If you are on a PC, most cards have multiple ports. Even on a mac with a single port you can put a lot of drives in line.
Note I started on SCSI busses and 10-base2, so daisy-chaining came naturally. With termination voodoo no longer needed it's a lot easier than it used to be easy.
"No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change."
Why would there ever be an end in sight? Even if the science was rock solid, the response to it is entirely a political decision.
Science can describe the problem, provide alternative solutions to the problem, and estimate costs and benefits of each alternative. Selecting among them is not Science's job. At some point, values come into play, and then it's in the realm of politics and religion.
A local example: Do you take out the dams on the Snake River to save the migratory fish? Or do you write the fish off to maintain power production and irrigation, which feeds more people than the fish ever will? If you do remove the dams, do you replace the 3 GW with 1500 windmills in the Columbia Gorge Scenic Area, build two or three nuclear plants, or tell the local population to do without? If you choose the latter, do you buy them out, since you have wrecked their present lives? Or do you just write the people off, and accept an increase in poverty, crime, and early death?
The heavy transport the dams provide is another issue which must be addressed, and it has a similar chain of consequences.
Science can quantify the effects of all the above, but can not make the values-based decision.
"I guess the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing because we don't allow enough logging to keep the trees in check,"
Or a multi year drought reduces snow fall, so that glaciers recede even at constant temperature. Warming isn't the only thing that makes glaciers shrink, or that changes the width of tree rings.
"Kay, we'll keep the spent fissionable material in your house"
In the back yard is fine provided the waste is hot enough that it produces heat. Then I can pipe the cooling water into the house during the seven months of winter, and shut the valve and let the pond gently steam in the two weeks of summer.
Seriously, I need heat any month with an R in it, and the first half of May. Air conditioning season is about two weeks in late July, for about three hours a day.
three to five. At least. Welcome to the world of hardware.
It can easily take five years to decide you want a plant, find a site, design the plant, then get the permits, then buy the equipment, erect the building, install the equipment, install and program the control systems, train the operators, commission the plant, and work the kinks out to get to full production rates.
"No matter what kind of scientist you plan to be, your knowledge of calculus will be essential. You'll never use statistics"
You have it backwards. Statistics will show up every week or so, calculus, rarely to never. Linear algebra shows up moderately often, and numerical methods comes in handy at times, as this is how you will solve whatever calculus does show up, which will not be intregratable by textbook methods.
Gaia did. That is why humans are here. There were too many ice ages, so Gaia made hominids evolve, so that we could warm the old iceball up to something reasonable. Another 100 ppm of CO2 should about do the trick.
Hey this makes at least as much sense as anything else about Gaia.
"Some of these vehicles don't have keys: just a radio remote. The emergency shutdown procedure is to hold a button down for three seconds (another design defect)."
What makes this ironic is that motorcycles are required to have kill switches on the handlebar in case the mechanical clutch or throttle cables break. Evidently the time has come for a Big Red Button that shuts down the engine/motor, Now. No argument. I don't care what the computer thinks I want, shut it down right effing now.
I drove a Prius on a business trip once. The user interface is odd enough that it was a bear to figure out, especially after the long plane ride. I remember the funny little joystick to shift, I remember a Park, forward, and reverse. I don't remember if there was a neutral. The "key" wasn't really a key either.
Keep your finger on a dashboard button for three seconds while dodging traffic at 90 MPH? Not easy to do.
I wonder what Nissan is doing with their electric car? It better come with a positive shutdown of some sort, and the shut down had better not be an input pin into the engine control computer either.
"my own personal pet peeve with the Mini is its absurdly maximum memory capacity -- 2gb on early Intel models, 4gb on more recent models. "
See Other World computers;
"Intel Core 2 Duo (NVIDIA Video & Firewire 800) Macmini3,1.... + Add up to 8.0GB memory + Up to 640GB Internal Hard Drive"
Now, you will pay dearly for that 8 GB, but you can do it with Snow Leopard and the Fall 2009 crop of minis.
