No mention of the 6,475,248 correct statements in the report.

Actually, there are only a handful of variables in a weather simulation. For a typical cloud-scale simulation you have the three components of wind, moisture, temperature, pressure, and precipitation variables. Say, 13 variables. That is not why you need supercomputers.

The reason you need supercomputers to do weather simulations is all about resolution, both spatial and temporal. Weather simulations break the atmosphere into cubes, and the more cubes you have, the better you resolve the flow. All weather simulations are underresolved; to properly model the turbulent flow in the atmosphere you need to get down to cubes that are roughly a centimeter on a side. As you double the resolution (halve the length of each of the four lines that makes up a cube face) you require eight times as many cubes. In weatherspeak, we talk about gridpoints instead of cubes where it's understood that each gridpoint represents the center of one of these cubes. In the computer model, they are represented as three dimensional floating (or double precision) point arrays. So take a 3D array and double the number of calculations on each of the thee for: loops, and you've got eight times as many calculations and eight times more memory required.

And it gets worse. When you double the resolutions, you need to halve the time step. Weather models step forward in time in discrete intervals, and now in addition to more calculations for each time step (eight times as many for doubling the resolution in three dimensions) now you need to go in steps that are half as large. This means 16 times more calculations, and eight times as much memory, to double the resolution.

And many of the calculations that are being made in the innermost loop involve things like divides, non-integers powers, square roots, etc... expensive calculations. And then because it's a massively parallel simulation, you have to do internode communications - which adds overhead and can be rather a bother. Then there's the hundreds of TB of data the model is dumping to disk. Now let's render that, shall we? Somebody call Pixar.

I am working on a project to simulation a thunderstorm which will produce a tornado in a "natural" way. The tornado needs to be adequately resolved. This simulations will have grid spacing of 10 meters. It requires a computer which hasn't been fully built yet (Blue Waters, in Urbana, google it). The time step will be 0.01 seconds, and the model will run for two hours of model time. It will take days of wallclock time. Keep in mind this model will have a physical domain not much bigger than about half the area of Oklahoma. Imagine global climate modeling now, and now you're talking 4 km resolution being all you can do.

This is why we need supercomputers to do high resolution weather simulations.

Yep. Any "open distributed alternative" will fall flat because what makes the mother of all social networking site useful, is that everybody frickin' uses it. You could delete your account in protest and start up OpenFrobnitzBook or whatever and have fun updating your status to the other pathetic losers who also deleted their facebook accounts out of protest.

Two easy facebook rules:

1. Tweak your privacy options to your liking
2. Before you post, pretend your future (or current) employer is reading

This will assist you in deciding whether it's a good idea to post those hilarious drunken half-naked pictures of you groping that dude dressed up in a Grimace costume.

Yes, they're great, I have one running Voyage Linux (stripped down Debian).

But Alix doesn't have gigabit ethernet, which sucks. Also, Linux has major problems with wireless G (google stuck beacon) so I'm hesitant to try the same approach with N.

Pretty simple, really. In an authoritarian environment, if you undermine authority, authority will come down on you.

Professors should post their slides on the web, and students should spend their time listening, thinking, and asking questions instead of writing. Anything less and students become mere stenographers, only retaining long enough to commit to paper.

You are assuming we all lecture from that awful abomination known as PowerPoint.

For some of my classes that works fine, and I do post them when I use them.

For thermodynamics it doesn't. You're going to have to watch me work through the equations on the whiteboard, and that's from paper notes and my head.

I thought it was a sweet ad. At the end, though, I had him googling "divorce lawyer."

The article mentions "modulations" over and over again as if they are some sort of evil force messing with your head.

Roughly speaking, modulations are changes in the energy at the sidebands of the carrier where the information is carried. Old cell phones were pure frequency modulation, the digital ones use a different scheme. But from you're brain's perspective, it shouldn't mean more than a slight change in the total energy being radiate at 2.4 GHz or whatever. The idea that your brain is affected by "modulations" seems extremely specious.

The fact that you're warming up your brain slightly when you hold the cell phone to your ear for a long time might have some sort of long term effect, I dunno, but I'm not too afraid of modulations.

I know I always go to Gentleman's Quarterly for my journal articles regarding the dangers of electromagnetic radiation exposure.

After moving to a new office, I entered a world of pain. I'm rather noise sensitive to start with, and it disrupts my ability to concentrate (concentrating is important in my work). The office had a HVAC system with pressure levels through the roof and inadequate damping. I had one of the health and safety guys come over with a dosimeter and they measured 87 dB(A). It took me about six months of bugging the facilities folks to get it down to a quieter, more manageable state. Had it been slightly louder, it would have violated OSHA. Had I been in Europe, it would have been illegal. Since I liked my office other than the noise, and didn't want to move far from my colleagues, I wore earplugs a lot until they got things under control.

