The World’s Richest Man Company Wants To Dim The Sun
Amazon, the company founded by Jeff Bezos, seems to be trying to dim the sun’s rays. Amazon’s cloud infrastructure is used to calculate various scenarios that might occur if the Sun is blocked.
It wasn’t Bezos who planned to do this, but National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The idea to reduce sunlight is called solar radiation management. This could be a last-ditch effort to cool the Earth if global warming continues and we fail to take steps to control it.
Quoted from Gizmodo, Sunday (5/12/2021) Earth’s cooling methods have become a controversial topic among scientists because there are no reliable data, empirical or experimental, that can help us understand the full impact of such a move.
The only way to predict it is to use a supercomputer that can run this scenario and give us the likely outcome.
Some of the world’s top 500 supercomputers are housed in climate research facilities, which run different models of what the Earth will look like in the future. However, setting up a supercomputer is not only an expensive process but also time consuming. What Amazon offers is the power of its cloud infrastructure to perform these massive computations.
The project is underway for NCAR, where Amazon’s cloud runs 30 different scenarios using NCAR data to model the Earth between 2035 and 2070. Some of this also includes blocking of the Sun, albeit partially.
This approach offers many advantages for researchers working on climate models. This eliminates the need to invest time in setting up a supercomputer while making it accessible to anyone, in almost any region of the world.
Data sets can be stored in the cloud and then integrated into models as needed, while the models themselves can be made more accessible to policymakers and the wider public.
Kelly Wanser, executive director of SilverLining, a nonprofit that works on measures to fight global warming, said cloud computing has become sophisticated enough to take on the workload reserved for supercomputers.
The question now is, what else can he do? As technology advances, we will be surprised to see more and more cloud computing infrastructure capabilities in the future.
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