Hot Stuff

2006-07-18 - 1:34 p.m.

It's been a very hot summer down here. We had a heat wave over the weekend that drove the temperatures up into the mid-100s. My car has a temperature display - when I left work at 4pm it registered 107 degrees.

So, global warming must be a fact, right? No.

There are a few basic facts that, for me, put a serious damper on the hysteria that "The Day After Tomorrow" and Al Gore are selling. A news story today helps link some together:

TOKYO (AP) — Japan is planning ultra long-range 30-year weather forecasts that will predict typhoons, storms, blizzards, droughts and other inclement weather, an official said Tuesday.

The project, to start next year, will harness the powers of one of the world's fastest supercomputers and is an offshoot of ongoing research by the country's science ministry to map global warming trends for the next 300 years.

Using the Earth Simulator supercomputer, housed in a hangar-sized building in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, Japan's science ministry hopes to calculate long-term patterns in the interaction of atmospheric pressure, air temperatures, ocean currents and sea temperatures, said Tomonori Otake, an official with the ministry's earth environment bureau.

The results will help establish predictable routes for typhoons and identify areas that are recurring targets for heavy rains, abundant snow, high waves, heavy winds, scorching heat or crop-threatening droughts.

"Now we can see what areas are at risk and start thinking about what kind of countermeasures to take," Otake said.

Early warning could enable the government to allocate money and resources to potential disaster areas before disaster strikes.

The ministry is now outlining the parameters of the project and will accept bids from researchers with an eye toward starting the program by next spring. A budget is not yet set, but it could cost in the area of $26 million a year.

The Earth Simulator, introduced in 2002, was the world's fastest supercomputer until 2004, when IBM's Blue Gene took the title. But the $350 million computer still performs 35.6 trillion calculations a second, more computations than there are stars in our galaxy.

The machine tracks global sea temperatures, rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters over the next centuries. As part of the project, Japan eyes forecasts for the entire planet for areas as small as 1.9 square miles.

But don't plan on locking in sunny weather for that planned family picnic in July 2036. These forecasts are only general trends.

"Just like the daily forecast, we can't give a percentage for how accurate they are," Otake said

So the doomsayers' predictions can't be accurate either, right?

Which also brings me to this point: regular on-the-job weathermen can't always accurately predict tomorrow's weather. But we're supposed to accept the doomsayer's predictions as fact. Their computers predict the temperature increases. That also leads to GIGO. [For those Too Young To Know: that's an old computer acronym that means "garbage in, garbage out"...a short way of saying "your computer results are only as good as the facts you enter".] Do these doomsayers have an agenda? Of course they do. So would they manipulate data that goes in - or deliberately leave certain data OUT - so they get the computer results they want? What do YOU think?

Now, let's jump BACK a few decades. In the 1970s, the polar ice caps thickened up a bit. The result: a "global cooling" hysteria. Take today's hysteria, replace "warming" with "cooling"...that's what it was like. And the argument was the same: it's all Man's fault, and we'd better do something before we have another Ice Age.

So here it is thirty years later. Where's the Ice Age? Right.

Therefore, I am skeptical about global warming.

Now, I don't plan on changing anyone's mind. It's all my opinion.

But thirty years from now, when the Earth's median temperature has gone up one degree...you can say I was right.

I won't mind a bit.

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Rant over, except for this:

A third ice cream truck has joined the neighborhood. This one plays "If You're Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands".

Geez...would it kill them to play The Beatles??

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Be seeing you.

Bob - 2006-07-19 05:26:34 - http://shadowgm.diaryland.com
The median temperature is not the average temperature. It is either the midpoint of a frequency distribution, such that there is an equal chance of a value falling above or below it; or the literal middle of a sequence with an odd number of values (or the average of the two middle values if there is no single one). Thus, in the sequence 45, 46, 56, 75, 77, 82, 107 ... the median is 75, and the average is 69. If we dropped the highest value (107), the median would be 65 (the average of 56 + 75).

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Brin - 2006-07-19 10:03:24 -
You know what *I* don't get, is when people complain about global warming this time of year. People, it's SUMMER TIME. It's SUPPOSED to be hot in the Northern Hemisphere!!!

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Bob - 2006-07-19 16:13:37 - http://shadowgm.diaryland.com
As for ice cream trucks playing Beatles songs, a) they'd likely get sued, and b) the kids wouldn't recognize the song.

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