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Any chance of a software tweak to show changing sea levels? I suspect there's a negative feedback process here, in that if the world warms, we lose some coastal lands, but gain for agriculture the Arctic, possibly even Antarctic lands, also maybe higher-altitude lands. Conversely, a new Ice Age would deny us a lot of N Europe and N America but we'd gain a lot of what are now shallow seas, e.g. Caribbean, Malaysian, for new land (just so long as deserts don't expand due to changing rainfall patterns, but some exisitng deserts would be greened also). Or course the version of the world map we use can skew our perception here; the old Mercator projection, the world as a rectangle, which vastly exaggerates the Polar areas (and incidentally Europe) compared to shrunken Africa and other Equatorial areas, makes it look as if the 'gains' (in far northern lands) are a lot bigger than they really are on a 3-d globe where the polar areas are actually quite small compared to the big wide equator. But what is the 'optimum' setting of the global 'thermostat' if our goal is maximum human carrying capacity? So which nation(s) might control this thermostat, Russia and Canada will have a very different setting in mind from Bangladesh or Australia. With increasing discussion of possible human interventions in the climate, suich as artificial dusting above the Arctic to increase albedo, this might be a real geopolitical debate in coming decades. After the water / oil / food wars, WW 4 might be a climate setting war. Dr Hillary Shaw Food and Supply Chain Management Department Harper Adams University Newport Shropshire TF10 8NB www.fooddeserts.org Gineria, a country where discrimmination is acceptable, In education, jobs, pay status, and more; Gyneria, the land of women. -----Original Message----- From: Deb Ranjan Sinha <[log in to unmask]> To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:41 Subject: FW: The Monash Simple Climate Model interactive webpage perhaps you will find this interesting.... -----Original Message----- Dear colleagues, we like introduce to you a Test Version of the web-based interactive Monash Simple Climate Model: <http://maths-simpleclimatemodel-dev.maths.monash.edu/> The Monash simple climate model is based on the Globally Resolved Energy Balance (GREB) model, which is a climate model published by Dommenget and Floeter [Climate Dynamics 2011]. It can compute global climate simulations of one year in about 1 second on a normal PC computer. Despite its simplicity the model simulates the climate response to external forcings, such as doubling of the CO2 concentrations very realistically (similar to state of the art climate models). The Monash simple climate model web-interface allows you to study the results of more than a 1000 different model experiments in an interactive way and it allows you to study a number of tutorials on the interactions of physical processes in the climate system. By switching OFF/ON physical processes you can deconstruct the climate and learn how all the different processes interact to generate the observed climate and how the processes interact to generate the IPCC predicted climate change for anthropogenic CO2 increase. We thinks this should be a good learning tool for university and high school students, but also for the general public and researchers as well. A good starting point to get an idea for how this web-interface works is to try one of the tutorials on the webpage: <http://maths-simpleclimatemodel-dev.maths.monash.edu/greb/cgi-bin/dmc.py> A short introduction information is given in the following pdf-file: <http://maths-simpleclimatemodel-dev.maths.monash.edu/greb/MSCM.short.introd uction.pdf> We hope you enjoy playing around with his interface and we would very much like to get feedback from you, as we are still developing this tool. In particular if you find some errors, have suggestions, improvements or if you like to contribute to the development of this Monash Simple Climate Model. Best regards and enjoy your holidays! Dietmar Dommenget School of Mathematical Sciences Monash University, VIC 3800 Australia phone: +61-3-990-54495 email: [log in to unmask] <http://users.monash.edu.au/~dietmard/index.html>