Google Earth Engine To Provide Climate Change Data 107
Meshach tips news that Google has unveiled Google Earth Engine, "a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data — current and historical — online for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment." They're also "donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities."
It seems like a good idea now... (Score:2)
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Ion Cannon Detected (Score:2)
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And Microsoft has a nuke. Is MS run by Kane? :D
White mice? (Score:2)
Response of a Real American(TM) (Score:5, Funny)
"Science" is baloney. It's just the government's way of trying to keep us in line.
The dodo bird never existed, it was made up by special interests.
The carrier pigeon was also a massive work of fiction.
The tropical jungles were never a huge as historians say they were.
The climate isn't getting warmer. And if it were getting warmer (which it isn't), it would be because of something completely unrelated to the activity of people.
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f*ckin' magnets...
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How do they work?
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No no the melting ice is what's causing the cooling, that's why it's been so cold the last few winters, duh. Just like ice melting in your drink, it cools stuff down.
I'd guess the ice started melting because it's been sitting there a really long time, again like the ice in your drink. Either that or Al Gore's house caused it.
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Global warming is part of a machiavellian plot by...by...someone...who wants to make Alaska closer to habitable...
If Alaska had more electoral votes, think about who would have a better chance of getting elected President.
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Data from this is gonna be damn accurate since most part of the climate change comes from Google datacenters chugging away to provide climate change data.
2010 in top three warmest years (Score:2)
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That's good to know as I sit freezing in my apartment, the entire country covered in as much snow as we had in 1965.
Are you really dumb enough to think that's a relevant argument, or am I giving you too much credit for thinking about the relevance of your arguments at all?
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Ah, I see my latter guess was correct. Thanks for confirming.
reading between the lines (Score:2)
Does GEE only provide *access* or does it also provide *the data and tools* for download/mail order?
Science is about repeatability. There is *zero* point in doing any kind of scientific calculations on data that is not public, and using specialized analysis software that can't be audited and rerun or re-analyzed years from now.
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The analytical methods are published. The code is often unpublished, but there's limited benefit to publishing the code for purposes of validating their findings -- you shouldn't reuse the same code, lest you include a systematic error. You should have new code that performs the same documented methods.
If your complaint is that it requires being a scientist in the field to have the knowledge necessary to reproduce a scientific result, then that's true.
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Without these two requirements, the analysis of data is merely a black box with untrusted inputs, and therefore untrusted outputs.
Your point that two independent scient
Economic Darwinism is a good thing (Score:2)
Yes, thank you Google for reducing taxpayer burden by eliminating jobs that are no longer necessary due to technological advances and automation.
Nobody has a right to have their industry protected from modernization. Or should we be subsidizing wainwrights who were put out of business by the invention of that newfangled device the "horseless carriage?"
Very important to include the time dimension (Score:2)
When visualizing global environment metrics, it is crucial to be able to see time-lapse imagery/maps.
For example, it would be very illuminating to see a time-lapse of forest cover globally over the last
1000 years. This would allow us to properly gauge human impact on forest eco-systems.
The older data would have to be created from approximations based on historical anecdote, the mid-twentieth
century data from paper maps in government offices, and the recent stuff from satellite imagery.
But putting it all tog
Empty bellies don't care about deforestation (Score:1)
The best way of preventing deforestation is to make sure the local people can feed themselves, and they are rich enough to start caring for their forests themselves.
Anything else will feed corruption and poverty.
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Re:Raw data, or "adjusted"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And can you blame them for using confusing quantifiers when CPU time is donated to them in hours per year?
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Hardly. Those strawmen are recycled and burned over and over again.
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What are you talking about?
Canadians have nothing to do with this.
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I guess he's referring to this [wikipedia.org].
Re:Raw data, or "adjusted"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds great, but is the climate data going to be massaged first to make the early 20th century colder, and the late 20th century warmer?
I am sure it will - just waiting for the Drudge Report to tell me so! The argument that there's a giant conspiracy to concoct logical arguments and huge amounts of data in support of a theory that is bad news for everyone makes much more sense than the idea that the activities of billions of humans could ever influence the environment.
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Yea, we should just ignore the evidence that suggests the warming would occur even if humans never existed, like every other cycle in the past where this exact same thing has happened.
What exactly happened? Did it just warm because that's what "it" does?
