If what you say is true then why does Microsoft and all of their paid mouthpieces in the press have their knickers in a bunch over the damned thing? Methinks they doth protest too much.
Dave Cutler was a genius, I'll give you that. A bit self-absorbed, and too confident that he created all the wisdom in his brain rather than standing on the shoulders of giants - but a genius nonetheless.
Is he still there? What the hell do they have him working on? Some skunkworks project or something, it must be - maybe Azure. He couldn't have been involved in anything relating to Vista or we'd have heard about the Postal incident.
He's 67 now. Maybe he's reached his dotage. I know I have, and I'm nowhere near that old.
Last week I was an AGW believer who was ambivalent about the harm. The abusive comments, including yours, and the rabid moderation of this topic have led me to investigate the issue. Now that I've seen that the "adjustments" are the whole source of the alarm, I'm convinced that the side of truth is on the AGW sceptics until we see some unadjusted observations. Congratulations - you've helped sway somebody over a cusp.
The diff on these two graphs is negligible. These two graphs constitute the entire alarm about AGW. Without these adjustments the source data is level noise whether you read it forward or backward, or substitute for it any random noise of your choosing.
These adjustment graphs have serious credibility issues involving the determinism of increasing error.
It's neither flamebait nor trolling to insist that these adjustments be explained before we scuttle the entire world economy to manually adjust the global ecosystem to fit a model that corrects problems found only in these "adjustments" of uncertain provenance.
Admins on slashdot don't have karma to speak of and they have infinite mod points. There's too much bad moderation happening here to be some sort of astroturf campaign. It has to be a slashdot admin going wild against people who disagree with his world view.
If we're adjusting the climate to suit humans, +6 to +10C should do it. That moves the arable zone closer to the irrigatable land. +13C would be bearable. Too much over that would be bad.
That leaves a large uninhabitable equatorial zone though. Most of Florida and many coastal cities will have to go. Most extant humans (India, Pakistan and China) would have to move North as their regions became uninhabitable. It would happen slow enough for the displaced to walk and forage on the way.
Even that doesn't prevent the Malthusian catastrophe but it does delay it for half a century or so. If we're not adjusting the climate to suit humans, well, we're screwed that much quicker.
The evil sulfur pollution that causes much of global warming and harm to human health is blamed on cars. This is not true. If you wanted to create the same effect on sulfur pollution as shredding every personal auto on Earth, you could do so by sinking 16 ships. 16. Not billions, not millions, not 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/1000th. 16.
/16 ships create more pollution than all the cars in the world.
Here's a nice graph of the NOAA's "adjustments". If you subtract these "adjustments" (their term, not mine) from every OMG Global Warming Will Kill Us ALL graph you've ever seen, you get noise. It doesn't matter whether you add the noise back in forward or backward, or substitute it with properly scaled level data from your favorite MP3: the result is the same alarming graph. But if you reverse the timeline on this "adjustment" and feed in your favorite source of noise you get a chart that looks like a precipitous drop in temperature in 1900-1909 that levelled off. Why did they make these adjustments? Was it because their raw data didn't agree with someone else's observations? I find it difficult to believe that NOAA's measurements became increasingly inaccurate over time with a determinable bias and that at the precise moment their instruments became reliable, the temperature increases stopped. That doesn't jive with my understanding of modern technology and error measurement, nor with my understanding of thermodynamics.
In short since the adjustments are the cause for alarm it would be best if they were examined closely. Most especially since several of the presumably credible sources use such similar "adjustments". The cause for alarm does not appear to be in the raw data. If you know of some credible source of uncooked raw data that does show this cause for alarm continuing to the present day (not ending in 1999), I'd love to see it. Be careful though - adding in these "adjustments" and throwing away the raw data appears to be the order of the day. If that raw data isn't out there, this is just the most amazing piece of pseudo-scientific groupthink I've ever seen.
The story now is that they've only lost 5% of the data, and the rest is good - trust us. This situation is fluid and there will be much more back-and-forth before the truth is finally heard. With the basic facts this dynamic, now is not the time to take bold action on questionable information.
Moderation abuse is a pretty big factor on this article. Nearly all dissent from the Anthropogenic Global Warming point of view is getting modded troll or flamebait. That's one way to tell that this is a very hot social issue that needs lots of attention. As for the moderation abuse -- it'll mostly go away after metamoderation probably, and those moderators won't get points for a long time.
