JimB

I’d rather know with more warning that the tornado was coming; don’t bother with that 50 feet better precision… If the thing hits anywhere in my town, I’m bookin’ it out!

Clive Thompson on How More Info Lead To Less Knowledge”

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-02/st_thompson

“As Farhad Manjoo notes in True Enough: … if we argue about what a fact means, we’re having a debate. If we argue about what the facts are, it’s agnotological Armageddon, where reality dies screaming.”

JimB

Worlds fastest supercomputer being built for Lawrence Livermore.

A few interesting tidbits:
“The progress they make in quantifying the range of error in their models could have far reaching impacts in the branches of science that use predictive models extensively, like modeling climate change or the protein interactions inside cells. ”

“Initially, Sequoia will be dedicated to the National Nuclear Safety Administration work. That means some of the exciting weather science will have to wait. With 20 petaflops of computing power, meteorologists could predict local weather down to the 100-meter range. For an event like a tornado, that could mean being able to predict the path that the twister takes through a town, allowing for targeted evacuations that save lives.

It’s performance like that, Seager argues, that’s changing the way that science is done, making simulation another branch of the scientific method along with theory and experiment.

“Scientific simulation is the telescope of the mind,” Seeger said. “We work with highly non-linear systems that have very complicated mathematics and models. It’s just too difficult to hold all that in our brain and analyze it. So by simulating them, we’re extending our brains’ capabilities.”

I really like the “making simulation another branch of scientific method” bit.
Does that mean that’s NOT happening now, and life will be much better when it does?

JimB

RE: 385 ppmv

The concentration of the various components in air taken at any site after analysis is computed and reported for a defined reference state known as “Standard Dry Air” (SDA), which is bone-dry air that is comprised only of nitrogen, oxygen, the inert gases and carbon dioxide (i.e, the so-called fixed gases) and is at standard temperature and pressure (STP, i.e., 273.2 K and 1 atm pressure). One cubic meter of SDA contains 385 ml or 17.2 millimoles of pure carbon dioxide. However, SDA exists at no place on the earth because “real air” is never at STP and always contains water vapor and clouds, the climatologists’ worst nightmares. The term “real air” is used by engineers for local air at the intake ports of air separation plants. “”

That has to be the dumbest way of specifying gas mixtures, I’ve ever heard of. For a start, there’s that 385 ppm !!-V-!! . Really wonderful; as you rise up through the atmosphere form ground level you have to keep recalculating the amount of gas in a volume, and then try to partition it among the component gases.

At least if they said 385ppmW or ppmM you would have some chance of figuring oit out.

What is so darn hard about specifying the concentration as simply the ratio of the numbers of each moleclular species.

Then you would know there are 78 N2 molecules for every 21 O2 molecules, and 1 Ar molecule, and 385 out of every million molecules was CO2.

Well evidently those are the wrong numbers; and you need a computer and a PhD to figure it out.

Next time I see atmospheric concentrations specified as ppmv, I am going to pull alol my hair out.

When they teach climatology in college, don’t they ever mention the atomic theory of matter ?

No wonder the science is in such a mess.

“

Ric Werme (21:08:15) :

evanjones (20:38:12) :

It takes a high IQ to be that stupid and blind. I have often felt that so-called “superior” intelligence leads many (most) those who have it right off the intellectual cliff.

I shudder to imagine a world where 160+ IQ types made all the decisions. Arrogance and lack of (and contempt for) common sense is a disastrous combination.

Being a long time member of Mensa (thank whomever that there is no periodic retest), I’ve concluded that intelligence is the MSG of aptitudes. I.e. it lets you do more with the other aptitudes you have. If you don’t have any other aptitudes (I think “common sense” is one), you’re just a waste of carbon footprint.

Mensa was originally founded to provide a resource for the British government to help solve all its problems. People quickly discovered that more than intelligence was required, but a lot of people had interests other than solving all the British government’s problems.

BTW, I think a lot of people here would readily qualify for Mensa (Evan, for example). You’d be surprised at how average we are. :-)

I can think of a few Mensans who’d make or are good leaders. They generally lack the patience for dealing with politics and have enough intelligence to not want the job….

BTW, Icecap seems to take a dim view of this work too.

That 1000 year forecast comes with a moneyback guarantee from NOAA. Too bad they don’t offer the same on their seasonal forecasts. the last two winters were forecast to be warm in Alaska and the lower 48 states. Susan can’t help but keep embarrassing herself first with her work on the ozone hole, then the IPCC AR4 report for which she was a Lead Author and now this.

Ouch.

