Captain Bligh's Logbooks To Yield Climate Bounty 232
Pickens writes "The BBC reports that researchers are digitizing the captains' logs from the voyages of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle, Captain Cook from HMS Discovery, Captain Bligh from The Bounty, and 300 other 18th and 19th century ships' logbooks to provide historical climate records for modern-day climate researchers who will use the meteorological data to build up a picture of weather patterns in the world at the beginning of the industrial era. The researchers are cross-referencing the data with historical records for crop failures, droughts and storms and will compare it with data for the modern era in order to predict similar events in the future. 'The observations from the logbooks on wind force and weather are astonishingly good and often better than modern logbooks,' says Climatologist Dr. Dennis Wheeler from the University of Sunderland. 'Of course the sailors had to be conscientious. The thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right!' The logbooks will be online next year at the UK's National Archives."
the little ice age (Score:1, Interesting)
didn't the little ice age end last century? that means the world is supposed to be warming unless the ice age temperatures are considered normal?
Re:Bligh was a genius (Score:5, Interesting)
All rational research points out that he was no worse than the average captain. There are multiple reasons we remember him as being evil, but all stem from the fact that Fletcher Christian's family was reasonably well off, and was able to pull off one heckuva PR campaign against him. Bring that through to modern times when people used that telling to create movies, and the idea of Bligh as a despot is cemented.
In addition to all (save one) of the mutineers being killed violently by their brethren, let us also remember the 250 years of child rape perpetrated on Pitcairn Island.
Re:Shhh! (Score:2, Interesting)
I like how a less than one degree of change over the past 200 years is clearly not normal. What's even more interesting is that pro-global warming charts only go back 200 years or so (some go back 500 years). And not say...back past 10,000 years ago. Which was the end of the last ice age. Of which there have been many.
I'm not going to go so far as to say with 100% certainty that mankind isn't responsible for any of the warming. However, until you (and pro-global warming people like you) even acknowledge that the planet changes its temperate most of the time, I just can't take you seriously.
Re:In before the global warming discussion (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, some evidence of hurricane patterns [wikipedia.org] is from Spanish records of ships in the Caribbean from 1500 to 1600.
Re:Shhh! (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you got the wrong end of the stick there; they weren't claiming such data doesn't exist. They were pointing out that "pro-climate change people" tend to use graphs that only show the last few hundred years, because when you look at graphs that go back a significant period of time the current warming trend suddenly stops looking abnormal and alarming.
Re:In before the global warming discussion (Score:1, Interesting)
We're now going to use completely unscientific accounts from long ago
How are Royal Navy log books "completely unscientific"? The age-of-sail professional navies had a paramount interest in accurate weather recording and prediciton. The men doing the measurement and recording had an even greater personal interest in maximal accuracy.
The tools used were standardized throughout the organization and improved using feedback from ships encountering the whole gamut of weather conditions. There were no agenda to skew the weather data from reality.
I'm sure you do not understand what "scientific" means. You are confusing it with TV-induced fantasies.
Re:We'll only read about it if they support AGW (Score:1, Interesting)
For the last decade there has been no global warming, at all, while producing more CO2 than ever. During that decade we have taken measurements with the goal of testing global warming, and found none. These measurements are taken from all over the world, and are the most accurate and analyzable (for sources of error, etc.) that we have or will have. The have uncovered _global cooling_.
Scientifically, this _necessarily_ throws global warming into serious doubt. The assertion that global warming exists cannot be made without correcting the errors in the old GW model to properly align with our current observations. The idea that some old temperature logs made with an uncalibrated thermometer by someone without a particular interest in accuracy could overshadow careful modern measurements is a sick joke.
The real deniers at this point are the ones that insist that global warming is a fact.
Re:Bligh was a genius (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that the Christian Family were reasonably well off and more than that, Bligh managed not only to inspire his men to munity against his command of the Bounty, he also caused the colony he was sent to govern to rise up in armed rebellion [wikipedia.org]. The real question is not whether Bligh was despotic or not, it's why the British authorities saw fit to appoint a man, who had proven himself a singuarly ungifted commander, to be the governor of it's most far flung colony. If you were on a board of directors, would you appoint the CEO of one of your failed subsidiaries to the same position in the principal company?
You'd think that after 1775 they would have realised that the heavy handed approach to colonial government wasn't going to work. OTOH the choice of Bligh's successor (Lachlan Macquarie) shows that maybe, just maybe, London did learn that appointing a talentless despot like Bligh to a position of authority had been dumb move.
Still, I did enjoy your revisionism quite a bit. It would be amusing to see you try to save ... I dunno ... say Saddam Hussein's reputation. If you are feeling up for the challenge that is. ;)
The Odyssy of Odysseus (Score:3, Interesting)
Quality of data ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of the old data can be of great quality - so these exercises can be highly useful.
A couple of decades ago, I worked - as a student intern - at British institution. A question came in on wave heights in the North Sea ... a firm was wondering about engineering tolerances for oil rigs and such. I had to go to the data: much from the last few decades was already computerized and I did a quite stats analysis - and was surprised at how many BIG waves were observed. This would be very costly to the rig builders ... so I was told to go and re-sift the recent data and dig up older data. The recent data sift yielded the same output. The old data ... going back to the 1700s ... showed the same statistical patterns (so long as you squinted at it a bit - the responsible sailors either were not at sea and certainly were not taking measurements in big storms, or didn't get to survive). The outcome was - as I recall - that in this particular spot of the North Sea, you'd see a wave (or cluster of waves) over 40' high every two or so months.
The reason for the tight correlation, of course, is that the data was being taken the same way: sextants and the like, with data literally tabulated by hand: and - registered vessels had someone on board whose job it was to take and log the data - it wasn't something done ad hoc. The systemic errors were consistent for two-plus centuries. Data since the 1980s is automated and since the 1990s is from satellite maps.