Posts tagged Science
Taking the Long View
Feb 9th
(the following is mine and mine alone, and does not in any way reflect opinions or viewpoints of my employer.)
I understand when people get on indignant rants. You see something that is so clear to you, and you just feel like verbally slapping a few people across the cheek to wake them up, so they can see what is so plainly in front of their faces.
However, the Indignant Rant often reveals the boundaries of one’s concern. When I was a reporter, I recall many people who would call and berate me for not giving ________ more time and attention than it was getting. “But you don’t see, if they name Mr. So-and-so to the committee, it will mean the end of civilization as we know it!”
Okay, their lips weren’t foretelling the end of Western Civilization, but their body tics, tremors, and voice inflection certainly did. It was classic fight or flight, and it’s definitely not what our bodies evolved as a proper response to our anguish over the makeup of the school textbook committee.
The Whiffle Life
P.J. O’Rourke – in his classic Parliament of Whores, calls this the “Whiffle Life.”
My friend’s kid lives in a well-padded little universe, a world with no sharp edges or hard surfaces. It’s the Whiffle Ball again. The kid leads a Whiffle Life, and so does my friend and so do I.
The premise is that we’ve dumbed down our existence and taken the risk out of so many things, that we’ve literally knocked evolution for a loop. Some of us (in the modern, industrialized West) live in a world where our mistakes have virtually no consequences for survival. You can screw up often, and the worst that happens is you get a little unpleasantness. Much in the same way that a thrown baseball can hurt, so we replace them with Whiffle Balls instead.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about being eaten by hyenas, you worry about whether pets are spayed and neutered.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about your teeth rotting out, you worry about whether they are white enough.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about having access to safe drinking water, you fret over whether it’s the right flavor or brand.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you watch the thermometer like a hawk because of Global Warming, and doom the planet to extinction.
History in an Icicle
Yes, this is the Indignant Rant that reveals the boundaries of my concern. I happen to think that human beings are wonderful creatures, and we have shown an amazing capacity for creating beauty and hope. I also worry that in trying to preserve our accomplishments, we’re squinting at the tiny and ignoring the very real, big threats to everything we know.
I want you to look at this graph by J. Storrs Hall. It’s taken from a Greenland ice core:
Yes, that is indicative of temperatures increasing. But notice they’ve been going up since the 1830s. You could try to tie this to industrialization, but remember, this is just one sample from one location. What I want to do is change your perspective for a moment. Let’s roll back even further:
It would seem that 1000 years ago, we were warmer than we are now. But that’s not enough of a Big Picture.
Go back a little over 10,000 years, and look at where we were. Ice Age. Pay attention to that little uptick at the end that so many people are getting all frothed about. Watch where it goes when we dial the Wayback Machine to 50,000 years ago:
That tiny little tick mark at the end of that line, which is smaller than each of the commas in this sentence, is the danger? Seriously? Pay attention to the scale at the left of the graph. We’re looking at temperatures 10-25 degress Celsius cooler than what we have now. Human civilization, and agriculture, and iPods could not have emerged before now. And what makes you think we could survive when it does get cold again? Switching to the Vostok core in the Antarctic, we see this:
Where is that 150-year rise at the end, again?
Cultural Arrogance
I’m fairly certain, that even if the planet heats up a little more, that we could adapt. People along coastlines move a little inland. Arable farmland actually increases, so we’d be better able to feed the masses.
What worries me is that in concentrating on this tiny epoch of time, we ignore the real threat. It’s clear from the graphs that we live in an epoch that is an anomaly. Yet we pretend as though nothing ever happened before recorded history.
Every time someone shows you one of those pictures of a glacier from 150 years ago, ask them: “And just what is the optimal climate for the Earth?” They can’t tell you. But for some reason, the Arrogant Anointed have decided that the Earth is supposed to be exactly the way it was when their great-grandparents moved to Martha’s Vineyard. Or when their daddy was sworn into the Senate. It is foolish to believe the Earth is not in a constant state of flux.
There are people who believe God created the world 6,000 years ago. I am not one of them, and boy would I be pissed off if a bunch of them started crafting public policy that would wreck the economy, based on their belief that the world ought to be Eden, and Eden started the moment they opened their eyes and started drinking Enfamil.
There used to be astronomers who believed in the Steady-State Theory, that stars and matter must be continually created to fill the void left behind, as galaxies move away from each other. (Doppler red-shift tells us galaxies are all moving away.) Not as many do, because it requires a belief in spontaneous creation of matter.