I have 4GB in mine, and at the moment can't see why I would want more. I'd upgrade the hard drive first. And that is fast enough most of the time. I have the 2.53 GHz/4GB/320 GB "high end" mini, and it's working out very well.
The meme now among the radical environmentalists is that humans should be collected into cities to minimize their ecological footprint.
The other side of this can be seen with the Buffalo Commons, and the Pleistocene Rewilding scemes that keep popping up. These involve forcibly removing people from large tracts of the Western US, and turning it into a giant theme park for the urban elite.
The region between the cities and the parks will be worked by the 50 million eco-serfs Richard Heinberg is always going on about, who will be grubbing on organic subsistence farms at bayonet point. (I do give the man credit for honesty.) There is countermovement now that the food should be grown in specially designed skyscrapers, so I'm waiting to see how that one plays out. Organic food vs the ultimate factory produced hydroponic food which is arguably even greener.
And as a bonus, this will certainly create Increasing Property Values for non-slum dwelling in the cities, so the Realtor's will be all over this.
And which part of "not statistically significant" confuses you?
Global warming stopped. It may start again, it may not. Solar Cycle theory says we are in for 30 years of cooling. Without claiming to be a booster of that theory, it did predict the mid-century cooling, and the late century warming of the 20th century. Maybe it's time to reexamine that hypothesis.
In the mean time, your prophet, messiah, whatever, admits there has been no warming in over a decade even though CO2 levels continue to rise, another "exalted member of the club" admits to lying in an official publication intended to influence public policy, and yet you still hold on to a blown hypothesis.
Are we talking about a science, or a religion?
The question you need to consider is how to clean house in a way that allows you to be taken seriously again. Some heads are going to have to roll. Much of the data will have to be revalidated by some one trusted by the "other" side. Once that is all sorted out, models vetted by third parties can be used to run the extrapolations. Then you might be able to make policy recommendations that will be believed.
So, deny you have a problem and become a religious cult, or face up to the mess, roll up your sleeves and fix it.
Even I admit to the possibility of a tipping point; the 8200 year event and the Younger Dryas make that very plain, and even a Little Ice Age rerun would be a huge mess. None of those climate changes were caused by human industrial activity, which is why I am skeptical about the anthropogenic part of Global Warming.
But I don't want the baby thrown out with the bathwater. The current climate research has been overrun with people pushing a religious and political agenda. So I am suspicious. If you want me to accept an energy command economy, which seems to be the movement's goal, you will need a lot better science than I have seen so far.
"Mention Phil Jones - imply he is the antichrist where ever possible"
I don't have to imply he's the antichrist anymore. He admitted there has been no warming in 15 years on the BBC.
And we have this fine headline; "The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders." The "Scientist" [snort] in question is later identified as Dr Murari Lal. He knew it was false. He put it in to scare people into doing what he wanted.
Global warming advocates have crapped in their own nest more thoroughly than anyone since Nixon and Watergate.
The record snowfall on the East Coast is just icing on the cake.
And my option 1 is to only buy vehicles with manual transmissions, so that I have a Mechanical Engine Disconnect (AKA clutch).
Option 2 is to only buy vehicles with a kill switch, just like the one REQUIRED BY LAW on my motorcycle. And for that matter, the table saw, the lathes at work, the Genie lifts, etc, etc.
If the computers go nuts, I can still stop the vehicle.
I already sent a note to the NHTSA about option 2, pointing out that motorcycles have kill switches, so why not cars? Not that they will listen. But now I can yell I told you so.
So you are blaming Reagan for the Cold War? I grant he was alive when it started, but that's giving a B-grade actor a lot more credit than Hollywood ever did.
Or are you blaming Bush the First for not keeping all those Federal employees who had been in or supporting the military on the payroll once the cold war was over?
"I think the people of the world including the leaders would think twice if they (that is, all leaders and followers) had to do this old-style with rocks and clubs."
