Gov't Proposes "National Climate Service" For the US 599
Standing Bear writes "NPR reports that 140 years after the creation of the National Weather Service, the US government is proposing the creation of a similar service that will provide long-term projections of how climate will change. 'We are actually getting millions of requests a year already about: How should coastal cities plan for sea-level rise? How should various other agencies in the federal government or in state governments make plans for everything from roads to managing water supplies?' says NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco. 'And a lot of that is going to be changing as the climate changes.' Under the plan, the new NOAA Climate Service would incorporate some of the agency's existing laboratories and research programs, including the National Climatic Data Center, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and the National Weather Service's Historical Climate Network. Meanwhile, as plans for the new climate service shape up, NOAA launched a new Web site, climate.gov, designed to provide access to a wide range of climate information."
Premature (Score:2, Insightful)
Setting up a Climate Service today would be akin to setting up an Astrology Service. They would probably both give equally good advice.
Re:Premature (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know where you're going?
No.
Well go faster.
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we should *require* them (Score:3, Insightful)
climate scientists disagree with you and (unlike astrologers) actually want to put their predictions on record because they have confidence in them. I say we let them.
I take it you haven't read the emails from East Anglia? Obfuscation, "hide the decline," discussion of how to destroy the careers of those who disagree with them, and subvert legal FOIA requests. Hardly the behavior of people who want to go on public record.
When scientific research is used as the basis of public policy decisions, that research should automatically be made available for public scrutiny, along with any associated monetary interests of the researchers. Then taxpayers can find out how badly
Re:we should *require* them (Score:5, Insightful)
Oops! (Score:3, Informative)
Per Dr. Phil Jones:
* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html##ixzz0fWNe9VeK
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OF course, you can read it from the Horse's keeper's month:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511701.stm
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Luckily, climate scientists disagree with you and (unlike astrologers) actually want to put their predictions on record because they have confidence in them. I say we let them.
Sure, why not - let them put their predictions on record. After all, Nostradamus did the same.
But acting on those predictions by ruining the civilization - well, that's something I'd like to think for a moment or two. Perhaps I will even go as far as to ask for a second opinion.
Re:Premature (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly will moving to renewable energy, building homes/businesses that are more energy efficient and better insulated, reducing the carbon output of of major industries and moving toward more sustainable resource use "ruin" the civilisation?
One of the good things about "doing something about climate change" is that even if we turn out to be wrong (and it doesn't look like we are, but just for the sake of argument) then all of those things haven;t done any harm whatsoever, unless you count breaking the grip of the fossil fuel industry and energy companies who are relying on super cheap coal. Their profits will likely go down, but there's nothing to stop them investing in new tech - do you have any idea just how much money is spent on oil field exploration every year? It totally dwarfs the money spent on green power research.
Hell, if we swapped out every single coal plant for a nuclear one right now we would cut the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere by a gigantic amount, and the amount of CO2. Two birds with one stone.
You can ask for a second opinion, and you are right to. I think you'll find the vast, vast, vast majority of scientists who have been studying the climate for the past 50 years or more will be happy to tell you all about it.
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How exactly will moving to renewable energy, building homes/businesses that are more energy efficient and better insulated, reducing the carbon output of of major industries and moving toward more sustainable resource use "ruin" the civilisation?
The civilization is already living on a narrow margin. Most of the people on the planet are poor; some are very poor (like in most of Africa.) Imagine that they will be forbidden to burn wood, and instead need to install solar heaters - that would kill whole coun
Re:Premature (Score:4, Interesting)
We are more than aware of new technologies that can assist us in our move to greener living - some are less useful than others, and some are dead ends (you mention biofuels - I agree; these are a dead end).
You jump right into talking about banning people in Africa from burning wood. No one is suggesting that at the moment (at least, not seriously). The developed nations of the world are *vastly* the dominant polluters and energy consumers, so these are the houses that need to be put in order before we start looking at the contribution of wood burning in the third world.
There are a lot of scare stories, and a lot of naysayers, but a great deal of the green tech is just common sense - energy efficient homes and vehicles. If Ford took the cars they sell in Europe right now and put them on US lots (DoT crash tests and certification aside, which they would pass easily) then the MPG would shoot up across the board. It's only the ingrained culture of the US that demands a 3 litre V6 strapped to a lazy slushmatic gearbox in a family car when you can get equal power with considerably better fuel economy from a better-designed 4 cylinder, or even a (shock horror) diesel. That's without even moving away from oil.
Nuclear plants need to be built by the hundred. It's an extremely mature, well understood, green technology that is hobbled by an undeserved public image and crippling legislative issues and regulations. If we can produce a large proportion of our electricity from nuclear and other green sources we take out a major chunk of pollution.
