RE: [ihc] About those parking brakes .....

[Steven Stegmann <steve.stegmann@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tom,

The earth has changed temperature this fast many
times.  In England they used to have a viable red wine
industry a few hundred years ago.  Can't grow those
grapes there any more.  Too cold.

At some point in the 17th century maybe there was a
"Year Without A Summer".  And there was a real cold
spell called a mini ice age somewhere along there.

Read this link:
http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/1816.htm

Yes the earth has gotten warmer over the last 100
years.  But nobody know what is causing it.  The "why"
is the junk science.

I can remember back in the 1970s the same groups were
whining that the earth was cooling and we would have
an ice age by 2000.  And in 1991 that the oil well
fires in Kuwait were going to cause global cooling...

The executive summary of the reports that the Kyoto
treaty were built on were not written by the
scientists that did the actual work.  Several were
trying to get their names removed from the reports
because the executive summarys were so far from the
actual reports.  Remembe that nobody reads the actual
work, just the executive summary.

I've spent many years involved in computer simulations
of all sorts.  Current weather models are meaningless
if they predict past 72 hours.  Climate models aren't
much better.  The problem is the difficulty of
representing a "not well understood", "very complex"
problem in software.  This is not an easy problem. 
Simplifying assumptions have to be made and they can
easily, frequently do, warp the whole thing.  And if
you do get a model where can you get enough
information for the initial conditions of the model. 
This is also a "hard" problem.

It wasn't very many years ago that the best weather
models didn't include oceanic effects.  What kind of
data do you think that generated.

If I had to do it over again I would study weather,
ever fascinating.  But "hard", "very hard" as a
classical mathematician would say.

I've spent this year working on, by comparison to
weather, simulating a very small natural phenomina. 
You'd be amazed at what shows up after the software is
written.  The high level behavioral testing after the
software is written is long, difficult, and
demoralizing as you learn what you didn't know.  Most
of the time this level of testing never gets done. 
After the original scientist thinks he's done, it will
cost more to do the high level testing than the
original writing.  Very rarely happens.

This time it will because there will be a very real
"reality check".

Steve