 Last week on The Climate of Middle-Aff. Professor Dan Lunt, a climate scientist from the University of Bristol, embarked on a quest to simulate The Climate of Middle-Aff. Ever since I've been a child, I've been really into the Tolkien books. I've probably read them tens of times, if not more. But one does not simply model The Climate of Middle-Aff. Assumptions were made. Dragons like S'moreg and the activities of the wizards and Sauron, for example, may well have raised the CO2 level on Middle-Aff. 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. Mainly because I spent so much time doing these past climate works. Actually, in the end, I was able to pretty much finish to set up the simulations in one evening. Although it was very long, it was more like an evening in 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 it, actually. But I did get to a point where I thought maybe people who were, you know, trying to discover a cure for cancer or something might get a bit annoyed that I was running middle-earth 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 recognising 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. And so what that means, however, these grid boxes, typically, may be the very highest-resolution models are 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. And 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 the model output, really, was to ask the question, what some of these places in middle-earth, how their climate resembled places in our earth. And so, for example, I chose a few places in middle-earth. So we started off with the Shire, with its rolling hills, and it's a very green, very nice part of middle-earth. And 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, had been shot in New Zealand. And so I was very interested as to whether the right choice would be 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 very similar to that of the Shire, but actually they were nearly all in the South Island, and 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 Earth. 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. But 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 most Mordor-like climate. So I think that almost certainly explained our whitewash by the Aussies this year. An interesting finding from Lance's climate model was an alternative scientific explanation of how the elves left Middle Earth. An interesting place in Middle Earth is somewhere called the Greyhavens, which is just on the west coast of Middle Earth. And it's a place where in the books it turns out that the elves, when they leave Middle Earth and go back to their homeland, if you like, they set sail from the Greyhavens and go west to their own country. And actually some of the main characters in Lord of the Rings is 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 Greyhavens is actually it turns out our model predictions was that we had very strong easterly winds that is blowing towards the west at the region of the Greyhaven. 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 Ents. Lance's climate model offered a possible new interpretation of Tolkien's Ents. There's a lot of discussion in the Lord of the Rings book about the Ents moving and actually, so these are the trees moving. Actually in the books it says that they were looking for their wives, the Entwives, and that they travelled 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 and grow. So we certainly found that actually in the real world there are, in our earth, there are cases and it's something that's predicted by models where trees will actually move in a similar way to the Ents 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 results of his scientific research to the public. I originally intended it to 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 like Mordor from Tolkien's books that they named it Mordor Pound. And let Roy 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 apologise. 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. That's awesome. He did, if you read the appendices, he did actually, yeah. Yeah, that happens after actually, yeah. He does too, you're right. It's geeky appendix knowledge, I'm afraid.