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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."
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.
Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures.
You may have an interesting definition of significant change. The satellite data for temperatures shows an increase that is quite notable.
Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium.
Most reconstructions of temperatures over the last millenium (and that includes many more than those offered by Mann and Bradley) show that the current observed warming is significant in terms of the rate at which it has occurred. Indeed, most show the current warming over the last 100 years as outside the range of reconstructed temperatures over the last millenium.
The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").
Of course the land based records attempt to take such effects into account, but aside from that we also have the ocean temperature records (which agree closely with the land based records), and several studies which all conclude that UHI effects don't cause the warming observed: [Parker 2004], [Parker 2006], [Peterson 2003]. Not to mention that if we go back to the question of satellite temperatures we see that they show no significant difference in trend to land based observations.
Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age
Mention of the Vikings on Greenland wrt the medieval warm period being very warm is deceptive. If you actually look at where the viking settlements were (Eastern Settlement, Western Settlement), and then check satellite imagery of those areas (Eastern Settlement, Western Settlement), you'll see that they are in sheltered fjords that are naturally quite green and suitable for farming. Some photos of the Viking ruins will confirm this (eg. this, or this).
The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.
Of course, as noted earlier, the Mann, Bradley, Hughes temperature reconstruction of 1998 is far from the only such effort. The others produced qualitatively similar results. Further, while there has been dispute of the original 1998 piece, the National Academy of Science report on the subject concluded tha
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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.