ADAMANT

Hot Ticket

       Milan's  famed La Scala has commissioned  Veronese composer 
             Georgio Battistelli to draft  a full length opera based on
          An Inconvenient Truth        
to premiere in 2011.  Here is a sneak preview of   Il Inconveniente Verita :

    Expecting  star performer  PLACIDO URSINO ,  shown above, to be extinct by 2011,
The Committee For Climate Opera At Aspen  has hired The Brokeback Mountain OK Chorale  to fill in  for the  rest of  the season.  While  Green Opera  maestro Giuseppe Verdi's   Hottello ,  and   fauve verte composer Hector Berlioz's chilling masterpiece,  The Damnation Of Frost are sold out,  boxes are still available for
         The Advection From The Seraglio
                La Forza del Beauforta
                   Orpheus and IPCC
               La Clemenza del Clima
                              and
          Die Fliegender Meistermodler

Featuring the Bali Global Village gamelan and
  Former Next Countertenor Algiorno Tennessi
   as the Meistermodler's faithful companion
     and carbon futures broker , Unterhund

           For younger patrons,

The Sesame Street Opera of the Deaf

               will present an alfresco performance of

                      The Madama Butterfly Effect

                                Excerpts from the beloved goratorio
                           Hansen's Messiah

               And the Brokeback Mountain Chorale's stirring rendition of

                                Sheep May Safely Graze In Greenland

                                Curtain at 8

                 Coaches  & Sedan Chairs at 11:30

                   No internal combustion engines

                   or carbonated beverages please.

Who's Afraid Of Virginia's Wolf?

Half a century after physicist C.P. Snow 's famous “Two Cultures” lecture  decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension...hostility and dislike”   sundering  “natural scientists,” from  “literary intellectuals,”   Natalie Angier writes  for the benefit of those willing to log in to the NYTimes ,  that the gap continues to widen as

 " educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.

Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems."

Surely  the New Humanities Initiative at  Binghamton University in New York "conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of English ... to build on some of the themes explored in Dr. Wilson’s evolutionary studies program," can find space for displaced palaeoconservative english majors --if Wilson is sincere in titling his new book  “Evolution for Everybody.”

Angier writes that in  Wilson’s view,

evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally? "

If  biotech savvy  Southern agararians can cotton to genetically reinforced corn and soybeans on them old weevil fields down home , the damn Yankees of Binghamton have a bounden duty to set aside some acreage for the new generation of Post-PoMo Generator  literati.

"One goal of the initiative " writes Angier "is to demystify science by applying its traditional routines and parlance in nontraditional settings — graphing Jane Austen, as the title of an upcoming book felicitously puts it. “If you do statistics in the context of something you’re interested in and are good at, then it becomes an incremental as opposed to a saltational jump,” Dr. Wilson said. “You see that the mechanics are not so hard after all, and once you understand why you’re doing the statistics in the first place, it ends up being simple"

Angier tells us that one of this new plantation's overseer's Rutger's Prof. Levine , the author of  Darwin Loves You.

” has criticized many recent attempts at so-called Literary Darwinism, the application of evolutionary psychology ideas to the analysis of great novels and plays. What it usually amounts to is reimagining Emma Bovary or Emma Woodhouse as a young, fecund female hunter-gatherer circa 200,000 B.C.

“When you maximize the importance of biological forces and minimize culture, you get something that doesn’t tell you a whole lot about the particularities of literature,” Dr. Levine said. “What you end up with, as far as I’m concerned, is banality.

Professor Heywood's work, notes  Angier ,  focuses on

 " the complex symbolism of the wolf, a topic inspired by a pet of hers that was seven-eighths wolf. “He was completely different from a dog,” she said...." Seeking a more full-bodied understanding, she delved into the scientific literature, studying wolf ecology, biology and evolution.

 She worked with Dr. Wilson and others to design a survey to gauge people’s responses ...in understanding how people read wolves, as opposed to seeing things through other filters and published texts,”

Angier does not , however note that competitive powerlifter Heywood is President of the Wman's Sport's Federation and authoress of  The Third Wave Agenda

Chipping At The Dyson Tree

I've enjoyed the latest Real Climate post--Few sights afford more innocent merriment than a catechist  defending his text  to the limit of his rhetorical ability , as when David Archer  ( surely no relation of the scandalous Lord Jeffrey ) , lets fly  four points  at Freeman Dyson's recent piece in the New York Review Of Books :

1."if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, "

Since when did  charcoal become thermodynamically less stable than diamond? If the guilelessly visionary  Freeman has left something out, it's the risk of forest fires

In 2. the problem is Archer's own selective memory:
" Why is it that Dyson’s remarkably creative powers of vision (carbon-eating trees for example) fail to come up with alternatives to the crude and ugly process of burning coal to generate electricity?"