And in a nutshell, you've explained why removing nuclear weapons from the world is a bad idea. As long as there are nuclear weapons on both sides, any leader who starts a war gets to play too. With conventional weapons, the leaders stay safe and their low-level followers get to die.
The great question of the 21st century is will that argument hold in with Islamic fundamentalists? They want to die, but do they want to see their relatives incinerated? And would the non-islamic countries blot out that many innocents to make the point? (But, look at what happened to Dresden.)
Last Result: Download Speed: 46563 kbps (5820.4 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 3742 kbps (467.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
That was a short hop to their Seattle location from Central Washington, so definitely best case, but it still looks cool.
I can usually sustain 3.5 MB/second downloading system updates from Apple's website. so the real world rate is less, but the problem has been slow servers at the other end for awhile now.
The connection out of the fiber-optic box is 100 Mbit, so that or the linksys box will be the slow link.
"if you don't believe the earth is heating up, you still have to admit the earth has had historic swings in climate, and that we earthlings will have to intervene at some point, correct?"
Good point, if for no other reason that no one has claimed the Ice Age cycle of the last 2 million years is over. So eventually we are going to have to slag some glaciers. Solid ice from Chicago to Long Island. Think the economic disruption that would cause. Not to mention the next Lake Missoula flood blowing over the Hanford Nuclear reservation. The local terminal moraine is a half-hour north of me, and it's pretty though provoking to stand on it.
The article is also interesting from the point that global warming has stopped for a decade. Even CRU admits this (off the record, as revealed by the emails) but the glacier watchers say they are still melting. Dust on the ice would reconcile the difference in observations.
"Peer review is useful but should never be an argument ender."
Just over a century ago, the peers said "There are only two questions left to answer in physics, the nature of the photoelectric effect, and results of the Michelson-Morely experiment." They were really right about that one.
Peer review turned into a religious ordination. Science faded into the background, as people who were convinced they were right, (and might actually be) decided they had a calling to save the world, and that the ends therefore justified the means.
key takeaways; Science and religion do not mix, and religions do not require a God.
"Does a 1-in-600 chance of getting bladder cancer sound "safe" to you?"
Over what time interval? Given there is a 100% chance of death in the grand overview, a 1 in 600 chance of death from bladder cancer by 80 years old compared with a the 1 in 3 chance of death from cancer in general is not that large.
Given the cost of arsenic removal to the ppb level, one has to ask is that cost the best use of available public health dollars? Or would more people be healthier by spending the money elsewhere? At some point we are spending ever more money to remove ever smaller risks. Look at the amount of arsenic in shellfish, and yet they are not being banned. I used to work a a mine that had an arsenic-rich ore. When we went in for our annual blood work for arsenic and other heavy metals, we got a note saying "eat no shellfish for the week preceding the test, or the blood results may come in high".
Why do you have to revalidate? Because you can no longer say what data is good and what is not. Analogy, the infamous glove in the OJ murder trial. If one bit of evidence is planted, then what else has been tainted? So you have to rebuild the entire trust tree.
Not all the data is corrupted, (I hope) but the burden of proof is is now on CRU, not the skeptics.
As for the assumption of privacy, I'll spare you from hearing about all the discussions about email security from legal counsel at work, and what my own lawyer has said in a private context. I will only point out that the "private" emails are not private anymore. As someone else said, "There is no more privacy, deal with it."
As for FEA models, I don't follow that entire line of reasearch. For what it's worth, my dissertation can be summed up in two sentences. "A non-linear model can be devised to fit any historical data to any desired degree of accuracy. However, this does not necessarily mean it can accurately predict the future behavior of the system." Being disgusted with the whole subject by then, I found honest work. By pure coincidence, I ended up in the solar energy industry.
By the way, did you notice the quote that even CRU admitted (in the "private" emails) that there has been NO warming for the last 10 years? Apparently they were about to go out and invent some.
