First Place Essay from "We Are IT" Day
Author: Erika Strong
January 2009
Editor's Note: “We Are IT” Day is part of an effort to encourage female high school students to pursue careers in IT. Technology First is a strong supporter of “We Are IT” Day.
Have you ever stopped and thought about how technology is changing the world we live in today? Or how much of an impact technology has on our planet? That is why it is up to you and me to improve our world and better other people’s lives by using information technology. Information Technology (IT) enhances the ability of people to create and share information through the use of computers and the internet. We, as students, could better our planet by learning about and communicating the many problems of the world to others by using IT skills.
One of the most serious problems in the world today is global warming. This is a term used to describe the gradual increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere. The changes in the temperature of the earth will cause rising sea levels due to the melting of polar ice caps and an increase in the occurrence and severity of storms. Human health will also be affected by global warming, as there will be more tropical diseases and an increase in allergies and asthma. Human activity is responsible for the warming trend that has taken place on our planet. Factories, power plants, and cars have burned fossil fuels such as oil and coal releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases into the Earth’s atmosphere. These gases trap heat in a naturally occurring process called the greenhouse effect. One way to improve this problem is to conserve energy, another is to better understand and predict climate changes. There are many ways to approach solving the problem of global warming. In order to gain the understanding of all the complexities of these and other aspects of the global warming problem, the use of supercomputers is necessary. The main technology solution that I recommend for improving our understanding of global warming is utilization of supercomputers. This is a solution that I and my friends could use while we are still in high school to begin to solve the worldwide problem of global warming.
Supercomputing is one of the most important technologies needed to solve global warming. Supercomputers were originally available only to scientists or college students; however for the past two decades access to supercomputers has become available to high school students through contests or special programs. Contests, such as SuperQuest that was started in Oregon in 1988 was one of the first opportunities that allowed high schools to have access to a supercomputer. That same year, in 1988 in Ohio, the Ohio Supercomputer Center Summer Institute (OSCSI) first offered talented freshman and sophomore students the chance to work with supercomputers. Although there have been many studies done by high school students at OSCSI over the past 20 years using the supercomputer, there were no references to global warming. However, there have been many studies on global warming conducted all over the world using supercomputers. During the past decade, virtually allimportant studies on global warming have used supercomputers. One example of how supercomputers can be used to study global warming was reported within the last few weeks. This study was announced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and tells how they will conduct a study using a powerful new IBM supercomputer called Bluefire. This supercomputer will predict 50 years into the future and give an accurate idea about how climate change will affect different aspects of atmospheric conditions, including information about whether hurricanes will develop greater frequency and intensity. Another example of how supercomputers help understand global warming was the Earth System Modeling Facility that also used a powerful IBM supercomputer. This study allowed researchers to predict climate, climate changes, and climate extremes that will affect Earth and people for decades to come. This facility simulates the effects of various aspects of global warming such as pollution and other climate stresses for up to three hundred years.
The use of supercomputers to help solve the problem of global warming can improve the world and people’s lives in many different ways. This includes predicting future climate well enough in advance to understand now how best to affect changes that may have disastrous effects on the planet and the entire living organisms that inhabit the planet. One specific example might include studying physical effects such as the interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere that controls the world’s climate. Abrupt climate change may occur within our lifetime and could have overwhelming effects, forcing rapid adaptation. Another example might be using computer simulations to understand chemical effects such as tracking the effects of pollution such as fossil fuel emissions, volcanic disturbances and overuse aerosols and there effect on the ice caps around the world. A third example would be studying biological processes including underwater ecosystems and how that would affect the food chain and ultimately humans and most of the life on the planet. The complex nature of all the examples described above indicate how important it is to use the technology of supercomputing to improve the world by better understanding global warming. The factors involved in this problem are so intricate and complex that the linkage and understanding of them challenges the capabilities of even our best supercomputers of today. As computers continue to advance, the predictions and solutions of global warming will continue to improve. I hope that I can start to explore ways to gain access to supercomputers while still in high school, so that I can better understand and begin to contribute to solving the problem of global warming within my lifetime.
