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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."
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?
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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.
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.
Relax, there is nothing more safe and secure in the middle of a police free rain forest where illegal logging occurs than expensive and unattended solar panels. Who'd take such a useless and expensive device to sell or use for electricity? Certainly not the loggers or itinerant farmers...
Just throw up some more satellites already. Take a thermo-graphic picture, let the earth spin for 12 hours, and repeat. There you go, a global temperature sample. Repeat for a year, there's your global annual average temperature sample. Compare them for ten years and you have an unambiguous trend.
Good god, man, stop trying to drag quantum physics where it isn't supposed to go. I mean, appealing to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is one thing; it's plenty silly, since small quantities of rare metal from when the (nicely ruggedized) devices finally rot away will affect the environment in a nonzero manner, but it is not likely to affect the environment in any way that they are going to be measuring.
The "wave function" bit is totally bogus, however. Nature doesn't actually exist in multiple conflicting states which then collapse into one when "observed": as a macroscopic system, the kind of particle interactions which lead to observation and collapse are already happening all the darned time.
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.
How will that help fix the underlying problems,
These days, you need a lot of scientific research as well as expert advice to get a grip of simple concepts like "Don't shit where you eat". Secondly, it is much more convinient to fence off oneself from presumably necessary actions that will reduce the likelihood of being re-elected by 'fence-research'.
CC.
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That worked! It finally made sense.
Note to self (again): Do not post until adequate caffeine levels established.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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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"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.
"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.