southern_cross
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
But I do have to ask: If that 100F temperature had occurred recently instead of over 100 years ago, how many people would be absolutely freaking out about it? And it would be all over the news, wouldn't it, complete with satellite interviews and talking heads and repeated insistence that "We must do something about climate change right now!"
As it is, though, it's just a historical footnote isn't it? And it seems that some folks are now trying to claim that it never really happened. (It appears to have been truncated out of the HadCRUT temperature data set, for example.) How inconvenient for them, then, there are other folks out there who have gone so far as to dig up the actual handwritten log for the weather station involved, which appears to be in good order.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-E1nQ_W4AEpC7D.jpg
Still other folks have noted that there are other logs out there for other stations which show equal if not higher temperatures, but Fort Yukon is called out as the official record high temperature for the state. I can only assume that investigation showed that those other stations weren't as reliable as Fort Yukon, but the possibility exists that they did in fact experience equally high or even higher temperatures.
It astounds me that the field of climate science is taken so seriously when it appears to actually mostly just be full of hangers-on, also-rans, and wannabes. And I can think of a few big names in it who have little to no scientific training at all.
Also, promises were made which were broken almost immediately. For example, there was a promise made that all meetings would be conducted on US time as opposed to Indian time. But only two weeks into the contract I noticed that our US outsourcing manager was routinely coming into the office late, where before she was always quite punctual. When I asked about this I was told that it was because she was now having regular 3 AM meetings with the folks in India.
We were also told (all of us) by upper management that if the whole thing didn't work out as planned, then WE would be the ones held responsible for this, not the outsourcing folks. You can imagine how well this went down. It became routine for some people to just lie to their bosses about well how things were actually going, all while looking for other jobs elsewhere because they knew it was going to hit the fan soon enough. In one particular case that I remember, I attended a teleconference with a project manager where folks were laying it on the line and being honest about how badly things were going. Then in an immediately following teleconference (which I also attended) this project manager turned around and flat-out lied to his bosses by telling them that everything was going great! He bailed for another job at another company before he really got caught out on this though.
The company finally got wise and cut loose the outsourcing group after a couple of years. But by that time things were in such bad shape that they were considering just tossing out their custom software (which they'd spent decades developing) and replacing it with some kind of package. I don't know how far along they got with that before the big bankruptcy came, though.
Ever since they emerged from that bankruptcy (and then only barely, after enduring great pain) they've been looking for a buyer, but with no great success. They've finally found one now, though, except that one of the conditions of the buyout is that all of upper management is going to lose their jobs. Oh well!
That all depends on what platform(s) you're using. For example, IBM still gives you zOS, AIX, the System i OS, and so on. And there are other operating systems for other platforms.
The computing world doesn't begin and end with Wintel, you know; it may seem that way sometimes, though.