Maybe I should have said "successfully publish a discovery" blah blah. If you don't believe that, well, talk to Einstein, Bohr, Watson, Crick, Darwin, etc. etc. etc.

Ding, we have a winner. Not supercomputer code. Sure, supercomputers are... super and all, but the biggest one only has around 1 million processing cores. How many windoze machines are out there, idling away?

False equivalency is false.

Guess what? A lot of the "alarmist" are the same scientists doing the research. Sure, people get attached to theories, but do you realize that the best possible thing to happen to a scientist is for him/her to make a discovery that tosses the widely accepted hypotheses on their head? In other words, if a scientist did a rigorously peer reviewed study which indicated that, say, it's a reduction in neutrinos from the sun somehow, oh, say tweaking aerosol concentrations, leading to a strong causal relationship between this phenomenon and observed global warming - while also showing that the greenhouse effect of CO2 was much less of a factor than previously thought - that person would be fricking king of the scientific world.

The tired repeated bleatings of non-scientists who have not spent their careers repeatedly getting their work shredded by reviewers [this being the norm, not the exception] on the path to eventual publication do absolutely zilch to move things forward regarding understand what's really going on. The simple-minded idea that climate science is some sort of "alarmists versus skeptics" battle is laughable; this false equivalency between two imagined camps, each claiming to know the truth, is entirely imagined by ignorant people. Unless you've actually done science and gotten your work published in decent journals, these opinions mean absolute diddlyshit; nothing more than mental masturbation splooging text on the screen, masquerading as informed debate.

Does the sun's decrease in activity effect climate change? Or perhaps affect spelling ability? That would be a weird effect.

The NCAR link is probably the best for relating this to climate change:

So could a lengthy drop in solar output be enough to counteract human-caused climate change? Recent studies at NCAR and elsewhere have estimated that the total global cooling effect to be expected from reduced TSI during a grand minimum such as Maunder might be in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 Celsius (0.18 to 0.54 Fahrenheit). A 2013 study confirms the findings. This compares to an expected warming effect of 3.0C (5.4F) or more by 2100 due to greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, even a grand solar minimum might only be enough to offset one decade of global warming. Moreover, since greenhouse gases linger in the atmosphere, the impacts of those added gases would continue after the end of any grand minimum.

So perhaps a serious lull in solar activity could put some feeble brakes on global warming, slowing it down... temporarily, only to charge back when the sun gets over its issues.

I'm a meteorologist, not a climate guy, but I find the hypothesis that the current solar lull is responsible for the recent cold snaps in the northern hemisphere to be extremely dubious. Much more tenuous than the hypothesis that the meandering jet stream is happening due to the reduction in the north/south temperature gradient due from a reduction of Arctic ice cover, which itself is physically feasible but still not shown very conclusively.

The best way to get a grip on these issues would be to run many, many ensembles of weather models and coaxing out statistical links. And this is where weather/climate modeling is going, for good reasons... but as all the armchair slashdot climatologists will (perhaps rightly) point out, models have issues... but they are getting much better and ensembles help a lot to provide a handle on the probability that forcing A is causing response B.

Yes, cell phones on a plane are a bad idea, but I've been using earplugs since forever and good ones (that seal well) will pretty much drown out everything... loud engine noise, screaming children, etc.

It would also help if the airlines charged a fee to access the cell repeater on the plane like they do with wifi. That might at least keep the most inane conversations from happening. Or not.

... are the biggest problems from where I'm sitting here in the convention center in Denver.

In short, there will need to be a serious collaborative effort between vendors and the scientists (most of whom are not computer scientists) in taking advantage of new technologies. GPUs, Intel MIC, etc. are all great only if you can write code that can exploit these accelerators. When you consider that the vast majority of parallel science codes are MPI only, this is a real problem. It is very much a nontrivial (if even possible) problem to tweak these legacy codes effectively.