It's possible we've annoyed a moderator with an axe to grind. Moderators have infinite mod points.
In the mean time, browse with a -1 lower limit. I set that for the default long ago because I know that the nuggets you get are worth wading through the tiresome nonsense. And if you're afraid to ruin your Karma, post your insightful and informative commentary someplace else.
Ah, there it is. ESR is a respected member of the community and I'll take his word for it absent definitive proof.
You can quite clearly see the "fudge factor" (actual code comment) where it was calculated to produce the desired result. Presumably this factor was computed, then munged into the raw data and the code commented out. Here you can see the hockey stick being built in the factory.
There are nice graphs where the "no trend" raw data is added to "a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" to create the results graph we have all seen that has no relation to the raw data but does show what would be an alarming trend if it were not for the fact that it's entirely made up. Since you clearly won't believe me, here's The NOAA's own fudge-factor chart by dataset and in total. They're from this page, and here's an official quote on that page from the NOAA:
The cumulative effect of all adjustments is approximately a one-half degree Fahrenheit warming in the annual time series over a 50-year period from the 1940's until the last decade of the century.
These scientists who discarded their raw data, they didn't go to the First True Church of Science like me. FTCS'ers believe in reproducibility and accountability. NeoScientists who don't follow that dogma are heathens. If they were once practitioners of True Science then they are also apostate and doubly damned.
AGW is Anthropogenic (of human origin) Global Warming. Anthropomorphic Global Warming would be treating Global Warming as a person, which is uncommon but not unheard of.
It's a scientific question whether humans are causing or affecting global warming and I'm all in favor of open data and models from credible sources. I don't happen to think realclimate.org is one, but that's an opinion.
It's an opinion also whether or not global warming is a bad thing. Certainly as few reasonable people would like to see glaciation return to south Florida as would like to see it sink into the sea.
The site is the web page of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), whose data, models and bias is under scrutiny here. This is the server the material was stolen from, and they're struggling mightily to do damage control. The material was assembled in response to a FOIA request and intended to be destroyed when the request was legally thwarted. This same organization has claimed to have "lost" the primary data their published information is based upon, and one of the researchers in a stolen email actually stated a preference for destroying the raw data to releasing it. Their newfound love of openness is nothing but damage control and the data they give should be treated with suspicion. Using them as a primary reference for this issue is of debatable worth.
And yes, one of the emails did reference using the site for advocacy - I just can't find the reference just now. If you know where it is, please post it here. As to whether or not the site is actually used for policy advocacy, don't trust me. Read it yourself.
It's possible you're talking about the wizards who gave us Windows NT in 1993. AFAIK all those guys, and everybody who could understand how they did what they did, left long ago. They should have - their options were fully vested and stopped gaining value over a decade ago. I've certainly seen little evidence since that they remain though the business types who think they're the smartest guys in the room seem to remain active to this day.
People at Google keep coming out with this immensely scalable stuff that demonstrates a strong background in hard information theory, and we get to see it only a couple years after they implement it for internal use. Their gnomes appear to still be digging in the goldmine. Android, ChromeOS, Hadoop, and other ongoing projects spring to mind.
I did write a MASM interpreter once. Perhaps I was doing it wrong, but it was _not_ fast. What it was: an abomination with all the convenience of assembler combined with the speed of interpreted BASIC. It was an interesting intellectual exercise, and that's all.
If you want a superfast scripting web language, try APL. You could probably fit all the APL code ever written in your CPU cache.
There once were two cats of Kilkenny,
Each thought there was one cat too many,
So they fought and they fit,
And they scratched and they bit,
Till, excepting their nails
And the tips of their tails,
Instead of two cats, there weren't any.
We can regulate our population all we want - others won't, and we'll just be a diminishing share. It's scary how much despite our intelligence, we are like cultures in a dish. We reproduce to consume all the available resources, adapt to live with diminishing resources, contend for resources with the other colonies in our dish. There will be perfectly rational and equitable geopolitical justifications for the resource wars of the 21st century. Ultimately Malthus wins. Of the 6 billion humans we have now a third of them are starving. It's hard to imagine getting to 6 trillion.