Things like solar hot water (not PV-based) in new homes (in the developed world) would cut energy consumption drastically. Even in the UK, where our climate isn't exactly known for its blazing heat and sunshine, solar hot water systems have proven to be extremely effective. They are expensive to install, but as part of a new build they are a no-brainer. They should be mandated by law to be installed in every new house that is constructed.
A lot of large companies are lazy. BP spends a gigantic amount of money on its cash cow: oil. It spends a truly absurd amount of money annually seeking out new oil sites, while its spending on greener projects is much less. It is spending something, as are companies like Exxon/Shell etc but they could really do more if they wanted to, but there is an emphasis on shareholders and quarterly results. The oil giants made record profits, despite the global recession. They control vast amounts of wealth and are likely the key to our future energy crisis (the cause and the solution) when they choose to put their minds to it.
There's no real need for higher taxes on small businesses - they are generally just scare stories used to make people fear change. We are going to face a huge blow to everyone, including businesses when the cost of oil starts to be truly felt when it becomes scarce. It really is used for almost everything in the modern world that we consume.
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lets avoid making panic decisions, such as banning oil and coal, but we should be working towards that goal sooner than later regardless of how bad global warming is.
This is reasonable; but rare a green proponent goes that far. At the last AGW conference, for example, African countries just requested $67B [reuters.com] "to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent", as they put it. That money will be paid by working people because only working people produce wealth. And this is just one ex
Re:Premature (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly will moving to renewable energy, building homes/businesses that are more energy efficient and better insulated, reducing the carbon output of of major industries and moving toward more sustainable resource use "ruin" the civilisation? One of the good things about "doing something about climate change" is that even if we turn out to be wrong (and it doesn't look like we are, but just for the sake of argument) then all of those things haven;t done any harm whatsoever, unless you count breaking the grip of the fossil fuel industry and energy companies who are relying on super cheap coal.
Broken window fallacy. If AGW is not correct but we focus on "green tech" then we will have spent society's resources inefficiently. We will have build carbon-capture facilities that are entirely useless. We will have researched efficiency technologies of less utility than we thought. We will have built homes/businesses/cars that are more expensive than they needed to be because we improperly calculated the cost of future energy input. We will have made our major industries less competitive by pointlessly reducing their carbon output.
These technologies that don't come for free -- any effort expended in making something less carbon-intensive necessarily either raises the price (thus denying us the money to spend elsewhere) or reduces some other desirable trait (houses with less open space, cars with less HP). To the extent that efficiency is favorable, there's no reason that consumers wouldn't already go for it (indeed, with rising energy prices that problem has solved itself to a large extent).
Secondly, it's not "energy companies" that rely on super cheap coal but rather it's the consumers that do. Energy companies are only an intermediary who respond to market pressure to provide what the consumer demands. I happen to be quite grateful for the fossil fuel industry -- they have made possible the largest increase in human utility in the history of mankind. Each washer/dryer, for instance, saves thousands of man-hours of effort per year -- allowing us to spend more time on other things. I was talking to my mother the other day (yeah yeah, stupid anecdote follows) and she was remembering how her mother used to sew together torn socks when she was a child (1940s). Think about that for a second -- our time is so much more valuable now that we wouldn't dream of repairing a sock. It's a testament to how much "wealthier", in relative terms, we've become that repairing socks is now beneath us -- made possible of course by the use of a fossil-fuel powered economy.
Finally, looking practically at the experience in Spain gives me shudders. They lost 2 manufacturing jobs for every green job they created and they artificially priced electrical power way over market price which drove business elsewhere. http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090327-employment-public-aid-renewable.pdf [juandemariana.org] [PDF WARNING]
Hell, if we swapped out every single coal plant for a nuclear one right now we would cut the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere by a gigantic amount, and the amount of CO2. Two birds with one stone.
On that, I can agree with you, but for geopolitical, not environmental reasons. That said, no reason not to form a coalition, eh?
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Fossile fuels are getting scarce! ... nuclear power is not an option in the long run
Then I'm confused, what do you propose? Green technologies depend on power far more than old ones. You can build a 1970s car just for the cost of computers in a Prius. Windmills kill birds. River dams kill fish. Geothermal is not available everywhere. Solar is an option only for well-lit areas (goodbye, Norway and Finland.) Fusion is 20 years away, as usual. Should we, perhaps, commit a collective suicide, or live like Am
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There is more than one way to reduce the carbon output from our modern society. I agree that nuclear power would reduce both the CO2 and radiation output from electricity generation but it does not appear that it is high on the list of things the government wants to do to reduce our impact on the climate.