Re:Raw data, or "adjusted"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Newsflash - all data is "massaged". It's either normalized, scrubbed of data by faulty measurements and of outliers, corrected for systematic errors, etc. No one works with raw data, because there is often so much noise in data that it is impossible to compare it to anything else.
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Re:Raw data, or "adjusted"? (Score:4, Informative)
No one works with raw data, because there is often so much noise in data that it is impossible to compare it to anything else.
Incorrect - and there's no reason the data provided can't be raw data either.
In the sense of climate data, we wouldn't throw out 1 value because it seemed "Off" -
when you WORK with the raw data, like making a report, THATS when you filter out the noise and outlying results.
But to say that you don't work with the raw data is just silly. The filtering is the work!
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By that definition, yes, you do work with raw data. But you don't analyze the data for what it says about a given theory, you analyze it for internal errors.
And no, the filtering is not The Work. It is part of it. The valuable work is figuring out what the data means in the context of various theories. And for that, you need to filter first.
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I'm sure then they can adequately explain why there's an overabundance of heat island station readings, while scrubbing any and all non-island readings, or 'country' readings.
But when you do science like that it sure makes for some pretty scary stuff. Wow look, you've just managed to raise the temperature by 3-6C
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Incidently Anthony Watts response to this evidence was to issue a false DCMA notice against the video.
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If you can't quantify your noise then you have no data. In other words every adjustment you make has to have a justification that can be proven, otherwise you're fabricating your result. You know, like when you adjust all the data by adding a line with a slope of .01 centered on 1960, the result is total bullshit but sure supports the sky is falling message.
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Except when the result is confirmed by other scientists working independently, utilizing different methods of analysis. Which is the case here.
Also, never use the word "proven" when referring to science. It only shows that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the scientific method works or even what science sets out to do. Science sets out to gather data upon which conclusions regarding the validity of a hypothesis can be made. "Proof" only exists in math and formal logic. Not science.
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Also, never use the word "proven" when referring to science. It only shows that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the scientific method works or even what science sets out to do. Science sets out to gather data upon which conclusions regarding the validity of a hypothesis can be made. "Proof" only exists in math and formal logic. Not science.
Who was Al Gore supporting when he said "The debate is over?"
Re:Raw data, or "adjusted"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonetheless, I suspect that you really have no interest in understanding the underlying arguments -- because it would be too threatening to you.
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If the best prediction of scientists right now is that the globe is warming to a level that will cause global calamity, then maybe we need climate change legislation. But if it can be shown that the models are wrong, we should be ready to get rid of climate change legislation. (Gore doesn't want that, beca
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Working independently? Are you aware that there are only three global temperature records and that the people who maintain them have been shown to collaborate to ensure that the same message is presented? Never heard of the whole "climategate" scandal?
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I'm not Anthony Watts' mother, so I couldn't tell you anything about his work. I'm pointing out that GISTEMP has unexplained modifications that exaggerate the observed warming. I.e. Hansen, Jones and Mann do poor work and fabricate results.
Please provide a citation to papers that do the work you describe in your post. Additionally ensure that these papers start with raw data, explain any adjustments they make, and provide their methods so they can be reproduced. Because it's pretty hard to make any argument
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Just out of curiosity, what do you think of Hansen, Jones and Mann's refutations of such allegations?
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Negative ghost rider. Science doesn't work by "reconfirmation" - it works by attempts at falsification. If your theory is "all swans are white", then finding 10,000, or 100,000, or a million swans doesn't make your theory any better. Trying *really* hard to find just *one* black swan is what really counts.
How many scientists in the AGW business have *tried* to fal
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How many scientists in the AGW business have *tried* to falsify their hypothesis? How many of them have looked for data that would confound their theory? How many have ever said, "if you observe X, Y, and Z, I'm wrong"?
All of them.
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Name a single one, and give me their "if you observe X, Y and Z I'm wrong" quote.
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Seriously, your best argument is "you go first"?
The skeptics aren't postulating an explanation for every observed variation in climate or temperature. The burden of proof is in the affirmative. Just because I'm saying that you can't predict the future doesn't mean that I'm saying that I can.
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Seriously, your best argument is "you go first"?
Beats your "it's not science because I say so" any time.
