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Interview - An image of the future in 100 years
Supercomputing, researchers, and the scientific basis of global warming
- Dr. Emori:
The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) was made possible through the efforts of researchers from around the world, including contributions from Japanese groups. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report has now become a focus of attention. One of the innovative aspects of that report was the international collaboration by 17 research groups (12 countries) that used their respective climate models under the same scenario to predict global warming. This was coordinated by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP).
The Japanese groups were fortunate enough to be able to use the Earth Simulator, which at the time was the world's fastest super computer (built by NEC). This enabled our group to make computational predictions at the highest resolution in the world.
The Japanese groups began working in 2002, at about the same time as the debut of the Earth Simulator, by developing a climate model even more closer to reality. In 2004, the computer started to make calculations. Initially, conditions from 1900 to the present were fed into the model to verify whether past climate change could be reproduced by that model. After that, various scenarios were used to make future predictions.
The calculations of 500 years in total were completed by the summer of 2004.
The results were then analyzed, verified, published, and collected into the IPCC report.
There have been numerous global warming simulations, but nothing like the international scale of collaboration as this time. The calculation results show that due to human activity in the twentieth century, the earth is getting warmer. It is clear that this global warming cannot be explained by "fluctuation" in natural phenomena alone***. The final IPCC report thus states it is very likely (90% or more) that global warming is due to human activity.
