A perfect example of why object-oriented programming has convinced engineers and scientists that programming is joke and not to be trusted. Why freshman engineering students who taught themselves to write efficient z80 and 68000 assembly language in high school learn to hate computer science after taking "CS-101A Intro to Object Oriented Programming"

anything from the Heartland Institute is suspect. They have been caught lying so often it isn't funny. Example The right-wing Heartland Institute has been making a big fuss about "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares." It turns out that the scientists on the list did not doubt man-made global warming and were outraged. Some scientists didn't know they were on the list and wanted to be removed.Here's a representative quote, from Dr. David Sugden, Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh:"I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite." University of Maryland's Distinguished Professor Eugenia Kalnay: "This is just another example of lack of scruples that climate skeptics have shown in pursuing short-term financial advantages, and basically condemning the next generations to suffer the consequences of climate change due to our lack of prudent and responsible planning." If Heartland really believes what it claims, why does it have to lie and slander scientists to make the point? Then of course you have Heartland's involvement with PhilipMorse, acting a front organization for the Tobacco Indusry lobby

Is it the developers fault that IT refused to listen when the developer described EXACTLY what the system configuration should be for the software to work, but IT MANAGEMENT changed the specs because IT MANAGEMENT knows more about the developers software than the developer? Sorry about the rant, but I ordered a visualization system using my grant money and IT MANAGEMENT changed the PO into a thin client claiming I didn't need anything more powerful and then said "what's this OpenGL stuff you'r talking about"

Nothing like taking a sentnce from one email and then juxtapositioning it next to a sentence and a few words from another email. Heck I can even do the same with your post. Let's see the mild sceptics are the oddballs and extremists making us even more uncompetitve globally Yes it's sad that sad that people let their political beliefs trump facts.

This is patently false statement. The rise in post 1970's temperatures are much higher than the pre-1940's. Mann (1999), Wahl and Ammann(2007), Huang(2000), Smith(2006), Oerlemans 2005, Esper et. al.(2002) and Moberg et al. (2005) document this. Try plotting the free and publically available HAD and CRU instrumental records with excel

I clicked on "unrest" link and lo and behold it takes me to Monty's blog where he whines about what Oracle is doing to "his" mysql. It seems to me that he sold "his" database to Sun for "approximately $1 billion in total consideration" (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/sun-to-acquire-mysql.html) Seems he wasn't too worried about the foss community when he sold mysql to Sun. Now that he finds that he isn't the center of attention any more he starts stomping his feet and holding his breath until he turns blue. He suddenly is worried about how open mysql is? I keep hearing about how bad oracle is, maybe you better look at just how "open" google is. I find google several orders of magnitude worse than oracle.

Oh you mean like telling him to call Vaisala or iMet and politely asking for a couple of rawinsonde ballons for a science project? No the US is screwed because in the late 1960's and early 1970's the US started listening to the MBA's. Instead of looking for and setting long-term goals for a company, the MBA's told us the only thing that was important were this quarter's profits. Thus, instead of investing in research and development that paid off three to five years down the road, we cut research and development to the bone to make sure this quarters profits look good.

Typical rawinsonde ballons are not very expensive. I buy them in lots of 50 at $10 a piece. In single units Vaisala and iMet charge $15 for the standard 300 gram ballon. If I fill the ballon carefully and don't get too much in the way of body oils (from handling the ballon in strong winds) on the ballon the rawinsonde will clear 100,000 feet. I suspect the cost of a box of contractor grade (Contractor's Choice) isn't that much cheaper than what Vaisala or iMet would charge. You might even get them to give you a couple of balloons by telling them what you are going to do. Because my launch site is near an approach to an airport I have to call ATC every 5000 feet and give them the GPS lat/lon/alt I'm surprized he didn't get into trouble over his launch considering where he launched from. The big deal though is why in the heck aren't more schools doing cheap, really cool, heavy-duty science projects like this. The cost certainly isn't going to be factor.