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My assertion is that it's not science unless someone is putting forth a falsifiable hypothesis. This isn't "because I say so", this is simply the definition of the scientific method. Whether or not you believe that or not is up to you, but "you go first" is a non-argument, a childhood schoolyard taunt, not a rationale for refuting someone's assertion.
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You're misunderstanding again - being skeptical of a proposition (such as catastrophic anthropogenic global warming), does not mean you have a proposition to replace it with. The burden of proof lies with the affirmative.
Furthermore, no matter how many other theories you falsify, their falsification doesn't make your theory true. The strength of your theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming depends on first, it's ability to be falsified, and second, the failure of purposeful attempts to falsify
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So then, is your position that we have man-made global warming, and this warming is going to be benign?
Unless AGW is going to be catastrophic, there's no reason to try to mitigate it.
If you want fewer straw men, stake out a real position for yourself instead of having me define you :)
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catastrophic
adjective
the losses were catastrophic: disastrous, calamitous, cataclysmic, apocalyptic, ruinous, tragic, fatal, dire, awful, terrible, dreadful.
Why should we be using less oil to prevent global warming that is not catastrophic? If sea levels aren't going to rise at dangerous rates, and if droughts and floods aren't going to get worse, what is the whole point of trying to keep plant food at less than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere?
Whether or not oil will run out anyway is besides the p
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catastrophic |katsträfik|
adjective
1 involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering : a catastrophic earthquake.
involving a sudden and large-scale alteration in the state of something : the body undergoes catastrophic collapse toward the state of a black hole.
of or relating to geological catastrophism.
2 extremely unfortunate or unsuccessful : catastrophic mismanagement of the economy.
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That an assertion, not a fact. There is no evidence at all that by driving up petroleum prices today and reducing consumption that we would avoid "fixing" anything in the future. This is a particularly weak assertion if the things we need to "fix" are non-catastrophic. That's a particularly poor strawman, and you know it :)
Now, for energy efficiency, I'm all for that, but remember, the more efficient we get, the more energy we use overall - we open up cheap energy to more people, who use it more efficien
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Statistics are "massaged". Data is data. I work in mining in Canada, like Steve McIntyre. In promoting a prospective mine in Canada, you are required to make everything available. The original notes written when a drill core comes up, the method used to split the core, the numbers from the ICP that are used to come up with an assay (including calibration and calculation methods). Everything. Even the remnant samples must be archived for potential independent verification. Th
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Let me ask you this: when you present your assessment of a prospective mine, do you only attach the raw data? Of course not. You present data in a format that makes your conclusion easy to understand. In other words, it's been massaged.
Now, is it important that the raw data is made available? Of course. Is it important that the massaging is sensible and intelligible? Of course. But this mantra of "show us the raw data" is complete straw man when it comes to cflimate research - because the raw data is availa
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You just have to do what they did: Contact all the same stations that originally observed the data, ask them for their raw data, and rebuild the CRU's raw data set.
The CRU is under no obligation (and it may even be illegal for them) to redistribute the raw data without the permission of the scientific entities that collected the data in the first place.
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Except they don't know all the stations that they contacted. They simply don't have a list of the sources of all their raw data, which means their starting point simply cannot be recreated- there is missing information.
Now, if they had a definitive list of all the stations they ever got data from, and all the values they threw away, or adjusted,
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To use a local colloquialism: That dog won't hunt.
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The climategate inquiries were hardly independent, and have been critiqued as fairly shallow whitewashes in detail:
http://thegwpf.org/gwpf-reports/1531-the-climategate-inquries.html [thegwpf.org]
If you're not willing to see, it doesn't matter if you look.
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I think you mean news for nerds, not news for morons that fall for falsified data.
Re:Raw data, or "adjusted"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point. I've fallen for falsified data before. Thankfully I was able to recognize evidence to the contrary and realize the weakness of my position. I now no longer count myself religious.
Now I just try to follow the evidence where it goes, even if it sometimes makes me re-think my positions. I recommend you try to do the same. It's scary, yet somehow liberating.
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Consensus among climate scientists: "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.....There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming."
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There's a much better chance that the scientists actually know what they're talking about.
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Especially the "consensus" around gravity. Hah! Intelligent falling is where it's at!
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Anyone that tells you that there's no consensus in science has never cracked open a text book.