climateprediction.net home page
Science and Technology in the News

Science and Technology in the News

Message boards : climateprediction.net Science : Science and Technology in the News
Message board moderation

To post messages, you must log in.

AuthorMessage
Profile Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl ...
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 17 Aug 04
Posts: 289
Credit: 44,103,664
RAC: 0
Message 40855 - Posted: 14 Oct 2010, 8:22:16 UTC

.


this project might help scientists better understand the climate of the past

The newest citizen science project from the Galaxy Zoo team lets the public travel back in time and join the crews of over 280 different World War I royal navy warships. While an engaging historical journey, the project will help scientists better understand the climate of the past. There are gaps in weather and climate data records, particularly before 1920, prior to when weather station observations were accurately recorded. But old naval ships routinely recorded the weather they encountered – marking down temperatures and conditions even while in battle. The information in many of these weather logbooks has not been utilized – until now, as the “Old Weather” project has made its debut as the newest way for the public to contribute in scientific research...

read more here ...

http://www.universetoday.com/75640/new-galaxy-zoo-project-crowd-sources-old-climate-data/
ID: 40855 · Report as offensive     Reply Quote
Profile Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl ...
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 17 Aug 04
Posts: 289
Credit: 44,103,664
RAC: 0
Message 40916 - Posted: 26 Oct 2010, 13:34:04 UTC
Last modified: 26 Oct 2010, 13:34:43 UTC

P ≠ NP? It's bad news for the power of computing ?

Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August 2010, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sent out draft copies of a paper titled simply "P ≠ NP".

This terse assertion could have profound implications for the ability of computers to solve many kinds of problem. It also answers one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's seven Millennium Prize problems, so if it turns out to be correct Deolalikar will have earned himself a prize of $1 million.

The P versus NP question concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a number. Some tasks can be completed reasonably quickly – in technical terms, the running time is proportional to a polynomial function of the input size – and these tasks are in class P.

read more ... here
ID: 40916 · Report as offensive     Reply Quote
Profile Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl ...
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 17 Aug 04
Posts: 289
Credit: 44,103,664
RAC: 0
Message 40917 - Posted: 26 Oct 2010, 15:11:32 UTC

US approves world’s biggest solar energy project in California

The U.S. Department of Interior approved on Monday a permit for Solar Millennium, LLC to build the largest solar energy project in the world — four plants at the cost of one billion dollars each — in southern California.

The project is expected to generate up to 1,000 Megawatts of energy, enough electricity to annually power more than 300,000 single-family homes, more than doubling the solar electricity production capacity of the U.S.

Once constructed, the Blythe facility will reduce CO2 emissions by nearly one million short tons per year, or the equivalent of removing more than 145,000 cars from the road. Additionally, because the facility is “dry-cooled,” it will use 90 percent less water than a traditional “wet-cooled” solar facility of this size. The Blythe facility will also help California take a major step toward achieving its goal of having one third of the state’s power come from renewable sources by the year 2020.

The entire Blythe Solar Power Project will generate a total of more than 7,500 jobs, including 1,000 direct jobs during the construction period, and thousands of additional indirect jobs in the community and throughout the supply chain. When the 1,000 MW facility is fully operational it will create more than 220 permanent jobs.

Adapted from materials provided by Solar Millennium, LLC.

read more here ...

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101025007018/en/Solar-Trust-America-Clears-Final-Regulatory-Hurdle
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101025007018/en/Solar-Trust-America-Clears-Final-Regulatory-Hurdle
ID: 40917 · Report as offensive     Reply Quote
Profile tullio

Send message
Joined: 6 Aug 04
Posts: 264
Credit: 965,476
RAC: 0
Message 40926 - Posted: 27 Oct 2010, 7:54:01 UTC - in response to Message 40917.  

This is an example of the solar thermodynamic process which has been pioneered in Italy by the Nobel prize winner Carlo Rubbia. But he could not find any support in Italy and went to Spain.
Tullio
ID: 40926 · Report as offensive     Reply Quote
Profile Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl ...
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 17 Aug 04
Posts: 289
Credit: 44,103,664
RAC: 0
Message 40927 - Posted: 27 Oct 2010, 20:45:56 UTC

Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues

Why can't we have a civil conversation about climate ?

