Cracks in Climate Policy

In today's keynote address at the Winter Simulation Conference, Undersecretary of Science Ray Orbach highlighted three major challenges for computer simulation: modeling cracks that form in the containment vessels of nuclear reactors, taking a systems approach to CO2 generation and absorption (a fixable flaw in the Kyoto Protocol and the U.S. Cap-and-Trade plans) and including human behavior in Global Circulation Models (GCMs). Each of these problems will require immense amounts of computing power and the U.S. Department of Energy has the computing power available through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

I'll pick up these topics in later posts. Back to the conference...