From the department of irony, Britain’s weather supercomputer
for predicting climate change is one of the nation’s largest
emitters of carbon dioxide: The Met Office has caused a storm of
controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer
designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst
polluters. The massive machine – the UK’s most powerful computer
with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory – was installed
in the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter, Devon. It is capable
of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400
scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to
power more than 1,000. The machine was hailed as the ‘future of
weather prediction’ with the ability to produce more accurate
forecasts and produce climate change modelling. However the Met
Office’s HQ has now been named as one of the worst buildings in
Britain for pollution – responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes
of carbon dioxide a year. It says 75 per cent of its carbon
footprint is