Yeah, it does make a difference in people who see where this is heading (and fast) actually do their job as voters. The two Swedish politicians who were voted into the European Parliament under the Pirate Party flag made an enormous difference while they were there, and the German Pirate Party MEP who succeeded them has continued to do so being the rapporteur for the parliament's review of the Copyright Directive - something that's happening right now.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...

Add to that the Icelandic Pirate Party who are making a difference in their national parliament, and are currently polling as the largest party in nation.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

The Pirate Party movement is represented in over 70 countries all over the world. The "only" thing that needs to happen to counteract the stupidity of Big Media and Authoritarian Government is for people to do their jobs while at the voting booths.

... thus "very few organizations besides NASA".

A lot of people seem to miss the point on how the ideal lab condition doesn't carry over into real world organizations.

"unless a mistake"
"should be preserved"

= best practice is to know and understand that the old bugs will resurface. I.e, there's a cost to do the rewrite (no matter if you call it refactoring or not) that will affect the business for some time after deployment.

Your Software Engineering education seems to be a bit lacking.

I am "in Software" since ~25 years. I also hold a degree as a Software Engineer.

People who obsess about rewriting old code just because it's old tend to forget that in that old code are many bug fixes for edge cases found over the years. It was well documented and part of my education to know and understand that rewriting often caused those same bugs to surface again.

Best practice is to run both the old and new software in tandem for a while and verify the results. In reality no organization besides NASA will do that.

No, there's no reason to treat error bars differently in climate science compared to any other branch of science.

At least if climate science aspires to be a science. If it doesn't - then by all means pretend that measurement errors don't affect the reliability of the calculations.

We have air samples of ocean pH levels?

The correct answer is no, you cannot infer anything about rapid changes from low resolution proxies. It's quite unphysical (and anti-science) to claim otherwise.

If you know of high resolution proxies, please let us know.

How?

We have no idea whether the rate is unusual. There are no proxies with that resolution available.

(But why let science stand in the way of a good scare story?)

I understand the climate models very well. How do you think the input parameters to the models are derived?

The parametrizations also involve numerical parameters that must be specified as input. Some of these parameters can be measured, at least in principle, while others cannot.

- IPCC AR4 WG1

The values used for parametrization are based on research that begins with measurements. Those measurements have errors - as in any other branch of science - yet those errors are not propagated through the calculations.

Science thus says that climate models cannot do projections more than a few years out, until the combined error exceeds the projection range.

There's no scientific support - whatsoever - for claiming that there's an expectation of weather to keep within 95% of the "confidence intervals". A model is only as good as its inputs - and measurements (en masse) are what those inputs are created from.

This is well known in all other fields of science, where claims of "confidence intervals" based on model runs would rightly get laughed out of all journals. The error bars of your measurements, inherit in all equipment, must be carried forward in all calculations.

For some reason that's not done in climate science. I don't understand why - there's no difference between "climate equipment" and other forms of equipment.

No, it's actually much much worse. Climate scientists create error bars on their projections by running models with different input parameters. They're not using the actual error variables from measurements and propagating the compounded error forwards in the calculations - which is how it's done in every other branch of science.

If you do that, the projections become meaningless just a few years out. The climate system is absolutely nothing like the single variable coin flip.

I'm very worried about the anti-science stance taken in climate discussions just because it doesn't lead to the preconceived result some hope to show (or even effect).

Not according to science.

Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.

http://www.mercurynews.com/sci...

Which of course makes me wonder why so many people feel it's important to claim otherwise.

Yes, the concept of "tipping points" validate the report I linked and refute the original post that all climate effects before have been slow and gradual.

It doesn't in itself mean that anyone is screwed though - it just means that humans throughout the Holocene have already lived through major changes due to such perturbations of the climate.

There's also plenty of written records of this - a collection can be found here: http://www.breadandbutterscien...

No, the events described aren't just cooling events. Please re-read the report.