There are training courses for chasers and for how to properly report severe weather, but let's not let facts get in the way of our rants. (Note, I do agree that the elitist attitude in academia is rather disgusting, but I believe that it is mostly with the "old guard").
What this article fails to mention is one of the reasons Vortex2 even got a go was partially because of the success and semi-stardom Dr. Josh Wurman got from participating in "Storm Chasers".
The publicity that show generated for them no doubt helped lube the federal funding money chute.
No, not true. Approval for Vortex2 happened before Storm Chasers. NSF approved the overall Vortex2 project in as early as 2007-2008. Storm Chasers came out shortly afterwards.
Seriously. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If it's that dangerous, he needs to drop his TV show.
Oh, there is plenty of resentment about "glorifying" storm chasing with his TV show and that he should drop his show. Personally, I originally thought that the show would convey just how difficult it is to chase safely and would scare people away from these storms. That does not appear to be the case, though.
So, let me just state it for the record, Storm Chasing is DANGEROUS!
Oh, look everybody! icebike, with his infinite experience in Meteorology, has declared that Vortex2 is largely redundant research and therefore, it must be!
You do realize that most of those successful storm chasers you are talking about are scientists who chase as a "hobby"? Where I work, if there is a good chance for tornadoes in the state, good luck finding a professor or graduate student as many of them are out chasing for fun (and learning). Many discoveries on how tornadoes work happened during these "chase days" by scientists watching what they love (e.g. - Markowski and Bluestein are two names off the top of my head).
Uhm, did you not watch those episodes? The meeting they filmed was just one of the early organizational meetings to discuss how they planned to communicate with each other. Because TIV was the other major chase group that year, it was in their mutual interest to be aware of each other.
It was also in the interest of Discovery to hook onto the Vortex2 as much as they could, not the other way around. Vortex2 already had The Weather Channel for its media outlet.
I go underground when one of those things are near.
You are one of the smarter ones... It is sad that people don't understand just how bad things can get. I saw the damage from the May 10th storms in OK first hand.
Ever see a boat wrapped around a tree... 30 feet from shore?
If the scientists didn't talk down on everyone else... The Vortex2 project was the one that was in "Storm Chasers" building up all the hype... well what did they expect?! I'm sure they have a passion for what they are doing, but they're kind of coming off looking like pricks.... just say'in.
Storm Chasers is not affiliated with Vortex2, for both 2009/2010 field campaigns. The only link is that Josh Wurman in the first few seasons is a part of Vortex2. However, while he while he was a member of Vortex2, he did not participate in Storm Chasers.
That's actually not a bad idea, I haven't heard of that one yet. Then I wonder why people think that eVoting is the only way to be compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act?
This is what we do in Oklahoma, and I think it works quite well. However, I think the main problem is that it isn't conducive to accessibility by blind people without human assistance.
Carbon dioxide enrichment seems to benefit fast-growing, young plants the most. So, how much CO2 will you be releasing as you use your weedwhacker to get all those new weeds?
What result do you expect from 5/2? I expect 2... 5/2 == 2 in C, C++ and FORTRAN (I think... I don't write much FORTRAN code these days...)
Just watch out in python 3.0, this will change. Because of python's duck-typing, you can never be certain if you were getting an integer or a float, and so it is possible to get different behaviors implicitly. Because python's mantra is "Explicit is better than Implicit", python 3.0 will only do integer (called floored) division when you do '//'.
In addition, many members are not involved in the currently impacted fields and might not care enough to be bothered. Heck, they may have never even been approached on the matter.
This is fairly rational, and thought-out, and it posits a well-testable set of conditions. To deal with your first question, one must define "optimal". There is a certain overall temperature that the planet must be at from a pure radiative balance point of view. It is a function of only the solar radiance, the distance of the planet from the sun, the size of the planet and its albedo. An atmosphere is just another layer of mass to account for on top of the surface.
If you mean 'ideal' in the sense of what is biologically sustainable, then you get into fun stuff involving dynamics and biology. Also keep in mind that very slow changes to the ideal temperature can still be sustainable if we can adapt. This is different from very rapid changes (same temperature change, but over shorter time, with no return to original temperatures), which can devastate wildlife and the foodchain, among other things.
Keep in mind that I have yet to talk about warming in particular, as the same is true if there is a cooling. The same is also true for any fundamental changes to a region's climate, for whatever reason. This is why the discussion "shifted" from one of just AGW, to Climate Change in general as the policy discussions apply equally in all cases, but I digress...
