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Cisco, NASA Plan 'Planetary Skin' For Monitoring Earth Climate
Slatterz writes "Cisco has inked a deal with NASA to build a new global system for tracking climate change. Dubbed 'Planetary Skin,' the network platform will connect a number of sensor and recording units throughout the planet in an effort to gather data for monitoring and tracking changes to the global climate. The company plans to begin building the system next year with a program called 'Rainforest Skin' which will track both climate change and deforestation in rainforest environments. Eventually, the company plans to take the system throughout the planet and create a global network of data-collecting systems for the project. A podcast and a video explain the project in further detail."
These sensors use trace amounts of rare metals which may be harmful to the environment in which they are used. Sensors, in the volumes given in the article, will bring large amounts of these metals with them when considered in aggregate.
You can't measure the environment without also impacting it in some way. Nature has its own "wave function" which is collapsed when we start trying to measure it in any statistically significant manner.
Satellite tracking is a much better idea, but one that won't make any money for Cisco.
Look, I know we all lost an hour of sleep last night, but can the HEADLINES at least be free of major typos.
We can worry about the summary later. When we've all had more coffee.
NASA plan s
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Will it run Linux?
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these...
In Soviet Russia, climate monitors your skin
We're sure to have an answer to climate change soon, now that NASA has some skin in the game...
1. notice the talk about climate change ....
2. get some skin in the game
3.
4. profit
If we could just terra-form this planet and make it suitable for.... oh wait, never-mind.
Seriously, what is the world going to do when they figure out that humans didn't do it, can't fix it, and we're in for 250 years of icy weather? Think about it. If they figure out that the flip of the magnetosphere will cause dramatic climate change, wtf are we supposed to do? Or, if that combined with the breeding patterns of small red crustaceans in the Mediterranean are causing global warming and the last breeding pair of such crustaceans was destroyed 24 months ago for a dinner meeting by the UN on climate control?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
The location of the sensors might result in anomalies extrapolated to larger areas. Case in point, Kenmore Square in Boston for many years had an air-quality monitoring station. Trouble is that it was mounted right at the confluence of a five road major intersection with a ton of often bumper-to-bumper traffic. Yet the data coming out of it was supposed to cover a much much wider area with comparatively little traffic. The net result was constant complaining in the media about high pollution levels. The uninformed public reads that but doesn't know where the sensor was so the assume the pollution level is the same everywhere. IMHO, what we're likely to "discover" is the obvious i.e. that pollution levels and greenhouse gas levels are highest in and downwind of major cities.
How will that help fix the underlying problems, such as inefficient use of energy, lack of consciousness about energy preservation, pollution, etc...?
A more constructive approach would be building a network recording the biggest pollutants, both on individual, regional and international scale, and then using this data to do lots of exciting things like getting the public's opinion on it, thereby pressuring the entities, whether they're factories or those working on deploying alternative energy sources, into working better and seeing who's doing more progress.
Competition is a good thing, and even better when put into a useful context.
Network engineers, start lining up for your CCPSPs.
NASA should colonize space,not waste money on such nonsense.
So once this system is online and does not find any signs of warming, what then? Will it have provisions to be "re-calibrated" so the results match the "scientific consensus"?
The entire earth is a skin job??? Season 4 officially sucks.
....tomorrow a truly giant casemod.
Cisco's expertise in "data handling"? What could possibly be so complicated about a network of sensors that NASA (the people who built the Shuttle) have to contract out to Cisco to pull it off. Oh yeah, Depression-era government spending.
So when this network of sensors is connected up, how long will it be before they actually provide any useful information about climate change as distinct from weather variation?
Which is not to knock the idea. Someone has to do it. It used to be the mark of a really advanced society that it planned for the long term - like British aristocrats planting trees to be felled by their great-grandchildren.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'd simply just plant more flowers everywhere - would sure smell better, cost less, and have a real measurable fucking effect on the climate (and the general atmosphere). Happy 8th March, Cisco!
First it was weather stations everywhere, recording the temperature, air pressure, and rainfall; then it was CCTV all over the place; and now they're planning to install recorders to monitor the health of the biosphere. Bastards. Anybody would think that the government wanted to have data upon which to base its decisions.
The Bush administration wouldn't have stood for all this wasteful government spending on the so-called "environment." They called that nonsense "reality-based decision-making" and wanted nothing to do with it. What ever happened to making policy based on gut feelings and the things a bunch of dead Hebrew poets and historians said a couple of thousand years ago?
I piss off bigots.
Look, I know we all lost an hour of sleep last night, but can the COMMENTS CORRECTING THE HEADLINES at least be free of major typos.
We can worry about the memes later. When we've all had more coffee.
Cisco, NASA plan
welcome our climate-change monitoring overlords.
