Big honking climate science puzzle here –
FORTRAN geek needed, apply within.
Please – If you do not have the skills/background to contribute to the linked discussion, don’t clutter their work with off-topic junk. Use this one for general comments.
But I do encourage you read the thread, as something very curious happens …
Looks like someone has had a WTF?! moment there.
Clearly, this is yet another in an already massive, growing body of compelling findings casting more than reasonable doubt on the IPCC’s alleged data and alleged findings.
I, for one, having seen all kinds of reasons why not to believe the IPCC and the Chicken Littlists out there… simply cannot go along with the alarmism. No way do I want to sacrifice the economy for… this. What are we, stupid?
Coincidentally, I just had a longtime pro-AGW commentor, a retired engineer, at my site, suddenly admit that it’s actually a matter of belief.
Gee, NASA is “sanitizing” their data? Say it ain’t so!
John Cross pay particular attention here, eh? This here is what I’ve been talking about to you for ages now.
I guess the odds of finding a FORTRAN programmer are better than the odds of finding a LISP programmer.
But scientists say the Glowball Vorming exists! I must believe ze scientists!
Eet eeez just numbears!
The “models” predict X … so now we must twist the real observations into contortions until they too equal X.
This is not science … it’s politics at work.
phantom – I think that John Cross is what is known as an ‘obsessive-compulsive’ personality. He needs to ‘control’ data and therefore, retain control over the future.
That’s why he actually saves and categorizes all his posts!
And, he rewrites history, so to speak. If he’s rebutted somewhere, he’s quite capable of rewriting the interaction to make it appear as if he had ‘an interesting discussion’; he won’t admit to being rebutted. Calling it a ‘discussion’ rather than a putdown by someone else means that he retains control of his data in the interaction.
And, his reductionism is also a tactic of control, where you reduce the data content to what you feel in control of. Of course, that tactic also destroys the reality; it’s making the false assumption that a complex system is merely a ‘collection of its bit components’.
So, phantom, John Cross is NOT going to accept this data, or any other data that denies AGW. He can’t, because he has that need-to-control. AGW is both caused by man, who is morally evil, (and controllers are prone to that judgment) and is therefore redeemable by man – who is in control.
“This is not science … it’s politics at work.”
This is not politics… it’s marketing.
“This is not science … it’s politics at work.”
This is not politics… it’s marketing.
weeeell no, it’s religion!!!!!
… Ok I concede … it’s none of the above … it’s entrepreneurship.
Phantom: I think that it is interesting and worthwhile work that they are doing over there, but from what I read, it doesn’t amount to a gotch-ya. In fact it looks like the main issue is related to the classification of the rural sites from Hansen based on Imhoff satellite work (if I read it correctly).
Regards,
John
Could it be said(by the enviro/lefties) that any wastefull/inefficient use of energy is bad for the enviroment. To much co2 being produced,bla,bla,bla.
What about Govt. waste and beaurocracy then?
Let’s start at the top!
“This is not science … it’s politics at work.
This is not politics… it’s marketing.
weeeell no, it’s religion!!!!!”
No, actually this *is* science at work.
Having spent some time around a science faculty at a major university, I was shocked to discover how common this kind of thing really was. Undergrads routinely fudge bad data for lab reports, because they know what the results should be, and were probably doing the experiment wrong in the first place. Academics sometimes do this too (perhaps from an incompetent grad student) but usually with no harm done.
sorry Fortran IV was end of the line for me and I cant find a punch card reader.
strangely enough I did some climate stats way back in 1974, and at that time I remember these startling conclusions of one hundred years of data. mean temperature of Alberta +1, SD 1 degree, markov coeffient of 0.9 , there was no rise or fall of temperature in that time within the error bars. this is one of the most unstable climates in the world and yet the markov coeffient was still 0.9, most places in the world are in the 0.95+ range.
as for the code above, yeah, lots like they are fkking with it.
There are headhunters that specialize in LISP programmers; I know a couple. And a lot of AI folks have done serious LISP programming.