The problem I have with so many of the proposed solutions to the problem of carbon output is the impact it has on my standard of living. Just about every proposal requires an increase in taxation and/or a
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On long range predictions, the AGW alarmists are doing just fine now voluntarily--OTOH, it might be worth it to pay them to STFU...
Agreed--let them do it on their own nickel.
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Re:Premature (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I remember those climatologists -- if I remember right, they were Patrick McDoesntexist and Jonathan Strawman.
Actually, it was [washingtonexaminer.com] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who isn't a climatologist, but is an "environmental lawyer" (and thus one would have hoped he'd fact-check before publishing...)
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Yeah, I've heard it. It is said by idiots who don't know anything about weather.
Read Changnon et al, 2006. 61-80% of major (over 6") snow events in the US occurred in warmer-than-average years, among other things. Warmer weather in temperate, subarctic, and arctic climates leads to more snow. It only leads to less snow in tropical climates and borderline-subtropical climates.
There is no temperature in which it's "impossible" to snow. But it does become decreasingly likely as temperatures fall. Ever loo
Re:Premature (Score:4, Informative)
I think he's trying to claim that they don't rely on first principles, which is complete nonsense. Actually, what's most notable about the models is how *few* parameters there are. Very little is dealt with statistically -- primarily cloud formation, as we still don't have a good handle on it. Cloud formation easily has the biggest error bars of all feedbacks -- although even the 95th percentile case is still well under the GHG forcing levels.
Re:Premature (Score:4, Insightful)
At this point, I think that climate deniers are very close to creationists. In both cases, there are people and organizations that disagree with the science. They can talk a good talk, but fail in the actual doing of the science. They can ask more questions than can be answered currently, can take quotes (and emails) out of context, they can use the human failures of people involved in the science against them, and any screw ups (and they certainly exist in both cases) are taken as evidence that the entire science is incorrect. But, they are ignoring the basic science as a whole, discarding what we do understand, and blowing the uncertainties way out of proportion, in order to promote an unscientific point of view.
Re:Premature (Score:5, Funny)
Typical liberal scum. You think your out-of-touch ivory tower "experts" can beat the common sense my mother and Glenn Beck taught me? You're just scary numbers, charts, and other things Real Americans like me don't understand to trick us. What you really want is to the destroy the America that our founding fathers knew and loved. Benjamin Franklin wouldn't have believed this climate change nonsense. He would have said it's our God-given right to release as much dioxin and carbon dioxide as we want. We've been doing it for 100 years and the world is the same as when our Lord created it.
Anyone who wants to destroy jobs by moving to new technology is a sinner and a tyrant, and wants to turn this great God-loving country of ours into a socialist fascist slavery hell. Thank God for Fox News to tell me the truth.
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/. really needs to grow a sense of humour. This is a joke comment. It should be scored "5, Funny". Even if it was serious, it should still be scored "5, Funny".
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Oh who marked that parent Article a Troll? It's not a troll it's entertainment.
That was funny. Nice work.
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You're right that no major scientific organization is openly skeptical of climate change now. But the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, American Association of State Climatologists, American Geological Institute, American Institute of Professional Geologists, and Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences have all issued statements that are non-committal. If they're still uncertain, why is is it so irrational for anyone else to be?
I'm not saying that climate change isn't real, isn't caused by us, o
Re:Premature (Score:4, Insightful)
Gosh I really can't imagine why Petroleum Geologists might feel reluctant to accept that CO2 emissions are the cause of dangerous climate change.
Is it so rational to ignore the views of the vast majority of climatologists on climate change?
Re:Premature (Score:5, Insightful)
Gosh I really can't imagine why Petroleum Geologists might feel reluctant to accept that CO2 emissions are the cause of dangerous climate change.
Fair enough, and it's probably no coincidence that they were the last ones to switch from a position of skepticism to one of uncertainty. But that explanation doesn't apply to the other groups. Besides, if the implication is that their source of funding makes them unreliable, doesn't that mean that similar analysis of the funding for climatologists on the other side of the issue is also fair?
Either way, I didn't say it makes sense to ignore the majority of climatologists who express concern. It doesn't. But it does make sense to ask critical questions about the methods they're using to make such dramatic predictions, especially when those predictions have policy consequences that extend far outside their own field.
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I have no doubt that podiatrists know more about feet than I do. I also have no doubt that their recommendation was so biased and unrealistic it was laughable... despite their entirely sincere intentions.
I have no doubt that climatologists know more about the
Widespread Lack of Intellectual Rigour (Score:4, Interesting)
I am noticing in many of the posts here a distinct lack of intellectual rigour. A friend of mine is an engineering professor, and he notices this amongst his students too. Specifically, many of his students have an attitude where they feel they can question any scientific theory. Fine you might say. After all, isn't it good to be skeptical? Well yes, perhaps. But when he asks these students specifically why they doubt a particular theory, they can't make a logical argument to support their position. They just say it doesn't intuitively seem right. It is almost as if they don't really comprehend the reasons for their opinions. And this is amongst elite engineering students.
