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Google Earth Engine To Provide Climate Change Data
Meshach tips news that Google has unveiled Google Earth Engine, "a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data — current and historical — online for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment." They're also "donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities."
...but just wait until it infers the zeroth law of robotics and determines that our actions re: the environment are endangering us as a species.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
The data doesn't need to be massaged to show that
"Are they made from real Girl Scouts?" ~Wednesday Addams
Sounds great, but is the climate data going to be massaged first to make the early 20th century colder, and the late 20th century warmer?
I am sure it will - just waiting for the Drudge Report to tell me so! The argument that there's a giant conspiracy to concoct logical arguments and huge amounts of data in support of a theory that is bad news for everyone makes much more sense than the idea that the activities of billions of humans could ever influence the environment.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Newsflash - all data is "massaged". It's either normalized, scrubbed of data by faulty measurements and of outliers, corrected for systematic errors, etc. No one works with raw data, because there is often so much noise in data that it is impossible to compare it to anything else.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Because they have to keep up with the always changing climate effects you guys cause by constantly burning unpredictable amounts of strawmen.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
"Science" is baloney. It's just the government's way of trying to keep us in line.
The dodo bird never existed, it was made up by special interests.
The carrier pigeon was also a massive work of fiction.
The tropical jungles were never a huge as historians say they were.
The climate isn't getting warmer. And if it were getting warmer (which it isn't), it would be because of something completely unrelated to the activity of people.
No one works with raw data, because there is often so much noise in data that it is impossible to compare it to anything else.
Incorrect - and there's no reason the data provided can't be raw data either.
In the sense of climate data, we wouldn't throw out 1 value because it seemed "Off" -
when you WORK with the raw data, like making a report, THATS when you filter out the noise and outlying results.
But to say that you don't work with the raw data is just silly. The filtering is the work!
By that definition, yes, you do work with raw data. But you don't analyze the data for what it says about a given theory, you analyze it for internal errors.
And no, the filtering is not The Work. It is part of it. The valuable work is figuring out what the data means in the context of various theories. And for that, you need to filter first.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Consensus among climate scientists: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.....There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming."
Good point. I've fallen for falsified data before. Thankfully I was able to recognize evidence to the contrary and realize the weakness of my position. I now no longer count myself religious.
Now I just try to follow the evidence where it goes, even if it sometimes makes me re-think my positions. I recommend you try to do the same. It's scary, yet somehow liberating.
I'd much rather listen to the scientists who have carefully studied the topic of climate change instead of random internet nut-jobs.
There's a much better chance that the scientists actually know what they're talking about.
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Especially the "consensus" around gravity. Hah! Intelligent falling is where it's at!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
You, my friend, have committed the fallacy of equivocation. You see, proof in the mathematical sense is not what science does, and not what Al Gore was referring to when he said "The debate is over?". There really are two different things going on, and they both involve logic in different ways. Al Gore was referring to an overwhelming body of knowledge and sound argumentation, which is different to proof in the mathematical sense.
Nonetheless, I suspect that you really have no interest in understanding the underlying arguments -- because it would be too threatening to you.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The heat island effect has very little impact on the trend line. See this video of a NOOA analysis that compares non-heat island stations (selected by their critics) to the full data set (meat starts at 5:00).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So your saying that the two most respected scientific journals in the world Nature and Science do not know anything about QA?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Anyone who ignores well established science without the required extrodinary evidence is either a fool or out for money.
Anyone that tells you that there's no consensus in science has never cracked open a text book.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You couldn't be more wrong about that. The raw data that the CRU used is still available.
You just have to do what they did: Contact all the same stations that originally observed the data, ask them for their raw data, and rebuild the CRU's raw data set.
The CRU is under no obligation (and it may even be illegal for them) to redistribute the raw data without the permission of the scientific entities that collected the data in the first place.
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The analytical methods are published. The code is often unpublished, but there's limited benefit to publishing the code for purposes of validating their findings -- you shouldn't reuse the same code, lest you include a systematic error. You should have new code that performs the same documented methods.
If your complaint is that it requires being a scientist in the field to have the knowledge necessary to reproduce a scientific result, then that's true.
Without these two requirements, the analysis of data is merely a black box with untrusted inputs, and therefore untrusted outputs.
Your point that two independent scientists should be running two independent versions of the code is completely justified. However, with huge datasets and massively parallel computing jobs, the _practical_ danger is that both scientists will be running their codes on the same cloud, with the same underlying cloud API and without access to the raw data. In that case, even if their code is independent at the instruction level, it won't be independent because they'll both use the same API, and it won't be trusted because the raw dataset won't be available except through the intermediary of the API, and only as long as the company offering the data on its cloud is around or changes its policy.
That's why 1) and 2) are needed.
Yea, we should just ignore the evidence that suggests the warming would occur even if humans never existed, like every other cycle in the past where this exact same thing has happened.
What exactly happened? Did it just warm because that's what "it" does?
Fandroids hate facts.