This whole thing turns my stomach. What inspired them to go and fudge the data? Where they so sure they were right that they felt the ends justified the means? (Shades of the cop in the OJ case who planted the glove.) Or were they addicted to the grant money? "Keep the proles scared and we can stay on easy street?" Or did they have dreams of being part of the ruling class, overseeing their own manors of eco-serfs? Or did they simply get caught up in their own propaganda, and were afraid to admit the new data did not support their original claims?
The drought isn't much of a drought, even by that graph. My parents live there, they haven't noticed. It normally rains about 40" a year up there, so they probably only got 30. What they have complained about is the bad last winter, the late spring, the cold summer, and the early fall. Those I've gotten an earful about.
I live in Eastern Washington (state, that is), where it is more Australia-like. Normal is 8" of rain for a year, and we have less than 6 so far. And we had the same general weather as back East. Record snow and cold last winter, late spring, late last frost, cool summer (which was rather nice, since it likes to go over 105 F in the daytime) and an early frost.
I'm glad that the person in charge stepped down. But now the hard part starts. Every bit of data has to be re-validated. Every model has to be rerun with the revalidated data. Every dataset that was calibrated to the now suspect data is suspect, and has the be recalibrated. Apparently the satellite data was calibrated to this now suspect land data, and so now that is suspect.
Even if it was all innocent back and forth, their cavalier attitude is precisely the wrong message to send. They claim that the entire planet has to be rebuilt in a new image and in two decades tops, and they are carrying on like frat boys. My jaw has hit the ground multiple times ever since this came out.
I have a Ph.D. for non-linear modeling in an industrial process. But if I had been that casual with my data, I'd have been bounced right of the program. And I'm not expecting several billion people to turn their lives upside down based on the conclusions of my dissertation. They are expecting, nay, demanding exactly that, so they have a responsibility to be somber, formal, and utterly proper at all times.
They blew it. This is a lot more serious than the cold fusion debacle a couple decades ago.
I'm not from the UK, so I don't know if the UK Times is a left or right wing paper. That is the source, as clearly stated above. And as I do have a Ph.D. that happens to involve non-linear modeling, this entire Climategate episode has left my jaw on the floor multiple times. They did what? I'd have been crucified for trying that nonsense on my dissertation.
Disappearing the original data? Oh yeah, let's make it even better. You always keep the original data, if for no other reason than a better noise reduction routine may come out allowing you to go back and extract more information out of the background hiss.
Their behavior is unacceptable. Someone needs to hang, at least figuratively. And the people who believe in anthropogenic global warming need to lead the mob, as it's their cause that has been defiled.
And for those who assume I work for big oil, I do not. I work in the silicon division of a solar energy company. So I stand to benefit if solar cell sales increase.
"You could make a case that it's in fact bad for people to all work off the same data set or code, as any mistakes (or even deliberate fraud) will then be common to all analyses."
And that deliberate fraud issue, sadly, appears to be the case. How many good models were scrapped because the cooked data made them give obviously bogus results? How much good new data was discarded because it didn't match with the "approved" data. A huge amount of work is scrapped, or is about to be.
My dissertation was on non-linear modeling. If I had cooked the data like this bunch I'd have been in the dumpster with my data. Although I did not have to show every bit of input data, it was required to be traceable all the way from the raw input through any smoothing, transforming, and normalizing to get to the input of the model. Anything less and there would be no Ph.D. after my name.
So it's been less than a week, but why are these guys still employed?
We cooked the data to show what we wanted it to show, then erased the originals to ensure that our version of the truth is the only version.
Those guys really took the lessons from the Ministry of Truth to heart. Way to inspire confidence guys. Way to convince the non-scientific public that there is a reason to quietly submit to a carbon version of a water command empire.
Slashdot Mirror
Daisy-chained firewire drives.
If you are on a PC, most cards have multiple ports. Even on a mac with a single port you can put a lot of drives in line.
Note I started on SCSI busses and 10-base2, so daisy-chaining came naturally. With termination voodoo no longer needed it's a lot easier than it used to be easy.