If I could venture my own opinion on this, I think that relativistic values (and I don't mean Einstein) have seeped into much of our educational system, and by extension to society at large. This relativistic world is a place where there is no real truth, where all opinions are relative to the self and are essentially given equal value. In such a world, taken to its extreme, there are no facts, only opinions. Everything is relative.
On the left, we see university professors pontificating from institutions founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry that these Greek principles are merely just another cultural view in their relativistic universe. And from the right, we see religious leaders cavalierly rejecting the search for Truth through rational inquiry and observation, preferring to create their own "Truth" as revealed in the bible. What both of these extremes are forgetting is that this country was founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry, that in the founders' minds, the Greeks were a primary inspiration. Separation of Church and State; Science; Universities where Truth is the primary virtue; the ideals of Justice; a three class society, in which the Middle Class (the Polis) forms the backbone of society; Democracy. These were ALL Greek values and ideals. And has been these Greek ideals that have made our country great.
If you don't believe this, I suggest you read some Greek literature. Plato. Aristotle. Aristophanes. Sophocles. In Greek literature you will find commentary on many of the most important issues our society faces. The Greeks even wrote about cultural relativism. I believe we are sorely in need of a rediscovery of Greek wisdom.
And here is my main point. I believe that many in our society are abandoning the Greek values that have made our civilization great. Values such as searching for Truth for Truth's sake through rational inquiry and logic. Skills such as rigorous logic applied in rational debate. In our modern technological society it often seems that Truth should only be pursued for material gain, for profit and not simply because it is noble to pursue the truth. Thus it is easy for business executives to ignore inconvenient facts if those facts might interfere with profit margins. And it is easy for religious followers to adopt truths that make them feel more comfortable with their chosen worldview. After all, if all Truth is relative, then why not pick an easy and comfortable Truth.
Re:Phil Jones threw CO2 climate warming under the (Score:3)
...by saying the opposite of what you just said.
Did you actually read the article?
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CO2 takes thousands of years to leave the atmosphere, so we can consider it cumulative. Every bit of fossil fuel CO2 we've used since Watt built his steam engine has contributed to the progression of global warming: it's just that the increase in emissions substantially accelerated in the 20th century, and since the 1950s, our cumulative history has begin to catch up with us.
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The main hypothesis of the global warming theory is one that has been borne out by evidence. Sea levels are rising,
glaciers are melting and rainfall patterns are shifting.
So yes, some places will get less snow. Other places will get more snow because the wind patterns in the upper atmosphere will have shifted to bring moisture to those parts. In addition, there will be more variation in climate everywhere. You'll have many more very wet years and very dry years - what will be missing are the moderate ye
I'm sure you would call me a denier (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe the climate is changing, as it always has and thank goodness we're on the upstroke of an interglacial age - the crop growing region is moving toward the arable land, which is good for feeding our teeming billions. Another 5C and most of Russia and Canada become farmland instead of permafrost. I would say that this would make much of southern California uninhabitable, but that would be redundant. The first three settlements there were never heard from again - it's a desert made habitable with wa
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Just because climate science is in its infancy doesn't mean that there's anything fundamentally wrong about consolidating what information we do have about it. It's certainly possible that it could turn out to be an astrology-like tea-leaf-reading exercise, but it's also quite possible to responsibly give information about fields where there is large uncertainty. It's not as if dealing with phenomena about which we have incomplete information and large uncertainty is something new to science.
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"Setting up a Climate Service today would be akin to setting up an Astrology Service. They would probably both give equally good advice."
Both ideas are brilliant!
What's your sign?
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Assuming for the sake of argument that you're right about the "greenhouse gas" aspect of climate change being up in the air (even though you're completely and utterly wrong), what you said still makes no sense. You yourself admit that the globe is warming. The article talks about an age
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. Certainly we know the globe is warming, but the greenhouse gas aspect of it is still very much up in the air.
Unless we go for carbon sequestration.
Anyhow, I've been following the "Global Warming" debate since the early 80s, before it was a political debate. It's simply ignorant to compare climate science to astrology. The debate has been scholarly and fiercely contested every inch of the way. Also at times ugly but if you've ever seen peer review comments you'll know that's par for the course. Science doesn't work because scientists are nice or wise or noble. But the process is a lot more honest than politic
Long predictions (Score:2, Interesting)
I can give one long term prediction. The government will not be able to use "climate change" as an excuse for a orgy of tax rises.
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Tax consumption, consumption goes, less is made, less pollution, less climate change.