Er, David, the Dyson I recall is perhaps the most eloquent and astute advocate of advanced  nuclear power.


Anachronism bites back in item  3
. : "when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now.."

Just so. Given what science does for technology, and technology for economics, expect them to be thinner and richer ,  independent of what the environment does to evolution.

4. " I often find myself contemptuous of efforts to misrepresent science to a lay audience.. I’ve got kids at home whose future I worry about."

On that base note , the dueling tuba concert continues.  Too bad the kids have to listen. And that their parents failed to read Dyson's 1977 article :

CAN WE CONTROL THE CARBON DIOXIDE
IN THE ATMOSPHERE?

Download Dyson_Energy_1977.pdf

As to freeman waxing visionary, here is his major contribution to future Arbor Day celebrations

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.orionsarm.com/eg/o/Orwood_Forest.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.orionsarm.com/eg/o/Or-Ot.html&h=360&w=480&sz=34&hl=en&start=2&sig2=RZ_EkuQrAqHke64vo0qUIg&tbnid=5Eyg4LwKPWXEwM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=129&ei=uN89SPHtOYTGetTMnccN&prev=/images%3Fq%3DDyson%2Btree%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG

The Reviews Are In

In the LRB, Terry Eagleton reminds us that in

 " 1579, John Stubbs had his right hand cut off for writing a work opposing the marriage of Elizabeth I to a French nobleman. Elizabeth herself urged that the printers of the anti-Anglican Marprelate tracts should be subjected to torture. In 1663, a London printer who published a pamphlet which argued that the monarch should be accountable to his subjects...was...hanged, drawn and quartered."

 "John Dryden was beaten up when leaving a coffee house because of an anonymous poem attributed to his pen" and the " proprietor of Blackwood’s Magazine horsewhipped at least twice by the victims of pugnacious, unsigned reviews... one irate author beat the proprietor of Fraser’s Magazine with a riding crop before fighting a duel with the journal’s dipsomaniac editor" while a vitriolic anonymous review merely " caused the ruptured blood vessel that eventually killed " Keats.

 " There was, however, profit as well as peril in anonymity. " Tobias Smollet t" produced an " unsigned complimentary review of his own Complete History of England. An unattributed notice in the London Chronicle which praised a work by James Boswell as ‘a book of true genius’ was written by Boswell himself... ... Even the high-minded George Eliot anonymously reviewed her partner G.H. Lewes’s life of Goethe, a work she had helped him compose. Not everyone disapproved of such practices. Stanley Morison, who edited the TLS in the 1940s, declared the self-review to be the ideal example of the genre. Coming from a man who ran a journal devoted entirely to anonymous contributions, this was dangerous stuff."

Dangerous Things

The cultural contrast between intriguing guests and apparently brain dead yack TV hosts has John Derbyshire  lamenting  :

" It's not the dumbing-down that bothers a lot of us fogeys so much, it's the loss of interest in things and stuff."

I’ll say- gone are the days when   Massachusetts and California overflowed with he not so wretched refuse of the electronics industry, and government surplus property offices  dished out  a high tech  cornucopia for pennies on the dollar of taxpayer money invested. The high water mark  was the sale of  bona fide Titan II  ICBM engines fourteen feet tall to any wannabe rocket scientist with a thousand bucks and a truck,

Hence the attraction of  the second career of  John Ratzenberger, AKA "Cliff Clalvin”. The former Cheers] actor is founder of the Nuts, Bolts, and Thingamajigs Foundation, "dedicated to raising awareness of skilled trades and engineering disciplines among young people." . On the O'Reily Show he expressed “ unhappiness at the fact that young Americans don't tinker any more." 