"No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change."
Why would there ever be an end in sight? Even if the science was rock solid, the response to it is entirely a political decision.
Science can describe the problem, provide alternative solutions to the problem, and estimate costs and benefits of each alternative. Selecting among them is not Science's job. At some point, values come into play, and then it's in the realm of politics and religion.
A local example: Do you take out the dams on the Snake River to save the migratory fish? Or do you write the fish off to maintain power production and irrigation, which feeds more people than the fish ever will? If you do remove the dams, do you replace the 3 GW with 1500 windmills in the Columbia Gorge Scenic Area, build two or three nuclear plants, or tell the local population to do without? If you choose the latter, do you buy them out, since you have wrecked their present lives? Or do you just write the people off, and accept an increase in poverty, crime, and early death?
The heavy transport the dams provide is another issue which must be addressed, and it has a similar chain of consequences.
Science can quantify the effects of all the above, but can not make the values-based decision.
"I guess the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing because we don't allow enough logging to keep the trees in check,"
Or a multi year drought reduces snow fall, so that glaciers recede even at constant temperature. Warming isn't the only thing that makes glaciers shrink, or that changes the width of tree rings.
"Kay, we'll keep the spent fissionable material in your house"
In the back yard is fine provided the waste is hot enough that it produces heat. Then I can pipe the cooling water into the house during the seven months of winter, and shut the valve and let the pond gently steam in the two weeks of summer.
Seriously, I need heat any month with an R in it, and the first half of May. Air conditioning season is about two weeks in late July, for about three hours a day.
"How many more YEARS do we have to wait? "
three to five. At least. Welcome to the world of hardware.
It can easily take five years to decide you want a plant, find a site, design the plant, then get the permits, then buy the equipment, erect the building, install the equipment, install and program the control systems, train the operators, commission the plant, and work the kinks out to get to full production rates.
Been there, done that more than once.
"No matter what kind of scientist you plan to be, your knowledge of calculus will be essential. You'll never use statistics"
You have it backwards. Statistics will show up every week or so, calculus, rarely to never.
Linear algebra shows up moderately often, and numerical methods comes in handy at times, as this is how you will solve whatever calculus does show up, which will not be intregratable by textbook methods.
"Why can't "Gaia" fix its own problems itself?"
Gaia did. That is why humans are here. There were too many ice ages, so Gaia made hominids evolve, so that we could warm the old iceball up to something reasonable. Another 100 ppm of CO2 should about do the trick.
Hey this makes at least as much sense as anything else about Gaia.
"Some of these vehicles don't have keys: just a radio remote. The emergency shutdown procedure is to hold a button down for three seconds (another design defect)."
What makes this ironic is that motorcycles are required to have kill switches on the handlebar in case the mechanical clutch or throttle cables break. Evidently the time has come for a Big Red Button that shuts down the engine/motor, Now. No argument. I don't care what the computer thinks I want, shut it down right effing now.
I drove a Prius on a business trip once. The user interface is odd enough that it was a bear to figure out, especially after the long plane ride. I remember the funny little joystick to shift, I remember a Park, forward, and reverse. I don't remember if there was a neutral. The "key" wasn't really a key either.
Keep your finger on a dashboard button for three seconds while dodging traffic at 90 MPH? Not easy to do.
I wonder what Nissan is doing with their electric car? It better come with a positive shutdown of some sort, and the shut down had better not be an input pin into the engine control computer either.
"my own personal pet peeve with the Mini is its absurdly maximum memory capacity -- 2gb on early Intel models, 4gb on more recent models. "
See Other World computers;
"Intel Core 2 Duo ....
(NVIDIA Video & Firewire 800)
Macmini3,1
+ Add up to 8.0GB memory
+ Up to 640GB Internal Hard Drive"
Now, you will pay dearly for that 8 GB, but you can do it with Snow Leopard and the Fall 2009 crop of minis.
