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Scientists Reconstruct Millennium's Coldest Winter
Ponca City, We love you writes "In England they called it the Great Frost, while in France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that fell over Europe in 1709 ushering in a year of famine and food riots. Livestock died from cold in their barns, chicken's combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travelers froze to death on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years with temperatures as much as 7 degrees C below the average for 20th-century Europe. Now as part of the European Union's Millennium Project, Scientists are aiming to reconstruct the past 1000 years of Europe's climate using a combination of direct measurements, proxy indicators of temperature such as tree rings and ice cores, and data gleaned from historical documents."
The cold winter in 1709 was towards the tail-end of the "Maunder Minimum" in sunspots and solar activity. Given that sunspot numbers are again unusually low, maybe it will happen again.
I have "optimized" (by running profilers on it) a very VERY good program for molecular simulation. It can do molecular dynamics, monte carlo, gradual insertion and what not...
It is designed to run on super-computers, and the next best contestant (Towhee), which is open source, is no where near it. For a simulation that takes 10 days on Towhee, we take only 3 days.
And it all is proprietary. It was written and maintained by a group of PhD students over many years, and they used to distribute binaries to those who needed them. No source code!
I got the source code in the name of profiling, but actually because they offered a PhD position to me, and I was supposed to work on it.
In short, competitive computer models remain closed source. The theory might be well published, the implementation remains within those who want to publish some-thing before someone else does.
You mean Realclimate, the website run by, um, Michael Mann...the man who created the "hockey stick" graph in the first place?
And, while McIntyre may not be a mathematician, Wegman was a professor of statistics, and his panel - which verified MM's findings - were also experts in statistics and statistical analysis. They were able to verify and reproduce MM's work, and not Mann's, and they were using Mann's data and methodologies.
Also, while McIntyre may not be a mathematician, Ross McKitrick, the other side of the MM team, is a professor of environmental economics - and economists spend a lot of time dealing with mathematical models.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
I suspect that the current "global warming" programs have been written with the assumption that global warming is real, and that they have built this "fact" into the programs. Since there is no way to review the source code to see if this is true, they protect themselves from discovery of this fact. In any other area of science, peer review is considered important, but in this area anything that supports it is lauded, but anything that negates is either ignored or loudly declaimed.
You MUST believe whatever they tell you, or the inquisition will come after you.
There are many bizarre ideas that you must believe to belong in the global warming cult. Such as, the sun has no effect on the earth, carbon produced by SUV's (which is less than 2% of that produced by natural means) is the major cause of global warming, volcanoes don't produce greenhouse gases, the Earth's temperature has never varied more than 1/10 of a degree over the last million years.
What can you say about a program that assumes that the sun and volcanic eruptions have absolutely no effect on the global temperature?
Until you seperate global warming from religion, you will not get any real science done. Until the real cause is understood, there cannot be a usable correction. Any "fix" without understanding the real problem would be like changing the tires on your car when you see an pool of oil under it. You've done something, spent a lot of money, but fixed nothing.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.