Time magazine already declared us “Person of the Year.” Perhaps next we will all get the Nobel prize in science (increasing all our life-spans by two years).

We might not ever get a reward for it, but over a quarter of a million people have helped Oxford scientists predict the world’s climate into the year 2080. The study has been highlighted in a BBC package this Sunday, which details how the experiment was done and what the preliminary results are (full results will be published in a scientific journal).

Now the results are probably what you want to know about, but I’ll leave that for later – this post will be a nail bitter. What we are interested in is the method of distributed computing that Oxford used to collect their data.

Thousands of participants (see the map of users) downloaded a simple program to run on their computer if it was left idle. Instead of a screen saver that showed last year’s vacation photos, their computers ran climate models that produced predictions. There are all kinds of variables in predicting climate change, like how much the polar ice caps melt and the amount of light reflected back into space, that any single computer could have gotten it wrong. But using a distributed network of computers, Oxford was able to collect more data and see what patterns emerged (over 20 million years were modeled).

Oxford Scientist Nick Faull explains: “The combined processing power of each person running a model is potentially greater than the most powerful supercomputer currently available to climate research. It’s also been fantastic to involve the public in climate research.”

So let’s recap. There is a big question looming in the air. Trained professionals (scientists) are charged with getting to the bottom of the question, but it proves to big to tackle alone. So the professionals use the net and ubiquitous technology to task out small parts of the question to regular citizen scientists. Not only do they get good results, but the public is now more engaged in an important topic and perhaps wants to help find a solution. (Now read again and replace scientist with journalist – lesson completed).

In truth the Oxford climate experiment isn’t the first science project to use distributed computing. As a kid I remember my father running the SETI (search for extra terrestrial Intelligence) program on our home PC, which is still “the largest distributed computing effort with over 3 million users.” Science in general is learning to benefit from citizen contributors, take the National Audobon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, where amateur bird watchers feed data about mirgration patterns.

Journalists rarely need massive amounts of computing power, but they could use different takes on computer assisted reporting. It’s not hard to imagine a case where journalists get their hands on a large database that needs to be analized with as many eyes as possible. In an age of radical transparency journalism isn’t about hidding the scoop until you are ready to publish, journalists need to start getting help to find the real scoop in the first place.

Oh and the results. I almost forgot the results! Um…yea. About that.

David Cohn is the editor of NewAssignment.Net’s blog.