I’d say there are a lot more FORTRAN geeks, however.
The last Fortran program I wrote was in 1977, so I’m afraid I won’t be much help.
I happened to that thread just after the file change described above. Next a troll commented that Tamino was currently correcting their ‘misconceptions’. I checked Tamino’s post prior to any comments having been made.
Now this all had been telegraphed to the RC faithful with a series of posts on Anthony Watts’ site on mysterious jumps in GISTEMP records for rural Texas and California government temperature sensors.
Back to the Tamino thread to read closely. It consisted of historical revisionism claiming that PCA, principle component analysis was the source of the a jump in current temperature records and concommitant decline in earlier records. Total, unmitigated, unabashed, nonsensical prevarication.
In fact, the fortran code was a simple but botched attempt to correct for UHI, urban warming. To manipulate the data for a specious purpose.
Returning the CA thread there were reports of other RC aides peeking at the files simultaneously….
The unavoidable conclusion that a sometime observer must draw is that the GISS/RealClimate consortium was in furious CYA mode. Your faithful representative.
Fortran! Lisp! Ah, the loves I have lost. I downloaded the GISTemp code and spent some time strolling around. Man, that is some ugly code. You know, there’s a reason scientists and engineers shouldn’t develop software, and that is that it usually ends up as ugly as GISTemp. I wonder how they test it.
What exactly, ET, is it that you have against one saving and categorizing all their posts?
PS: Warwick Hughes has a link to David Archibald’s excellent new paper here:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf
FORTRAN ???? What is needed is a WATFOR Geek !!
(ask Prof. Graham).
Cheers !!
P. s.
Kate,
I’m waiting for someone to define “WATFOR”.
Love your site!!
My first programming language was Fortran II in ’71.
After my masters I taught WatFor and WatFiv for three years
at the UofA. Once to a class of 200 engineers. Great fun.
http://www.answers.com/topic/watfiv-programming-language
“Vitruvius”,
My intro was at U of W (in 19 -0- 69). WATFOR was developed there (remember the ‘punch card’ stations?
Cheers
I learned how to type on an IBM 029, Garry ~
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/029.html
I was programming an IBM 1800 then ~
www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV4022.html
I was waiting for someone to provide the definition “WATERLOO FORTRAN” = WATFOR. I’m going to dust off my “SCEPTRE” text book !!
Cheers!
Vitruvius: Your comment about engineers not writing software is so true. I actually made a living in grad school writing software (fortran of course) and I cringe at those programs now. Of course we were under a constraint in regards to the size of the program so if you could use a variable of 1 letter it was useful. In regards to firsts, the first computer I worked on was a good old PDP-8 (yes, they made them that small).
Regards,
John
Depends on the use one has for such an activity, vitruvius. You, obviously, do so, but then, you aren’t a ‘controller’, ie, someone who needs to control. Every post you’ve ever made, every comment, shows that you are not a ‘controller’; you are on the side of reason, evidence and logic and allow these processes to ‘speak for themselves’. With regard to anyone who rejects such, you simply play or ignore…
However, if collation and categorization is used to control the definition of one’s own life, by both oneself AND by others, then, I think it’s a neurosis.
If it’s simply a collation of analyses of a subject(s), that’s different.
I am following the discussion but don’t have the time to contribute, so I come here to pour vitriol on all the climate warmenizers who clearly either (a) cheat or (b) are incompetent/don’t know what they’re doing.
Are you listening Jim Hansen?
Yes, the old 8’s and 11’s were a lot of fun, John, the first Unix I used (in
’74) was on an 11/45, I eventually did some kernel development on it.
But I must note that it is also the case the software developers shouldn’t do engineering. Here are two clauses from our current contract with our customer (redacted for anonimity of course):
2.5: Design Discretion
(a) [Customer] has sole discretion as to the [Domain] engineering best practices for the [Product], and shall be considered the final authority on such matters.
(b) [Developer] has sole discretion as to the computing science and software development details of the design, development, and documentation of the [Product], and shall be considered the final authority on such matters.
