How long will the modelling take?
Quite a while. We are anticipating at least six weeks of CPU time on fast machines, perhaps three or four months on slower machines. Serious climate science requires serious computer time. The flipside of this is that the fact we can conduct this sort of experiment at all is one of the minor miracles of the computer age: general circulation climate models are among the most sophisticated computer models in the world. They have always been run on supercomputers because of their complexity and the intensity of the number-crunching involved. It’s yet another (if more were needed) testament to the phenomenal development of personal computing that you can run such a model on the machine you have in front of you.
