New seagoing robots read oceans' vital signs

[babylonsister]

New seagoing robots read oceans' vital signs
By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Friday, November 2, 2007


WASHINGTON — Scientists have just finished deploying a worldwide network of 3,000 automated floating sensors that will provide unprecedented information about the oceans' powerful impact on the world's climate.

The Argo network, named for the ship that carried the fabled Greek sailors, the Argonauts, covers the seas in unmatched scope and detail. Because water covers 75 percent of the Earth's surface, what happens in the oceans affects rising sea levels, the warming of the atmosphere, the birth of tropical storms and hurricanes, and much of the world's food supply. The sea also absorbs half of the excess carbon that's blamed for global warming.

"Now we can accurately measure changing ocean temperature globally for the first time," said Dean Roemmich, a marine scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

Before Argo, oceanographers depended mainly on measurements taken for short periods in scattered locations. The new network is designed to produce a continuous stream of data from various ocean depths for decades.

"The climate science objectives that drive the Argo array require that we observe the global oceans indefinitely," said Roemmich, the co-chairman of the Argo steering committee. "Achieving the global array is merely the beginning."

more...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/21052.html

[phantom power]

1. This is cool.

And it will provide us with new high-fidelity models that show exactly how we are fucked, to 8 decimal places.

[tom_paine]

2. And yet the Bushie Climate Change MegaSlushFund will spring into action!

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the Information Age, in which we float on a literal sea of misinformation and disinformation (much of it designed by PR and Bushie propaganda professionals) with a few islands of information within.

It is almost medeval how easily lies are spread today, about how scientific consensus can be 95%+ and the public still 50% deceived by the Mega-Tumpets of Lies.

Gestalt-based propaganda. That's my name for it. One day I am going to find out if it has an "official name" and terminology. It works. Virtual Realities. False Reality Bubbles. Call it what you will, but somehow we went from the cradle to college and back to the cradle.

If God is just, then there is a special level of Hell for PR and advertising people, for they were the midwives of this brave new world where there is no real boundary between lies and truth, no basic indisputable 'facts', except maybe 1 + 1 = 2 and that's only because LimbOReilliHanniCoulter and the boys and girls at Heritage haven't yet NEEDED to throw a little mud on mathematics itself.

If they launched their usual Mighty Wurlitzer campiagn of disniformation, half-truths, lies, accompanied by hot blondes and calliope music, they coul get the number of Ameikan responding in polls who now question 1 + 1 = 2, a grotesque Liberal notion, up to AT LEAST 10%, if not more.

Though they would never try, it's too extreme a task with no reward for them to try, I wish I could see just how high the % would go after 2 years of it.

I am joking, but just barely. Just barely.

I guess my point was...8 decimal place or 8 times 10 to the 8th power decimal places, it cannot shriek louder that the Big Screen TVs and the mad calliope of nonsense. Scientific truth cannot shout louder than a Ten Billion Dollar Co-Oridnated and Sophisticated Propaganda Machine.

Like a lone person shouting against a crowd of 100 with megaphones, it cannot be done.

[Nihil]

3. Shame they didn't make them duck-shaped and yellow ...

... in tribute to those valiant markers of the ocean circulatory patterns!