Rick Perry, climate change skeptic, soon to oversee U.S. supercomputing

[FarCenter]

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, will also have charge of the nation’s largest supercomputers. These systems are used to investigate “national challenges,” which includes climate change. But Perry is a climate change skeptic, as is Trump, and believes the science is unsettled.

Perry’s skepticism about the science of climate change may be a problem for the department he's been tapped to run; the Department of Energy (DOE) considers climate a major research focus.

“DOE plays an important role in climate change research -- a very large role,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3150229/high-performance-computing/rick-perry-climate-change-skeptic-soon-to-oversee-us-supercomputing.html

Supercomputers were developed for the nuclear weapons programs (and likely for NSA, but less is public) in order to design and simulate the operation of bombs and warheads.

As that design work tapered off, the National Laboratories cast about for various other problems that would justify their continued development and acquisition of supercomputers. One such application is climate simulations.

[lapfog_1]

1. I swear to god (if god exists)

Trump and his transition team do not understand what the DOE actually does.

I'm pretty sure they think it has something to do with regulating oil and coal and natural gas. Which is why Rick Perry famously forgot the Departments name when he was trying to think of 3 Departments (or agencies) to close.

Climate Research and renewable energy are NOT a huge focus of the DOE, despite the article.

I've been working with the DOE labs for decades now. The primary mission of the DOE is nuclear weapons.

Specifically, right now, those Supercomputers mentioned are mostly working on simulations of aging warheads and how to ensure that they will work as designed as they age, without actually testing any of them (nuclear test ban treaty). That's Oakridge, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, Los Alamos.

Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Argonne, parts of Lawrence Livermore work on fundamental science (smashing atoms) and future energy production (fusion).

There is a small part that deals with renewables (NREL or the National Renewable Energy Lab).

That is not to say that some of the "open" supercomputers don't work on climate change studies, they do... but the vast majority of compute resources are in the closed areas (i.e. classified) and those are not working on climate change.

[pangaia]

3. Very interesting. I had no idea.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

2. But he's wearing glasses now! That means he's smart!