Captain Bligh's Logbooks To Yield Climate Bounty

Pickens writes "The BBC reports that researchers are digitizing the captains' logs from the voyages of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle, Captain Cook from HMS Discovery, Captain Bligh from The Bounty, and 300 other 18th and 19th century ships' logbooks to provide historical climate records for modern-day climate researchers who will use the meteorological data to build up a picture of weather patterns in the world at the beginning of the industrial era. The researchers are cross-referencing the data with historical records for crop failures, droughts and storms and will compare it with data for the modern era in order to predict similar events in the future. 'The observations from the logbooks on wind force and weather are astonishingly good and often better than modern logbooks,' says Climatologist Dr. Dennis Wheeler from the University of Sunderland. 'Of course the sailors had to be conscientious. The thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right!' The logbooks will be online next year at the UK's National Archives."

Comments

Not old enough

[Anonymous Coward]

We need transcripts of the logbooks of 16th century pirates and merchants, to accurately measure the temperature when pirates abounded.

Re:Not old enough

[timmarhy]

i refuse to buy into this bullshit that CO2 is evil - CO2 is a key component to beer, and nothing related to beer can be evil, so shove it.

Day 322 - Shore leave.

[djupedal]

The climate on shore is, well, far from dreary. Safe to say all hands finding no restrictions to exploration of terrain. Clear, smooth and moist in all the right places.

it's all about the snowfall

[stokessd]

There's little hope that the log books had accurate temperature readings, but the climate change could be inferred from things like snow depths on fiji. In fact I'm pretty sure the average snowfall on fiji has remained pretty constant in the last couple centuries, potentially refuting this whole global warming thing.

Sheldon

Re:it's all about the snowfall

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that s/he said "fiji", not "Fuji".

filtered for quality too

[danlip]

The thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right

And filters out the data of the people who got it wrong!

Limited use

[SEWilco]

Too bad it's of limited use. Day 175: No breadfruit.
Day 176: No breadfruit.
Day 177: Breadfruit.
Day 178: No breadfruit.

Re:We'll only read about it if they support AGW

[geekoid]

All branches are dead ends eventually.