If you are one of those people easily riled by the weather channel predicting snow for the morning rush hour then you'll really hate the computer Dr. Richard Peltier works on at the University of Toronto.

It can predict the climate around the world 10, 20, or even 50 years from now. And the climate in 2050 and beyond is apparently something that should worry us all.

The earth is getting warmer and the consequences, scientists fear, could be everything from massive flooding to forest fires and tidal waves on a scale never before experienced.

"We can predict the climate," says Peltier a world-renowned physicist and climatologist and 30 years a professor at U of T. "But predicting the weather in 2050 is impossible."

The $7 million supercomputer is one of the most powerful on earth and what it, and others like it tell us, is that the Great Warming scientists and environmental activists have been clamoring about for the past 20 years has already begun.

The world, Peltier said is 6/10 of a degree warmer then it was 100 years ago. Most scientists involved in climate studies agree that the rate that greenhouse  gas are being released into the atmosphere will lead to an even greater surface warming

A one or two degree increase in the overall temperature of the world the may not seem like much to the person on the beach but the effects on the planet could be catastrophic.

It means the Arctic will shed its sea ice and snow cover much faster meaning shorter hunting seasons for the Inuit hunters who feed on the polar bears and the seals. In South Asia rising seas flooded by the melting ice caps could inundate coastal villages and saturate the farms that feed hundreds of millions of families.

In Canada scorching summers and heat waves could turn fertile Prairie farms into virtual wasteland.

Predicting the climate 50 years into the future is one of the most complex, mind-boggling tasks ever attempted by the human brain. And this is how Dr. Peltier does it with  the aid of his  supercomputer.

First you take the spherical Earth and divide it into a number of cells, or patches, along lines of longitude and latitude. Then you rigorously apply the laws of physics, physical and chemical theory to each patch.

Next, add in the thousands of variables from the temperatures of the oceans to the amount of sunlight reflected by snow. Then you mix in the expected changes in carbon monoxide concentration, sulphate concentrations and other known impact, or expected impact over the next century.

Stir gently, and voila, a model of the climate in 2050 emerges that may cause your unborn grandchildren to start worrying.

"With these models we're able to ask "what if" questions," Peltier said in a recent interview. "What if for example, the number of coal fired plants on the surface of the earth were to increase dramatically?

"Or we can ask the question which is very much on our minds at the present, what if the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide were to go up, what would this mean in terms of surface temperature?"

And just as radar guns have to be calibrated to ensure accuracy these climate models are tested by programming in known conditions from our past to see if it can predict weather conditions that actually occurred.

"We tune them so they give a very good facsimile of modern climate then we test them by seeing whether they are able to reproduce large changes in climate which occurred in the past," so says the professor.

"If they are well tuned to the modern climate then we think they should be a reasonably useful vehicle for predicting the future," Peltier said adding that the known effects of greenhouse emissions is the reason Canada has signed the Kyoto accord.

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC), is correct in the predictions that it has made as to what will happen as green house gases continue to increase in the atmosphere."

So can we blame climate warming for the heat wave in France, which killed an estimated 15,000 people last summer or the devastating forest fires which consumed so much of Europe and California.

"It may be the cause but we are not able unambiguously to make that identification,"  said Peltier who is co-chairing a gathering of 3,500 scientists in Montreal this Spring who will debate this issue, among others

"I'm a physicist, someone who is interested in the interior of planets as well as their climates," said Peltier, 59. "I worked on continental drift, earth rotation and all these things, and I'm very interested in climate change."

"But I don't predict the weather."

Now class, remember these are only projections based on computer models. Anyone still around in 2050 is welcome to drop Dr. Peltier a note then and tell him how accurate  his projections were.

Peltier is one of the environmental heroes featured in The Great Warming a three-hour Canadian produced documentary on the effects of climate warming. It premiers on Earth Day, April 22, on the Discovery Channel.