Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing project to produce predictions of the Earth's climate up to 2100 and to test the accuracy of climate models. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.
We need you to run a climate model on your computer. The model will run automatically as a background process on your computer whenever you switch your computer on and it should not affect any other tasks for which you use your computer. As the model runs, you can watch the weather patterns on your, unique, version of the world evolve. The results are sent back to us via the internet, and you will be able to see a summary of your results on this web site. Climateprediction.net uses the same underlying software, BOINC, as many other distributed computing projects and, if you like, you can participate in more than one project at a time.
Climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. Current research suggests that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; Climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.
Participating in the project is very easy. All you need to do is download and install BOINC, then attach to the Climateprediction.net project — you can select the project from a list of all available projects when you run the client.