Bad Karma because I keep posting links to the science that refutes nonsense like "global temperatures haven't risen since 1998" and "I suspect many environmentalists are unaware that global warming consensus comes entirely from simulations written by humans and not actual recorded observation."

No the scientists are not blaming localized weather on globalwarming. It is the rich ruling class. Inhofe (Oil-OK) built the igloos during a mild to moderate winter in Washington DC not scientists.

Trouble is that observations and model output seem to be in close agreement http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-4.htm look at figure c. This includes all forcings including natural and anthropogenic. The curves match quite well. Then there is Jim Hansen model forecast from 1988 ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Hansen_2005_Model.gif ) which matches observations quite well. Hansen's Scenario B (described as the most likely option and most closely matched the level of CO2 emissions) shows close correlation with observed temperatures. Don't give us the bull*it like Pat Michaels did when he LIED under oath before Congress that scenario A is what Hansen was forecasting. Hansen overestimated future CO2 levels by 5 to 10% so if his model were given the correct forcing levels, the match would be even closer. There are deviations from year to year but this is to be expected. The chaotic nature of weather will add noise to the signal but the overall trend is predictable. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it provided an opportunity to test how successfully models could predict the climate response to the sulfate aerosols injected into the atmosphere. The models accurately forecasted the subsequent global cooling of about 0.5 C soon after the eruption. Furthermore, the radiative, water vapor and dynamical feedbacks included in the models were also quantitatively verified (Hansen 2007). So SCIENCE SAYS THAT CURRENT GENERATION MODELS MATCH OBSERVATIONS WELL WITHIN THE ERROR BOUNDS OF OBSERVATIONS. Deniers continue to LIE about the mismatch

Maybe not a rack-full but certainly a HP DL-385 G7 with two AMD magny-cours cpus, 48gb of memory and 1tb of disk. Using OpenSolaris and SunStudio compliers WRF (an easily parallelized numerical weather prediction model) performs exceptionally well and the cost is under $5500US

Let's try the lasty first go to surfacestations.org and then to www.ncdc.noaa.gov and compare site photos. Then look a what objects are in focus in the surfacestations.org photos. The only way the two objects in the surfacestations.org photos can be in focus is with a very very large depth of field. To get that large of field a very long telephoto lens (>400m focal length) had to be used. Photographers often make use of the large depth of field of long telephoto lens. The large depth of field of telephoto lens can be seen in photographs of football games where both the Quarterback and people on the sidelines are all in focus. Simply put air conditioner next to the surface station isn't It is far away, the photograph was deliberately done in manner to make it look there are next to each when they are not. Since you are such a big fan of Watts, why don't you read all of his posts where he defends his photos as being legitimate even though they aren't. Second point Watts supports Spencers claim that clouds are causing warming. Watts supports Spencer deliberately choice of model data and observations that the greatest difference. Using the same approach as the difference can be made nearly zero. For Watts to support this kind of cherry picking shows a misrepresentation of Dresslers work. For you first point Gee you mean like where Watts doesn't understand the difference between a mean and a sample, or maybe you mean where Watts doesn't understand that the values and graphs presented in journal articles represent the deviation from a long term mean, even though the figure label clearly states that values are the deviation from the long-term mean. Maybe you mean Watts doesn't understand that 10 years of observations does provide enough values to meet a 95% level confidence test. Try reading Global Physical Climatology by Hartmann or Physical Climatology by Landsberg both are used in a freshman meteorology majors climatology course. Then try Statistical Theory and Methodology in Science and Engineering by Brownlee

