A new £33m supercomputer which was bought to investigate climate change might be responsible for a fare chunk of global warming itself.

Red faced weather men have admitted that the new supercomputer, which will become operational later this year, will emit 14,400 tonnes of CO2 a year.

The Met Office is buying an IBM supercomputer which is projected to become the second most powerful system in the UK and within the top 20 most powerful systems worldwide. It should be capable of a peak performance of 125 trillion floating point operations per second. By 2011 it will have a peak performance approaching 1 PetaFlop.

Ironically the Met Office recently warned that if no action is taken to curb global warming temperatures are likely to rise by 5.5ºC and could rise as much as 7ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Its report called for early and rapid reductions in CO2 emissions are required to avoid significant impacts of climate change.

Alan Dickinson, Met Office Director of Science and Technology, told the Times that running supercomputers consumed huge amounts of power. But it needed them to predict the weather and the effects of global warming.

His view is that in the long term the new computer will actually help Britain cut carbon emissions on a far greater scale than those it emits. It claims that its forecasts save the European aviation industry alone close to 3m tonnes by improving efficiency.

Of course, no matter how expensive and powerful a computer is, the accuracy of its climate predictions is only as good as the climate model it is asked to process. One global warming sceptic recently remarked that these were more like toys than models. X