Unlike the culture, we can escape the dish. That is probably the best outcome we can hope for though it does nothing for those who remain behind.
People with half a brain are realizing Google is becoming the greatest corporate evil ever.
Um, until I actually see google doing something evil, I'm going to have to not believe you here. AT&T isn't exactly the corporate version of Rainbow Brite. Their evil is less theoretical and more actual. Google can do this to the phone companies because they're outrageously overcharging for their products. They pretend to be competing but it's obvious that what's happening is not a free market dynamic.
Like the market for software, cellular services is a space where the cost of the invention is fully paid back several times over and the incumbent providers are engaging in rent-seeking behavior. All Google has to do to threaten that model is not participate in it, and instead offer a value and quality proposition. Maybe after Google rationalizes the cellular networks they will get into content distribution or Pharma. That would be nice. There's no lack of rent-seeking industries for Google to assimilate so this could go on for quite a long time.
This will be very interesting to see how this will work out as every Cell Phone Carrier will do what ever they can to Quash this as its attacks their revenue streams.
This is why the providers were so upset that Google got up in the spectrum auction and forced the open access provision - they can't prevent it legally. If they try to tie Google up in court they may find themselves Garmin'd. The auction didn't sell off the last national spectrum license, and Google has enough money to buy it and build their own wireless network.
It's completely environmentally positive, as are the magic beans I have. If you plant them, they'll grow into wind driven dynamos that will provide power for free.
Unfortunately the R&D on my magic beans was quite extensive so I have to charge quite a bit for them. I'm sure you understand.
Oh, I'm butting in because someone was retarded and only wanted to prove a point when he posted this. This actual Grandma, mine - the spouse's Grandma, is on a very, VERY fixed income - she absolutely DOES NOT pay $1800 a year for internet. And she actually hates Ubuntu, honestly she wants the computer formatted and Windows put back on it, she just didn't want to hurt someone's feelings. Just to set the record straight.
Slashdot Mirror
If what you say is true then why does Microsoft and all of their paid mouthpieces in the press have their knickers in a bunch over the damned thing? Methinks they doth protest too much.
Dave Cutler was a genius, I'll give you that. A bit self-absorbed, and too confident that he created all the wisdom in his brain rather than standing on the shoulders of giants - but a genius nonetheless.
Is he still there? What the hell do they have him working on? Some skunkworks project or something, it must be - maybe Azure. He couldn't have been involved in anything relating to Vista or we'd have heard about the Postal incident.
He's 67 now. Maybe he's reached his dotage. I know I have, and I'm nowhere near that old.
Last week I was an AGW believer who was ambivalent about the harm. The abusive comments, including yours, and the rabid moderation of this topic have led me to investigate the issue. Now that I've seen that the "adjustments" are the whole source of the alarm, I'm convinced that the side of truth is on the AGW sceptics until we see some unadjusted observations. Congratulations - you've helped sway somebody over a cusp.
Here's NOAA's "adjustment" graph: graph.
Compare and contrast to UEA's "Adjustment" graph.
The diff on these two graphs is negligible. These two graphs constitute the entire alarm about AGW. Without these adjustments the source data is level noise whether you read it forward or backward, or substitute for it any random noise of your choosing.
These adjustment graphs have serious credibility issues involving the determinism of increasing error.
It's neither flamebait nor trolling to insist that these adjustments be explained before we scuttle the entire world economy to manually adjust the global ecosystem to fit a model that corrects problems found only in these "adjustments" of uncertain provenance.
It takes 16 ships.
A huge part of the atmospheric pollution we see could be terminated with 32 well-aimed torpedos.
Admins on slashdot don't have karma to speak of and they have infinite mod points. There's too much bad moderation happening here to be some sort of astroturf campaign. It has to be a slashdot admin going wild against people who disagree with his world view.
If we're adjusting the climate to suit humans, +6 to +10C should do it. That moves the arable zone closer to the irrigatable land. +13C would be bearable. Too much over that would be bad.
That leaves a large uninhabitable equatorial zone though. Most of Florida and many coastal cities will have to go. Most extant humans (India, Pakistan and China) would have to move North as their regions became uninhabitable. It would happen slow enough for the displaced to walk and forage on the way.