This bothers Derb much more than kids not reading or going to art galleries." But rejoice-  technophilia has gone wild at a California fair sponsored by Make Magazine,  where ,in a counterblast to  nodyne  OSHA regulations that felonize sharp objects and mandate  chemical-free chemistry set ,  fire engines belch celebratory fire,  robots strut the midway, and home-brew lightning  flashes from ten-foot  Tesla coils.

The sight of Muffin Cars  with roaring turbines out-segueing  Segways may make  Congressman Waxman cringe,  and greens flee in terror, yet a merry old time was had by young and old,  including  a fellow:

" holding forth in a vintage British military uniform and pith helmet, and is gesturing with a hand that holds a sloshing tankard of ale. “We’ve been told by corporate America that we cannot fix the things we own,”  John O’Hare told a somewhat shell shocked reporter from The New York Times:  “All we can do is buy their stuff and like it.Cars have become too complex to work on under a shade tree, and people have no idea what is inside their cellphones and cameras. “All this technology, and it’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s, Make is about taking that back off and making it yours.”

said the  Steampunk enthusiast  universally known as Major Catastrophe,  who stood out from the 65.000 who attended by virtue of having arrived in this three story Victorian mansion on wheels.

This  gearhead extravaganza sounds like serious Red State Stuff, and though such events began in the  San Francisco Bay  fever swamps that spawned the Home Brew Computer Club and  gave us the PC,  the sponsoring magazine, www.make.com , is starting another Make Faire in Austin Texas, with plans to expand the franchise.  Boring as media culture has become, the heartland  continues to cherish and  fire the intellectual independence  that  took fire in the  Goldwater movement and led to the Reagan revolution.  It is one thing for libertarians to remove to the Nevada  desert  for an annual  anarchist potlatch , quite another when Middle California breaks out of its smoke-free suburbs, and starts  waving pitchforks and propeller beanies at the culture of regulation. MacGyver gave way to  Mythbusters,  What will the sequel be to The Boys [and now The Girl's ] Book Of Dangerous Things ?

THE GENESIS OF EXPELLED

                      IN 2002, BEN STEIN ASKED FORBES READERS
                      WHAT'S THE BEST WAY TO  DESTROY AMERICA?
                           He answered  his own question thus :

"Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its scientific and competitive edge..

Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--...to an equal status with technology in the public mind... and act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo."

NULLIUS IN VERBA : Lord Rees Replies

Lord Rees , the President of The Royal Society, has taken issue with my Wall Street Journal article last criticizing the Society's attempt to defund critics of its climate policy. Here it is. His reply follows.

......Nullius In Verba

By RUSSELL SEITZ
In 1663, a group of savants formed a London club to discuss "useful knowledge." John Milton's "Areopagitica" was very much on the minds of those early scientists, for it warned that Puritan control of the press could turn into state control of thought. Dissent could get you killed in Restoration England, at sword's point if gentlemen took umbrage, or on the gallows if it traduced royal policy or Holy Writ. So they were mighty relieved when King Charles II agreed to join them, for, with such a patron, the Fellows of the Royal Society (including Oliver Cromwell's brother in law ) would not fear for their necks or purses when speaking truth to power or questioning authority -- until now.

What In Creation?

Many in government still experience difficulty in politicizing Earth science, witness the failure of the The Congressional Record to memorialize the 6,000th anniversary of the Earth's creation-- 4004 BC-- AD 1997.
To bring America's  National intelligent Design Curriculum up to date,

The Seitz System Of Condensed Concordia 
...Integrates noted Revelation scholar & alchemist
.Sir Isaac Newton's Calculus, Archbishop Ussher's
..peer-reviewed addition of Begats & the Geognostic
.Magisterium of late Commonwealth Latin Secretary
.John Milton Esquire &  Doctor John Winthrop
........of  Harvard College ,  into  America's  first
.........BIBLICALLY  CORRECT .............GEOCHRONOLOGY
This postmodern miracle reduces the Tedium of Plate Tectonics by cutting the span of geological time God-fearing students need to memorize by a factor of a million !

   Copyright MMVIII                                             Russell Seitz    

..4004 B.C. Hadean Era commences with Lucifer's fall to Earth

* 4003 B.C.:             From Eden, Adam & Eve request
                                    asbestos waders to cover their shame.

    * 3984 B.C.: The first biotechnologist, Cain, patents heat resistant bacteria.

    * 3804 B.C. Lava rains on Mesopotamia for 40 days and 40 nights; Noah's Ark incinerated.

