Re: [asa] Bacterial Gene May Affect Climate And Weather

PvM wrote:

> Now one may lament that the results do not support one's viewpoint and
> thus one has various options. 1) Lacking scientific arguments one
> attacks motives 2) lacking an interest in ad hominem attacks one does
> the hard scientific work to show that there are significant problems
> with these models, and that these problems affect the predictions in a
> significant manner.
>

Good note. I was wondering if there was any place for a scientist's
world view to affect what he considers noise or anomalies and thus to
impact the overall results? My guess is that in any single refereed
paper yes, but not where so many different groups are working at the
models such as the ICPC.

I started running the climate prediction distributed model on my
machine. It looks like each run will take 3 months, running day and
night. Since the cpu is a dual core AMD 3800+ that represents a lot of
computation even though the Intel architecture does not do floating
point well as compared to the Sun Sparc or IBM Power. On a desktop
machine floating performance does not matter much (except of course for
gamers where a lot of physics is being simulated). I would guess that
single or double Floating precision is being used in what I am running
locally but hopefully somewhere runs are occurring at quad or higher
precision, thus checking for rounding problems which can lead to chaotic
behaviors even were the initial conditions known precisely.

Rich wrote:
In the case of climate models, the predictions is global average
temperature which is not as chaotic as whether it will rain tomorrow in
Des Moines.

Seems to me that is a very good point.

Dave W

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Received on Tue Feb 27 12:25:02 2007