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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.
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.
Oh come off it! The amount of possible environmental damage of such a small release is easily offset by the potential gain in knowledge. I really hope that my humor detector is broken or something because if you are serious this kind of nonsense gives environmentalism a bad name.
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?
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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?????
"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.
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.
The Greenland Glaciers can be over a mile thick in places. I doubt GPS signals can penetrate 10 meters of ice. Sorry, but there really is no way to track them. Even supplying a power source for that long in that small of a package would be dificult.
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The article says he already tried a GPS tracker, and it failed to report in. I suppose he figured that rather than continuing to toss in expensive devices, he'd try a larger number of cheaper objects. If nobody finds them, at least it wasn't a big waste of money.
By the way, there are already robot floats in the ocean which can be tracked to show ocean currents (ARGO). Most of them don't use GPS, though, but Doppler radio tracking (here).
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.
Now lets all calm down, nobody here needs to gain any knowledge.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
That's no phishing. It sounds more like paultrying.
Ezekiel 23:20
Embed a hit single from Mariah Carrey in each one. Let the RIAA find them.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
It will make people eat more, you could expect it to make them eat just enough to make up for the energy spent. The point being, that food is everything but green. There's lots of trucking/tractoring involve in the making and transportation of everything you eat, your food itself produces polluting crap (i.e. how pig shit pollutes underground water), and so on. Unless they're all trying to become skinny, people are going to eat more if they spend more. i'm just knocking on the myth of green/free human energy, which is complete hippie bullshit, and a fallacy comparable to the broken window fallacy.
You just got troll'd!
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.
Using dollars is not a good metric. Food production is heavily subsidized; the price you pay for food at the grocery store in no way represents its actual costs to produce. (And it gets even worse when you try to take into account the externalities of food production that are allowed to be placed on the public without recompense -- the runoff from farms into water supplies and the Gulf, for one example.)
A better way is to look at energy and calories. The exact values depend on the food, your location, and other factors, but it's not atypical for 1 calorie of food energy to use over 100 calories of petroleum energy in its creation, transportation, packaging, and retail sale. If you buy nothing but raw foods at farmers' markets, the number will of course be lower, but even something as innocent as iceberg lettuce can have a huge energy debt. Michael Pollan does an analysis in one of his books, and if you are on the East Coast, eating lettuce from California, it's something like 4500 cal of petroleum for the measly 80 cal of human-consumable energy in the lettuce. It's much worse for heavily-processed foods.
I am a big proponent of bicycling, but it's not necessarily as obvious a win on carbon-emission grounds as it might appear. There are lots of other good reasons to bike, though. (To name a few, it decreases urban air pollution, which leads to health problems that consume resources, same also with obesity-related issues, if widely adopted it would make the roads safer, etc.)
I think of it as a "healthy / pleasant lifestyle" choice, rather than an "environmental" choice. You cannot claim to be much of an environmentalist while leading a resource-intensive, Western lifestyle. It simply cannot be done. Even the most "environmentally conscious," bike-riding, CFL-using, Prius-owning, self-righteous neo-hippies are contributing massively to the problem, practically just by getting up in the morning. You cannot eat, drink, shit, or die in America and not be contributing to the problem in some way. (You can't really even kill yourself without incurring a debt, since the way we deal with dead bodies is, in itself, not exactly environmentally sound. Although that's probably the most un-hypocritical approach.)
The truth is that individual choices matter very little in the grand scheme. If you drive an efficient vehicle, or ride a bike, great -- that's slightly less demand for gasoline, slightly lower prices, and slightly more gas for someone else to put in their Hummer (or someone in India to fuel their shiny new Tata). It's still getting pumped out of the ground as fast as we can find it either way. Our civilization is going to hurtle down the road it's going down, until it runs into something Really Bad -- maybe global warming, maybe Peak Oil, maybe something else -- and either engineers a clever way around it, or collapses in an orgy of suffering and death like nothing history has ever recorded. Whether or not you rode a bike to work won't change the outcome in the slightest.
It might make you feel a lot better, though, in the meantime. That's why I do it, and why I'd tell anyone they should as well.
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