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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."
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.
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."
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!
Modern data IS accurate. The report you linked to is not. You are going to LOVE this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0-gX7aUKk
That weather station location study discussed in the video you linked to attracted the attention of NOAA who wrote a reply:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf
Those white boxes which make up the old style weather stations that Anthony Watts (the guy who did the video you linked to) is investigating are called "Stevenson screens".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen
They form the oldest weather network in the US. They have been replaced with much newer units. The stevenson screen setups don't even have anemometers.
But the data from those stations are only a very small fraction of all of the weather measurements taking place on earth. Satellites have been used extensively:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements
As have radiosondes attached to weather balloons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosonde
as well as many other natural indications.
Quoted from the above linked video:
> In order to test the validity of Mr. Watts' accusations,
> the NOAA scientists made a comparison of
> temperature trends, using Mr. Watts' data. Two graphs
> were plotted using the same technique. One analysis
> was for the full data set of 1221 US weather stations.
> The other used only the 70 stations that Mr. Watts and
> his volunteers classified as "good" or "best". If climate
> denier theories are correct, the temperatures at the
> optimally sited stations should be markedly different
> from the data as a whole. In fact, the curves show
> virtually no difference. That's right. Even using the
> cherry-picked stations listed in Watts' publication, the
> data -- according to leading scientists at NOAA --
> shows no evidence of distortion.