I have 4GB in mine, and at the moment can't see why I would want more. I'd upgrade the hard drive first. And that is fast enough most of the time. I have the 2.53 GHz/4GB/320 GB "high end" mini, and it's working out very well.
It's cynical.
The meme now among the radical environmentalists is that humans should be collected into cities to minimize their ecological footprint.
The other side of this can be seen with the Buffalo Commons, and the Pleistocene Rewilding scemes that keep popping up. These involve forcibly removing people from large tracts of the Western US, and turning it into a giant theme park for the urban elite.
The region between the cities and the parks will be worked by the 50 million eco-serfs Richard Heinberg is always going on about, who will be grubbing on organic subsistence farms at bayonet point. (I do give the man credit for honesty.) There is countermovement now that the food should be grown in specially designed skyscrapers, so I'm waiting to see how that one plays out. Organic food vs the ultimate factory produced hydroponic food which is arguably even greener.
And as a bonus, this will certainly create Increasing Property Values for non-slum dwelling in the cities, so the Realtor's will be all over this.
And which part of "not statistically significant" confuses you?
Global warming stopped. It may start again, it may not. Solar Cycle theory says we are in for 30 years of cooling. Without claiming to be a booster of that theory, it did predict the mid-century cooling, and the late century warming of the 20th century. Maybe it's time to reexamine that hypothesis.
In the mean time, your prophet, messiah, whatever, admits there has been no warming in over a decade even though CO2 levels continue to rise, another "exalted member of the club" admits to lying in an official publication intended to influence public policy, and yet you still hold on to a blown hypothesis.
Are we talking about a science, or a religion?
The question you need to consider is how to clean house in a way that allows you to be taken seriously again. Some heads are going to have to roll. Much of the data will have to be revalidated by some one trusted by the "other" side. Once that is all sorted out, models vetted by third parties can be used to run the extrapolations. Then you might be able to make policy recommendations that will be believed.
So, deny you have a problem and become a religious cult, or face up to the mess, roll up your sleeves and fix it.
Even I admit to the possibility of a tipping point; the 8200 year event and the Younger Dryas make that very plain, and even a Little Ice Age rerun would be a huge mess. None of those climate changes were caused by human industrial activity, which is why I am skeptical about the anthropogenic part of Global Warming.
But I don't want the baby thrown out with the bathwater. The current climate research has been overrun with people pushing a religious and political agenda. So I am suspicious. If you want me to accept an energy command economy, which seems to be the movement's goal, you will need a lot better science than I have seen so far.
"Mention Phil Jones - imply he is the antichrist where ever possible"
I don't have to imply he's the antichrist anymore. He admitted there has been no warming in 15 years on the BBC.
And we have this fine headline; "The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders." The "Scientist" [snort] in question is later identified as Dr Murari Lal. He knew it was false. He put it in to scare people into doing what he wanted.
Global warming advocates have crapped in their own nest more thoroughly than anyone since Nixon and Watergate.
The record snowfall on the East Coast is just icing on the cake.
And my option 1 is to only buy vehicles with manual transmissions, so that I have a Mechanical Engine Disconnect (AKA clutch).
Option 2 is to only buy vehicles with a kill switch, just like the one REQUIRED BY LAW on my motorcycle. And for that matter, the table saw, the lathes at work, the Genie lifts, etc, etc.
If the computers go nuts, I can still stop the vehicle.
I already sent a note to the NHTSA about option 2, pointing out that motorcycles have kill switches, so why not cars? Not that they will listen. But now I can yell I told you so.
So you are blaming Reagan for the Cold War? I grant he was alive when it started, but that's giving a B-grade actor a lot more credit than Hollywood ever did.
Or are you blaming Bush the First for not keeping all those Federal employees who had been in or supporting the military on the payroll once the cold war was over?
One good snark deserves another :-)
"I think the people of the world including the leaders would think twice if they (that is, all leaders and followers) had to do this old-style with rocks and clubs."
