Computational and Global Sciences at ORNL

The Problem: One of America's most important priorities for years and years to come is our obligation to deal with the problem of climate change and build a secure future for our country that allows economic growth and protection of the planet.
Oak Ridge has had an important impact on the U.S. Government's role in recognizing and offering solutions to the problem of carbon dioxide and climate. In the late 1950's, global climate was an unknown threat to the world's environment and social systems. The connection between rising carbon dioxide concentrations and potential changes in global climate was not common knowledge, nor were the consequences of climate change understood--except for a few ORNL researchers who had just completed their first briefing to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commision (AEC) on the need to understand the global carbon cycle. details

ORNL Solutions:

• Established the standard methodology by which global estimates of atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are calculated.
• Developed a systems view needed to integrate the cumulative effects of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and other important greenhouse gases.
• Demonstrated the promise of massively parallel computing to simulate future climate more rapidly than other computing platforms.
• Showed that terrestrial ecosystems (forests, vegetation, soil) have a central role in the global carbon cycle and that these ecosystems respond very quickly to climatic events such as El Niņo, the periodic ocean-warming phenomenon.
• Confirmed the physiological mechanisms that control enhanced carbon uptake by and productivity of forests.
• Integrated socioeconomic and ecological factors to predict causes and effects of land-use changes (i.e., deforestation) in tropical regions.
• Developed approaches for reducing carbon dioxide emissions through policy instruments addressed at the private sector, changing the energy mix of developed and developing nations, incorporating biomass as an alternative fuel, and implementing energy efficiency improvements.
• Built integrated assessment approaches to evaluate the consequences of global climate change through new tool developments such as systems ecology, risk assessment, evaluation analysis, and engineering systems analysis.

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