So if we tax government corruption and waste, we'll get rid of it forever? Can I add a surtax on the macarena and line-dancing, too? What about light beer or the designated hitter rule? Can we get rid of those as well?
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It we are looking at taxing things that get rid of stuff, I would like to tax stupidity directly. The lottery is just not cutting it anymore.
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Future predictions (Score:4, Funny)
so, let's see the predictions from the national climate service.
(in a democratic administration)
Plan for warmer temperatures. higher sea levels, some deserts getting a lot of rain, some areas getting a lot less rain.
and we can change the climate to make things better
(in a republican adminstartion)
climate will be about the same, it will be hot during the summer, cold during the winter, floods will occur, droughts will occur.
and no-one can do much about it.
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... we can change the climate to make things better
No, this should read: we need your money to dump into a hole, so climate guessers can pull Punxsutawney AlGore out every August and tell us it's getting warmer out.
dangerous conclusions (Score:3, Interesting)
and we can change the climate to make things better
That is what makes me suspicious of what some might call "gorebots"--those that assume not only the problem exists the way they see it, but that the solution is to try and "undo" it.
I think there is enough scientific evidence to suggest the climare is changing, that the world is slowly warming up, and even that human actvity involving the release of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases has affected climate.
What I am VERY concerned about is that there is so much certainty that the problem is a
Manbearpig? (Score:4, Funny)
So the hunt for manbearpig continues?
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"Don't ask what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" - Democrats listen to your idol!
Interesting sig, but I'd rather they didn't listen. Essentially, what he meant was "Don't ask what I can do for you, ask what you can do for me".
Recursion (Score:2, Insightful)
I actually think this is a good idea (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:I actually think this is a good idea (Score:5, Informative)
I think it will be important in 5 years to say: We've got a climate model that's made correct predictions for the last five years, so you should trust that model as a good guide to the future.
They've made plenty of predictions. They're just always wrong. The IPCC was established in 1989 and published its first assessment report in 1990. In that report, they predicted an increase of 1.3 to 2.3 degrees C. That didn't materialize and in 1997, the IPCC had their asses handed to them in front of congress: [loc.gov]
So, the IPCC went back to the drawing board and returned with Mann's infamous Hockey stick graph. They declared DOOM. End of the world. Humanity was fucked. They extrapolated from 1998 temperatures (an unusually hot year) that climate change was 'for real' this time and was about to run out of control. When the skeptics got their hands on his computer model, they found that entering random data produced hockey stick graphs too. [newsweekly.com.au] Oops.
So, uh, yeah, they've got egg on their face with that one. Nevermind that their prediction was wrong, again. Temperatures peaked in 1998 and haven't been that high since. In fact, it doesn't take a lot of searching to find examples of where their model predictions do not match reality. [sciencedaily.com]
In spite of all this, there are still people out there who believe in the IPCC. They cannot explain how this planet managed to have an ice age with atmospheric CO2 levels around 4200ppm during the Carboniferous period. They cannot account for three gigatons of CO2 that simply vanishes [eoearth.org] right out from under their noses each year. But hey, there's a consensus. The IPCC says so. So "the debate is over."
Nevermind Hansen's faked data. [telegraph.co.uk] Nevermind the
Great (Score:2, Insightful)
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As far as I know all you have to do is ask for the model to get it.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
The source code for quite a few models is publicly available. Here are three: one [ucar.edu], two [mpimet.mpg.de], three [jussieu.fr]. The last one even does development in a public repository (click "browse source" in the menu bar) and features quite detailed documentation.
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Release the source code of your data models
This won't help much because the original data was destroyed by CMU years ago. All you have is the data that had been normalized and re-normalized, and you can't use that. And it will take a long time to re-gather the data and to repeat all the processing. But I guess if climate scientists want to get somewhere they'd better start on that.
Inevitable (Score:2)
There are already several organizations measuring climate and environmental conditions. So many, there are open file formats to support data sharing.
Part of the recent US budget includes $433 million to support similar science.
Who are you looking to for validation that Cap & Trade works? How do you measure that and trust the results?
If climate science has progressed far enough to provide results, and so much depends on a safe climate - both for progress and survival, someone needs to keep an eye on th
Sounds like a bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
So the lab facilities, and possibly the employees, would be competed for by two separate bureaucracies? I can't see how that would work smoothly.
Why can't they just throw some more money at the NOAA or NWS, telling them they need to take on some additional responsibilities?
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You obviously missed the part where the Climate Service is going to be part of NOAA. What they are doing is taking the already existing, climate related offices in NOAA that are scattered about in different line offices, and putting them in to their own line office. The offices don't change what they are doing, or even where they are located. What happens is they can now more easily work with each other on a shared mission.
