PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Al Gore claims that supercomputer simulations could mobilize popular support for cutting the greenhouse-gas emissions that could reverse global warming.
Global warming has been proven "unequivocally," according to former vice president and environmental evangelist Al Gore, who claimed that supercomputers could help reverse the trend in his keynote address to the Supercomputer 2009 conference (SC 2009, Nov. 14-19).
"We face a planetary emergency," said Gore, who cited recent scientific results that he claims prove that global warming is real and then outlined how supercomputers could reverse that trend.
Greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere while soot from around the globe is settling on the ice at the polar caps, thereby changing its reflectivity so that less sunlight is bounced back into space. These trends are raising the Earth's temperature at an alarming rate, according to Gore.
"The atmosphere is not impervious to the changes that people can do to it," said Gore. "CO2 has become the exhaling breath of current civilization."
Science has popularized the global warming debate despite the counterintuitive psychology involved. According to Gore, the situation is similar to when Nicolaus Copernicus initiated the debate over whether the Earth was the center of the universe. The debate was not settled until Galileo Galilei made details observations with the newly invented telescope, showing that the Earth orbits the sun, and not visa versa.
Supercomputer simulations, according to Gore, have become the "telescope" not of space, but of time, and have already helped heal the hole in our ozone layer. Supercomputer simulations showed what the consequences would be if we did not switch from the chlorofluorocarbons causing the ozone hole. These visualization tools, according to Gore, proved the threat to ordinary people, resulting in the political will to switch away from chlorofluorocarbons.
"We are now well on our way to solving the problem of the hole in the ozone layer," said Gore.
Supercomputers could again play a critical role in creating the political will to make the necessary changes to reverse global warming. The challenge, according to Gore, is to make the climate crisis a tangible experience.
People only respond to emergencies that can be made tangible, according to Gore, because our brains are still wired the way they were before civilization—to respond most strongly to physical threats like wild animals attacking, rather than by reasoning from current conditions to a hypothetical future.
Large but slow moving crises like global warming do not trigger the same kind of visceral responses as small but tangible threats. Supercomputer simulations can help here by making those hypothetical futures tangible, thereby eliciting the same kind of visceral responses as physical threats.
"Supercomputers can make impossibly large phenomena small enough to see," said Gore. "Visualization is a key strategy to making the results of inaction tangible enough to evoke our hardwired visceral responses, and instill in people the political will to change."
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