Methane Burps and Heat Waves: Global Warming Made Visible

Aug. 4, 2006 — -- Visualization can be a powerful aid to realization, and two such aids to realizing the great and imminent danger of global warming have just come to light.

One paints a remarkable picture of the output of an immense supercomputer hidden in the basement of a futuristic government building in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies that requires a special pass. The other reveals a scene on the sea floor off the coast of California, previously requiring SCUBA gear and a waterproof map.

Now you can see both by just clicking on the "Video -- click to watch" caption under the picture next to this story.

The gigantic super-computer in the basement of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., is so big you can walk down the aisles inside it, the walls of the sleek black servers at either elbow, wrapped in the constant hum of air coolers and countless trillions of silicon chip operations working day and night to calculate the climate future over the next several decades of the only home we've got: Earth.

"These super computers are getting more and more powerful every year," scientist Jerry Meehl told us as he gave us the tour. "It makes the computers we were using for global warming predictions back in the 1980s look primitive."

And even those computers, we now know from events such as the double heat wave just past, were predicting accurately.

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder have now figured out how to project the computer predictions -- which used to be just rows of numbers -- in the form of changing colors on a 5-foot sphere with the continents outlined on it.

A number of these spheres are now being installed in museums around the United States and the world, so the world can see what it's in for.

With green and blue for cooler temperatures, scientists and regular folks can watch the digitized projectors paint the globe, starting in 1870. Along about 1990, the globe grows yellower -- warmer -- and is entirely yellow by 2001.

Then comes the sobering part. Red, for much warmer, starts to appear in North America --