# The Day After When…?

By Murray Bourne, 15 Feb 2005

Tomorrow is finally the official start of the Kyoto Protocol - that agreement among selected countries to reduce greenhouse gases that was actually discussed in 1997.

But the US and Australia, the biggest polluters in their respective hemispheres, refuse to have anything to do with it.

And Kiribati, a small island in the South Pacific is already being inundated with water - it's like a slow moving tsunami. there are thousands of low lying islands around the world - what is to become of their people?

There is some really interesting (and complicated) mathematics going on in the study of climate change. The models that they use to predict the effects of increased carbon dioxide levels require solving systems of partial differential equations. A lot of this analysis was not possible before the use of computers.

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