    * 3504 B.C.: Archaean copper deposits form , kick-starting Bronze Age.

    * 3104 B.C.: Tubal Cain inaugurates banded Iron Age. Sphinx starts to fossilize.

    * 3004 B.C.: Y1K  crisis averted : Gilgamesh unable to count as high as 1000.

    * 2804 B.C.: Methuselah begins to notice passage of geological time.

    * 2604 B.C.: Tired of reading graphic granite, Imhotep devises hieroglyphs.

    * 2584 B.C.: Earliest sedimentation; discovery of slate leads to stone tablets.

    * 2384 B.C.: Breathable atmosphere develops; first sermon preached.

  

  

BLUE JADE :

A report on my archaeological work from: 

 

                                      In Guatemala, A Mother Lode Of Jade 

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

For half a century, scholars have searched in vain for the source of the jade that the early civilizations of the Americas prized above all else and fashioned into precious objects of worship, trade and adornment.

The searchers found some clues to where the Olmecs and Mayas might have obtained their jadeite, as the precious rock is known. But no lost mines came to light.

 Now, scientists exploring the wilds of Guatemala say they have found the mother lode — a mountainous region roughly the size of Rhode Island strewn with huge jade boulders, other rocky treasures and signs of ancient mining. It was discovered after a hurricane tore through the landscape and exposed the veins of jade, some of which turned up in stores, arousing the curiosity of scientists. The find includes large outcroppings of blue jade, the gemstone of the Olmecs, the mysterious people who created the first complex culture in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the region that encompasses much of Mexico and Central America.

It also includes an ancient mile-high road of stone traversing jaguar territory in a mountain wilderness containing rocks from the Earth’s mantle , called eclogites. The deposits rival the world's leading current source of mined jade, in Myanmar, formerly Burma, the experts say. The implications for history, archaeology and anthropology are just starting to emerge.

For one thing, the scientists say, the find suggests that the Olmecs, who flourished on the southern gulf coast of Mexico, exerted wide influence in the Guatemalan highlands as well. All told, they add, the Guatemalan lode was worked for millenniums, as compared with centuries for the Burmese one. In part, the discovery resulted from the devastating storm that hit Central America in 1998, killing thousands of people and touching off floods and landslides that exposed old veins and washed jade into river beds.

Local prospectors picked up the precious scraps, which found their way into Guatemalan jewelry shops and, eventually, the hands of astonished scientists.

“‛Lordy,’ I said, ‛this is Olmec type,’” recalled Russell Seitz, who decades earlier directed a jade hunt in Guatemala for the Peabody Museum at Harvard. “Where did it come from?”

 Led by Mr. Seitz and local jade hunters, a team of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History, Rice University and the University of California scoured the forested ravines of the Guatemalan highlands for more than two years. In the end the scientists made a series of discoveries  in bus-size boulders of Olmec blue jade, some astride creeks. "It kept getting better and better," said Virginia B. Sisson, a geologist at Rice University who has recently examined jades in Myanmar as well as Guatemala. The blue jade, she said, “is all over the hillsides.”

The exact locations of the outcroppings are not being given, to protect them. Leading archaeologists in Guatemala, though not directly involved, are applauding the finds. Hector Escobedo of the Universidad del Valle called the jade discovery "one of the most significant" in decades of investigating the Mayan past and said the new deposits probably account for "all of the sources for Mesoamerican jades." He added that

PYRITES OF THE CARRIBEAN

    In Which Ye  Author  Most Shamelessly Plugs

  A NATURAL HISTORY OF MUSTIQUE

The only place to read a Patrick O'Brian novel is lounging in the  mizzen top of a brig like Astrid. Nowhere else can a landsman keep track of what the man is talking about.  Running down the Windward Islands from English Harbor to Fort De France, I glanced up to spy that the nearest volcanic peak semed to be  greenly shivvering. So I put down The Nutmeg Of Consolation and swung from the mainyard garnet 'neath the futtocks to the quarterdeck ratlines to  go check the synthetic aperture radar--with a nightmare rig like Astrid's you want plenty of post-modern Nav gear, wired all Bristol-fashion.