And in a nutshell, you've explained why removing nuclear weapons from the world is a bad idea. As long as there are nuclear weapons on both sides, any leader who starts a war gets to play too. With conventional weapons, the leaders stay safe and their low-level followers get to die.
The great question of the 21st century is will that argument hold in with Islamic fundamentalists? They want to die, but do they want to see their relatives incinerated? And would the non-islamic countries blot out that many innocents to make the point? (But, look at what happened to Dresden.)
According to speakeasy:
Last Result:
Download Speed: 46563 kbps (5820.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 3742 kbps (467.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
That was a short hop to their Seattle location from Central Washington, so definitely best case, but it still looks cool.
I can usually sustain 3.5 MB/second downloading system updates from Apple's website. so the real world rate is less, but the problem has been slow servers at the other end for awhile now.
The connection out of the fiber-optic box is 100 Mbit, so that or the linksys box will be the slow link.
First page on a google search;
in 2004; 29,569 total firearm fatalities, including 16,750 suicides, 649 accidents and 235 with unknown intent.
"if you don't believe the earth is heating up, you still have to admit the earth has had historic swings in climate, and that we earthlings will have to intervene at some point, correct?"
Good point, if for no other reason that no one has claimed the Ice Age cycle of the last 2 million years is over. So eventually we are going to have to slag some glaciers. Solid ice from Chicago to Long Island. Think the economic disruption that would cause. Not to mention the next Lake Missoula flood blowing over the Hanford Nuclear reservation. The local terminal moraine is a half-hour north of me, and it's pretty though provoking to stand on it.
The article is also interesting from the point that global warming has stopped for a decade. Even CRU admits this (off the record, as revealed by the emails) but the glacier watchers say they are still melting. Dust on the ice would reconcile the difference in observations.
"Peer review is useful but should never be an argument ender."
Just over a century ago, the peers said "There are only two questions left to answer in physics, the nature of the photoelectric effect, and results of the Michelson-Morely experiment." They were really right about that one.
Peer review turned into a religious ordination. Science faded into the background, as people who were convinced they were right, (and might actually be) decided they had a calling to save the world, and that the ends therefore justified the means.
key takeaways; Science and religion do not mix, and religions do not require a God.
"Does a 1-in-600 chance of getting bladder cancer sound "safe" to you?"
Over what time interval? Given there is a 100% chance of death in the grand overview, a 1 in 600 chance of death from bladder cancer by 80 years old compared with a the 1 in 3 chance of death from cancer in general is not that large.
Given the cost of arsenic removal to the ppb level, one has to ask is that cost the best use of available public health dollars? Or would more people be healthier by spending the money elsewhere? At some point we are spending ever more money to remove ever smaller risks. Look at the amount of arsenic in shellfish, and yet they are not being banned. I used to work a a mine that had an arsenic-rich ore. When we went in for our annual blood work for arsenic and other heavy metals, we got a note saying "eat no shellfish for the week preceding the test, or the blood results may come in high".
Why do you have to revalidate? Because you can no longer say what data is good and what is not. Analogy, the infamous glove in the OJ murder trial. If one bit of evidence is planted, then what else has been tainted? So you have to rebuild the entire trust tree.
Not all the data is corrupted, (I hope) but the burden of proof is is now on CRU, not the skeptics.
As for the assumption of privacy, I'll spare you from hearing about all the discussions about email security from legal counsel at work, and what my own lawyer has said in a private context. I will only point out that the "private" emails are not private anymore. As someone else said, "There is no more privacy, deal with it."
As for FEA models, I don't follow that entire line of reasearch. For what it's worth, my dissertation can be summed up in two sentences. "A non-linear model can be devised to fit any historical data to any desired degree of accuracy. However, this does not necessarily mean it can accurately predict the future behavior of the system." Being disgusted with the whole subject by then, I found honest work. By pure coincidence, I ended up in the solar energy industry.