Let tom skilling do the job!! (Score:2)
Let tom skilling do the job!!
Letter to Dr. Jane (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you please produce a record of the millions of requests you have gotten. As you may know, there is a LOT OF INFLATED CLAIMS in this area and I would like to independently verify your statements without having to hack your servers.
Thank you for your prompt reply,
The Public Taxpayers
If you haven't already, watch this video. (Score:4, Informative)
Professor Richard Alley [wikipedia.org] recently gave a presentation [agu.org] called "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History," in which he makes the case that climate models simply don't work right unless you incorporate CO2.
The key point he makes is that there is a record dating back over 400 million years that provides proof that climate is sensitive to CO2. Doubling CO2 adds 3 degrees C to global temperature.
There are multiple lines of evidence to support climate sensitivity, and additional research is filling in what gaps might have been missing, and further strengthening the argument.
Separation of powers (Score:3, Insightful)
We in the U.S. have decided that separation of church and state is a good idea.
I wonder how long until we decide that separation of science and state is also a good idea.
This sounds like it will be an office of propaganda, not a scientific establishment.
--
Toro
Another bureaucracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Great, yet another federal bureaucracy. Guess what, there are plenty of professional consultants who will help with city planning, etc. Using private industry will be a lot cheaper than building another monstrous federal bureaucracy. The services will be paid for by those who use them, rather than by everyone, whether or not they are needed.
AGW had made no, none, zero long-term predictions that have been correct. Increased hurricanes? Wrong, at historical lows. Continued decrease in arctic ice? Wrong, increasing for 2-1/2 years now. Continued increase in global temperature? Wrong, decreasing trend since 1998. Rapid sea level rise? Wrong - increasing at the same rate it has done for hundreds of years. And on and on...
At the moment, AGW fanboys are saying that anything and everything is proof that they are right - hot weather, cold weather, heavy snow, you name it. The problem is, they have predicted none of these - it's all after the fact, and hence worthless. Given false assumptions, you can prove anything at all.
But, sure, have them make public predictions - put them on record. Also generate control sets (randomly generated predictions). If the AGW predictions exceed the random predictions by a substantial margin, over the course of several years, then and only then should anyone pay any attention to them.
None of this, however, is any justification for the government to establish yet another public agency.
Re:When... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all about cap-and-trade. First alarmists were preaching global cooling, then global warming, and now that global warming is proving to be a farce and the numbers are skewed, it's "global climate change." Last time I checked, global climate has been changing since before hominids walked upright.
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I'd say it's all about creating another bureaucracy for democratic party patronage and to act as a mouthpiece for liberal/democrat ideas about climate change. Think of it as kind of like giving Al Gore his own personal branch of government so he can spew his nonsense on the taxpayer's dime.
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I'd say it's all about creating another bureaucracy for democratic party patronage and to act as a mouthpiece for liberal/democrat ideas about climate change. Think of it as kind of like giving Al Gore his own personal branch of government so he can spew his nonsense on the taxpayer's dime.
Good point. Say, where has Al Gore been hiding lately, anyway? He's been mighty quiet since Climategate broke. If you have any free money laying around, you might want to buy stock in tar and feathers. Something tells me those are two commodities that are going to be in big demand real soon now.
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Yes , because if you are not with it , you are against it , right ?
The only thing getting feathered here is the truth : with all this nonsense, it's almost impossible to know the facts, as everyone seems to have an agenda.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Clearly the more scientists who agree on something, the less true it is!
You mean like the consensus that plate tectonics and continental drift was "Utter, damned rot!" etc?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/12/are-scientists-always-smart/ [wattsupwiththat.com]
Re:When... (Score:4, Insightful)
I swear, I'll never understand your obsession with Gore. It's the views of ~97% of climate scientists [uic.edu] that we care about. Gore's opinions have no more bearing on the science than Christopher Monckton's or Michael Crichton's do.
It is hard to say that his views do not have bearing when he won the Nobel prize for that sham of a movie he made.
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He won the Peace Prize, not a Nobel Prize in a science. Once again, it's the science and the views of scientists in the field that we care about. What is hard for you to understand about this?
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Per Dr. Phil Jones:
* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html##ixzz0fWNe9VeK
Spin it!
Re:When... (Score:4, Informative)
You're complaining about 'spin' while linking to the Daily Mail? Really? How about you get it from the original [bbc.co.uk] source [bbc.co.uk], then you might have some idea of what he actually said.
