities for everyone to contribute to the science of climate, often as a part of a current hobby. Two opportunities are discussed in this post, but there are many more projects where your participation would be welcomed.
“Phenology” is the science that studies the influence of climate upon of plant and animal phenomena as the budding and flowering of plants, and the migration of animals. Many of us are already phenological scientists; bird watchers routinely record migration and nesting data, while many gardeners record flowering, harvesting and other data. The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) depends upon volunteers to observe and share their data, and to organize and analyze previously collected data. To be an observer, you can watch the same tree in your front yard, and each year report when the leaves appear, or fall. Such data collected by many can tells us a great deal about climate change, and help us prepare for the future.
You are obviously using a computer to read this; if it is yours you can donate some computer time to a climate change project (if it is not your computer you don’t want to do this!). Climateprediction.net is a a project to produce predictions of the Earth’s climate up to the year 2100, and to test the accuracy of climate models. Based at Oxford University, the project utilizes “distributed computing”, which depends upon the donation of time on individual, personal computers. The project utilizes a free, open-source software program, “BOINC” developed at the University of California-Berkeley for volunteer and distributed grid computing. BOINC is currently running on nearly a half-million computers belonging to over 300,000 volunteers and organizations.
To participate in an distributed computing project you load BOINC on your computer, and then select a project to receive your donated computer time, of which Climateprediction.net is just one. Other projects include topics such as the control of Malaria, mathematics, protein analysis, and genetics. Climateprediction.net recently published a ground-breaking study based on computation conducted on approximately about 60,000 donated computers. The entire process of setting up a computer for this use takes less than 15 minutes. The program then runs in the background, using only unused computer cycles, and automatically shutting down when it might slow, or otherwise interfere with your usage. As most computer tasks typically use only a small percentage of computer capacity, the Climateprediction.net is using only wasted resources and is invisible to the user.
These are but two of many volunteer opportunities that require very little time and effort, but where the collective contribution of many volunteers is of great value. And in each case, you can watch the progress and results of the project in which you are participating. Visit http://usanpn.org for more information about phenology, http://climateprediction.net for information on climate modeling projects, and http://boinc.berkeley.edu for open source grid computing software and to volunteer for various projects.
