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Rubber Duckies For Global Warming Research
The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."
This is a dupe.
What are the chances that these rubber duckies end up inside the tummy of some sea creature? In which case, that is just more pollution floating around in our oceans.
- Tempestdata
Raise your hand if the prospect of an environmentalist dumping plastic into the ocean for research purposes is deeply amusing.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Rubber duckie, you're so fun.
Dr. Behar happily illustrated the idea in his baththub, using a bar of soap along with one of the ducks in question.
disko ducks. so 70's. Quack.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
I'm sure this is where he got the idea.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464768/Thousands-rubber-ducks-land-British-shores-15-year-journey.html
From what I could tell when I RTFA, they already suspect that the melt water from the glacier reaches the ocean and I doubt that anybody would have any reason to dispute this. If and when somebody reports finding one, they'll have proved this. TFA talks about learning about conditions under the glacier, but makes no mention of how. There are no instruments inside the duckies or any way to record what they go through, so how can the scientists learn anything from them, other than the (as I pointed out above) obvious fact that the melt water reaches the sea?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
This is all fun and games until the Italians get a hold of the ducks and hold them for ransom. Then our world will have no defense against global warming. What will these "scientists" be saying when the Italians control our weather with their nefarious ices?????
They're only releasing about 90 of them each time, so I don't think any environmentalist would be bothered.
"This duck was lost by a Nigerian prince. Email this address to claim your reward."
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
"Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward."
Congratulations! You found one of our rubber ducks! Now send us an email and we'll let you keep it!
I do wonder what they are offering though...
Okay, yeah, sure. Rubber duckies floating in the middle of the ocean and hoping someone will find it is always a fun idea. I never really thought it should be practiced however. As much as I do love the rubber duckies wouldn't it be a better idea just to use a GPS tracker instead?
Yes, a GPS. While sending 90 GPS systems might be a little expensive, you wouldn't send off 90 of them. How many of the 90 duckies would they expect to get back? 5, maybe.
It would be way more efficient for the scientist to throw some GPSs into the ocean than some ducks. Now they could see where they would end up and where they went to get to where they ended up. Much better way to track ocean currents right?
Well the probable truth is that this is just a fun way that they can waste their time, still get paid, and not actually do any research... Go our environmentalists!
The melt waters flowing under the glacier and through small streams will flow through gravels and other obstructions that the rubber duckies can't flow through. Thus, any data coming back will have a huge caveat hanging over it and will be rather useless from a scientific point of view. Radioactive tracers etc can give far better information.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Without dismissing the value of research, I'd say we already know what we can do today with today's available tools to reduce our impact on the warming of the planet.
Stories like this make us feel better that we are doing more to combat global warming. But actually, if we rode our bike to work, bought less stuff and used things that required less power then we'd be making a positive difference.
Or we could wait for researchers and government to come up with a silver bullet. Human interest, feel good articles like this don't make me think this is imminent.
I know opinions like this aren't popular on Slashdot where its more important to find a way to justify upgrading the next gadget. But really, if its no the intelligent, wealthy population of the planet who will lead us to a solution by example, exactly who is it?
cheers,
david
I hear they considered the environmentally friendly Pooh Stick alternative but felt that was too childish.
Let's publish the rubber duckies for Global Warming Research and ignore Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA headed by James Hansen which published falsified data. James Hansen is a global warming alarmist.
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
This is simply another proof that the mainstream media is no longer interested in facts or reporting unbiased news, just like during the election of the Anointed One. Rather, they simply parrot agendas that fit their own opinion.
Missing: One large yellow rubber duck, answers to the name 'Rubber Duckie'
Has made apperances on childrens television shows
Please report any information on the whereabouts on Rubber Duckie to Ernie, Sesame St NY. +123 (456) 789-10-11-12
Cash reward
Make SELinux enforcing again!
If the ducks first hit open water at Disko Bay, are these ducks intended to be called the Disko Ducks? [Wikipedia]
Scientists are extremely alarmed over a new phenomenon recently observed in the arctic glaciers. Melt water, which normally flows through micro rivers deep in the glacier until it reaches the sea, has started to flow over the surface instead, accelerating the rate at which the ice melts. "It's like something went and plugged up the flow, and now it's backing up like a giant toilet with a rubber duck stuck in it." remarked one researcher.