And here we are today, with environmentalists who cling to the belief that our planet, the way it is today, is the way it has always been and ought to always be. They have absolutely nothing to base that belief upon. And in a way, they deserve even more scorn for that belief than the traditionalists who tout a 6,000 year world history.
I’m all for being a good steward of the environment, but before we wreck the global economy chasing a fantasy about a steady-state Earth, how about putting some research dollars into the threat we know is coming? How does man survive when it gets too cold? Are we going to move out and find new sources of food? Look for hospitable worlds elsewhere? We have the time and the resources to do it, if we don’t starve ourselves to death on granola and pray to Gaia as the ice envelopes us.
Fire From the Sky
Forget about how we’re overdue for an Ice Age for a moment. We know we’ve got at least a thousand years or so to lick that problem.
What about a comet strike? Or a sufficiently large meteorite?
In 1908, a piece of a comet nailed a remote section of Russia. It created an explosion and a mushroom cloud, and wiped out everything for miles around. If we didn’t know any better, it would have been called a nuclear bomb. In fact, it’s a good thing we didn’t know any better, because if it had happened 50 or 60 years later, the world would have been glowing from the remains of retaliatory strikes before anyone bothered to figure out it was a natural occurrence.
But what if the Tunguska comet had been larger?
Make it larger by a factor of 10, and it would have rocked the world. Make it even bigger, and it could wipe out nearly all intelligent life on the planet.
So while we’re dickering with Mars missions and Moon missions and all manner of foolishness, we’re ignoring the very real instant threat to civilization. (And that means all the puppies will die, too. And the Black Eyed Peas.) We’re investing next to nothing in discovering or tracking the large objects that sweep into near-Earth orbits. We’re investing even less in researching technologies that would allow us to alter their orbits, or even explode them remotely where they would pose less of a threat.
I’m talking about something that could strike tomorrow. Or a year from now. That’s the Indignant Rant that keeps me up at night.
The Big Picture
We’ll solve the plastics problem, and the Styrofoam problem, and the nuclear waste problem. We’ll figure out how to leave cleaner and meaner and smarter, because we’re humans and that’s what we’ve done for 10,000 years. Occasionally, in the middle of miles of steps forward, we take one or two back. That’s okay, because we learn from those missteps.
Or at least we do, when we bother to look back with enough perspective.
Flat Thinking
Dec 22nd
“A lot of ideas looked good on paper, but probably should have been rendered in three dimensions or more.”
Headlines, ripped straight from the Razr
Aug 11th
From today’s New York Times:
Twitter has been described many ways. At its best, it has been called a revolutionary political tool and a low-cost marketing machine. At its worst, it has been dubbed a waste of time.
Now, two researchers are calling it a hedonimeter, a device that measures happiness.
Peter Sheridan Dodds and Christopher M. Danforth, a pair of statisticians from the University of Vermont, are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through the popular micro-blogging platform at any given moment to read public opinion and sentiment in real-time.
Sounds a bit similar in concept to a piece I wrote two years ago.
Yes, the application was an April Fools’ joke, but the concept isn’t.
Global Warming Can’t Handle Pressure
Jun 3rd
Some people want to classify me as a “climate-change denier.” Instead, call me what I am, a skeptic of the highest order.
I originally majored in geology because I wanted a broad science background to become a science reporter. My school wouldn’t have any of it, and instead wanted me to narrow down into a little box. I don’t like boxes so much, so I switched majors and went for a journalism major with a political theory minor.
I also don’t like people using bullying tactics in an attempt to make others go along. The scientists I looked up to never bowed to consensus, nor did they attempt to silence others with the billy club of popularity. Believe me, the moment you speak out against such things, people will come out of the woodwork to pick apart everything they can about you personally, because ad hominem is a great way to shut up dissenters without considering the merit of the argument.
[Ad hominem works both ways, by the way - as there are those who try to connect all environmentalists with a hidden agenda of socialism.]
Folks, no matter what they tell you, the science is not settled, and the case is not proven. Science is never, ever settled. And the academically-honest scientists will tell you that they aren’t making a scientific case for radical environmental change, they are asking for you to make an economic one based on Pascal’s Wager.
Betting on the Angels
Pascal’s Wager is a simple one: given the costs for believing in God (the entry fee, so to speak) and the risk/reward for the existence of Heaven/Hell – it makes sense to believe in God. The eternal reward is so great if you’re right, and if you’re not, you didn’t lose very much.
