Category Archives: Global Warming

My New Boat, HMS Laconia, Citizen Science, and Global Warming

What do you think of my new boat? You have to admit it is pretty nice. It is the HMS Laconia a former passenger liner turned armed merchantmen built in the early 1900’s.

Photo fromOldWeather.Org

It’s a little big to launch a lake for bass fishing and it probably doesn’t have a live well for the fish we’d catch anyway. HMS Laconia is a little pretentious for a fishing boat anyway.

It does have a Dining Saloon however. I don’t know if chicken fried steak is on the menu or not.

It doesn’t matter because it was sunk by the German submarine, U 50, pictured below six miles off Fastnet, which I think is an island just of the southern Irish coast on 25 February 1917.

 (subsim.com) (I am not actually sure this is the right U50. There were three U50’s in World War I and one more in World War II).

Oh well, it would have been fun.

Why am I calling this boat mine? I found the coolest thing on the internet, second only to geocaching. It is called OldWeather.Org. It is a citizen science project to transcribe the old log books from all sorts of British Ships from the early part of the century and you can browse this site to know more about it. The books were written by hand in handwriting that is almost as bad as mine so they cannot just  scan them into the computer. They need people to transcribe them.

It’s easy and fun and doesn’t cost anything. They give you templates and instructions on where to enter the date and the location of the ship as wells as water, air, and dew point temperatures, wind speed, and direction, and sea state. Plus you can read the log pages as your ship goes into and out of ports and loads and unloads stuff. It really is fascinating. When they started the project they had a total of 750,000 log pages they need transcribed.  They also have other links involving citizen science if you want to do something else.

What is this data used for? It is for climate research to help calibrate and validate the weather models being developed today to help scientists determine just what affects are climate and how much. They didn’t have the network of weather stations back then with weather satellites. Plus Al Gore hadn’t been born yet and so they didn’t have the internet, that he built, to link all the data together. (Yeah I know, he never claimed that he built the internet.)
Go to OldWeather.Org to see how to get started.

Below is a video from their tutorial section to show how to get started.

Old Weather – Getting Started from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.

So what do you think? Give it a go. Don’t tell me you don’t have the time. You wouldn’t be reading this if you were busy.

Global Warming and Me

I’ve been following the global warming controversy for some time. I think in the early 1980’s I saw my first graph of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere vs time and accompanying graphs of average surface temperatures over time. The trend started up in the late 1800’s following the advent of the industrial age.
(Note the above graphs and all the rest of the images, unless otherwise stated, are from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change web site.)
I was interested but not too concerned. The issue got another lift when former Senator Gore became a spokesman and helped put out the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” I didn’t really listen to him. Sorry, I didn’t care for him, so I didn’t listen to his message.
Then as the issue developed further Oklahoma’s own Senator Jim Inhofe came out with his message that global warming is just a big hoax. Of course, why scientists would perpetrate the hoax is not explained.
The whole time I was sitting back and just reading and pondering, but I was wasn’t reading and pondering very deeply. My position was that Earth may or may not be warming but it might be due to natural cycles beyond our control. I go to lots of energy industry conferences and stuff and since weather is vitally important to our business for a number of reasons I have many meterologists talk about weather patterns. They all acknowledged that the Earth is warming up, but they also said that they thought it inconclusive about whether humans are causing the warming up by our emissions of greenhouse gasses.
But now we are getting to the point where the USA and the rest of the world are talking about spending some serious money on the issue. Hundred of billions of dollars. Hey that wakes me up.
So I decided that it is time for Yogi to take a stand on this issue. The issue has become so polarizing though that it is hard to find non-biased sources. I’m an engineer and prefer arguments based on science, facts, and logic. I am also not a conspiracy theorist. So where do I start.
As luck would have I received the Winter 2010 Issue of “The Bent” which is an engineering honorary society (Tau Beta Pi) journal. There was an article in it Alan S. Brown who is a science writer. The article is “Climate Models and Their Critics.” (The article is not available online as far as I can tell.)
Climate models are very important because we cannot model the Earth in a laboratory. We have to model the weather.  The models are very complex and have to take many factors into account. One simulation can take months to run on the most modern supercomputers. The models have got tremendously better over time but they are still approximate. All models are approximate so criticizing a model because it is not exact doesn’t make sense to me.
Mr. Brown references the Intergovernmenal Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”). It is an international scientific body that that reviews climate research. Check it out I think they are solid. They won a 2007 Nobel Prize for their work on climate change. Their web site is amazing. They summarize findings from lots and lots of research. It is all foot noted and documented.
Here are some of their conclusions from the “Summary for Policymakers” from their last report.
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is
now evident from observations of increases in global
average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting
of snow and ice and rising global average sea level”
Further:
“Observational evidence4 from all continents and most
oceans shows that many natural systems are being
affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature
increases.”
And:
“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures
since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the
observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.
7 It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic
warming over the past 50 years averaged over
each continent (except Antarctica)”
“Continued GHG emissions at or above current rates
would cause further warming and induce many changes
in the global climate system during the 21st century that
would very likely be larger than those observed during
the 20th century”
I could go on and on but I’ll just cut to the chase and say I am now a believer in the concept of human activity causing climate change by causing increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
So what does that mean? Nope I am not jumping over to the Democratic Party. The country still needs to evaluate what needs to be done about the problem. The proposed solutions are very expensive and need to evaluated on their own merit. For example I am totally against giving China 2 cents to help them solve their problems
So what about you, have you taken a stand on this issue yet? What is it?