In regards to some of your other questions, yes, the temperature of the Earth has changed before for a variety of reasons. And so, some would argue that this situation is just a continuation of the natural variability. However, that still doesn't mean that one should not discuss adaption/mitigation policies because changes in the past has always been associated with significant changes to the biosphere. Are we as a species ready for that?
A single volcano eruption spews out a LOT of emissions; do human vehicles really cause that much more of an effect?
It has been very well-studied and documented that the cooling effect by particulate emissions of volcanoes overwhelmingly dominates the warming effect of CO2 emissions from a volcano. This is mainly because the CO2 can not "trap" any warmth if the sunlight never gets far into the atmosphere in the first place.
And who is calling you a 'denier'? I can safely say that if you were to talk to most experts in the field with your positions, you would not be considered a denier. However, if other people who are not responsible for doing climate science (or planetary science in general) are calling you a denier, then they haven't met a *real* denier like I have.
Deniers, to me, are the ones who refute that CO2 is even a greenhouse gas, and claim that the whole greenhouse effect is thermodynamically impossible. Rational discussion with these people is impossible and a waste of time. I would much rather debate the finer points of mitigation/adaptation policy and the "winners/losers" policy with you than with those people any day.
I see that you are mixing up two different situations. One situation was that some climate scientists felt that a particular journal had an editor that was accepting papers that they felt were not good enough to be published. So, they threatened to boycot the journal. No publications were rejected because of their actions, they simply took their business elsewhere.
The other issue had to do with the process of authoring one of the sections of the IPCC publication. The IPCC publication has many authors, and there are always going to be disputes about what to include and what not to include. Their objections were over-ruled and those items were included.
Sounds like business as usual for science, and cooler heads prevailed.
Canonical does not do many kernel patches. However, they are a major contributer to the desktop environment. In addition, the "patches submitted" metric might be misleading. The focus with the Ubuntu community has been diagnosis of problems (if possible), and upstreaming bug reports with as much detail and information as possible. That is a perfectly valid contribution to the Linux community in my book, especially given the variety of hardware configuration that Ubuntu encounters.
Hard coded paths, code migration, lots of data, incorrect files, reprocessing of data, converters... all sorts of opportunities for mistakes. Many mistakes were found and recorded in that read me.
I don't think the CRU was committing fraud, nor do I suspect their conclusions are likely to be wrong, at least in the broad sweep, but now that their results (and the datasets they produce) are going to be used to help decide the future direction of civilization, don't you think it would be a good idea to go back and do things over, a bit more carefully? Just to check?
First, one should recognize the fallacy of "their results are going to be used to help decide the future direction of civilization". Yes, they were influential, but they were hardly the only group out there. Their work depended on massive amounts of raw data collected from many sources. Other groups used some of the same raw data as well as completely different datasets.
Second, what has lead you to believe that people haven't gone back and done things over? For example, Dr. Mann himself has revised the "hockey stick" graph after issues were pointed out in his original publication.
I know another issue where there was a difference in how a configuration file was being read from how it was documented. This caused atmospheric gas concentrations to be incorrect for the model and the researchers published a correction article.
Another good example was an error in the initialization of a climate model that mixed up the warm/cold periods around the WWII era. When that was discovered, a new paper was published with corrected results.
Do I think the current set of models are completely bug free? No. Do I think that the data initializing our models are perfect? No. Do I think that there have been work to address this? Yes, but it can be even better. Myself and others in this field have been pushing for better CS training among atmospheric scientists (source control, lint, program design, etc.), but the universities have failed us in the intro CS classes.
Not quite. The issue being dealt with in the "diary" (as I call it) of the readme file is that the person was trying to reproduce the results of an older study using a newer system. The newer system caused a bunch of issues because the code being migrated had file paths that were hard-coded and incorrect files were being compiled in and such. In addition, the data had to go through newer versions of software which made changes to the assumed coordinate system, so various data converters had to be made.
Do keep in mind that we are talking about early 1990s here. I was using a 486 through much of that decade. They were probably using old Sun or VAX systems with the FORTRAN77 using proprietary extensions. Migrating from one system to another is hardly an easy job for experienced programmers, let alone for a bunch of non-CS scientists.
The reason the site hasn't been maintained was the the functionality was moved into visual studio for automatic download. It's just a part of the tools now.
So, why didn't they update the site to explain that? I don't know... something doesn't seem right to me.
Slashdot Mirror
There are training courses for chasers and for how to properly report severe weather, but let's not let facts get in the way of our rants. (Note, I do agree that the elitist attitude in academia is rather disgusting, but I believe that it is mostly with the "old guard").