What we’re being offered on the environmental front is a variation on Pascal’s Wager. Worst-case scenarios are being trotted out, and we’re told that we simply “can’t wait” for the science to prove conclusively that we are beyond the point of global extinction. What’s the harm in living a little cleaner and greener, anyway?
Turns out, there can be quite a lot. Cleaner and greener is a great way to go if all things are equal, but they almost never are. Every choice has a consequence, there’s a trade-off and an opportunity cost: what else could we have done with that money? (Conversely, the opportunity cost of doing nothing at all about the environment is the same as Pascal’s Wager; going to Hell.)
Before you bet on the Angels, though, there are some things I’d like you to consider about the data regarding Climate Change.
Assumptions to Challenge
What is “normal?”
Are we talking about within a lifetime, or within a nation’s written history? Are we talking about centuries on the average, or millenia? Are we talking geologic time?
Oh my God, glaciers are retreating! (We are coming out of an ice age, you know…)
Oh my God, we could lose the polar ice caps! (Some estimates show that within the last 6-million years, we’ve had polar ice around 20% of that time. So polar ice is the exception, not the rule.)
Oh my God, the coastal cities will drown! (Ever see a map of Pangaea? Coastlines aren’t permanent.)
Oh my God, Earth is getting warmer!
That last one is even subject to some debate. Forty years ago, science was convinced we were heading into irreversible Global Cooling (caused by pollution.) And all of those computer models and projections failed to predict that the Earth would peak in 1998 and has been cooling since.
Can models be trusted?
Of course models can be trusted, to the extent they are programmed correctly. You can make a virtual model of a card game, and use it to predict which strategies work and when to double down. You can make very good assumptions over time about how to maximize your profits at the blackjack table. But what if you were playing blackjack and these starting showing up?
The +4 card forces you to draw an additional four cards, and would almost assuredly force you to go over 21. That’s not fair, though! That’s not a part of the game!
If the card starts showing up in real blackjack games but isn’t accounted for in your model, then who is at fault?
Models are only as good as their inputs. I have no doubt that the scientists working on climate change projections have every good and noble interest at heart, but their models have missed some pretty big influences over the last few years, such as El Ninos, sunspots, and variations of solar radiation. The models have been tweaked and poked, but will only be as useful as they are based in reality.
Fundamentally, it is a given that carbon dioxide levels are the engine for the warming as a greenhouse gas. This ignores other, more potent and influential greenhouse gases – and the pressures they exert.
Give or Take a Billion
The genesis for this post came from reading this article in Wired, about the possibility that Earth might be inhabitable for an additional billion years than previously thought.
King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.
The theory here is that atmospheric pressure has always varied on Earth. A theory. Completely unsupported at this point, but the Caltech team is doing the math to see what the consequences might be. And why is he doing that math?
“I am glad that Li and colleagues have raised the issue of how overall variation in atmospheric pressure may have affected past and may affect future climate,” ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University said in an e-mail. “This could be relevant for understanding climate change on the billion-year time scale.”
Despite this potentially important role, atmospheric pressure in the distant past has gone uninvestigated.
“We have a lack of data about the past history of the atmospheric pressure,” said Li.
What is that again? A lack of data? No one has even measured it before, and it’s only now being theorized that it has varied much (or will in the future). Which brings us back to all those climate change models:
- They don’t know nearly as much about the past as they’d like us to believe
- They use an arbitrary “norm”
- They have not shown any true predictive capability, even on the timescales and outputs we can measure.
And they want us to bet trillions of dollars that could instead be put to use for education, health, disease prevention, innovation, quality of life improvements, preventing hunger, relocation, or any of a laundry list of social goods that we might have instead?
They haven’t even accounted for the pressure. So for now, I refuse to bow to theirs.
We’re Still Here
Sep 10th
There was quite a bit of consternation about whether you would still exist to read this now.
In case you are in fact reading this particular message, that meant the Large Hadron Collider in Europe has not created little black holes that will swallow the Earth. The particles are being smashed in an effort to recreate conditions present at the beginning of the universe.
For a little background on that topic, I present the scholarly works of MC Hawking.
Side note… when I get home, I have to explain to my six-year-old what a “black hole” is. I’m not allowed to show her the video. Any suggestions?
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, humor, LHC, CERN, YouTube, Stephen Hawking, black holes[/tags]