PS: Did I mention that I have over 50,000 emails saved and categorized?
Of course, that’s a small portion of the 3,101,310 files on my machine 😉
hey, not fair, Kate. I hadn’t gottent to #128.
Now you’ve spoilt the fun.
So, NASA follows Steve McIntyre.
Massaging data?
No kidding!
A friend of mine pulled seismic boat duty in the Arctic North of Tuk looking for possible oil and gas.
He came back with the story that all the serious theoretical types had calculated the exact cubic inch air gun array they needed to get the proper resolution to find the structure they were looking for.
But, the best laid plans in the office did not get the desired result by a long shot in the field.
This shoot was so important that the President himself was also on the boat, and he demanded satisfaction.
Not a chance. All the fine tuning in geek heaven could not get those air guns to get anything useable.
So I asked my buddy, what did you finally do.
He said the Pres ordered the air guns opened to the max and they blasted away.
The Pres stated, rather matter-of-factly, that sometimes, you just have to throw science out the window to get results.
Now this global warming thingy seems like somebody has invested so much time money and effort in using bad/wrong data that they now refuse to admit it.
Gee, I wonder if there are any environmently friendly jails for these guys, since the science is being corrected and settled by other people now.
If I may interject my small bit of ignorance, since I’m not a scientist or numbers geek, I’ll stick to what I taught my students in grade school.
In science, when you create a model, you must then test it against the real world to find out if your model works.
But, in global warming science, it would seem that you create a model, then you keep tweeking the real world data you collect until it fits nicely into your model. The amount of contortions you go through is immaterial … as long as your model is “shown” to predict future and past events. You do so because you are so convinced that your “model” is correct, that it must be the “real world” data that is corrupt.
In psychology, we’d call that a denial pathology of sorts …
Is there something I’m missing?
FORTRAN, IV, LISP, APL, COBOL, PL1, my goodness I think I’m having flashbacks… Once more this proves that SDA readers have a huge amount of knowledge, experience and not exactly as gullible as the average Gore leftoid.
Ok, I’ll bite. My Fortxx is older than your Fortxx. I was punchcarding Forgo on an IBM 1620 in ’65. Fortran II was the nirvana and WATFOR and IV were still buried at UofW… Damn, I still have the manuals in my study… 🙂 Hey, Nature believes it, so it must be true… After all. all those juried authors can’t be wrong, can they??? Eh???
“good old PDP-8”
Heh. I was cruisin’ along on a PDP-11.
ET, given John Cross’s reply there it would appear your assessment is correct.
John, dude. How many times do they have to -change the data- right before your eyes before you start to wonder if maybe somebody somewhere has motives other than science?
This is the old “how many drops of pee spoil the soup?” question. We’ve been watching this situation deteriorate for quite a while now. They aren’t adding drops John. They’re taking turns standing on the rim of the pot for relief. That ain’t soup no more.
Even though I was only a hardware guy at the time, the Xerox 9700 ‘Laser Printing System’ that I supported was run by a PDP 11/34 and some external h/w that made up the character disptacher/image generator.
It was pretty leading edge stuff at the time.
As for the program tweaking, well, I guess it’s just the SOP in the GW industry now…
Well, Kate did say, Use this one for general comments, so…
I just went into the archives to find a listing from one of the many ca. ’72 Fortran II programs I wrote, to further play this game, and I found — wait for it — a listing of the first program I ever wrote. In October ’71. I had thought the listing was lost.
Oh joy, oh joy, a loved one found (for some value of love). I had not seen this code for over 35 years. I’ve scanned in its three pages, and I’m now going to go make a web page that reproduces the original algorithm (and shows the original page scans).
But wait, there’s more. Here are three lines (punched cards) from the program:
11 FORMAT ('YOU ARE STUPID. IF YOU ARE ADVANCED ENOUGH TO USE A '/ 1'COMPUTER TO CLASSIFY BUTTERFLYS AND YET DO NOT KNOW WHAT A SULFR' 1/' IS GIVE UP.')Well, I was 16 at the time 😉
PS: The 9700 was indeed beautiful, Brian.
