Radiation

I've heard a couple of stories on NPR claiming people in the US are worried radiation from Japan is going to make it over here. The strange thing to me is that the couple of scientists I've heard respond haven't laughed in the faces of those who are worried. Perhaps I'm just mean, but if someone seriously suggested radiation from JAPAN was going to harm me here in CALIFORNIA, I'd probably question their knowledge of geography. There is an entire ocean, and not a small one, separating the two countries. Knowledgeable people tell us radiation isn't likely to be a serious hazard for most of Japan, never mind the US.

The self-centeredness of the worry too--the workers at the nuclear plant are legitimately risking their health and possibly their lives, there are more than a billion people who are much, much closer to Japan than we are, and we're worried about our risk?

I'm not sure I should even link this for fear of spreading misinformation. Lest you wonder, initially I thought this report on Faux news was a parody. While one of my professors in college taught us it was possible some animals, especially those living underground, might be able to sense imminent earthquakes a few minutes out, there's no credible reason to think we can seriously predict an earthquake days in the future based on animal behavior. That geologist is crazy--I want to see his statistics on the whale beaching-earthquake connection, though apparently the anecdotal info is good enough for the Fox newscaster.

Crazy.

Big, wrong ideas

Scientists love big ideas--ideas that explain in a coherent way a big open question. Extinctions, for instance. Explaining the extinction of dinosaurs was caused by a meteor impact was definitely a big, and therefore intellectually attractive, idea.

Unfortunately, impacts are so intellectually attractive that they're called on to explain all kinds of things they almost certainly are not related to, like the end Permian extinction, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, and end-Pleistocene extinction of megafauna in North America. The suggestion impacts caused all of those extinctions is just a bit nutty and most scientists would agree meteor impact is at best an unlikely explanation for any of those events.

The general public, however, is not made up of scientists, and apparently the general public likes a big idea as much as a scientist. The problem, of course, being that without the background to critically assess a claim or recognize a reliable source of information, it's not difficult to convince non-scientists something unscientific is true. Especially if it's something that sounds good or is something people want to believe.

My rambling here is because yesterday in the seminar I'm taking from Jay Malosh, we discussed the idea that the end Pleistocene megafauna extinction was caused by a meteor impact--an idea popularized through a popular science book, legitimized by a paper published in a prestigious journal without a peer review, and an idea that's more than likely wrong. The problem is, people don't want to believe the most likely culprit (humans) were capable of causing the extinction of almost all the big animals in North America.

None of this would matter except that these situations make science look bad. Global cooling (which was popularized by a couple of articles written by a couple of guys who did not present the scientific consensus, 'cause there wasn't one in the 70's) gets brought up to me all the time as an example of "scientists not knowing what they're talking about," or "changing our minds." It's irritating. The science that makes it into the popular press is so limited and too often not rigorously described, so people get wrong impressions about what's going on in science. It doesn't help that most of what makes it into the popular press is controversial or new and sexy (and so more likely to be wrong). Reporting results that essentially validate our current understanding of things just isn't interesting enough most of the time, so even though the vast majority of science does exactly that (reinforce our current understanding of things) people seem to want to see science as constantly being shaken up or pushing new, exciting, unexpected boundaries.

The Anthropocene

Apparently this is my week to read things that get my dander up. The Economist has a nice little story up about global warming beginning 5,000 years ago thanks to agriculture. They reference a paper that I can't read yet, as it is still in press, so I don't exactly know what it says, but the author, Bill Ruddiman, argues elsewhere that the Anthropocene (the Geologic age defined by Humans becoming dominant contributors to geologic cycles) should start with the spread of agriculture, 5,000 to 8,000 years ago rather than in 1784 with the invention of the steam engine (see here for a quick summary of the argument between Ruddiman and Paul Crutzen). The Economist story isn't a bad story, actually, for its brevity.

Then come the comments. In them, the same tired, "humans can't really influence climate/global warming isn't real/it's a natural cycle/where were the humans to cause the end of the last ice age/pick your favorite duplicitous misrepresentation of science" were trotted out, refuted, and re-trotted. Why, when scientists argue amongst themselves about the minutia of our fields, is that argument immediately taken as proof that what we say is wrong? The argument here is not whether or not global warming is real, is happening, is significant; but rather the argument here is whether anthropogenic forcing of the climate began earlier than most scientists (and non scientists!) suppose. It's an argument over definitions, and boundaries, and ultimately over what is considered significant. I realize it may be difficult for a non-scientist to catch all of what's going on in a quick blurb (and realistically, anything less than a book is probably a quick blurb), but seriously, could we employ our brains for just a few moments and examine what we're reading logically? Is an article that ends with,

So although the size of the effect has increased markedly since the industrial revolution, it looks as if humanity has been interfering with the climate since the dawn of civilisation.

really a great one to support the "global warming isn't real" mantra?