Sure enough, the williwaw rustling the cane fields of Martinique's  Mont Pelee' was reaching across the sea-- it was time to shorten sail. From meteorology to ornithology and mineralogy, there's no avoiding natural history cruising the Caribbean. On land and under water , much of it is delightful ; but while  Captain Raul King of Bequia once declared " Nothing in this sea will harm you", you do need to know enough not to grab the fire coral , poke the sea urchins , or steer afoul of its underwater volcano.

With so much to oogle, the naturally curious visitor might well need  A Natural History Handbook to seek out, and sort out all the beautiful creatures, lovely corals, and sparking mineral veins. So I helped write one.

All The News That's Fit To Map

 

                                                                                                                                 It is noteworthy that a generation ago, this asymmetry was drawn from its epicenter  by the late great cartoonist Saul Steinberg:

Of course, publications  change as well as demography Today the culture of cartograpy centers on geophysics , so :

Yangoon Show

When The Sea Comes Up Like Thunder
And  the flying fishes play
O'er the landscape underwater
On the road to Mandalay
Stop reading Goddam  Kipling
There's a cyclone on the way

Burma's  PR  campaign marched on  as  Kipling's original rhyme became a tragic reality. Flying fishes  ruled  Myanmar's highways last week as Cyclone Nargis sucked in a dome of Andaman seawater five meters high and forty kilometers across, and bore it , flying fish and all, a hundred kilometers inland , dissolving half the  Irawaddy  delta into a flowing mudscape that is still running out to sea into a broad diagonal swath that literally extends  to the road  to Mandalay running north from Yangon.

With over  25,000 square kilometers under water, the death toll from this perfect cyclone may come  within a factor of two of the  2004  Boxing Day tsunami. The storm surge obliterated most of the coast  and Irrawaddy  delta reclaimed by ricefield  poldiering and levee construction  under the British Empire ,and in the two generations since.

I suspect Kipling had jumping Asian carp glimpsed from a  Mississippi-style steamboat of the Irawaddy Flotilla in mind, but there is no report  as to whether The  Old Moulmein Pagoda weathered the storm.

If the Goon Show in Yangoon goes on holding up foreign aid, the Burmese may  come up like thunder, before too many dawns have passed.

Before & after satellite photos of Burma.

The Grape of The Locke

AND STOP SHOOTING CROSSBOWS AT APPLES

Oblivious to the sterile  hybrid roses growing on the parliamentary  parterre, and the seedless grapes and melons served in its  dining rooms, the Philosophes in the Swiss bureaucracy  have passed guidelines banning Federal funding of research that affronts the dignity of plants. The object is to stop such horrific affronts to the  sovereign  integrity of the plant kingdom as genetic engineering that deprives vegetables of their independence.

Three hundred years after Locke praised the Geneva Republic, it's bad enough plants don't have the vote ( although they are not subject to compulsory military service either). Nature news reports the Swiss government's ethics committee on non-human biotechnology  has

"issued guidelines instructing researchers how to avoid offending the dignity of plants. If their projects are ruled as affronts to plants, their funding will be pulled.... The committee does not consider that genetic engineering of plants automatically falls into this category, but its majority view holds that it would if the genetic modification caused plants to 'lose their independence' - for example by interfering with their capacity to reproduce.

Reason  biotech watcher Ron Bailey wonders about :

"such egregious violations of vegetal dignity as grafting cabernet sauvignon shoots to alien American grape rootstock? And might not hybridization be considered forced plant miscegenation? Also, what could be worse for plant "independence" than domestication? After all, domesticated plants can't thrive without human nurturing. We've turned such crops as corn, wheat, oats, potatoes, and tomatoes into photosynthetic slaves. Finally, what could be more outrageously disrespectful to chlorophyll-kind than being eaten by people? The horror, the horror! "

Krak's Back

Anak Krakatau, the "Child Of Krakatoa" born from the depths of the caldera left in the seabed by the catastrophic eruption of 1886 seems to be entering its lusty adolescence . I have a Krakatau Number of 3, having talked to Luis Alvarez about the eruption in 1984. He got an eyewitness account from his sometime  WWII boss, Norden, of the eponymous bombsight, who was born in Batavia ( now Jakarta) a dozen years before the big bang.

The Uses Of Doubt

The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists has published an admirably candid collation of what some high profile climate modelers have to say to each other
The uncertainty in climate modeling   Some  cautionary excerpts follow, but  best read the whole thing

Climate prediction works well for some variables and poorly for others
James Murphy
" are the results too dependent on debatable expert assumptions for some variables, hence precluding predictions that are more than a "best guess" and an uncertainty range?

