Wednesday
Apr282010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill CCC and the future
Apr 28, 2010 Climate: Surface The Clear Climate Code guys have posted up a presentation looking at their work on GISS and outlining some future projects. The latter appear to cover areas like arctic sea ice, paleoclimate and HADCRUT. This is admirable stuff.
Reader Comments (11)
Yes, it was good to meet Nick and the rest of the crew at Open Knowledge. I was sitting next to an oceanographer from France for this presentation, which was impressive. More on the implications for climate science as a whole of this event as it emerges - but there was a great deal of interest in the subject and emerge I sure it will.
I gues it's a bit quite here today because of Gordongate....
I really need to learn to type..
Quiet here today, because of Gordongate
Being an assembler language man, I do like working at the register level, I find such non-standard programming lanugages such as Python a pain to learn and use. I know Python is meant to be more highly readable, but nothing beats program, sub-program and line-by-line comments on the code your are developing. I can look back at old assembler programs with its complicated mnemonics, op-codes and directives and with in few minutes of reading the comments I understand what is being done and why. The use of such programs as Python may introduce a tendency for the programmer to reduce the amount of information neccessary for others to understand how a program works ....... and in the end that defeats the object of the whole enterprise.
It's my birthday today, and as I had hoped, I got a copy of The Hockey Stick Illusion.
I expect to be turning the light off late tonight!
OT:
More great work from the University of East Anglia:
"Wildlife documentaries infringe animals' privacy, says report
(...)
Footage of animals giving birth in their burrows or mating crosses an ethical line that film-makers should respect, according to Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies at the University of East Anglia."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/29/wildlife-films-infringe-privacy
how depressing is your upcoming election?
26 April: BBC: Victoria King: Election 2010: Parties do battle over climate change
...for 90 minutes on Monday, Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Green representatives went head-to-head on the issue in front of bodies such as Greenpeace, Oxfam, Christian Aid and the WWF. ..
For the Lib Dems, Simon Hughes set his party up as the most ambitious of the main three on green matters. As Mr Miliband put it: "Simon says, 'My plan is bigger than your plan'."
There was conflict between Mr Hughes and Darren Johnson of the Greens, possibly because they share many of the same potential voters...
The Ask the Climate Question hustings was chaired by the environment editor of the Independent, Michael McCarthy, with questions ranging from nuclear power to emissions reductions..
(Clark, Conservatives) "We're all agreed on the ambitions and aspirations but what's been lacking is action," he said, promising to introduce a bill in the Queen's Speech in a month or so's time, if elected, to get going straight away.
Mr Clark came under fire for the number of Tory MPs and candidates that are climate change sceptics, but he insisted that wasn't a problem. Asked about one such sceptic, in particular, he said: "I don't agree with that guy, I've never heard of him." ..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8644192.stm
27 April: Guardian: Ukip: Science test results
We challenged the main political parties to answer questions about their science policies posed by prominent scientists including Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh and Petra Boynton. Here Martin Robbins analyses the responses from Ukip, the UK Independence Party
The Met Office comes in for particular scrutiny, with an odd pledge to link funding to the accuracy of its forecasts. Given that Met Office forecasts are generally considered to be among the best in the world and improving, that may not have the desired outcome...
Viscount Monckton provided the answers to our questions – a surprising choice as spokesperson for its science policy considering he has so little credibility in the scientific community...
Ukip's innovative approach to science funding is to set up a Royal Commission to investigate climate change in a court of law, and immediately cancel all funding "connected with 'global warming'" pending its outcome, thus wresting the science budget from the hands of "rapacious extremists".
It is a policy that places Ukip squarely in the realm of fantasy.
Since just about every national and international scientific institution on Earth accepts the evidence of humanity's impact on the climate, such a commission would almost inevitably conclude in science's favour. Ukip doesn't explain what it would do in the event of that outcome, having already crippled scientific research into potentially one of the greatest problems facing humanity this century.
Ukip claims that the Royal Commission would allow scientists to "reach a conclusion" on climate change. The problem is that scientists reached a conclusion decades ago, and research shouldn't be halted on the basis that Ukip's members are incapable of keeping up with it, or don't like its findings....
The nature of this "extensive manipulation of scientific data" is unclear, but it seems Ukip's policymakers have spent a bit too much time surfing conspiracy sites on the internet...
CONCLUSIONS
On science, Ukip is dire, with no credibility in the scientific community and candidates who have a demonstrably poor grasp of basic scientific principles, which perhaps explains its general disarray and flip-flopping in areas such as health.
Ukip is the only significant party to support homeopathy, and the only party apart from the BNP still in denial over climate change. The appointment of Viscount Monckton as a science spokesman adds to the air of a party of old British eccentrics.
Woeful.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/apr/27/ukip-science-policy-election
Just received "The Doomsday Syndrome" by John Maddox.
Mine is a 1972 edition. It is incredible. Maddox describes a movement ~38 years ago that is nearly identical today- a movement about (mis)using science to sell overstated risks for the purpose of imposing ineffective policies on people.
I will report more ASAP, but urge people to order this book. I paid, including shipping, $4.50 US.
I enjoyed a bit of Glenmorangie yesterday evening, and so read only about the first 20 pages - the book sure is starting off great.
@Mac: We do use comments too! See page 10 of the presentation. Almost as many lines of comment and docstrings (which are just comments really) as code.
And don't tempt me, a version in Z80 assembler or PowerPC would be bliss.