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NASA Releases Free Global Climate Model Software
ink_polaroid writes "NASA has released its Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM) for high school and university desktop computers. The software incorporates a 3-D climate model developed at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York. It wraps complex computer modeling programs with a graphical interface familiar to most PC users."
Post a 65 mb file to slashdot without a .torrent?!?!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Here is the story which just hit the wire:
Yea, but they'd better be carefull. A lot of those parents would might take their money elsewhere if the school dared to teach about global warming!
Use the same inaccurate software global warming hoaxers use to make their claims! Ignore the fact that the software isn't even able to predict cloud cover!
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
The whole nature of chaotic systems is that iterative models cannot be used to predict future events. You can create models that demonstrates a theory, but the model is of little use in predicting what will actually happen.
Some things never change - death, taxes, and the fact that the climate is always changing.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
I wonder if you could get the source. NASA part of the US government, right? Well, anything created by the US government is, by law, in the public domain. Wouldn't that include the source code? Also, as long as it's not classified, it should be available under the Freedom of Information Act of 1997 (1997?).
I have a strange feeling NASA isn't that concerned with eye candy.
you should be damned to the deepest regions of hell for a) enjoying that movie and b) admitting it.
Chrichton is not a climatological scientist - he's an author with an interest in selling books. Do you seriously think all hospitals are like E.R., or that there are islands with genetically-resurrected dinosaurs on them?
Get your *facts* at the source - from the science journals, and not through the reality-distortion lens of fiction.
Dr Cox probably has something to do with this software. This article in Nature seems to fit the overal description of the model the software uses. Some people have used this model to suggest that trees should be cleared so as to stop them becoming a source of CO2 others have used it to suggest he is a stooge. I don't know much about Dr. Cox but it seems he is attacked by the fringe from both sides of Climate politics, normally a sign that someone is at least honest. Your quote directly relates to the "tree" debate and will drive both sides into a frenzy.
"The climate will warm more in the future but the ability of the land to store carbon dioxide will be compromised," he said, adding that warmer soil was less able to hold the greenhouse gas.
Now I'm no climatologist but it gets hot here in Australia. When the Roo's, Sheep, Cows, Dogs, and other big animals want to escape the afternoon heat, guess where they go. They even scratch at the dust every now and then to reveal cooler earth underneath. Experienced farmers (rancher's if you like) leave at least one big tree accessable to thier stock.
I recognise some of Dr Cox's research and I think his "complexity" approach to the Climate is very interesting. The "dimming" effect seems to me well documented but poorly explained by anything else other than soot from coal & oil. Just like I doubt he is advocating mowing down trees, I also doubt he is advocating pumping soot into the air to keep cool by "almost canceling out the greenhouse effect".
I think his message is that humans can influence the climate but at the moment that is sort of accidental, hard to quantify and potentialy very dangerous for Humanity. So we should aim to learn about the factors and how they interelate before we try "hacking" the Climate, say by suddenly eliminating soot without considering CO2 & methane concentrations, "cloud seeding", and all manner of biofeedback.
I think we are learning (possibly the hard way) that we do have a significant and often detrimental impact on the biosphere and if we continue to ignore it Humanity will end up like a neglected Goldfish.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
DAMN. That was funny. One of those rare instances where + 5 just isn't enough.
Laws are for people with no friends.
http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications/ warming_earth/skeptics.htm
s cience.php
"Laypeople frequently assume that in a political dispute the truth must lie somewhere in the middle, and they are often right. In a scientific dispute, though, such an assumption is usually wrong." - Paul Ehrlich
"It is human nature to protect your own interests. We may recall the extensive and incredibly successful campaign of the American tobacco companies to conceal the link between cancer and the use of tobacco products. For decades, they knew the reality of the addictive nature of nicotine and the carcinogenic effects of tobacco use. For decades, they successfully kept that reality hidden from the American public.
The oil, coal, gas, and mining industries stand to lose tremendously if the truth about global warming becomes accepted by American society. As the tobacco industry invested millions in keeping its deadly secret, so also have the oil, coal, gas, and mining industries attempted to hide and discredit the link between CO2 emissions and a warming earth. They have funded, promoted, and used as witnesses a handful of greenhouse skeptics, who have widely and loudly proclaimed that global warming is a myth."
Here is a mainline anti-global warming site. How long does it take to ferret out the who is doing it and if they have an agenda. Is this the future of dis/information???
http://www.globalwarming.org/
How can we combat disinformation campaigns in science with a puplic increasingly ignorant of scientific process (scientific method, peer review)?
To back up the parent poster, consider the following:
We are unable to predict the electron density at a specific point in a a metal wire, at a given time.
Yet, we _are_ able to predict the total behaviour of electricty in a wire. Given that electricity is motion of electrons, how does this arise?
Well, this is a common situation, where models of behaviour at different scales are related only through a very small number of parameters.
For example, we can predict the magnetic behaviour of a system from just two parameters (for an binary antiferromagnet), yet to calculate the behaviour of the electrons (which cause said magnetism) takes of the order of 100 or so (and about 15 orders of magnitude longer).
So for practical calculations on magnatic things, you don't need to do the quantum mechanical calculations, just the much simpler ones.
Sure, technically these are inaccurate. In my experience, we're off by 0.001%, and by about 3-5% in the second derivative. That's so accurate, that there are very many additional cases where the calculations show two possible results, and the experiments arn't accurate enough to tell these apart. Or, in plain terms, good enough.
I use magnetism and electricity as examples here, because if these agrregate models didn't work, then the computer that you are using to read these works also wouldn't work. That's a pretty solid argument for the usefulness of these types of models.
Brining this back to weather and climate, the weather researchers call 'weather' individual and specific data points, like cloud cover, rainfall on a day, and so on. 'Climate' is things like total rainfall per year, average temperature in a month - much broader, less specific information.