They really seem to have a problem with getting HVAC right at my university. They recently spent a half million dollars over budget to fix noise and temperature problems from a recent upgrade to a science hall (i.e., they were ripping out things that had been installed weeks earlier). It's still noisy as hell over there, but most people seem to have gotten used to it. For me, it was an absolute nightmare to have to sit in this "wind tunnel" for all these months. While it's still noisier than I'd like in my office, it's to the point where I forget it's there, something I simply could not do when it was 87 dB.

Why don't they just call it "women only" and be done with it.

Hurr durr.

The damage is done: nobody will believe ANY temperature data any more. Personally, I'm tacitly accepting of AGW, but even I will no longer put any value on that data. Even if somebody tries to reconstruct this data from other sources, I'm not going to believe it. The political influence is just too strong.

Nice projection. You, Chemisor, will not believe any temperature data any more. The rest of the world will make up its own mind. Belief has no place in science anyway. That belongs to religion.

People like you have an influence through the political process, but you have no influence in the realm of scientific research. You can pick and choose what to believe. We scientists will continue to do research and publish our results using established scientific guidelines accepted by scientists all around the world, and our results will be made public. You, Chemisor, have the option of ignoring these results, cherrypicking the bits which fit your worldview, or trying to take a step back and analyzing the data like a scientist and drawing a rational conclusion. We cannot do this for you. Good luck.

Well stated. The thing is, most everyday people do not understand how science and research is done and hence they filter everything through the lens of their own non-science-understanding experiences. They leap to extraordinary conclusions based upon sketchy data or anecdotal evidence. Unless you've published and been through the peer review process and have actually collected data and done exhaustive literature review etc., it's easy to think that research results could be easily manipulated like an accountant cooking the books. The big difference is that in science, there is a global "community" of scientists scrutinizing your output, somewhat like the open-source many-eyes model that just about everyone here praises.

As researcher in meteorology the CRU stuff has been an obvious source of hallway chatter between myself and my colleagues. If you could summarize our conclusions, it's mostly that (a) this looks band, but will blow over (b) we scientists just want to be left alone to do science and finally (c) most people just don't understand anything about the scientific process. Few of us are good at relating what we do to the general public or handling the press. When you peek behind the curtain and ask us to explain ourselves, don't expect a slick press release. Many of us want to scurry away to our dark labs and put our hands over our ears and work on the plodding, grudging, often infinitesimally satisfying world of scientific discovery.

Either that, or THE CONSPIRACY GOES DEEPER THAN I EVER IMAGINED POSSIBLE!!!!

I have open sourced my code (http://hdftools.sourceforge.net) but it's so nichey that nobody but a few people would find it useful. So there are only a few eyes. The many-eyes advantage goes away for tiny niche projects, unfortunately.

What a load. Peer review is not accuracy checking in the slightest. It is a sanity check on submitted articles, to remove obvious poseurs.

They have tossed the raw data, not intermediate runs. Their numbers simply cannot be reproduced. Their data set is essentially meaningless. They are saying "trust us", and the code that is evident in the files posted shows that you can't even begin to trust them.

Their work is completely discredited. They are disgraced.

You obviously aren't submitting articles to the same journals I am. Were it so easy to publish if all it took was not being a "poseur."

Based upon your logic, all experimental science involving measurements should be highly suspect or discarded where the measurements cannot be reproduced exactly. This would involve all experimental science conducted before say 1950 or so. Toss it out, the original objects being study have turned to dust, hence those experiments are worthless!

There is a lot of inherent trust involved in science. Sure, some rogue could cook data, but that would eventually work itself out when other scientists came up with alternate hypothesis which called the rogue study into question. It really is survival of the fittest when it comes to scientific hypotheses. Nothing is sacred.

Reproducibility exists within the countless other observational datasets involving climate change, although perhaps not with their exact observations. So what. Just because their exact raw data isn't available doesn't negate their science. Should all scientific data ever collected be kept forever? What you neglect to appreciate or understand is that new experiments are being conducted all of the time. It's not as if the entire basis for anthropogenic climate change rested on some data collected a handful of scientists in the 1980s.

Mewl and puke about it all you want, I don't care. It sucks, it's a black eye for climate research, but this too shall pass and the rabbling masses will find something else to distract their attention before long while we continue to head to the inevitable 500 ppm CO2 by the time I shed this mortal coil...