What this article fails to mention is one of the reasons Vortex2 even got a go was partially because of the success and semi-stardom Dr. Josh Wurman got from participating in "Storm Chasers". The publicity that show generated for them no doubt helped lube the federal funding money chute.
No, not true. Approval for Vortex2 happened before Storm Chasers. NSF approved the overall Vortex2 project in as early as 2007-2008. Storm Chasers came out shortly afterwards.
Seriously. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If it's that dangerous, he needs to drop his TV show.
Oh, there is plenty of resentment about "glorifying" storm chasing with his TV show and that he should drop his show. Personally, I originally thought that the show would convey just how difficult it is to chase safely and would scare people away from these storms. That does not appear to be the case, though.
So, let me just state it for the record, Storm Chasing is DANGEROUS!
Oh, look everybody! icebike, with his infinite experience in Meteorology, has declared that Vortex2 is largely redundant research and therefore, it must be!
You do realize that most of those successful storm chasers you are talking about are scientists who chase as a "hobby"? Where I work, if there is a good chance for tornadoes in the state, good luck finding a professor or graduate student as many of them are out chasing for fun (and learning). Many discoveries on how tornadoes work happened during these "chase days" by scientists watching what they love (e.g. - Markowski and Bluestein are two names off the top of my head).
Uhm, did you not watch those episodes? The meeting they filmed was just one of the early organizational meetings to discuss how they planned to communicate with each other. Because TIV was the other major chase group that year, it was in their mutual interest to be aware of each other.
It was also in the interest of Discovery to hook onto the Vortex2 as much as they could, not the other way around. Vortex2 already had The Weather Channel for its media outlet.
I go underground when one of those things are near.
You are one of the smarter ones... It is sad that people don't understand just how bad things can get. I saw the damage from the May 10th storms in OK first hand.
Ever see a boat wrapped around a tree... 30 feet from shore?
If the scientists didn't talk down on everyone else... The Vortex2 project was the one that was in "Storm Chasers" building up all the hype... well what did they expect?! I'm sure they have a passion for what they are doing, but they're kind of coming off looking like pricks.... just say'in.
Storm Chasers is not affiliated with Vortex2, for both 2009/2010 field campaigns. The only link is that Josh Wurman in the first few seasons is a part of Vortex2. However, while he while he was a member of Vortex2, he did not participate in Storm Chasers.
That's actually not a bad idea, I haven't heard of that one yet. Then I wonder why people think that eVoting is the only way to be compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act?
This is what we do in Oklahoma, and I think it works quite well. However, I think the main problem is that it isn't conducive to accessibility by blind people without human assistance.
That didn't stop Microsoft from implying that Windows 7 was the first OS with all sorts of things, why should it stop these people?
I knew I couldn't trust 'em!
Carbon dioxide enrichment seems to benefit fast-growing, young plants the most. So, how much CO2 will you be releasing as you use your weedwhacker to get all those new weeds?
Are you confusing Buzz and Wave? They are two different things.
What result do you expect from 5/2? I expect 2... 5/2 == 2 in C, C++ and FORTRAN (I think... I don't write much FORTRAN code these days...)
Just watch out in python 3.0, this will change. Because of python's duck-typing, you can never be certain if you were getting an integer or a float, and so it is possible to get different behaviors implicitly. Because python's mantra is "Explicit is better than Implicit", python 3.0 will only do integer (called floored) division when you do '//'.
In addition, many members are not involved in the currently impacted fields and might not care enough to be bothered. Heck, they may have never even been approached on the matter.
This is fairly rational, and thought-out, and it posits a well-testable set of conditions. To deal with your first question, one must define "optimal". There is a certain overall temperature that the planet must be at from a pure radiative balance point of view. It is a function of only the solar radiance, the distance of the planet from the sun, the size of the planet and its albedo. An atmosphere is just another layer of mass to account for on top of the surface.
If you mean 'ideal' in the sense of what is biologically sustainable, then you get into fun stuff involving dynamics and biology. Also keep in mind that very slow changes to the ideal temperature can still be sustainable if we can adapt. This is different from very rapid changes (same temperature change, but over shorter time, with no return to original temperatures), which can devastate wildlife and the foodchain, among other things.
Keep in mind that I have yet to talk about warming in particular, as the same is true if there is a cooling. The same is also true for any fundamental changes to a region's climate, for whatever reason. This is why the discussion "shifted" from one of just AGW, to Climate Change in general as the policy discussions apply equally in all cases, but I digress...