Even that doesn't prevent the Malthusian catastrophe but it does delay it for half a century or so. If we're not adjusting the climate to suit humans, well, we're screwed that much quicker.
The evil sulfur pollution that causes much of global warming and harm to human health is blamed on cars. This is not true. If you wanted to create the same effect on sulfur pollution as shredding every personal auto on Earth, you could do so by sinking 16 ships. 16. Not billions, not millions, not 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/1000th. 16.
/16 ships create more pollution than all the cars in the world.
Here's a nice graph of the NOAA's "adjustments". If you subtract these "adjustments" (their term, not mine) from every OMG Global Warming Will Kill Us ALL graph you've ever seen, you get noise. It doesn't matter whether you add the noise back in forward or backward, or substitute it with properly scaled level data from your favorite MP3: the result is the same alarming graph. But if you reverse the timeline on this "adjustment" and feed in your favorite source of noise you get a chart that looks like a precipitous drop in temperature in 1900-1909 that levelled off. Why did they make these adjustments? Was it because their raw data didn't agree with someone else's observations? I find it difficult to believe that NOAA's measurements became increasingly inaccurate over time with a determinable bias and that at the precise moment their instruments became reliable, the temperature increases stopped. That doesn't jive with my understanding of modern technology and error measurement, nor with my understanding of thermodynamics.
In short since the adjustments are the cause for alarm it would be best if they were examined closely. Most especially since several of the presumably credible sources use such similar "adjustments". The cause for alarm does not appear to be in the raw data. If you know of some credible source of uncooked raw data that does show this cause for alarm continuing to the present day (not ending in 1999), I'd love to see it. Be careful though - adding in these "adjustments" and throwing away the raw data appears to be the order of the day. If that raw data isn't out there, this is just the most amazing piece of pseudo-scientific groupthink I've ever seen.
The story now is that they've only lost 5% of the data, and the rest is good - trust us. This situation is fluid and there will be much more back-and-forth before the truth is finally heard. With the basic facts this dynamic, now is not the time to take bold action on questionable information.
Moderation abuse is a pretty big factor on this article. Nearly all dissent from the Anthropogenic Global Warming point of view is getting modded troll or flamebait. That's one way to tell that this is a very hot social issue that needs lots of attention. As for the moderation abuse -- it'll mostly go away after metamoderation probably, and those moderators won't get points for a long time.
It's possible we've annoyed a moderator with an axe to grind. Moderators have infinite mod points.
In the mean time, browse with a -1 lower limit. I set that for the default long ago because I know that the nuggets you get are worth wading through the tiresome nonsense. And if you're afraid to ruin your Karma, post your insightful and informative commentary someplace else.
Ah, there it is. ESR is a respected member of the community and I'll take his word for it absent definitive proof.
You can quite clearly see the "fudge factor" (actual code comment) where it was calculated to produce the desired result. Presumably this factor was computed, then munged into the raw data and the code commented out. Here you can see the hockey stick being built in the factory.
There are nice graphs where the "no trend" raw data is added to "a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" to create the results graph we have all seen that has no relation to the raw data but does show what would be an alarming trend if it were not for the fact that it's entirely made up. Since you clearly won't believe me, here's The NOAA's own fudge-factor chart by dataset and in total. They're from this page, and here's an official quote on that page from the NOAA:
Here's another nice link. Enjoy.
This is not science, to my understanding of that symbol.
These scientists who discarded their raw data, they didn't go to the First True Church of Science like me. FTCS'ers believe in reproducibility and accountability. NeoScientists who don't follow that dogma are heathens. If they were once practitioners of True Science then they are also apostate and doubly damned.
AGW is Anthropogenic (of human origin) Global Warming. Anthropomorphic Global Warming would be treating Global Warming as a person, which is uncommon but not unheard of.
It's a scientific question whether humans are causing or affecting global warming and I'm all in favor of open data and models from credible sources. I don't happen to think realclimate.org is one, but that's an opinion.
It's an opinion also whether or not global warming is a bad thing. Certainly as few reasonable people would like to see glaciation return to south Florida as would like to see it sink into the sea.
