Drought in the Sahel

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A new paper by Jian Lu and Thomas Delworth argues tentatively for a link between greenhouse warming and drought in the Sahel.(Lu and Delworth, 2005)

This matters, of course, far more than my usual hobbyhorse of drought in the southwestern U.S. Here when our water supplies run low because of drought, we suffer economic dislocation. In the Sahel, the semiarid band across Africa on the southern border of the Sahara, famines set in, governments collapse, people die.(Glantz, 2003)
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The Bible and Open Source

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Via Luis, Matt Asay discusses the King James Bible and free/open software. Until William Tyndale created his English translation, the Bible was Latin, the province of the priests (and even many of them only had access intermediated by the church):

By making “public” the Bible, Tyndale enabled lay readers to discover Christianity for themselves, unmitigated (for better or for worse) by the Church. (Open source, as I’ll explain below, accomplishes much the same thing, and with eerily similar results for the “Proprietary Church.”

The metaphor breaks down if you push it far enough, but it does so in useful ways. Asay’s point is that the computer priests who control the source code command you computer-sitting-serfs do their bidding: that is, use the computer in ways they have decided are appropriate. Free/open software allows users to take ownership over their computing lives. Asay is wrong to an extent, in that the control given by free software is not as complete as the freedom granted to a person to read a Bible in his own language. But it is a step in that direction. It also is wrong to say that control over one’s computing life is completely lacking among those who use proprietary software. But the metaphor nevertheless shines light on an important distinction between the two computer worlds.

Sony Infringes Copyrights?

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Irony upon ironies. Ed Felten reports on the evidence that Sony’s profoundly troubling digital rights management software includes code from a number of GPL and LGPL programs. (It goes without saying that the programs do not comply with the GPL/LGPL.)

In other words, the industry giant self-righteously arguing against the theft of intellectual property has stolen the intellectual property of others in its misguided attempt to protect its own intellectual property.

Blogroll Additions

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Kevin Vranes, whose hockey stick post I discuss below, is part of a group of science policy bloggers at no/se/nada (well, it looks like the group is mostly Kevin). Added to the blogroll.

Now that I’ve got a “science policy” section over there, Chris Mooney’s been added. I’ve shared my discomfort with his work, but he’s still pretty much a must-read.

And before there were blogs, there was Bob Park. He used to fax around his “What’s New” every Friday.

Hockey Sticks and Inaction

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Kevin Vranes pretty much nails it with an insightful analysis at Prometheus about the way the hockey stick debate has become such an odd sideshow:

Inaction was the political response to the 2001 SPM* presentation of the hockey stick. The hockey stick both as science and icon could not have been more hyped. But They saw it and They didn’t care. By that inaction, the HS lost its salience.

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Caribbean Sloths

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Interesting piece by Sid Perkins (sub. req.) in the Oct. 29 Science News on the discovery of fossil sloths in Haiti and Cuba 4,000 years ago. In the longstanding debate between climate change and human hunting in the extinction of the big mammals in the Americas 10,000 years ago, score one for the humans with this bit of evidence, presented by Ross D.E. MacPhee at the SVP meeting in Mesa, Ariz.

Such a recent demise practically absolves post–ice age global warming as the cause of die-offs among these mammals and could undermine climate change as the trigger for extinctions throughout the Western Hemisphere since the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago.

The argument is straightforward – people traipsing all over the continent, big mammals die. No people out on the islands in the Caribbean, big mammals live. MacPhee and a bunch of other people published a paper along these lines over the summer in PNAS.

Stuff from the bike

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Stuff from today’s bike ride, seen and heard:

  • The Curb Cafe, going in where the old Cafe Riviera used to be on Constitution just west of Carlisle
  • A guy walking down the bike path, up along the north diversion channel, playing a flute
  • A lovely little hawk of some sort, alighting on a telephone pole
  • On the banana peel sticker battleground, the number of stickers is up to 36
  • Not one, nor two, but three new trains stations under construction – one on El Pueblo for the Railrunner commuter train, one in the BioPark parking lot for the zoo toy train, and another that I think is for the Railrunner over by downtown
  • A woman in a car behind me at a stop sign who shouted, “Nice ass.”

The Effect of Media Coverage on Public Understanding

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Having thrashed around quite about over the last year in the issues raised by Dan Sarewitz’s scientization paper, I’m at a bit of a loss on something. Perhaps y’all can help.

There have been a couple of discussions this week on RealClimate (here and here) about the “false balance” problem – the allegation that journalists seeking to balance their coverage of science controversies create bias by quoting outliers and mainstream scientists, leaving the public with a false impression by giving the outliers greating standing than they deserve in contrast to the mainstream consensus on the issue at hand.

There’s an underlying premise to all this that has been unexamined: that what we in the press write does, in fact, matter. Does it? If so, how do we know? This is not a rhetorical question. Bob, in the comments to a previous post of mine, cited some interesting-looking literature.

In order to figure out how to function as a journalist in this scientized world, I need to figure out how to deal better with these questions. This is a lazyweb request. I know there are some very smart people who occasionally stop by here. Please cite more literature.

Murray Capitulates, Lambert Misses the Point

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If I may, then, in my next breath criticize my good friend Tim Lambert whom I’ve never met, I think his post this morning on CEI bloviator Ian Murray’s remarkable global climate change conversation rather misses he point.

Murray used to be a serial denier of the consensus science on climate change. Now, in a breathtaking recantation, he’s turned the corner. Now he argues that the costs of greenhouse gas reductions outweigh the benefits of halting climate change. Lambert dismisses the argument with a quip, but really, that’s what the argument needs to be about. What are the costs and what are the benefits of various courses of action? We’ve all been off palavering about hockey sticks and MSU satellite data, studiously ignoring the elephant in the room. Until we get off the proxy arguments (pardon the pun) and get on with actually discussing the costs and benefits of various policy responses, we’re all just spinning our wheels.