The researchers are currently seeking a $10 million grant to investigate the cause of this disturbing event.
Whoever thought of this must have been a real quack.
So do you need to send any personal information to report a rubber duckie finding? If not, how can they verify the finding? If so, and had you not read this posting, would you believe that this was a genuine scientific experiment and not a phishing attempt?
That's no phishing. It sounds more like paultrying.
Ezekiel 23:20
If they show up soon -> Proof of Global Warming.
If they show up in 100 years -> Proof of Climate Change.
Either way, we need to stop whatever we're about to do.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
... that good PR achieves better results in maintaining and increasing funding than providing scientific value does.
NASA's brief is not science -- science is a rare but happy side-effect which they use to justify their budget.*
The reason they exist is to funnel taxdollars to favored companies, largely defense contractors, and congressional districts.
* No intellectually serious person could suggest that the shuttle program is an effective use of R&D dollars. NASA *loves* the shuttle. In terms of press mentions gained per billion dollars spent it is their best investment since going to the moon. Plus if you have the shuttle around you've got to be able to use it, which justifies spending several hundred billion on an equally purposeless space station. Construction began in '98, is projected to complete in 2011, and if things go according to plan they'll be using it until 2016, after which it is "please insert 100 billion to continue".
Oh, and check this out -- NASA is pleading for extra money to keep the Shuttle running so they can actually *visit* the Space Station they built so as to have something to do with the Shuttle!
http://www.space.com/news/080907-nasa-griffin-email.html
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I live in a place which is the result of glacial deposits and only a small % of the water here travels on the surface, or even anywhere near where the rivers are.
Sure, the ducks might provide a bit of curiosity, but it would be misleading to take them as being representative of water flow as a whole.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If they show up soon -> Proof that the glacier is melting quickly
If they show up in a long time -> Proof that the glacier is melting slowly
Yeah yeah, we get it, Global Warming is just a worldwide conspiracy to destroy the US economy...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Just a stunt to get more publicity to promote more non-science "proof" of global warming. Oh wait, we have to call it "climate change" now. Guess those temperature measurements aren't going the way you hoped, Al?
I say it's more likely that the rubber duckies get taken away by a bird / hit by a sharp edge of the glacier and pops / it arrives at the wrong country and people don't know what's going on than that this will work. How long do they expect it will take to travel 30 miles?
Pour a large quantity of fluorescein into the melt water in question. Observe the ocean surrounding the glacier (perhaps from a satellite) for a bright yellow-green patch.
If you want to trace the flow, introduce a neutrally buoyant, screaming hot but short half-life gamma radiation source into the meltwater. Track it via sensitive correlated gamma detectors in 3 dimensions. Some choices include Sodium-24 with a half-life of 15 hours and gamma energies of 1368 keV and 2754 keV, or Ir-188, or Y-90.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
It's only 90 ducks. Sheesh. Compared to this, that's nothing.
"if you want to get a research grant to study squirrels, you won't get funds, but if the request were to study the impact of global warming on squirrels, then there is plenty of money available."
That may be true, to an extent. Of course, people do get grants to study squirrels independent of climate change. And of course, you have more options for funding to study squirrels if you can apply in two different areas (biology and climate). But it's not clear that there's anything wrong with this. If something has the potential to, say, decimate squirrel populations, that's obviously something of interest to the squirrel research community and perhaps deserves some extra funding.
Where the cynics cross the line is where they claim that the evidence for global warming itself has been fabricated by climate scientists in order to get funding. (Not that squirrel researchers have anything to do with that anyway. Scientists aren't one big homogeneous group.) The evidence is very real.
You can glean a great deal from historic documents, such as ice reports from Lloyd's List, which could help with this; each years reports are different. I collated the reports for one month in April 1912, and have written up my results here. Theres a Java applet in there showing time evolution of the reports, and I am working on a few bugs in it.
My web domain.