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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."
What we need is not mining per se, but just a set of best-practices for improving REPORTING and OBSERVING of weather conditions and communicating these findings ACCURATELY to the public
I worked on a grant for the NWS (National Weather Service) and as such have logged thousands of hours doing computer science-based research into weather prediction formulas and the general practices for consumer/weather relations.
The weather IS getting warmer, and this is based on fact. December to February is much warmer, and overnight temperatures are much hotter as well, but that may simply be due to the flock from suburbs into city communities. I read online somewhere that "by 2025, 65% of the world's population will be living in urban centers."
But there is no FINAL SOLUTION to whether this is global warming or just standard run-of-the-mill temperature variations.
You know what the weather is going to be? Look for some extreme shit, like flooding and more earthquakes, huge temperature swings and drought, coastline erosion, and crazy shit like that. Watch out for thunderstorms and hurricanes in future decades. Things are getting VERY interesting.
My time with the NWS was well-spent and I got paid well and did some interesting research that you can see on your local news/weather station (AccuWeather technologies, etc.). I can plot weather in real-time 3D using 24-bit color, and do it smoothly.
Weather is VERY important, and I support this new research as much as anything else out there. And I KNOW what I'm talking about, though I do mostly database research these days and not math-based geometric modeling of weather patterns.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Bring on the heat. I'm cold. So we lose Bangladesh? Big deal, in the process, Canada would finally become habitable. We can move them there, eh?
I am not at all worried about global warming and the 'balance of nature' because there is and never was a balance. I say we should terraform Earth so that it's nice and warm and there are more girls in bikinis.
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