Cray holds workshops where scientists can learn about these new topologies and some of the programming tricks to use them. But that is only a tiny step towards effectively utilizing them. I'm not picking on Cray; they're doing what they can do. But I would posit that before the next supercomputer is designed, that it is done with input from the scientists who will be using it. There are a scarce few people with both the deep physics background and the computer science background to do the heavy lifting.

In my opinion we may need to start from the ground up with many codes. But it is a Herculean effort. Why would I want to discard my two million lines of MPI-only F95 code that only ten years ago was serial F77? The current code works "well enough" to get science done.

The power problem - that is outside of my domain. I wish the hardware manufacturers all the luck in the world. It is a very real problem. There will be a limit to the amount of power any future supercomputer is allowed to consume.

Finally, compilers will not save us. They can only do so much. They can't write better code or redesign it. Code translators hold promise, but those are very complex.

If anyone is a "super submitter" it must be this guy, I think he is the submitter of about one third the submissions I click on.

Honestly, the most this whole mess has affected me, a college professor at a state university, is to fill my head with thoughts of taking my bare hands and strangle the life out of some of these yahoos in Washington. I know of many people who have been furloughed, as I am involved in federally funded research and have many colleagues who work under the umbrella of the federal gov't, some of whom have been furloughed, some of whom have not. My thoughts lately are about the looming debt ceiling "crisis" and how perhaps we are truly approaching the moment with the United States of America goes the way of every other superpower the world has ever seen... only we still have nukes and billions of guns. Sadly, if this happens, it will have come from within, not the result of a worthy enemy. And make no mistake about it: Pull away the curtain and this is all the doings of the ultra-rich who are pulling the strings. These people have nothing but pure disdain for the commoners and the poors and do not care that they are playing roulette, since all chambers are loaded and the gun is not pointing at them.

Two mistakes pop up immediately int the article - IPPC (eh? OK, typo) and "The Journal of the American Meteorological Society". It's IPCC and the Bulletin of the AMS (BAMS). Maybe this guy creamed himself while typing, it is the WSJ after all.

CLIMATEDERP!

I've always assumed that data on Dropbox wasn't very secure, which is why I was happy to find that ecryptfs works well with dropbox across multiple machines (assuming they are all running Linux). To wit:

chinook: ~orp df /home/orp/e
Filesystem          1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/home/orp/Dropbox/e 491451392 129077764 361240528  27% /home/orp/e
chinook: ~orp ls Dropbox/e
./
../
ECRYPTFS_FNEK_ENCRYPTED.FWZS4gY2TLKRZUavoct.ewyb3LhUsTmtMCkw6-7kc4NR3-58yIKIxSsrgk--
ECRYPTFS_FNEK_ENCRYPTED.FWZS4gY2TLKRZUavoct.ewyb3LhUsTmtMCkw9VkRKmwOO95LV0W1qwwNHk--/
ECRYPTFS_FNEK_ENCRYPTED.FWZS4gY2TLKRZUavoct.ewyb3LhUsTmtMCkwKsqUWInaV2aVwzvhw6CcW---
ECRYPTFS_FNEK_ENCRYPTED.FWZS4gY2TLKRZUavoct.ewyb3LhUsTmtMCkwOggoYf2PUQpQQmgJLHwIaU--/
ECRYPTFS_FNEK_ENCRYPTED.FWZS4gY2TLKRZUavoct.ewyb3LhUsTmtMCkwQEdvushvgMYZ2uRpeRJ9EU--
[etc]

This works with the same partition mounted across multiple machines. Save a file to /home/orp/e, and it "magically" appears in its unencrypted form (name, content) on any other machine that was updated on Dropbox that has the encrypted partition mounted the same way. All dropbox ever sees is the encrypted stuff.

The main disadvantage to this approach is that if you are trying to access files on a non-linux machine you are hosed; Lastpass and other password managers that have file encryption functionality can give you cross-platform encryption but not with the nice filesystem access that Dropbox provides.

...when a sinking ship like Zynga looks good to a rat like Mattrick you know Microsoft are in trouble.

If it's so important to you, compose your stuff in an editor, save it, copy, paste.

Which is what you just said. IAADA (I Am A Dumb Ass)