By Michael D. Lemonick

In Brief

If people and governments are going to take serious action to reduce carbon emissions, the time pretty much has to be now, because any delay will make efforts to stave off major changes more difficult and expensive to achieve.

In the wake of “Climategate” and attacks on policy makers, the public is more confused than ever about what to think, particularly when it comes to talk of uncertainty in climate science.

Climate policy is stalled.The public needs to understand that scientific uncertainty is not the same thing as ignorance, but rather it is a discipline for quantifying what is unknown.

Climate scientists need to do a better job of communicating uncertainty to the public and responding to criticism from outsiders.



In trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon, it is tempting to default to one of two comfortable and familiar story lines.

For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics. But over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black­board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points—and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.”

She reserves her harshest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For most climate scientists the major reports issued by the United Nations–sponsored body every five years or so constitute the consensus on climate science. Few scientists would claim the IPCC is perfect, but Curry thinks it needs thoroughgoing reform. She accuses it of “corruption.” “I’m not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC,” she says, “because I think I don’t have confidence in the process.”

Whispered discreetly at conferences or in meeting rooms, these claims might be accepted as part of the frequently contentious process of a still evolving area of science. Stated publicly on some of the same Web sites that broke the so-called Climategate e-mails last fall, they are considered by many to be a betrayal, earning Curry epithets from her colleagues ranging from “naive” to “bizarre” to “nasty” to worse.

All of which sets up the two competing story lines, which are, on the surface at least, equally plausible. The first paints Curry as a peacemaker—someone who might be able to restore some civility to the debate and edge the public toward meaningful action. By frankly acknowledging mistakes and encouraging her colleagues to treat skeptics with respect, she hopes to bring about a meeting of the minds.

The alternative version paints her as a dupe—someone whose well-meaning efforts have only poured fuel on the fire. By this account, engaging with the skeptics is pointless because they cannot be won over. They have gone beyond the pale, taking their arguments to the public and distributing e-mails hacked from personal computer accounts rather than trying to work things out at conferences and in journal papers.

read more here ...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-heretic&sc=WR_20101027
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-heretic&sc=WR_20101027

ID: 40927 · Report as offensive     Reply Quote
Profile Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl ...
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 17 Aug 04
Posts: 289
Credit: 44,103,664
RAC: 0
Message 41095 - Posted: 19 Nov 2010, 15:46:41 UTC




How Can Warming Cause Colder Winters ?

It may sound pretty crazy at first, but that's because we give the wrong name to what really is going on around us. Our changing climate isn't all about temperatures.

Several new studies -- most recently that of physicist Vladimir Petoukhov and colleagues in Germany and Russia, reporting in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- have been pointing to a warming Arctic to explain recent severely cold winters in the Northern Hemisphere.

climate isn't all about temperatures.

SEE ALSO: Warmer Arctic Spells Colder Winters

Warming temperatures may be at the root of it all -- on a planetary scale -- but where the changes hit the pavement on a regional scale, where you and I live, it is not necessarily the warming that we are going to remember.

Like a furniture mover running amok in a comfortable room, temperature changes are rearranging important features of our climate system -- altering patterns of cloudiness, for instance, as well as ocean currents, glaciers and ice caps. Most important for the Northern Hemisphere's winters is the loss of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean.

SEE ALSO: Winter Outlook: Wet, Cool Northwest, Dry Southeast

What happens in Las Vegas may stay in Las Vegas, as they say, but this definitely is not true of the Arctic. Instead of the sunlight bouncing off the bright sea ice and reflecting back into space, the exposed ocean now absorbs its warmth -- changing not just the temperature of the water but the circulation of the atmosphere above it.

Read More here ...

http://news.discovery.com/earth/inside-the-cold-winter-paradox.html
http://news.discovery.com/earth/inside-the-cold-winter-paradox.html
ID: 41095 · Report as offensive     Reply Quote

Message boards : climateprediction.net Science : Science and Technology in the News

©2024 climateprediction.net