Bishop Hill New historic temp series
Oct 13, 2010 Climate: Surface There is a new historic temperature series available. There is a small problem though: the data is all handwritten. Volunteers are therefore being sought to translate the data into machine readable formats.
World War One ships chart past climate
The public are being asked to revisit the voyages of World War One Royal Navy warships to help scientists working on a JISC project to understand the climate of the past and unearth new historical information.
Visitors to OldWeather.org, which launches today (12 October 2010), will be able to retrace the routes taken by any of 280 Royal Navy ships including historic vessels such as HMS Caroline, the last survivor of the 1916 Battle of Jutland still afloat.
The naval logbooks contain a treasure trove of information but because the entries are handwritten they are incredibly difficult for a computer to read. By getting an army of online human volunteers to retrace these voyages and transcribe the information recorded by British sailors we can relive both the climate of the past and key moments in naval history.
Reader Comments (29)
They should talk to the Re-captcha peeps. Tis a very clever distributed transcription process.
Hope they have some good quality control methods in place. I mean honestly, what could go wrong if the alarmists get involved on a big way?
Mailman
Very nifty project. I wish them the best, especially since it will be an auditing nightmare.
I got a creepy feeling about this project.
I couldn't put my finger on why. In any other subject I would love this - people helping each other, volunteering, finding out about history, about ships, about explorers. Blue Peter stuff.
But the C word killed all enthusiasm for me. Then I found this page which confirmed my fears:
Why Scientists Need You
Depends on what you understand by the word "understand". Just cataloging and labelling past weather is not the same as understanding it. To a scientist, "understanding" something means that you know the reason why something happened and can predict when and where it will happen again.
This is the fundamental problem with "climate science": they approached the subject like botanists - they thought that they could just look at more and more data and maybe draw some graphs and this would osmotically lead to understanding and predictive powers.
Their Philip Brohan spills the beans:
Sorry, dude. You can reshape the wooden headphones and build another bamboo control tower - but the
planes aren't gonna land.
How were the data gathered? Were there any coal fire smokestacks, nearby, on these dreadnoughts? At what part of the ship were the data collected, for'd, aft, amidships, and in what direction was the wind blowing, if any, and were the data collected on the windward or leeward side, and did this change with wind direction?
Anthony Watts has unearthed enough anomalies with land sites, so what hope have we got for data collected on moving targets?
If they manage to extract trends of better precision than ± 5° C/decade I will be amazed!
"Hope they have some good quality control methods in place. I mean honestly, what could go wrong if the alarmists get involved on a big way?"
Oct 13, 2010 at 9:45 PM | Mailman
It'll be a damn sight worse if the gullible oil shills grab it. Most of those guys are trying to convince people that AGW isn't happening. History will look back on them in horror and disgust.
Related project here:
http://www.corral.org.uk/Home
learnt about the logs on this site and decided to join in, after a couple of hours of filling in, came back to this site to review what is being said. frankly i'm appalled at quotes from both sides of the argument about the veracity of input by individuals which leaves me pitying the critics involved.
Zed,
What are we going to do?
How do we stop global industrialisation and development? Not just in China and India and Brazil and Russia, but everywhere else that it is gathering industrial momentum. Because this will outpace Western CO2 emissions, reductions included. Not to mention generating vast amounts of black and brown carbon and sulphate aerosols.
And we cannot do anything about it.
The forces that history records are monsters that we create but do not control.
Have a moment of existential terror. Ask yourself why you bother commenting here or anywhere else. You suggest that there are many here who are fringe nutters but you keep coming back to attack them.
Why?
Future climate change will have nothing to do with you, me, this blog or failed Western talking shops and the delusion of future global influence that they project. And which you adopt as your raison d'etre.
If you believe that climate catastrophe is in the post, then why not devote your energies to formulating adaption strategies? Or devising a virus that will solve the problem by other means?
You are clever and committed, but literally pointless.
What really annoys me about this is the grandstanding. For some time there has been a project using the records of National. Maritime Museum Greenwich to build up from ships logs, chiefly RN but also from HM packets on the Halifax run from the 1760's onward, to assemble an account of the weather en voyage especially in respect of the southernmost extent of the Arctic ice. This is a massive project which will tell us much but is unlikely to be completed for another 20 years.
Given Wegman is this plagiarism or what?
Kindest Regards
BBD
The best way for dealing with stray trolls is to ignore them. Unlike stray cats and dogs, you do not want to encourage them with kind words, treats or anything of the kind as if they move in and they will prove to be unruly, not house broken and generally fractious. Since the local pounds do not accept stray trolls, you are left with few other options. Ignore them and they generally go away, although this one has been persistent, I will agree. We tried to get him for Troll Training with a Troll Whisperer, but it apparently did not work.
this is in australia's quadrant mag today:
14 Oct: Quadrant: BOM loses rainfall
by Tom Quirk
In the last two years some 900 mm of rainfall have been removed from the rainfall record of the Murray-Darling Basin. This startling discovery was made by comparing the annual Murray-Darling Basin rainfall reported on the Bureau of Meteorology website in August 2008 and the same report found yesterday.
The annual rainfall figures are shown as reported in October 2010 (GRAPH)..
The comparison with the August 2008 report is revealing. The difference is a decrease of 900 mm rainfall in the 2010 report.
The significant decrease occurs after 1948..(GRAPH)
The Bureau is already on record adjusting Australian temperature measurements and they now appear to have turned to rainfall, making the last 60 years drier than previously reported.
