I noticed that when BOINC has taken over CPU and network on my Mac Pro while running climateprediction.net tasks that the ongoing power usage is at about 316 watts compared to about 180 watts when BOINC/climateprediction.net is not running. This means that there is more electrical power consumption and that more carbon is being emitted to atmosphere as a result. Just curious as to whether or not climatepredictions.net is taking this added power usage into account in their modeling and climate predictions.

This thread discusses this somewhat. Depending on the model type, CO2 can be varied by differing amounts to check all kinds of carbon emitting scenarios.

There was also a discussion on RealClimate about \"waste heat\" in the context of the rather misleading chapter on climate change in the Superfreakonomics book - An open letter to Steve Levitt.

In short, waste heat is negligible.

There\'s also a page about the energy used on the Boinc website here.

As the energy used by the computer becomes heat, if during the winter months one can turn the normal heating in the room down/off, not much extra energy is used.

It\'s easy to compensate for the extra carbon emissions by occasionally having a meal without meat, particularly beef, or with less.

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I would say that gaming produces much more waste heat that BOINC, since graphics boards are power-hungry and must be cooled by powerful fans, which also produce heat.There are a few BOINC projects that make use of graphic boards as GPUs, like SETI@home using nVidia boards and the CUDA environment, Milky Way using ATI boards and the Stream environment, waiting for OpenCL which should be capable of supporting all boards. People insert up to 4 graphic boards or Tesla and Fermi coprocessor boards in order to gain more credits by crunching faster. Climatepredictio.net has so far refused to follow this shortcut and I hope it will continue to do so in the future.
Tillio

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If more of the minority of members whose computers frequently crash models would post on the forum to ask what to do, we would produce more completed models for the same energy consumption.

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