The scientists HAVE NOT TURNED POLITICAL, it was the likes of Inhofe, Miloy, Watts, Morano and a host of other NON-SCIENTISTS who found that their status-quo would be adversely affected by any policy changes if the SCIENCE were acted on are the ones who turned climate science in a poltical battle. Exactly the same strategy followed by the tobacco industry to discredit those scientists whose work showed the link between lung cancer and smoking. Indeed Steve Miloy, who devised the tobacco strategy freely admits he suggested using the same strategy for climate science to the oil/gas industry. Thus you get Dennis Avery who worked for the tobacco industry via the Hudson Instititue suddenly becoming a climate scientist even though he has NEVER done any work or even taken a course in either meteorology or climatology. Given that "distinguished scientists" were need to back the disinformation/politicalization campaign they tried people Fredrick Sietz. Unfortunately Sietz said in an interview in May 2006 “‘They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking,’ but it nevertheless served the tobacco industry’s purposes. Throughout those years, the industry frequently ran ads in newspapers and magazines citing its multi-million-dollar research program as proof of its commitment to science—and arguing that the evidence on the health effects of smoking was mixed.” Unfortunately Sietz didn't serve either the tobacco or the science deniers very well. In a 1989 internal memo from tobacco company Philip Morris explaining that Seitz “is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational to offer advice.” Then Arthur Robinson and Sietz got into further trouble with the Oregon Petition. Arthur Robinson and Sietz along with the Exxon-backed George C. Marshall Institute, co-published the infamous “Oregon Petition” claiming to have collected 17,000 signatories to a document arguing against the realities of global warming. The petition and the documents included were all made to look like official papers from the prestigious National Academy of Science. They weren’t, and this attempt to mislead has been well-documented. Along with the petition there was a cover letter from Seitz. Also attached to the petition was an apparent “research paper” titled: Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. The paper was made to mimic what a research paper would look like in the National Academy’s prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy journal. This was just the first salvo in the politization of science in order to stall off any policy changes. When the oil/gas industry started dumping metric buttloads of money into the science denial project all sorts of "climater scientists" came out of the wood work. People like Ian Pilmer, washed up and retired geologist, Tim Ball, who has not published a single research paper in 11 years in ANY TOPIC, Tony Watts who isn't a meteorologist, but claims he is, Gerhard Gerlich, a physcist who says the first and second laws of thermodynamics are wrong

Yes I've read how Roy Spencer is whining that he has had his hat handed to him and he is mad that he is being taken to task for claiming in press releases results that his own paper did not claim. Yes I know that Spencer claims that there is vast conspiracy to prevent him from publishing and getting grant funding, yet he continues to publish rubbish which any first year meteorology student or first year mathematics student can demoloish. Yet he continues to be funded for his real research via NASA. Yes I know that is paid large sums of money by groups like AEI, Heartland, Heritage on the radar chicken circuit to voice his own political beliefs as the results of science. Yes I know that Watts made fundamental errors and misrepresented with malice of forethought Dessler's comments in the poste you quote. Yes I Know that Watts faked photos on his surface stations web site.Yes I know that using Watts' own data and techniques Menne, Williams and Palecki (doi:10.1029/2009JD013094, 2010) showed that there is a mean bias associated with poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites; however, this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to electronic sensors in the USHCN during the last 25 years. Moreover, the sign of the bias is counterintuitive to photographic documentation of poor exposure because ASSOCIATED INSTRUMENT CHANGES HAVE LED TO AN ARTIFICAL NEGATIVE BIAS ("COOL") BIAS IN THE MAXIMUM TEMPERATURES AND ONLY A SLIGHT POSITIVE ("WARM") BIAS IN MINIMUM TEMPERATURES. In other words using the "bad" or poorly sighted stations results a REDUCED increase in temperature with time. "Good" stations only provided a ten year trend of 0.28 +-0.11 degree increase, but "good" and "bad" stations provided a 0.14 +-0.11 increase. Thus Watts premise that including poorly sighted stations artifically increased the observed temperature trend is not only wrong, but including poorly sighted stations DECREASED the observed temperature trends. Before merely repeating garbage from a site that is so full of obvious errors and repeats political screed I suggest you get a copy of "Physical Climatology" by Helmut Landsberg and read the section on how to use statistics. Then get a copy of "Global Physical Climatology" Dennis Hartmann to learn a little basic climatology. Then a copy of "An Introduction to Atmospheric Thermodynamics" by Tsonnis to learn a little about basic thermodynamics. Having taken the time to learn about the science go back to read Watts again and have a hearty laugh at what a fool Watts is