Slashdot Mirror
Old School Data Mining, Maritime Style?
jason0000042 writes "The BBC is reporting on Cliwoc, the Climatological Database for the World's Oceans, which pulls data about climate change from 18th and 19th Century sailing ships' logbooks. It's like a window in time that could help us better understand global climate change, if they can decipher the olde timey language of the 1750's. Personally, I can't wait to know if we're going to melt down, or alternatively, have an ice age."
Actually, current models look like we're going to get both.
The basic gyst is that the warming melts Greenland. This diverts the gulf stream; plunging Europe into an Ice Age. [It also cools the NE of North America, but Europe really gets it.]
The average temperature is rising, that doesn't mean it's getting warmer everywhere.
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
The weather has been demonstrated conclusively to be a chaotic system. One feature common in chaotic systems, easily seen in the Lorenz simulation (e.g. in your screen saver) is that when the system's oscillations get increasingly large (a little moreso each cycle), this is prelude to a change in mode to a different attractor, where all recent history has no predictive value at all.
Imagine what would happen if the Gulf Stream decided to flow on a different path, e.g. because of the massive salinity decrease around the north pole. The end of agriculture in northwestern Europe is just a beginning. Anybody who thinks that ocean currents can only flow the way they do now is very silly indeed.
Funny, lots of shipping company executives are excited about the prospect of driving across the north pole.