NUKE PYONGYANG; IT'S A TWO-FER:

Computer processors across Amazon Web Services recently hummed into gear to create 30 simulations of what Earth could look like by the middle of this century. Normally, climate models run on supercomputers. But this effort on Amazon's servers represents one of the first attempts to do modeling on the cloud and could revolutionize how modeling is done. Buying time on the cloud is vastly cheaper (though still not inconsequential in cost) than building and running a supercomputer. That alone makes it unique, but so, too, do some of the virtual worlds that scientists created.

If you were living in some of the 30 worlds created by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, you'd read reports of carbon dioxide climbing ever higher. The string of hottest years on record in the late 2010s would be average years by mid-century. Sea ice would fall to record lows and may even disappear completely some summers.

In a few of the worlds, though, something would be slightly off. The temperature is cooler, the sea ice around for longer. The sky might be slightly filmy, like someone smeared white into the normally crisp blue, only for the sunsets to explode in extraordinary color. This world is one where humans have decided to dim the Sun--just a bit--allowing less energy to reach Earth's surface so that there's less to be trapped here by rising carbon emissions.

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