I wrote my first Fortran program in 1967 as a learning excercize. (I was a hardware guy at the time)
It was a mortgage amortization program that would calculate total amount of interest over the life of a mortgage. A most useful excercize since I saved thousands of dollars by accelerating my mortgage payout once I found out what a major difference a small increase in monthly payments made.
And I remember when COBOL74 was new,
And how to clear core.
(but by now I forgot why)
It is ever fun thinking back to when we entered the New World. I think with me it was the day my Univercity Prof, (Univ of Guelph 1968) Showed us his new pen that didnt need to be fillied and wrote forever , it seemed. He called it a Brick or something.
With 2/3rds of the earth covered in water, where it seems there are no weather stations, how the hell can we measure global temperatures if we miss 2/3rds of the planet.
First, the Warming-Alarmists fudge the numbers.
Then, they force a more polluting, more expensive fuel on us.
Then, they force us to use toxic, expensive light bulbs.
Can the Fanatics not get anything right?
[A review of the environmental and economic damage caused by growing biofuels was ordered by the UK government today.
Ministers say a number of new studies have emerged recently that question the environmental benefits of such fuels. The government wants to check that UK and European biofuel targets will not cause more problems than they solve.]gaurdian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/21/biofuels.transport/print
[Eco-activist groups, like Environmental Defense — which historically have agitated to banish toxic substances from homes, workplaces and environment — surprisingly have said that the mercury in CFLs is nothing to worry about. But this new posturing flies in the face of the multitude of scary activist-inspired studies that hyperventilate about potential health risks from the slightest exposures to mercury, not to mention a 1987 article in Pediatrics reporting real-life mercury poisoning of a 23-month old from a broken fluorescent light bulb.] Steven Milloy
http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20080221.html
You guys are making me feel like a newbie … and I thank you. I didn’t get started till the mid 70’s. I spent a lot of time in the late 70s and early 80s in the benchmark labs … tuning both SW and HW … back then if you didn’t have a million – you didn’t have a “real” computer …. the 8s and 11s couldn’t handle huge terminal traffic.
IIRC – 5 sec response time was acceptable … 3.5 was the target. At that time 1G of storage was considered a large site.
Vitruvius – do you remember Henry (I think his last name began with W) the data center manager at the U of A back then? I’ll never forget the day he showed me a bunch of IBM drum storage disks he bought … never seen them before or since.
Oh yeah; well I met a guy a few years ago who was STILL programming in an assembly language, and had been doing it since the early 1970’s (over 30 years!). He claimed to love it; and, since the assembler code he wrote was used in things like electric wheelchairs and scooters he was even happier about what he did (they needed compact, very efficient code).
I wrote some FORTRAN as well as some assembly code, and even some lines of machine code, back around 1980 (it was for scientific programs, which had to be really, really efficient). It was fun at the time, but I don’t miss it.
Oooh, we used to dream about assembler.
You tell that to kids today, they won’t believe you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsWd5QC7K5E
I remember fighting for the punch machine which printed the line of code along the card’s top edge, otherwise one had to read the hole patterns if one mixed the cards. And our programs were downloaded to the UVic computer using a predecessor to ftp called Canada Post.
Cheers
The Germans have a new **Super-Computer** ..
*His* name is Eugene. There WILL be an absolute answer. Stay tuned. = TG
The PDP-11 was used for Post editing CMX systems in ~1979. I still have the punch tape game “Star Wars” that ran on the PDP-11.
Given the amount of computer knowledge shown in this thread, why didn’t the Crooked Liberal Party du Canada ask us to set up the gun registry?
Years ago, I told my wife and friends that 5 people or less I know personally, could have created the whole gun registry for $5 or $10 million and saved the feds a billion dollars.
How Ottawa could find such a collection of bungling fools to spend so much money on the gun registry bogles the mind.