Getting warmer...

But still oh so cold!

Of course, observations of the coldness of our current weather apparently suggest to some people (who I will refrain from linking to out of a desire to not alienate anyone) that global warming must not be real since it's so stinkin' cold outside right now.

Argh.

If you, dear reader, happen to be one of those who think that our current cold weather somehow proves global warming isn't happening, I kindly suggest you either quit reading or strap on your thickest skin.

All done?

Now, then, ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME??!!??

I know, you think you're being funny, saying things like, "Thank you global warming for the coldest winter ever," but really, you're just showing your ignorance. First of all, I promise you this isn't the coldest winter ever. And that's just for the years for which we have good records (which is probably only about the past 125 years at best). Oh, and climate is different than weather. Climate is an average. Weather, since it's not an average, can vary over a much wider range than "average." In fact, you expect weather to reach highs and lows that are at times far outside the average. 'Cause that's how averages work.

Has it ever occurred to you, dear misinformed reader, that perhaps it is your expectations that are to blame for your appalling misinterpretation of the current weather? Did you really expect the weather to do some DC shift upward? Even if that were the case, would you really expect that you'd be able to see a 0.6 degree C temperature shift? Really? REEEAALY?

Please, before you make more bad global warming jokes that do little more than underscore your devotion to the anti-science agenda of right-wing conservatives, please, PLEASE educate yourself.

More misunderstood science

Having just sat through a Sunday school lesson where science was the bad guy because scientist "know everything" and "change their minds about things all the time," this particular discussion comes at a perfect time to annoy me. I'm going to frame my discussion in terms of models, where models are the mental images we have of the world around us. In science it is understood, first of all, that ultimately our explanations are just models, and second of all, that our models are in many ways incomplete and wrong. We expand and correct our models using hypotheses, which are tested by experiment, observation, and measurement. It is also understood that there exist multiple working hypotheses--multiple, equally probable explanations that we should take into account and, in a well-conceived experiment, distinguish between. Scientific models, because of their connection to experiments and observations, must be directly tied to the physical world around us (except for physicists--they're special. J/K, Clark). Does that connection make us conceited about our knowledge? Maybe. I'm sure it looks that way from the outside. We really do have a lot of confidence in a lot of our models, including evolution, and that probably comes off as conceit. Evolution has withstood an awful lot of testing, so we're really rather confident it's correct. As confident as we are in many models, every scientist acknowledges that there are likely to be refinements, or even occasionally replacements of widely believed models when a new theory comes along that has better explanatory power. I'd say evolution is unlikely to be overturned completely by a new theory simply because it does do such a good job explaining what we see in the natural world. That said, if sufficiently convincing evidence were to come forward that something else were behind the diversity of life we observe, scientists would eventually accept the new model.

Religion is also a model, but unlike a scientific model, it need not be verifiable by independent experiments. In fact, the nature of faith precludes the possibility of independent verification of most beliefs. Whatever evidence underlies your faith (and physical evidence is certainly a valid part of faith for many!) your model is not one that can be verified or invalidated by someone else. Just isn't possible. Religious belief is still a model, though, and there are certainly aspects of your model, my model, everyone's models, that are incomplete or incorrect. Our culture seeps into our religious models, staining those models with baggage that has no eternal significance, and yet seems terribly important to us standing at this time and in this place. Because we are not privy to the thoughts of Deity, we have no concrete, independently verifiable way of removing those unnecessary bits for ourselves and for everyone else. It's also more or less impossible to get everyone to agree on a religious model--even within a religion! If you doubt that, just try getting a bunch of people to agree on what the true nature of God is.

Unfortunately, a lot of non-scientists seem to think it's appropriate to apply a religious model to a scientific model. It's not. In fact, it's incredibly conceited to think that it's appropriate. Because scientists are aware that our models are incomplete and incorrect, we are willing to modify, and even throw out models when they fail to accurately reflect reality as measured by experiment and observation. I find such mental flexibility much more often lacking in those of a more religious persuasion, particularly when it comes to a religious model.

Misunderstanding Science, 101

This is just silly. On year erases a 100 year trend? Learn to read a graph before trying to interpret it, please. The graph in question shows monthly global temperatures from the HadCRUT data set for the last 250 months--or, from 1988 to January of this year. The temperature anomaly decreases to about where it was at 100 months from the beginning of 1988, or about 150 months ago. For those who are counting, that means global average temperatures are today about what they were in 1996 or '97. Yep, a whole decade. For even better graphs that show exactly how unremarkable this year is for the last 30 years, see this or read the original and follow-up posts that started the whole brew-ha-ha.

If you're going to deny the science, please at least understand what you're saying.