03Jan
[Another cross-post from Adapt Already]
One way to deal with uncertainty is brute force engineering. See, for example, the canal that brings 1.5 million acre feet (1850 gigalitres according to Google) of Colorado River water into Arizona each year (the Central Arizona Project or CAP).
Or, here in Victoria, there’s the massive desalination plant under construction on the Bass Coast, which will deliver annually 200 gigalitres of water purified from the ocean.
This is apparently one third of Melbourne’s annual consumption. The fancy-pants animation provided on the project website ends with the dramatic and reassuring words:
“Water now
and for the future.
For sure.”
And this is precisely the point. The impact of climate change on annual rainfall is potentially quite bad, and at best, highly uncertain. The response? Find a source independent of rainfall. While fears of climate change no doubt played a significant role in bringing about this desalination project, this is one form of adaptation that doesn’t rely on detailed climate predictions in order to be effective.
Chalk this up as one of the many examples that contradicts the conceptual model proposed by the Climate Science Framework:
climate science –> adaptation research –> adaptation
On another note… Continue reading »
Tags: adaptation, Climate, prediction, technology, uncertainty, water
12Aug
In his essay, “Prediction in Society,” Dale Jamieson notes with some exasperation that typically, upon the massive and persistent failure of economic models to predict important economic events:
people do not fire the economists and throw away their models. Instead, they argue that we need more economists and better models.
It was in that context that I suspiciously read through last week’s Nature, which has several articles on Agent Based Modeling (ABM) of the economy. Continue reading »
Tags: economics, Interdisciplinary research, models, Science Policy
18Jul
This article from Christopher Beam at Slate examines the funding and decision processes behind various genome sequencing projects. After reviewing the criteria used by the NIH (the heaviest hitter in the game), he notes (emphasis mine):
Scientists often target organisms that are already used in the laboratory, since their genomes are likely to be the most useful. Accordingly, the mouse, the fruit fly, the zebra fish, and the roundworm were among the first sequenced genomes.
Hmmm… what exactly do these scientists mean by “useful”? Continue reading »
27May
The newest SoapBox article is a Memorial Day-inspired poem from Dan Sarewitz entitled “Progress and the Final Sacrifice.” Dan draws our attention to the fact that much of technological advance has come as a result of efforts to kill more effectively:
Let us know humanity by the ever-great efficiency and creativity
with which it visits death upon itself,
And wars by the salutary influence they have
on what we are pleased to call progress.
Tags: SoapBox
26Mar
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