”

My wife likes it when I take her to Mensa meetings. It makes her feel that I am much more normal. (I’ve been a Mensa member for 25 years.) “”

Not sure who said what above; but I once asked my Mother in law (she’s Mexican Indian) if she would like to join Mensa (which I believe means “Table” in Latin); and she damn near died laughing.

“Why would I want to join an organisation for crazy ladies?” was her response.

It seems that in Spanish table is MESA, not Mensa.

And Mensa comes from a different Latin root from which we get Month, Menses, Menstruation and the like.

Anyhow, in colloquial Mexican lingo, it literally means a crazy lady; one who has gone lala; probably something to do with the moon or the month.

So i though it was priceless, that this organisation for high IQ special people evidently are unaware what their organisation name means in other languages.

I asked a SFSC language professor, who was interviewing the SF chapter of Mensa President, or whatever they call their leader, on a talk radio program; did Mensa have very many Mexican women in their organisation.

He cut me off, and never did aks why I asked such a weird question (and he’s the language prof). the Mensa chap said they were not a racist organisation, and anyone could join who met the IQ requirement.

Ah well; language can do funny things to us.

Anyhow here is the jewel that he threw at me on another web forum, where the subject is anything but climate; but If I dare make mention of some “climate issue” that might relate to the subject (fishing); all manner of real environmental climate scientists emerge from the woodwork and immediately slam me for being anti-environment and uneducated to boot. One even complained that he felt insulted, because someoine else suggested a “Follow the money” scenario.

I was actually commenting on the Eric Steig/Michael Mann et al paper on Antarctica warming; mainly to point out that it was a storm in a teacup, because it would take 5000 years for the place to get up to the melting point at the obseved rate of warming; and that the satellites only measure the surface temperature, and since ice and snow are good thermal insulators, th ewarmed layer wouldn’t be very much total ice mass compared to the 6-10,000 feet of ice that is there.

So here is the new Physical Dogma:-

Ice by definition at atmospheric pressure is at zero C/32F; no matter what.

So all that gigatons of ice covering Antarctica is at zero deg C; no matter what, evn if the eair immediately above it where the Owl box is, is at -90 deg C, the ice itself remains at zero c; by definition; he says.

Now I only have a Bachelor’s deg, in Physcis, and maths, and radiophysics, and mathematical physics; so my education got cut off before I got to learn that ice is at zero deg C by definition at one atmosphere pressure.

No wonder I have been figuring everything wrong all these years.

So there you have it; scoop of the day.

George

George E. Smith (09:27:02) :

Climate modeling is old hat; so now they are going to make up the data as well.

LMFAO too true George, but I’m afraid to say they’ve been doing that already!

On top of that, I have a question.

Could our current CO2 rise just be the MWP coming to visit?

DaveE. “”

Well Dave, that IS what one would deduce from Al Gore’s ice core data that he waved around in his sci-fi movie. 800 years ago was 1200 AD; seems like the middle of the MWP to me.

Thanks!

I see a couple of problems with 1850. Since missing gaps are ‘made up’ any tendency for older data to have more gaps results in more ‘made up’ past. Also, since all of past temps are re-written based on a recent anomaly, then a TOB bias change in 2008 re-writes temperatures recorded in 1851. This resulted in a 1.75 C movement for the not too distant past of Pisa. Who knows what it would do to 100 year earlier temperatures!

I fail to see how either of these is an improvement in accuracy…

Since the NOAA directions I posted some threads ago still advises that missing highs / lows can be ‘estimated’ (i.e. made up) I don’t see that the 1850 data are any more made up than the recent ones!

That’s the real data I’m talking about, not the created, er. adjusted, no, make that interpolated, I mean fabricated, oh just call it the GISS ‘data’…

Excellent post. One of my particular bugbears are ‘global temperatures to 1850′

I have a great problem with the notion of global temperatures anyway as they are so wildly inconsistent in methodology even before they are adjusted. However the data back to 1850 become even murkier with so few stations, frequent changes of location equipment and operator. This person was usually untrained and was not averse to making up temperatures they might have missed out (we call it interpolation these days) The location for thermometers (often uncalibrated) was sometimes bizarre and more for the convenience of the operator than the science. This practice seems to go on to the present day judging by surfacestations.org.

I wondeted if you had looked at this subject and what your opinion on ’1850′was?

It is absolutely crucial to the science and basic proposition of AGW to be able to point to temperatures from 1850 and to be able to state to fractions of a degree that we are the cause and its unprecedented. (Lets not get into the MWP or Roman warm periods et all for the moment).

TonyB

It was actually me, E.M.Smith that was most of your quote…

I’m curious, how did you come to be able to review the code for GISSTemp? Is it publicly available?