In practice, the answer is likely to differ from variable to variable, possibly even from season to season. Probability distributions for average future changes in surface temperature and precipitation, for instance, may be within reach, because the main processes expected to drive such changes are captured in the current generation of climate models.

On the other hand, changes in, say, surface evaporation or wind speed are too dependent on basic physical assumptions, which vary between different models--the problem being that we currently lack the detailed observations and understanding needed to distinguish which of the different assumptions is correct. In the latter case, we might decline the challenge of probabilistic prediction. The important thing is to have quantitative methods of determining where to draw the line, rather than relying purely on expert judgement.

In UKCIP08, for example, we are handling this problem by combining results from two different types of ensemble data: .... For some climate variables this works reasonably well, implying that probabilities can reasonably be estimated. For other variables we find much wider divergence between the two types of ensemble data, implying that probabilistic predictions aren't yet feasible.

... We can only judge credibility by assessing whether climate models capture the relevant processes on a case-by-case basis.....t the potential benefits of waiting for better information from future generations of models needs to be made very clear.

Climate modeling is still an abstraction of reality
Leonard A. Smith
... I doubt we can blame the media for many problems climate science seems set to bring upon itself. .., the pivotal question is whether today's models are able to provide additional relevant information, and if so, on what scales?

... Suppose a cup of coffee slips from my hand. I know enough physics to predict that it will fall to the floor. I'm also confident that if I reduce the distance it falls, it's less likely to shatter and create a mess. We know with this kind of certainty that the greenhouse effect has initiated global warming. Yet, I also understand that I don't know enough physics to predict how many shards will result if the cup shatters or where exactly the coffee will splatter. Nor can I usefully estimate a "critical height" below which the cup has an acceptably small chance of shattering. The fact that I know I don't know these things is valuable information for evidence-based decision support: It keeps me from making overconfident plans based on the "best available information." Instead, I act based upon what I do know--the cup is likely to shatter, and therefore, I plan to jump left.

But what if the physicist next to me offers to sell me a probability distribution from his state-of-the-art "falling fluid container" model? His implied probabilities describe whether or not my cup will shatter, what the shards will do if it does, and the trajectory of various drops of coffee after the cup lands (so we know which direction to move to avoid coffee splatter). High-resolution MPEG movies of the model are available for a small extra charge, and they look great!

Should I pay attention to him?
Do we believe that today's models can provide decision-relevant probabilities at a resolution of tens of square kilometers for the year 2060--or even 2020 for that matter? No.... to accept a naive realist interpretation of model behaviors cast as a Bayesian probability distribution is, as mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead surmised, to mistake an abstract concept for concrete reality....Shorn of this context, model results have an aura of exactitude that can be misleading.

Interpreting climate predictions should be collaborative
Claudia Tebaldi
We all seem to agree that our state-of-the-art models aren't satisfactory representations of climate on Earth--at least not to the degree required to make decisions with them. We also agree that people are concerned with climate change ...
Beyond this common ground, we fall on different points of the spectrum between James's pragmatic approach, where he proposes giving decision makers information as our "best guess" about future outcomes nonetheless, and Lenny's highly skeptical position--namely, there's no hope in approximating the real world in any useful sense.

The reader who doesn't dabble in climate modeling or statistics is probably asking herself, "What am I to make of all this?" To which I would say, "That's exactly what I want you to think!"

Let me explain: If I can say anything for sure, it's that I don't want anyone to take a precooked climate projection--whether a single model or a multi-model ensemble, probabilistic or not--and run with it. Any decision will be best served by looking at the available observational and modeled information and listening to the opinion of climate modelers and climatologists. The experts will be able to form an integrated evaluation based on changes already observed,...
... By doing so, we may get closer to a full characterization of the uncertainties that we know exist....As for the unknown unknowns. . . There's no way around those.

Probabilities aren't so scary
James Murphy
Policy makers and planners now accept the reality of man-made climate change and are turning their thoughts toward adaptation. Should they make their decisions now, or wait to see if better climate models can provide more precise information? .... Modeling centers have worked incredibly hard on this during the past decade, yet the range of projections hasn't changed much....There's no obvious reason to expect more than gradual progress,

The scientific credibility of a probability distribution function therefore depends not on having near-perfect, error-free models, but on how well the methodology used to sample the uncertainties and convert the model results into probabilities summarizes the risk of alternative outcomes. This is by no means an easy hurdle, but one I believe we are capable of overcoming.