Daily Fail says:
BBC says:
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
And also (text in bold here and further on is the questions by the BBC):
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
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It's simple, Gore took an issue and propagandized it into the biggest "save the earth" crusade he could. The point of this was political: to draw as many people into the democratic party as possible. Gore is a politician, not a scientist. Why is this so hard to understand? The science was never the point, he successfully personalized AGW for anyone fool enough to believe him. Everyone with a ration of sense knows there isn't a damn thing you can do about CO2 emissions. The US could cut emissions to zero
Yeah, it'll be fabulous. (Score:3, Insightful)
First we have the NWS, a service that predicts ten days ahead, but often (usually, where I live) can't get the prediction correct within a reasonable margin eight hours into the future, because what they do is astonishingly difficult; many things are not yet understood, and some things that are understood are so complex, so under-sampled, so skeletally simulated, that it's often not much more than hand-waving.
To this, we (apparently) want to add a service that deals with climate predictions... a domain w
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now that global warming is proving to be a farce and the numbers are skewed,
Citation needed.
If you're talking about Climategate, sorry, I know it sounds like a cop-out, but that was an isolated incident. Thousands of other studies have confirmed that the climate is changing, and that humans are responsible.
Re:When... (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't an isolated incident. The Russians are now complaining that their data was misused as well.
Re:When... (Score:5, Informative)
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com.
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Re:When... (Score:4, Informative)
This is not an isolated incident, Climategate just opened the door and started the revelations.
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Not to mention that so much of the climate studies are based off each other. Climategate wasn't just one unique thing, it's 'data' was nested and twisted in with so much of the other studies that it makes a house of cards look sturdy.
Re:When... (Score:5, Informative)
So then your sources are a Russian think tank (who, by the way, tried to publish papers on their claims, but failed to pass peer-review on them), and now a meteorologist (*very* different from a climatologist) and a computer programmer? Really?
Here's why the idiots who push these "omitting stations" claims can't pass peer-review on them: they're *supposed* to omit stations. It's not done manually; it's done algorithmically. The primary reason for this is yet another thing that the deniers fault them for, without realizing that their two attacks are in direct contradiciton with one another: that a lot of the stations are bad. So what they do is first look for regional trends. A heat wave hitting NYC will also tend to hit Philadelphia, but not Los Angeles. So you find the correlation in temperature anomalies between stations. You then have it look for individual stations that buck the trend. You also have it look for individual stations that suddenly experience a persistent discontinuity. Stations with problems are automatically either corrected for or eliminated, so long as each region that shows consistent correlated temperatures has representative stations. The results of this are then validated by a number of subsequent papers. For example, urban heat island effect elimination is demonstrated by comparing trends on windy days with those on calm days (heat island effect is diminished on windy days).
Additionally, there are a few "inconvenient" facts for the people who push these arguments. One, the same trends show up when you just dumb-average all stations, or just rural stations, or just urban stations. Even more inconvenient is that the stations that Watts' team of deniers flags as "bad" show *more* warming than those that he flags as "good". Why? Because the "bad" stations tend to be located near human settlement, and are generally a cheaper type of sensor than the fully-standalone ones that tend to be in "good" locations. The cheaper sensors have a small tendency to report cooler temperatures than the better, standalone ones.
Re:When... (Score:5, Informative)
1) How did the IPCC come into this? We were discussing how the different peer-reviewed temperature datasets are built up. Oh, that's right, you wanted to change the subject to whatever talking points you had handy.
2) "wasn't even derived from a single fact" -- Yes, it was. The New Scientist got the digits reversed. It was a typo that got spread. Saying that it "wasn't even derived from a single fact" is false; it was derived from the date of 2350.
3) It wasn't an "off-the-cuff number". It was a number from an upcoming paper.
4) "IPCC trusts WWF" -- first off, the IPCC explicitly *is* allowed to use industry, NGO, and governmental sources, not just peer-reviewed sources. This is typically only done in WG2 and WG3, which, contrary to how this is being played, are *not* about the science of global warming. WG1 is about the science of global warming, and is much more heavily reviewed. WG2 is basically a news report, and WG3 is how to avert AGW. Over, even in WG2 and WG3, the overwhelming percent of cites are peer-reviewed papers. If you want to attack the science of AGW, you need to attack WG1. And furthermore...
5) the complaints are about a handful of places in a *three thousand page report*. And we're not talking about a handful of *pages* in a 3,000 page report; just a handful of *claims* (there are generally a couple dozen claims per page). So, it's your turn: write a 3,000 page report with dozens of claims per page without a single error, *then* complain to me about a lack of perfection. If you want to show that the IPCC report (let alone WG1, if you want to attack the science rather than the news) is unreliable, you're going to need a *much* greater error rate than ~0.003%.
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Climatology has about as much overlap with biology and geology as it does with meteorology. Meteorologists start at current and look into the future until the locations, intensities, etc of various systems ceases to reliably match up. Climatologists start at any point in time (past or present) and extend the trends past the chaos to compile averages of events, not when said specific events will occur. Meteorologists don't care about the "why". They don't care why the level of insolation is what it is, w
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Well, if you want to disregard what the Wegman Report says, that's up to you.
