 Last week on the climate of Middle-Earth, climate scientist Dan Lump constructed a climate model that simulated the climate of Middle-Earth. To my delight, we found that Los Angeles in the US had a climate almost identical to that of Mordor. His climate modelling also explained the poor performance of the English cricket team. One of the test matches that we lost was almost right bang in the middle of the most Mordor-like climate. I think that almost certainly explained our whitewash by the Aussies this year. Lump's next task was to communicate the results of his research. But what other surprises lain store for the climate model of Middle-Earth? With the climate modelling completed, the next step for Lump was to do what all scientists or wizards do. Write a paper about it. That was always the idea for this work, was to communicate with the public about climate science. We didn't really want it to be purely a fun exercise if you like, just about Middle-Earth. Originally, I envisaged this perhaps being a page on the university web page where we mentioned something about the Middle-Earth simulations and then talked a bit about our own work on past climate simulation. But actually, the more I got into it, the more I realised there was actually a potential to do more than that and actually write something a little bit more substantive. I can't remember at what point, but at some point I had the idea of actually writing almost a mock paper about these simulations. In fact, in some ways it grew and grew. 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. Lump wrote his paper under the pseudonym Radagaster Brown. The first step in any writing is know your audience. It's sometimes difficult to know whether you're writing for a Tolkien fanatic audience or your climate science colleagues or Joe blogs on the street. But in the end, hopefully we got the balance between those three. Lump received a great deal of feedback from those most difficult to please fans, Tolkien purists. The thing I got the most correspondence about after the work, the most complaints about, certainly was our pretty feeble attempt to translate our paper into Elvish and Dwarvish. In fact, the way that I did that was I confess I just changed the font of the paper into Elvish script and Dwarvish runes and didn't actually change any of the words itself and so I got lots of complaints about the fact that I hadn't done that properly. So for all those people I do apologize. However, one piece of feedback that surprised and delighted Lump came from Australia. So another interesting thing that happened was just after the paper was published I actually got an email from an Australian geologist who'd done a lot of field work in Australia. And one of the things we said in our paper was that one of the regions of our real Earth that was very similar to the climate of Mordor was very close to Alice Springs in Australia. That was sort of one of the bull's eyes of Mordor climate, if you like. And I got a letter a week later from an Australian geologist so I was expecting him to be very rude at me for highlighting this. But he said actually no, it's actually completely true because 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. So it was actually almost like art imitating life or life imitating art or the other way around it at me. But perhaps the most interesting feedback comes from Lunt himself. As a scientific expert in climate modelling what did he think of Tolkien's efforts to describe the climate of mid-life? It is incredible actually the way that a lot of the model predictions actually were in agreement with what some of the things that Tolkien mentions in his books. And I think like you say that a lot of that was because Tolkien was such a careful scholar if you like. And it wouldn't surprise me actually if he spent some time thinking himself about the climate of his Middle Earth. One of the things we did do is we did place Middle Earth in our simulation somewhere similar to where Europe is in the real world and I think that's part of the reason why we get climate similar to that which Tolkien predicted because it's quite possible that he had the European region in mind when he thought about the extremes. For example if you look at the climate of the Scandinavian countries the north of the Scandinavian countries going right down to the south of Spain and North Africa is quite similar to the sort of climatic range that Tolkien had in Middle Earth. So yeah I think he probably was a very good meteorologist as well as being a very good linguist. Lunt continues to develop his climate models in the geographical sciences department at the University of Bristol. A labyrinth like building more complex than the minds of Moria. After Lunt's success in modelling Middle Earth what's next in his future? Could he apply his modelling skills to other alien worlds? Could he for example explain the one climate planets of Star Wars? So I've heard people say that it's interesting that Star Wars planets have the same climate over the whole planet. I'm not sure that that is the case. I know for example the ice world of Hoth certainly is cold everywhere but you'd still imagine if it is indeed a spherical world and orbiting a single sun and didn't have a completely unusual orbit or axis of rotation we would expect it to still be warmer at the equatorial regions in the middle of the earth than it would be at the pole but it's certainly possible. Maybe it has some chaotic orbit and it's tumbling around so that's why all parts of the planet receive on average throughout a year the same amount of radiation so maybe it is possible I don't know. Possibly the most burning question for Lunt is this will he create a climate model of the world in Game of Thrones? So that was also mentioned to me that we should try and do the Game of Thrones climate so that's something that may be under development in the near future I don't know. Perhaps fans will finally have an answer to that all important question is winter coming to Westeros? Maybe I'll start the model running and I'll let you know. I have three major passions in my life is climate change, motherings and cricket That's very similar to me. That's very similar to me actually. I'd probably football in that as well. Ning, Ning, Ning, Ning, Ning.