In regards to some of your other questions, yes, the temperature of the Earth has changed before for a variety of reasons. And so, some would argue that this situation is just a continuation of the natural variability. However, that still doesn't mean that one should not discuss adaption/mitigation policies because changes in the past has always been associated with significant changes to the biosphere. Are we as a species ready for that?
A single volcano eruption spews out a LOT of emissions; do human vehicles really cause that much more of an effect?
It has been very well-studied and documented that the cooling effect by particulate emissions of volcanoes overwhelmingly dominates the warming effect of CO2 emissions from a volcano. This is mainly because the CO2 can not "trap" any warmth if the sunlight never gets far into the atmosphere in the first place.
And who is calling you a 'denier'? I can safely say that if you were to talk to most experts in the field with your positions, you would not be considered a denier. However, if other people who are not responsible for doing climate science (or planetary science in general) are calling you a denier, then they haven't met a *real* denier like I have.
Deniers, to me, are the ones who refute that CO2 is even a greenhouse gas, and claim that the whole greenhouse effect is thermodynamically impossible. Rational discussion with these people is impossible and a waste of time. I would much rather debate the finer points of mitigation/adaptation policy and the "winners/losers" policy with you than with those people any day.
I see that you are mixing up two different situations. One situation was that some climate scientists felt that a particular journal had an editor that was accepting papers that they felt were not good enough to be published. So, they threatened to boycot the journal. No publications were rejected because of their actions, they simply took their business elsewhere.
The other issue had to do with the process of authoring one of the sections of the IPCC publication. The IPCC publication has many authors, and there are always going to be disputes about what to include and what not to include. Their objections were over-ruled and those items were included.
Sounds like business as usual for science, and cooler heads prevailed.
"I just prefer a more personal touch..."
Canonical does not do many kernel patches. However, they are a major contributer to the desktop environment. In addition, the "patches submitted" metric might be misleading. The focus with the Ubuntu community has been diagnosis of problems (if possible), and upstreaming bug reports with as much detail and information as possible. That is a perfectly valid contribution to the Linux community in my book, especially given the variety of hardware configuration that Ubuntu encounters.
Hard coded paths, code migration, lots of data, incorrect files, reprocessing of data, converters... all sorts of opportunities for mistakes. Many mistakes were found and recorded in that read me.
I don't think the CRU was committing fraud, nor do I suspect their conclusions are likely to be wrong, at least in the broad sweep, but now that their results (and the datasets they produce) are going to be used to help decide the future direction of civilization, don't you think it would be a good idea to go back and do things over, a bit more carefully? Just to check?
First, one should recognize the fallacy of "their results are going to be used to help decide the future direction of civilization". Yes, they were influential, but they were hardly the only group out there. Their work depended on massive amounts of raw data collected from many sources. Other groups used some of the same raw data as well as completely different datasets.
Second, what has lead you to believe that people haven't gone back and done things over? For example, Dr. Mann himself has revised the "hockey stick" graph after issues were pointed out in his original publication.
I know another issue where there was a difference in how a configuration file was being read from how it was documented. This caused atmospheric gas concentrations to be incorrect for the model and the researchers published a correction article.
Another good example was an error in the initialization of a climate model that mixed up the warm/cold periods around the WWII era. When that was discovered, a new paper was published with corrected results.
Do I think the current set of models are completely bug free? No. Do I think that the data initializing our models are perfect? No. Do I think that there have been work to address this? Yes, but it can be even better. Myself and others in this field have been pushing for better CS training among atmospheric scientists (source control, lint, program design, etc.), but the universities have failed us in the intro CS classes.
Not quite. The issue being dealt with in the "diary" (as I call it) of the readme file is that the person was trying to reproduce the results of an older study using a newer system. The newer system caused a bunch of issues because the code being migrated had file paths that were hard-coded and incorrect files were being compiled in and such. In addition, the data had to go through newer versions of software which made changes to the assumed coordinate system, so various data converters had to be made.
Do keep in mind that we are talking about early 1990s here. I was using a 486 through much of that decade. They were probably using old Sun or VAX systems with the FORTRAN77 using proprietary extensions. Migrating from one system to another is hardly an easy job for experienced programmers, let alone for a bunch of non-CS scientists.
The reason the site hasn't been maintained was the the functionality was moved into visual studio for automatic download. It's just a part of the tools now.
So, why didn't they update the site to explain that? I don't know... something doesn't seem right to me.