By the way, did you notice the quote that even CRU admitted (in the "private" emails) that there has been NO warming for the last 10 years? Apparently they were about to go out and invent some.
This whole thing turns my stomach. What inspired them to go and fudge the data? Where they so sure they were right that they felt the ends justified the means? (Shades of the cop in the OJ case who planted the glove.) Or were they addicted to the grant money? "Keep the proles scared and we can stay on easy street?" Or did they have dreams of being part of the ruling class, overseeing their own manors of eco-serfs? Or did they simply get caught up in their own propaganda, and were afraid to admit the new data did not support their original claims?
Sigh.
The drought isn't much of a drought, even by that graph. My parents live there, they haven't noticed. It normally rains about 40" a year up there, so they probably only got 30. What they have complained about is the bad last winter, the late spring, the cold summer, and the early fall. Those I've gotten an earful about.
I live in Eastern Washington (state, that is), where it is more Australia-like. Normal is 8" of rain for a year, and we have less than 6 so far. And we had the same general weather as back East. Record snow and cold last winter, late spring, late last frost, cool summer (which was rather nice, since it likes to go over 105 F in the daytime) and an early frost.
I'm glad that the person in charge stepped down. But now the hard part starts. Every bit of data has to be re-validated. Every model has to be rerun with the revalidated data. Every dataset that was calibrated to the now suspect data is suspect, and has the be recalibrated. Apparently the satellite data was calibrated to this now suspect land data, and so now that is suspect.
Even if it was all innocent back and forth, their cavalier attitude is precisely the wrong message to send. They claim that the entire planet has to be rebuilt in a new image and in two decades tops, and they are carrying on like frat boys. My jaw has hit the ground multiple times ever since this came out.
I have a Ph.D. for non-linear modeling in an industrial process. But if I had been that casual with my data, I'd have been bounced right of the program. And I'm not expecting several billion people to turn their lives upside down based on the conclusions of my dissertation. They are expecting, nay, demanding exactly that, so they have a responsibility to be somber, formal, and utterly proper at all times.
They blew it. This is a lot more serious than the cold fusion debacle a couple decades ago.
I'm not from the UK, so I don't know if the UK Times is a left or right wing paper. That is the source, as clearly stated above. And as I do have a Ph.D. that happens to involve non-linear modeling, this entire Climategate episode has left my jaw on the floor multiple times. They did what? I'd have been crucified for trying that nonsense on my dissertation.
Disappearing the original data? Oh yeah, let's make it even better. You always keep the original data, if for no other reason than a better noise reduction routine may come out allowing you to go back and extract more information out of the background hiss.
Their behavior is unacceptable. Someone needs to hang, at least figuratively. And the people who believe in anthropogenic global warming need to lead the mob, as it's their cause that has been defiled.
And for those who assume I work for big oil, I do not. I work in the silicon division of a solar energy company. So I stand to benefit if solar cell sales increase.
"You could make a case that it's in fact bad for people to all work off the same data set or code, as any mistakes (or even deliberate fraud) will then be common to all analyses."
And that deliberate fraud issue, sadly, appears to be the case. How many good models were scrapped because the cooked data made them give obviously bogus results? How much good new data was discarded because it didn't match with the "approved" data. A huge amount of work is scrapped, or is about to be.
My dissertation was on non-linear modeling. If I had cooked the data like this bunch I'd have been in the dumpster with my data. Although I did not have to show every bit of input data, it was required to be traceable all the way from the raw input through any smoothing, transforming, and normalizing to get to the input of the model. Anything less and there would be no Ph.D. after my name.
So it's been less than a week, but why are these guys still employed?
Translating Freely:
We cooked the data to show what we wanted it to show, then erased the originals to ensure that our version of the truth is the only version.
Those guys really took the lessons from the Ministry of Truth to heart. Way to inspire confidence guys. Way to convince the non-scientific public that there is a reason to quietly submit to a carbon version of a water command empire.
Why is Mr Jones still employed?