The site is the web page of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), whose data, models and bias is under scrutiny here. This is the server the material was stolen from, and they're struggling mightily to do damage control. The material was assembled in response to a FOIA request and intended to be destroyed when the request was legally thwarted. This same organization has claimed to have "lost" the primary data their published information is based upon, and one of the researchers in a stolen email actually stated a preference for destroying the raw data to releasing it. Their newfound love of openness is nothing but damage control and the data they give should be treated with suspicion. Using them as a primary reference for this issue is of debatable worth.
And yes, one of the emails did reference using the site for advocacy - I just can't find the reference just now. If you know where it is, please post it here. As to whether or not the site is actually used for policy advocacy, don't trust me. Read it yourself.
So there, mister "flamebait" moderator.
Where did I read that RealClimate.org was a propaganda arm of the AGW movement? Was it in those hacked emails?
It's possible you're talking about the wizards who gave us Windows NT in 1993. AFAIK all those guys, and everybody who could understand how they did what they did, left long ago. They should have - their options were fully vested and stopped gaining value over a decade ago. I've certainly seen little evidence since that they remain though the business types who think they're the smartest guys in the room seem to remain active to this day.
People at Google keep coming out with this immensely scalable stuff that demonstrates a strong background in hard information theory, and we get to see it only a couple years after they implement it for internal use. Their gnomes appear to still be digging in the goldmine. Android, ChromeOS, Hadoop, and other ongoing projects spring to mind.
I did write a MASM interpreter once. Perhaps I was doing it wrong, but it was _not_ fast. What it was: an abomination with all the convenience of assembler combined with the speed of interpreted BASIC. It was an interesting intellectual exercise, and that's all.
If you want a superfast scripting web language, try APL. You could probably fit all the APL code ever written in your CPU cache.
-- English nursery rhyme
Whether the activity was illegal or illegal is irrelevant. The intent and the effect was to profit from the prevention of progress. That's evil.
We can regulate our population all we want - others won't, and we'll just be a diminishing share. It's scary how much despite our intelligence, we are like cultures in a dish. We reproduce to consume all the available resources, adapt to live with diminishing resources, contend for resources with the other colonies in our dish. There will be perfectly rational and equitable geopolitical justifications for the resource wars of the 21st century. Ultimately Malthus wins. Of the 6 billion humans we have now a third of them are starving. It's hard to imagine getting to 6 trillion.
Unlike the culture, we can escape the dish. That is probably the best outcome we can hope for though it does nothing for those who remain behind.
People with half a brain are realizing Google is becoming the greatest corporate evil ever.
Um, until I actually see google doing something evil, I'm going to have to not believe you here. AT&T isn't exactly the corporate version of Rainbow Brite. Their evil is less theoretical and more actual. Google can do this to the phone companies because they're outrageously overcharging for their products. They pretend to be competing but it's obvious that what's happening is not a free market dynamic.
Like the market for software, cellular services is a space where the cost of the invention is fully paid back several times over and the incumbent providers are engaging in rent-seeking behavior. All Google has to do to threaten that model is not participate in it, and instead offer a value and quality proposition. Maybe after Google rationalizes the cellular networks they will get into content distribution or Pharma. That would be nice. There's no lack of rent-seeking industries for Google to assimilate so this could go on for quite a long time.
This will be very interesting to see how this will work out as every Cell Phone Carrier will do what ever they can to Quash this as its attacks their revenue streams.
This is why the providers were so upset that Google got up in the spectrum auction and forced the open access provision - they can't prevent it legally. If they try to tie Google up in court they may find themselves Garmin'd. The auction didn't sell off the last national spectrum license, and Google has enough money to buy it and build their own wireless network.
It's completely environmentally positive, as are the magic beans I have. If you plant them, they'll grow into wind driven dynamos that will provide power for free.
Unfortunately the R&D on my magic beans was quite extensive so I have to charge quite a bit for them. I'm sure you understand.
Oh, I'm butting in because someone was retarded and only wanted to prove a point when he posted this. This actual Grandma, mine - the spouse's Grandma, is on a very, VERY fixed income - she absolutely DOES NOT pay $1800 a year for internet. And she actually hates Ubuntu, honestly she wants the computer formatted and Windows put back on it, she just didn't want to hurt someone's feelings. Just to set the record straight.
That comma is author's choice. Bite me.