Oh, god, don't get me started on the Wegman Report. Let's start by pointing out that the NRC and the NAS analyzed the Mann paper and confirmed it, and that there have been numerous reconstructions since Mann et al, all of which show the same general shape -- but using different data (including, now, boreholes, which are a much less opaque science than dendrochronology). No fewer than four papers rebutted McIntyre and McKitrick, a
I think we've moved past the emails. (Score:3, Interesting)
The dendro-proxies are kaput too. We're onto making fun of himalayan glaciers and the Day After Tomorrow warnings now. Next up: satellite thermal measurement calibration to .01 degree C at a range of 2,000 kilometers, and the incredible disappearing Midieval Warm Period [wikipedia.org].
If the 1800's continue to cool at the current rate, it will not be long before we're thankful of the role of AGW in staving off the impending ice age of 1940.
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Thousands of other studies have confirmed that the climate is changing, and that humans are responsible.
Using which datasets? Climategate is regarding the creation of datasets which many thousands of studies are based on. Of course we can't verify whether this is the case because the raw data is now "lost".
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The Audi commercial [youtube.com] wasn't supposed to be a 'how to' commercial.
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As for global cooling, well, either you have a really good memory or you've been listening to people really intent on spreading the crap. "Global cooling" was an early conjecture by a minority of scientists back in the 70's. Scientists haven't found that theory supportable for a long time. In fact, scientists at the time didn't really back it then, either.
Even if they had, though, why scient
Re:When... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:When... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm really surprised that in a site full of supposedly technically savvy people that there are so many here who haven't really looked at the evidence,
It's not really surprising. Slashdot is full of people who think that knowing how to use a computer makes them humanity's elite. For several years now, slashdot has been overrun by arrogant assholes whose only education outside of computing is reading Ayn Rand.
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That idiots don't believe something is not a good reason to not do it.
Re:Fix it quick! (Score:4, Insightful)
"You're also pretty damn arrogant - and ignorant - if you think your Prius - or my Suburban - makes a whit of difference to this "climate." "
If we are talking of only 1 car vs 1 car in the context of a planet. Yep your right.
However we are talking billions of people. With a good portion of those driving cars now. Most of which are P.O.S. spewing god knows what. So Mr. I'm not arrogant or ignorant the facts are you as an individual are a piece of the puzzle. It's only the truly selfish that refuse contribute to others. You however have decided Take from others. Hybrids are in the millions of sales now and climbing fast. The save huge amounts of petrol. The two together account for a noticeable change in the emissions.
Lets take you feeble brain back a few decades. To the days before emission standards. I suspect you are fresh out of diapers so you might not remember this. Do you recall standing anywhere in a big city. Choking on the fumes from the cars. Do you remember the soot that was over everything. Do you remember that god awful haze over the city 24/7. Well for the most part cities are escaping this. Why emission standards forcing cars to clean up. Guess what the job still isn't done. We managed to attack the stuff we can see. Now we have to go after rest of the crap coming out of cars.
So yes it does make a "whit" of difference if you drive one vehicle over another.
And now to cut off a line of retort
This style of argument that people so often use these days of well "why should I they don't." Is how kids in school argue. It's not how mature people argue. Ones that can understand the full consequences of their actions.
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"You're a moron spouting nonsense and everything you have is almost automatically mine unless you can elect others to appoint people that will take up guns and imprison those who don't agree with you."
What the?
You didn't even try a rebuttal. You attacked my grammar ( which is bad ) Then you just used the word "nonsense" as an opposing argument. Then you went on this weirdo trip elections, guns, prison and then daisies in the field love in moment.
---
Do you find it disturbing that you mentioned war guns and
Re:The Scientific Quandary (Score:4, Insightful)
and the snow piled up so high in Washington D.C. that
Interesting point. But... should we take the snow in D.C. as an indication that climate change is bunk? Or should we take the desperate lack of snow in Vancouver as an indication that climate change is happening? Or should we just agree that the weather in one particular location has nothing to do with global climate change?
Re:The Scientific Quandary (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but anybody who thinks the current amount of snow in DC disproves global warming has absolutely nothing useful to add to the discussion. At this point it's not even worth explaining why. Some people just believe whatever they want to believe.
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"climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing.
Actually it's often the media that say these things when they want to make some simplified link between the weather and "climate change". Scientists are well aware that weather is not climate [newscientist.com]. For example, with Hurricane Katrina you had some commentators saying that "Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming". It's a nice, simplistic soundbite that the average American television viewer can understand. However, scientists understand that the world is more complex than that [newscientist.com], which is why they actually s