I came to review by my own choice. (One of ‘The Team’ that regularly supports AGW here was silly enough to post a pointer to the place where I could down load it) From my docs of it:

To download the GISSTEMP source code go to:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/

and click on the download link.

Unpack the archive, and read gistemp.txt

I’m also curious how we test code when we don’t know what the correct answer is? I use test cases where the results are known, given specific inputs. Don’t these models just make assumptions about how parts of the climate system interact?

As near as I can tell, no testing as you are familiar with was ever done.

And yes, they make gross assumptions about ‘how parts of the climate system interact’ that are clearly false, then they run with them. No questions asked…

In particular there are two ‘brokennesses’ that I’ve found.

1) Temperatures from the GHCN (no TOB or equipment correction) and USHCN (with TOB and eq. correction) data set are compared and a difference calculated based on subtracting GHCN from USHCN. This is limited to at most 10 years of data. The idea is to make a ‘delta’ that is used to ‘correct’ USHCN to remove its Time of Observation Bias and equipment change corrections; to better match GHCN. Nice in theory, wrong in practice.

Why? If, say, Reno had a thermometer change 8 years ago that resulted in an increased temp reading, what sense does it make to subtract this from the temperatures recorded in 1910 or 1940 or 1970 or… Perhaps this is why GISS data often re-write past temperatures lower…

2) The “Reference Station Method” is used to ‘adjust’ the urban heat island effect in cities. Unfortunately, they look at ‘rural’ stations up to 1000 km away and use those to change the data for cities. Just what do Lodi and Reno tell you about San Francisco?

This matters because most population is on the coasts. There is not much ‘rural’ out to sea, so the ‘corrections’ come from inland. OK, where’s the problem? Inland temps have a steeper slope. Yes, the ‘anomalies’ correlate, but non-linearly. The code uses a linear adjustment… (Either a straight line or a line with a single ‘knee’ in it, but never a proportional percentage or other slope adjusted correlation …)

I’ve been told these climate models are extremely complex. From reviewing the code, what’s your take on this? Can you give us an idea of how many lines of code are in GISSTemp? What programming language is used and what system does it run on?

The GISStemp is not a climate model. It is a ‘gather temperature data from many sources and change it’ process. Unfortunately, that is an exact statement of function and not a political comment.

By the time GISS temperature data reaches the models it is already fatally flawed and not in touch with reality. The models don’t have a chance…

The code is fairly trivial. Most of it is minor format changes (change ‘data missing flag’ from “-” to “-9999″) and file concatenations / deletions. There are about 6000 lines of code in GISStemp of which I would estimate about 1000 are truly ‘functional’. It consists of 6 coded “steps” in 5 directories plus a couple that are not coded (manual data download, for example). These are numbered STEP0 STEP1 STEP2 STEP3 STEP4_5 (plus the un-numbered steps of manual data download, and subroutine compilation / installation …)

The code in STEP1 is Python (with two major function libraries in “C” that Python calls). All the other STEPs are FORTRAN.

It ought to run on any system with f77 or similar compiler, Python, and “C”. Unix or Linux ought to be your best bet. So far I’ve seen nothing in the code that is tied to a particular architecture. I have seen a lot of ‘crufty practices’ such as writing scratch files in the same place where the source code is ‘archived’ and treating FORTRAN like an interpreted language (compile in line in scripts, run binary, delete binary. An example of why so many lines are ‘non-functional’ IMHO.)

(Apologies to anyone not a programmer. “Cruft” is clearly understood by programmers to mean “crud, not good, junk accumulated over time and never swept up, junky style” as an approximation; but seems to be a word that is not known to standard English. I’ve used it for about 40 years professionally and to this day don’t know where I learned it… Isn’t jargon fun?)

I have also downloaded the ModelE simulation code but have not looked at it… yet.

I have posted pointers to the data and source code downloads in the comments section of the ‘resources’ tab on this site.

Hope this is helpful to you…

Some of us are complaining about handing huge buckets of money to the same folks who gave us the bad science in the first place. Giving more money to folks without clue does not give them clue…

Want better science? Give me the money! (only 1/2 ;-) unfortunately. I’d rather stay retired, but the present crop of, er, “stuff” being produced really needs some adult supervision and I know of at least one person who could provide it…)

“:The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Wow. Maybe I need to read some Mencken…. I’d heard the name before but just ‘wrote it off’ as ‘trendy whatever’. This leads me to believe the guy ‘Has Clue’….

Thanks! You have pointed me at a path for new understanding…

You missed the $400 million for Earth sciences in the NASA budget from the Stimulus package.