One can understand that adjustments might be made to a few of the most recent years as records are brought up to date but a delay of forty or fifty years seems a little long.
This raises the question how certain is the data that is used by policy makers?
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/10/bom-loses-rainfall
Since the value of the number 2 has changed over the years since WWI, I am sure the recorded values will require "adjustment".
just for a laugh, am posting this preposterous Louise Gray headline:
13 Oct: UK Telegraph: Britons use three times the planet's resources
People in Britain are consuming three times the resources than the planet can provide, according to a new study.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8061709/Britons-use-three-times-the-planets-resources.html
crosspatch@5:16,
Yes, those variable constants can be tricky, can't they? The Jargon file described it well - Pi = 3, for small values of Pi, and large values of 3.
:)
The quality of any data produced by this exercise, would depend entirely on the subsequent adjustments, that are always necessary to produced the desired results
I signed up to it and transcribed a couple of log pages. The number of serious problems I encountered doing that little makes me think they will have to get each page independently transcribed three or more times and then compared. The handwriting is simply awful. I did one entire page wondering why the air temperature was 30 degrees cooler than the water temperature before I realized the person making the log entries wrote his 7s so they looked exactly like 4s. I never did make sense of his notations for wind direction so I left them blank.
BTW all temperatures are recorded to the nearest degree, which is fair, but I shall be interested so see how many decimal places appear in any reported results.
The QA effort on this stuff is going to be simply huge. It is not going to be done for free, so I wonder how it can ever be done at all. Interesting and potentially worthwhile, but not very promising.
@ Pat
just for a laugh, am posting this preposterous Louise Gray headline:
13 Oct: UK Telegraph: Britons use three times the planet's resources
People in Britain are consuming three times the resources than the planet can provide, according to a new study.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8061709/Britons-use-three-times-the-planets-resources.html
This is old news. It started out as an unholy alliance between the Global Footprint Network, brainchild of one Mattias Wackernagel, and the WWF.
Using questionable methodology developed by the GFN, the WWF produced what I think it called the Living Planet report, which blared that we were using three planets' worth of bioproductive land to support our 'unsustainable lifestyles'.
The WWF asked a consultancy in Haringey called CarbonPlan (run by an ex-City boy and an architect) to 'calculate' the Ecological Footprint (EF) for UK cities.
It produced a league table with Winchester (!) at the very top. The poor people of Winchester have been hit over the head by this bogus claim ever since. There is even a very influential pressure group called Winchester Action on Climate Change (WinACC) which has a disproportionate amount of leverage on local council policy.
What NOBODY ever mentions is that in 2007, DEFRA commissioned a detailed independent study of the methodology behind the EF calculation. The report rejected EF as an appropriate index because of the problems it found.
@ Don Pablo
Yes, you're probably right, but sometimes I give in to temptation and engage with her (I'm -sure- it's a she; don't you get that... that 'tone'? I was at university with many such and the effect is Proustean).
Jack mentions that Philip Brohan is on the team. Where have I heard that name before?
Oh yes, co-author with Phil Jones of a paper about the HADCRUT data.
Also , in the FAQ it says,
Hmm, data will be 'processed'...
Don't be too harsh, yet.
It seems some lessons have been learned and some attempts made to do it properly. This has similar challenges to the Surface Temperatures project, which also has a tonne of old paper records that need digitising. Ideally the sea records will follow and be/end up compatible with the 5-step surface project, and Stages 0-3 are available to all, plus the metadata. That way people can see exactly happens at Stage 2. Those stages are described here-
http://www.surfacetemperatures.org/
By all means, meticulously transcribe this data. Having obtained requisite credibility, we can then make one or two adjustments: Drop the starting-point, raise the end-point, connect the dots with a so-called trendline and interpolate the intervening data-set accordingly. Voila!-- Gaia is warming, we tell ya, warming. You doubt our word? No pressure, Ma'm Fran has the solution.
http://climatechangedispatch.com/climate-reports/7902-royal-society-humiliated-by-global-warming-basic-math-error
Re John Blake
Don't be so cynical, yet :)
If it follows the 5-step plan, I'd hope the only 'adjusted' data we see is Step 4 onwards. For the sea or land logs, if the scan shows '5' I'd expect to see '5' in the 'keyed' version and in the converted version, give or take unit conversions. If people then want to torture the data, they can do that from step 4 onwards. and there's an audit trail for people to go back and query QA processes or assumptions used in 'value added' stuff. Raw data is raw data, it is what it is, it's only when it gets to step 4-5 that it could be argued 'right' or 'wrong'.
I've been having a go as well though and seeing the same as Roy, sometimes it's hard to read the writing. Seems a useful thing to do though if people have some spare time.
Shhh... Nobody mention instrument and reading error...
BBD -
thanx for the info
I'm not a scientist and can't normally contribute much - but here I can. I'm a former Merchant Navy Officer and I can assure you that the bulk of weather/temp/sea temp observations entered in the log were at best guestimates (unless the data was being prepared for transmission to Bracknell Weather Centre). The main reason for this lassitude was the thought that no-one would ever look at this stuff again. Now admittedly I wasnt at sea in Victorian times or in the RN, but I must suspect that the same thing may well have gone on.
cndy: that's the best rebuttal to zedsdeadbed I've ever read
My guess would be that they want to get those 1940's temperatures down a bit.