NASA releases detailed global climate change projections

What kind of agriculture? Every plant species is different, and various growing techniques are suited to different conditions.

What kind of habitat? Every dwelling is different, and every person has unique requirements of it.

See the problem?

1 year of data would mean 120GB files or so (assuming 100 years total)

Breaking it down by lattitude would mean 800MB lattide-year average data sets. Breaking it down by longitude would be very helpful too, and not much reason to not make that breakdown in addition to the lattitude one, which means 5mb data chunks.

Its almost as though they are being intentionally uncooperative by dumping 12TB.

Hopefully, some group makes a web interface that allows downloads in these manageable chunk sizes.

I have 25 mbs which equals to 1041:40:00 (hh:mm:ss) That is 25 mbs perfect connection with no errors or drops. 1041 hours equals 43+ days.

http://www.numion.com/calculators/time.html

The greatest changes in the new NOAA surface temperature analysis is to the ocean temperatures since 1998. This seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements – ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend. Nevertheless, the NOAA team finds a substantial increase in the ocean surface temperature anomaly trend since 1998. ... The global surface temperature datasets are clearly a moving target. So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.

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The link above also includes more on some of the specifics of the new adjustments NOAA made.

That doesn't feel like a particularly strong response to ESR's claim. Taken as a response to that claim, it feels kind of like: "our predictions were wildly inaccurate, but it's a complicated system with short-term and long-term factors and the short-term factors caused more warming just before we made our predictions and less just after, and that threw us off".

Which doesn't inspire confidence. If you can't predict the short-term factors, you need to widen your confidence intervals. I feel like at the very least, you should be making predictions like "conditional on these factors staying within these bounds, we expect this amount of warming". Then if that condition doesn't hold, you don't lose any bayes points.

(I recognize that the article wasn't written as a response to ESR, I'm not even sure it was a response to the same thing that ESR is talking about. But you offered it as a response, so that's how I'm evaluating it.)

During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)

"My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code." -Theo De Raadt http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129261032213320

     > Most of the environmental movement is composed of 
    innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard    
    core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops.

Also, using the phrase "global warming denialist" distracts from your point. When some scientists thought neutrinos traveled faster than light, they weren't called "light speed denialists". Have some respect for alternate scientific opinions.

The problem with GW predictions is that most of them are wrong and the ones that are correct aren't correct for the right reasons.

This is not a political position, it is an expert's evaluation after having looked at the code and documentation for some of the better models. You simply can't parameterize away as much of the physics as they do, or impose conservation conditions by hand the way they do, and expect a long-term integration to produce anything but the crudest approximation to reality.

System-wide averages are likely accurate in terms of scale. That is, global heat content is increasing at the order of 1 W/m2, probably not 0.1E-2 W/m2 and certainly not 10 W/m2. This is important, because 1 W/m2 is consistent with observtions and likely problematic in terms of local climate. The global economy is heavily optimized to the current climate, and even relatively modest changes would turn trillions of dollars of investment into malinvestment. This is a bad thing, if you care about global capitalism.

Climate scientists are not computational physicists. They have not spent most of their careers modelling systems that are ultimately subject to laboratory testing, and as such they have not seen their best laid plans gang aft agley.

I have long wondered how much of the hubris in climate prediction was coming from the policy level and how much was coming from the scientists themselves. This release suggests that it really is coming from the scientists, and that's unfortunate. Twenty years from now most of these predictions will prove to be false. That falsity will be in all directions: some will have temperatures or rainfalls far too low, some far too high. And the enemies of science will use that to further attack us.

Unfortunately, when I stand up and say this, I get attacked as an enemy of science by people who think they love science, but who are actually drawn to it simply as a useful stick with which to beat their political opponents.

> Noting that “buoy data have been proven to be more accurate than ship data,” the new study applies a new “bias correction” to address the difference between them.