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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."
The mutineers were really the scum of the earth. They ended up knifing each other to death on the island where they settled. Bligh on the other hand made the most spectacular sailing feat of all time in order to get to Fiji, in a small boat with hardly any provisions. (The accusations against him btw are largely based on legend, not fact.)
If the logbooks don't support human-induced climate change, the media will ignore them.
Don't you DARE call it "science" when skepticism is met with derision.
I'm sure that this is going to devolve (pun intended) into a discussion about global warming (an argument often put against global warming is that we just don't have enough data to prove it exists). Regardless to how people feel about said subject, I hope you guys focus on how cool it is that we're preserving old information from paper-rot.
We need transcripts of the logbooks of 16th century pirates and merchants, to accurately measure the temperature when pirates abounded.
Global climate change is true. Even if it's not true causing pollution is not good.
Hopefully these logs will provide support for global climate change but if not it could be argued that reporting techniques of the time were crude.</quote>
I like this train of thought. You can't lose. "Hey, if this supports our theory, then it can be hailed as definitive proof. If it conflicts with our theory, well, they were wrong, and it'll be easy to discredit."
It common knowledge that nothing on this planet ever changes. Most certainly not the temperature or weather!
Of course, three thousand years ago, the Sahara was a savannah and not the desert it is today. But we all know that's just the product of oil companies' propaganda.
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.
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
I hit a reference to this in the Analog magazine I'm currently reading:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf
Entitled "Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?" it reviews the accuracy of the current US surface temperature measurement network and finds it woefully lacking for the sort of analysis that results in things like 0.7 degree changes over decades.
As a quick summary, there are the following issues with the temperature measurement methodology:
1. The measuring statements are often either surrounded by asphalt or in the air path of air conditioning exhaust or other hot air.
2. Data points are often not collected, and the missing points are created by interpolation.
3. Exterior finish specification changed from whitewash to latex paint, and that change has a significant impact on measurement results.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
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!
Too bad it's of limited use. Day 175: No breadfruit.
Day 176: No breadfruit.
Day 177: Breadfruit.
Day 178: No breadfruit.
Hmmm, my analysis of The Odyssy (written in the 9th century BC), suggests that the climate in the Mediteranean was pretty much the same as today while sea levels have gone down dramatically in some areas and up in others.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Do you seriously think that hasn't been considered? Seriously? Do you seriously think that climatologists all over the world are so mind-numbingly stupid that that hasn't occurred to anyone? Yes, that has been addressed, time and again. We are *worsening* and *accelerating* the warming. No one has said that climate never ever changed until humans screwed stuff up. The only way you can ask that question is if you've only gotten your information from right-wing BS sources like Beck.
The idea is that we are having a negative impact on our environment, and that we should try to minimize that as much as possible. No one said we can master global climate and roll back the clock. The simple acknowledgement that human action can degrade the environment in which we live is not egotistical--it's pretty much the opposite of that. It's not arrogant to say we have the capacity to damage our environment. If you think we can have no impact on the environment, then sit in a closed garage with a car running for a few hours. Should you turn off the car and open the garage door, or would it be arrogant to think you can avoid killing yourself by cutting back on the pollution you're pouring into your immediate environment?
No, they're all thick as posts. So dumb, several types of rocks have more intelligence. They are so woefully short of understanding their instruments, they regularly burn down their labs. They have so little knowledge of the animals they study, they leave out saucers of milk for the lions. Heck, most of the vulcanologists think the red oozy stuff is badly made jello!
And they thank you for pointing out that you, a mere Slashdot reader, have managed to understand more about global climate change in five minutes of careful study (six, if you include the fox news commercials) then they've learned in ten years of careful data collection and vigorous debate. Wow! What a champ you are!
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Some of the old data can be of great quality - so these exercises can be highly useful.
A couple of decades ago, I worked - as a student intern - at British institution. A question came in on wave heights in the North Sea ... a firm was wondering about engineering tolerances for oil rigs and such. I had to go to the data: much from the last few decades was already computerized and I did a quite stats analysis - and was surprised at how many BIG waves were observed. This would be very costly to the rig builders ... so I was told to go and re-sift the recent data and dig up older data. The recent data sift yielded the same output. The old data ... going back to the 1700s ... showed the same statistical patterns (so long as you squinted at it a bit - the responsible sailors either were not at sea and certainly were not taking measurements in big storms, or didn't get to survive). The outcome was - as I recall - that in this particular spot of the North Sea, you'd see a wave (or cluster of waves) over 40' high every two or so months.
The reason for the tight correlation, of course, is that the data was being taken the same way: sextants and the like, with data literally tabulated by hand: and - registered vessels had someone on board whose job it was to take and log the data - it wasn't something done ad hoc. The systemic errors were consistent for two-plus centuries. Data since the 1980s is automated and since the 1990s is from satellite maps.
Nearly every civilization has fallen, which usually meant the death of > 99% of it's people.
Easter Island, Inca's, Maya's, (and there were several others in that region), Lots of Chinese civilizations, Buddhists, Persians, Babylon, Mamluks, Ottoman (the various "muslim" (though mostly less than 10% actual muslims) civlizations), ... all have perished and taken a huge death toll in their last few years.
But we can derive a lot of hope. Western, Christian civilization now continuously exists for over 1500 years. You might even say 2000 years. That's a hell of a long time, and few others have ever reached that age.
I disagree with the bioweapon stuff. Ethnic cleansing, whether we're talking about the muslim black gold (the muslim slave trade in blacks), or even the WWII atrocities against jews and pow's were done using relatively low tech means. The vast majority of victims died of starvation and illness. The quintessential state that comitted masses of ethnic cleansing, the muslim mongol state, did so manually. Using just knives, they literally massacred their way into majority in an area larger than the entire US. Whatever the weapons, the ideology behind them is to blame. The main ideologies that have comitted massive ethnic cleansing in history are well known : islam, fascism and communism. Those are to blame, nothing else.
Besides, those massacres did not allow them to survive, and for all their troubles, they (mongols) got massacred by the arabs. Funny how things turn out.