As if SurfaceStations.Org didn't have enough fun looking at all the existing poor weather stations, here comes a whole new batch of odd locations to look at.
Temperature sensors will be places in Walmart parking lots, next to AC fans and other heat sources no doubt. Right next to the existing ones.
I still have a problem with the fact that almost all climate scientists that cry "OMGZ were all gonna die" get their grant money because of global warming fearmongering. Scientists that disagree with global warming almost never get their grant money from that area. So while they are not climatologists and study other areas of science, their research is less biased because global warming does not give them a salary. Since Global Warming is all statistical data and computer models that can be easily manipulated to suit the facts, I wonder if these climatologists are actually trying to find a C02 based global warming trend when there really isn't one. There is no doubt that the numbers show a warming trend, but if it is because of something we can't fix, like the sun, then they do not get their money and have to go find a real job. It is like the pharmaceutical company that cures cancer but holds it back because they can make more money selling treatments. Can we really trust this group of scientists?
propping up religion for atheists. The U.S.'s financial house is on fire, but we apparently have plenty of money to throw at NASA & Cisco to investigate something we already know: the Earth's climate is changing. Tell me when the Earth's climate HASN'T been changing. Half of this continent used to be under a freaking glacier.
"The planet is warming, the planet is warming..."-- one lantern by land, two by sea.
"Boss... da CO2, da CO2!"-- That you tatoo, I see it.
"The debate is over, now please by my company's carbon offsets... (I need a new SUV)"-- Algorus minimus.
"No CEO taking taxpayer money should earn more than 500K a year... (not mentioning the postmaster General makes $800K and is losing money)"-- The messiah.
...that this sensor net will have more care in its placement then the existing sensors do. Their poor placement and maintenance are why you can't trust the ground numbers the Warmites love so much at all.
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Yikes! Their video is corporate government enviro-mental double speak gone wild and crazy! Big Brother will be implemented to enforce the bogus climate change politics of the likes of Al Gore! Yikes!!! Run for the hills, oh wait, Cisco is there with their planetary skin sensors monitoring you! The holier than thou crowd can control swarm after you to correct your 4% exhale of Carbon Dioxide in your breath foot print! They are after you since you didn't get your lungs downgraded to 1% carbon exhales!
Planetary Skin is no less that the Total Information Awareness Grid/Matrix needed for the USA to combine with their Flying Death Machines to Control the World with the Threat of Death at Any Moment From the SkyNet.
Let's hope the skin gets a rash.
Note the heavy use of the word "manage". These folk have already assumed what their sensors are going to tell them. I wonder whether the sensors will be allowed to disagree. With all that management it's unlikely that any of us will.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
or will transmissions from these things be encrypted and only decryptable by NASA, which will "cook" or otherwise "warm up" (ahem) the data before it's made available for public consumption?
Tag lost or not installed.
Grandparent IS a copy and paste argument with no relation to the actual topic of the article here.
"Let's not forget about the sensors that are already near black asphalt parking lots, tar covered rooftops, and down wind from a rooftop heat exchanger. Remember all you climatologists. In the world of computing, it's garbage in, garbage out.
Those silly climatologists have a name for it, it's called the Urban Heat Island, they have known about it for decades. Here is an embedded movie (scroll down a bit past the still picture) from Japan's Earth simulator. It shows the garbage that emeges from the physical and chemical equations in their high resolution finite element models, the garbage comes complete with jet-streams and cyclones forming in the right places.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
global warming is a hoax!!!!
www.discussglobalwarming.com/blog
"Oh? Already forgot how the used October data from Siberia for the November average temp calculation "by mistake". How about the infamous hockey stick graph that totally ignored the medieval warming period? And then there was the Alaska size part of the ocean that was supposed to be open water but when you looked at the raw satellite image was covered in ice? ...and the list goes on..."
It's your perogative to keep repeating the endless list of misinformation from George Will, Andrew Bolt, Dr Ball and other like-minded opinion columnists. However the misinformation you have been fed about Mann is based on the NAS testimony to the senate which if you actually read it does not debunk Mann's hockey stick. Mann did not ignore the MWP, what he said was that the world was now warmer than the during the MWP, the overwhelming majority of published reconstructions agree with him.
The meat of the testiomony: "We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities.
Does your bullshit detector not sound an alarm when none of the psuedo-skeptics that have misinformed you ever point to the sources they base their claims on. Does your bullshit detector not go off the scale when it hears the senate wanted to "verify the claims" of one scientific paper, as if it were the only thing that AGW is based on? How about you and others who believe George and his mates actually look at the accuracy of Mann's 1998 forceasts rather than simply regurgitating the bullshit that the opinion columns spoon feed you.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
debunk Mann's hockey stick
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Please stop astroturfing on slashdot.
Posting AC as I'm guessing you're the retaliating kind.