Trusting in Statistics

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My friend Luis, who was smart before he started going to law school, has an interesting discussion of the expansion of the open source model:

There is no guarantee, but community practices evolve to make it statistically likely that help (or bug fixing, or whatever) will occur. The internet makes this possible- whereas in the past if you wanted free advice, you had to have a close friend with the right skills free time, you can now draw from a much broader pool of people. If that pool is large enough (and in software, it appears to be) then it is a statistical matter that one of them is likely to have both the right skills and the right amount of free time.

The question Luis poses: where else (the law?) has/will this also occur?

Rain

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I’ve been a bit of a slug about rounding up my rainfall data, but I finally got around to totalling things up from The Amazing Monsoon. Here are the numbers:

Month Avg. NWS My house
June 0.61 1.14 0.99
July 1.38 3.55 3.76
August 1.42 3.74 5.80

(Avg. is the National Weather Service’s long term average, NWS is the reading at the weather service office, which is at a similar elevational gradient to my house, my house is my house.)

The Public Scientist

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I can humbly say “I knew Andrew Dessler before….” 🙂

I stumbled across him a few years back when he co-authored a paper with Ken Minschwaner, an atmospheric physics guy here in New Mexico, so the roots of our conversation predate my obsession with climate change.

Now Andrew’s made the big time (“I define success as being interviewed by The Houston Chronicle’s SciGuy, Eric Berger,” Andrews said on his blog.). In the Berger interview, Andrews makes an important point about the lack of incentive for scientists to play a public role:

why don’t more scientists engage the public in a broader way? There are a lot of risks when scientists do that. There’s a risk that their work will be misinterpreted. There’s a risk that they feel they will be negatively perceived by their colleagues. There’s no real reward in the academic system for being someone who goes out and talks to the general public. I think that’s a real problem with the tenure-university system, we don’t get rewarded for outreach. You get rewarded for publications and grants. So, you know there are these downsides, and there’s not a lot of upsides.

This is unfortunate. I acknowledge a bias here. I need scientists willing to do what Dessler does, or I’ve got nothing to write in the newspaper. But I also think it’s important that scientists communicate with the public about what they’re doing.

A Feedback, But How Large?

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Zhuang and colleagues, in GRL, publish a new analysis of high-latitude carbon source/sink behavior. Their conclusion, considering among other issues CO2 fertilization and the contribution of fire to the system (see here for a discussion of the fire CO2 source/sink issue) that the region’s CO2 contributions will go up as things warm over the century, but that “these emissions will exert relatively small radiative forcing on global climate system compared to large amounts of anthropogenic emissions.”

even a blind pig…

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My source for real estate skepticism, Aaron, has an update:

[T]he number of places in my neighborhood for sale keeps piling up– $500k condos, $900k single-families, that kind of thing. So thought I’d look around to see if there’s any news about that impending real-estate disaster I keep thinking is just around the corner. Remember, I’ve been thinking it’ll happen any day now for at least three years. As my 7th grade history teacher used to say, even a blind pig finds an acorn once in awhile.

Lane

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If you look at the National Hurricane Center’s latest track for Lane, it looks like the moisture is headed our way here in New Mexico by some time next week. So far, though, the forecasters at the local National Weather Service office don’t think it’ll get here:

CONDITIONS WILL REMAIN DRY UNDER A RIDGE OF HIGH PRESSURE LIMITING
PRECIP CHANCES THRU MID WEEK. MOST OF THE MOISTURE FROM LANE WILL
BE SHUNTED TO THE SOUTH AND EAST

Peiser Again

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In the comments here a while back, Benny Peiser, publisher of the invaluable CCNet electronic newsletter, said this:

John

As you know, CCNet publishes *both* sides in the numerous climate change debates.

It was with that in mind that I read Benny’s latest CCNet missive: “MORE TROUBLE FOR IPCC AS SCIENTISTS PREDICT SOLAR DOWNTURN & GLOBAL COOLING”. As usual, Benny’s got a bunch of interesting stuff, especially a New Scientist piece on researchers looking at the solar-climate connection. But in his attempt to be thorough and share “*both* sides in the numerous climate change debates,” Benny apparently missed one of the papers that came out this week:

Overall, we can find no evidence for solar luminosity variations of sufficient amplitude to drive significant climate variations on centennial, millennial and even million-year timescales.

Note to Benny: Check out Foukal et al., Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth’s climate. It’s on the cover of this week’s Nature.

Drought Benefits

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There’s been an interesting discussion in the drought community about the use of the weekly drought monitor for making determinations about who’s entitled to drought benefits. The problem is that the monitor’s maps are a subject blend of the best judgment of a community of people about drought conditions, intended as an informational tool. When you start making money decisions based on where the line on the map falls, you end up with a weird set of pressures on the system.

But that’s exactly what’s happening, as the IRS implements a tax break for ranchers affected by drought:

Using data from a map produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center, the IRS will publish a list of eligible counties for the extension sometime this month.