Last week on the Climate of Middle-Aid. Professor Dan Lunt, a climate scientist from the University of Bristol, embarked on a quest to simulate the climate of Middle-Aid. You know, ever since I've been a child, I've been really into the talking books. I've probably read them in tens of times, if not more. But when does not simply moral the climate of Middle-Aid, assumptions were made. Dragons like smorg and the activities of the wizards and so on, for example, may well have raised the CO2 level on Middle-Aid. Once Lunt had built his climate model, it was time to run the simulation and see what his climate model would produce. I was amazed, actually, it was mainly because I spent so much time doing these past climate works. Actually, in the end, I was able to pretty much finish set up the simulations in one evening. Although it was very long, it was my evening and the morning, but I got quite into it. However, real-world issues also presented their own challenges. It was in my spare time, it wasn't funded, but I did run the simulations on the University Supercomputer, which is free to use by members of the University for research purposes. So I didn't tell anyone I was doing, actually, but I did get to a point where I thought maybe people were trying to discover a cure for cancer or something like that, a bit annoyed that I was running Middle-Aid simulations. After Lunt had completed his simulation, next he had to interpret the results. An important part of understanding what climate models can tell us is recognizing their limitations. Now, the model can't actually tell you anything about the climate on a scale that is smaller than one of these grid boxes. So what that means, however, these grid boxes typically are maybe the very highest resolution models of perhaps the order tens of kilometres, but most models you're talking hundreds of kilometres. So there are lots of processes in the atmosphere, in particular, that actually occur in reality on a much smaller scale than that. For example, clouds themselves are much smaller than the size of one of these grid boxes. So we have to make approximations to how some of those processes work. Interpreting his model results presented its own challenges. Lunt took an innovative approach to making sense of the data. A useful way of interpreting that the model output really was to ask the question what some of these places in Middle-Aid are, how their climate resembled places in our Earth. For example, I chose a few places in Middle-Aid, so we started off with the Shire, with its rolling hills, and it's a very green, very nice part of Middle-Aid. So I thought, well, what is the model predicts the climate of the Shire? How does that compare with the real Earth? And in particular, I knew that the recent film had been, a lot of that, or if not all, have been shot in New Zealand. And so I was very interested as to whether the right choice had been made, and whether the Shire's climate really was like that of New Zealand, for example. So I actually made a map of the world, our Earth, and highlighted all those regions that had a climate similar to that of the Shire. And so we found out, for example, that there were parts of New Zealand that had a climate similar to that of the Shire. But actually, they were nearly all in the South Island, and it was apparently the film was filmed in the North Island. So it was out by a few hundred miles, maybe. Apparently, Tolkien envisaged the Shire as being similar at least to parts of the UK. And in fact, we found that Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire do have a very similar climate to that of the Shire, if you believe the climate model. After doing the Shire, we were obviously interested in other places. And in particular, we thought, well, Mordor is a very well-known part of Middle-Aid. It's where the evil Sauron lives. It's very black and desolate. And so we tried to find places in the real Earth that were like Mordor. And actually, somewhat to my delight, we found that Los Angeles in the US had a climate almost identical to that of Mordor. Also parts of Australia, I think, Alice Springs and also had a very Mordor-like climate. At the time when I did this, England were actually down under in Australia playing cricket against Australia. And I thought, and actually, one of the test matches that we lost was almost right bang in the middle of the Mordor-like climate. So I think that almost certainly explained our whitewash by the Aussies this year. An interesting finding from the Lance Climate model was an alternative scientific explanation of how the elves left Middle-Aid. An interesting place in Middle-Aid is somewhat called the Grey Havens, which is just on the west coast of Middle-Aid. And it's a place where in the books it turns out that the elves, when they leave Middle-Aid, then go back to their homeland, if you like. They set sail from the Grey Havens and go west to their own country. And actually, some of the main characters in Lord of the Rings actually not elves, but Frodo and Sam, and apparently also Gimli and Legolas also set sail for the west. And actually, we found that one of the reasons why they might have set sail from the Grey Havens is actually it turns out our model predictions was that we had a very strong, easterly winds that is blowing towards the west at the region of the Grey Haven. So that explains why they left from there and not, for example, further south from somewhere in the west of Gondor, for example. Tolkien wrote about walking, talking trees called ants. Lans climate model offer a possible new interpretation of Tolkien's ants. There's a lot of discussion in the Lord of the Rings book about the ants moving, and actually, so these are the trees moving. Actually, in the books it says that they were looking for their wives, the ant wives, and that they traveled vast distances. And actually, what our work perhaps suggests is that perhaps the real reason they moved was that they were trying to move to more climates that were more suitable for them to flourish in Grey. So we certainly found that actually in the real world there are, in our earth, there are cases that it's something that's predicted by models where trees will actually move in a similar way to the ant's did, but they will be moving in response to climate change rather than looking for their wives. Next week, none will face a challenge that confronts all scientists, communicating the result of his scientific research to the public. Originally, intended it would be quite short, but in the end I think it's one of the longest papers I've ever written. He will explain how his climate model helped find a piece of middle earth in our own world. Just outside Alice Springs, there is a region known as Mordor Pound, because in the 70s some geologists were there and thought the climate and just the whole feel of the place was so light Mordor from the talkings books that they named it Mordor Pound. And let me explain his greatest regret in simulating the climate of middle earth. I got lots of complaints about the fact that I hadn't done that properly, so for all those people I do apologize. Find out more next week in the climate of middle earth. That explains why they left from there and not, for example, further south from somewhere in the west of Gondor, for example. He did, if you read the appendices, you did actually... I only laugh when we read the appendices. That happens after actually. That's what he does, too. It's geeky appendix knowledge, I'm afraid.