Of course, the probabilities must be accompanied by sensitivity analyses that educate users not to interpret the probabilities to too high a degree of precision.  room should be made for changing forecasts in the future....perhaps we can be less frightened of telling users what we believe--and perhaps we can credit them with the intelligence not to interpret our current beliefs as everlasting promises.

In planning for the future, make room for changing forecasts
Leonard A. Smith

...Seeking a perfect relationship that would bring decision-support bliss might hinder the development of our warts-and-all models, which, while improving, are in no way converging towards perfection....Gavin notes that the average of many models is frequently "closer to the observations" than any individual model. While true, this doesn't suggest that such an average can support good decision making. Even when the model is perfect, averaging can be a bad idea. Consider the parable of ... three...statisticians who cannot swim but desperately need to cross a river.

Each has a forecast of the change in the river’s depth from one bank to the other; in each forecast, there's a different point at which the river is so deep that the statisticians will drown. According to the average of their forecasts, it’s safe to ford the river. Even though the average is closer to the actual depth profile of the river than any one of the forecasts, action based on that information is not safe--if they cross the river, they’ll drown. .... there are few, if any, examples of purely model-based probability forecasts supporting good decision-making ...

Not all climate models are created equal
Claudia Tebaldi

It's exhilarating to see the fruits of climate research achieve such prominence in the media, political debate, and concerns of industrial and municipal stakeholders. As scientists, though, it's incumbent upon us not to mislead the lay audience...., I wholeheartedly agree with Gavin that these kinds of probabilistic projections aren't appropriate for risk analysis and decision making under uncertainty and won't be for a long time.

Climate models produce projections, not probabilities
Gavin Schmidt

"I'm just a model whose intentions are good, Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood," Nina Simone may as well have sung. Models are fundamentally necessary in all sciences. They exist to synthesize knowledge, to quantify the effects of counteracting forces, and most importantly, to make predictions--the evaluation of which is at the heart of the scientific method...

Climate models are amalgams of fundamental physics, approximations to well-known equations, and empirical estimates (known as parameterizations) of processes that either can't be resolved (because they happen on too small a physical scale) or that are only poorly constrained from data.... models are all limited by similar computational constraints and have developed in the same modeling tradition. Thus while they are different, they are not independent in any strict statistical sense.

Does agreement on a particular phenomenon across multiple models with various underlying assumptions affect your opinion on whether or not it is a robust projection? The answer, almost certainly, is yes. Such agreement implies that differences in the model inputs, including approach (e.g. a spectral or grid point model), parameterizations (e.g. different estimates for how moist convective plumes interact with their environment), and computer hardware did not materially affect the outcome, which is thus a reasonable reflection of the underlying physics.

Does such agreement "prove" that a given projection will indeed come to pass? No... the assumed changes in forcings in the future may not transpire...

So how should one interpret future projections from climate models? I suggest a more heuristic approach. If models agree that something (global warming and subtropical drying for instance) is relatively robust, then it is a reasonable working hypothesis ... while it is seductive to attempt to corner our ignorance with the seeming certainty of 95-percent confidence intervals, the comfort it gives is likely to be an illusion. Climate modeling might be better seen as a Baedeker for the future, giving some insight into what might be found, rather than a precise itinerary."

Very Scary Calimari

IT'S JUST A RUNT
The 26 foot squid  from Antarctica's Ross Sea being dissected in New Zealand , though Colossal,is not Giant- they run more like 46 feet, and are being avidly tracked by hungry oceanographers. 

The hunt for  Captain Nemo's nemesis, Archyteuthys may finally succeed this season , so start stockpiling tartar sauce today

Or view the mighty archive of giant squiddery at New Zealand's Te Papa Blog

Say Again?

Just in case they re-edit Expelled ,to reduce the cognitive dissonance level, note this comment by David Berlinski:

 

Just for the record: I have never endorsed any creationist views whatsoever; and I am a published critic of intelligent design. I take airplanes because I believe in the principles of fluid dynamics; when I must use a cell phone, I place my faith in quantum electrodynamics.

So what?

DB

Pajamas Media Apr 28, 2008 - 11:17 am