Global Warming might now be "irreversible"

I remember reading the 1998 State of the World report for a class in college. One of the articles was on the risk of global climate change reaching a saturation point, where no matter how we changed our habits, a tragic sequence of events would proceed to change our planet for hundreds or even thousands of years. That was considered dire threat 10 years ago.

After 8 years of suffering the will of self-centered oilmen, a new study out in PNAS shows that the latest climate models suggest we have just passed this point of no return.

Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new scientific study.

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world's top climate scientists.

Now I am not an expert on these types of dynamical climate models, but I have worked on similar attractor systems for my own research and I can say that once these competitive forces cascade, there often is nothing to do but to let the system stabilize. Whether we really have reached this point is still up for debate. However, the fact that we're even worried about it is disturbing enough. I hope that Al Gore's Nobel Prize didn't come 10 years to late.

Chess or Checkers in Diplomacy?

Scientific American has a beautiful post on the policy genius of J. Robert Oppenheimer. We normally associate Oppenheimer with mathematical brilliance and nuclear physics. However, Oppenheimer was also a man of Chess in an international game of Checkers. A tactical wizard who understood the complexity and depth of international politics.

From the article:

During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush, I appeared as a guest on comedian and social commentator Dennis Miller's television talk show on CNBC, during which he made the following comparison: John Kerry is like a wickedly smart chess player, capable of looking ahead many moves, anticipating what his opponent might do and carefully weighing all his options before arriving at a rational decision. By contrast, George W. Bush is more like a checkers player, moving by instinct and glancing around the board for an easy way to king his men. In this world of good and evil, Miller explained, simple black-and-white thinking based on unwavering principles of absolute right and wrong trumps the drawn-out consideration of the nuanced thinker. In other words, with evil empires and malevolent terrorists on the loose, Miller would prefer a checkers player over a chess master.

...

Oppenheimer was a chess grand master in a game of checkers. He was looking to checkmate the other guy's king by trapping his queen, maneuvering around his bishops and sidestepping his knights, whereas his opponent was merely planning to jump his pieces and have himself kinged. For most of his political and military (and to a lesser extent scientific) colleagues, building the atomic bomb and dropping it on the enemy was a moral no-brainer. Oppenheimer was tormented by the bomb's moral complexities, particularly its postwar expansion into an arms race. It's not that the other leaders of the Manhattan Project had not carefully thought through their decisions; it is that once they made their decisions they moved forward without compunction. What ultimately brought down Oppenheimer was that the government prosecutors in the 1954 hearings trapped him in what they considered to be blatant lies that were, for Oppenheimer, difficult moral choices that caused him to change his positions on people (whom he associated with before or during the Manhattan Project—namely, an ex-lover and a communist sympathizer) and decisions (to share or not to share atomic secrets after the war).

Read the whole article for more, but if ever there was a Prometheus of the atomic-age, it was J. Robert Oppenheimer.

A new dawn for Science and Politics?

This weekend, Salon (subscription or watch a brief ad) has a brilliant analysis of Obama's new cohort of energy advisers which brings a tear to my eye.

From the article:

But the path toward a carbon-reduced future will not be an easy one. President Obama will be challenged by a lack of awareness by the media and major opinion makers, who still don't grasp the scope of the problem, and by the majority of GOP politicians who refuse to accept the dire facts of climate science. If Obama is going to lead this country and the world in the fight to preserve a livable climate, he will be forced to do so in a partisan fashion. That task can't be underestimated. But it's a huge relief to see the energy team that Obama has assembled for the battle.

Be sure to read the whole thing. Joseph Romm gets the true brilliance of this team of scientists and policy makers in perfect form. By giving power to people who are steeped in not only scientific facts, but the true adherence to skepticism and empiricism that is the core philosophy of science, Obama has shown that he is serious in addressing the long left abandoned problems of the 21st Century. It will be interesting to see what this Chu, Jackson and Browner can get down in the next few years.

My apologies for the long delay

Am juggling too much at work right now.  But man, I have to say it is going to be a BOON for science with this new administration.  So refreshing from the last.

I will be back in a few weeks with more postings.  In the meantime... check out the posts I'm reading on my Google Reader page.

Corruption vs. Republican: An interesting correlation

(Cross-posted with Daily Douches)

Hey Kids,

Okay. I know this isn't a shameless, juvenile attack on some idiot douchebag (like my usual MO), but I thought this was interesting.  Hell, if I'm right here I might have to start going plural in my Daily Douche award.

USA Today has a graphic showing the most corrupt states in the US.  From the article:

On a per-capita basis, however, Illinois ranks 18th for the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Department of Justice statistics.

Louisiana, Alaska and North Dakota all fared worse than the Land of Lincoln in that analysis.

If you look at their map and compare it to this year's election results, you notice a correlation stand emerge.  The "top-tier" corrupt states overwhelmingly went for McCain (10/16) and tend to be more Red in general.  In fact, if my numbers are correct, the 2008 Red States had an average of 3.93 (+/- 2.34 standard deviation) convictions per 10,000 people.  In contrast, Blue states had only 2.72 (+/- 1.31) convictions.   That's 44% more convictions in Red States than Blue.

Now being trained in statistics, I involuntarily react to these comparisons by saying "correlation does not equal causation!"  So I'm willing to take this with a grain of salt.  It could be that Red States just get more convictions, but given the current state of the Department of Justice, I think not. 

Just how close can this get?

Slashdot is hosting a story on some brilliant work done by Mike Sheppard (a graduate student in statistics in Michigan). Using some pretty simple math, Mike shows just how close the last two elections were. His analysis can be found here. In short he observed:

"There have been 12 Presidential elections that were decided by less than a 1% margin; meaning if less than 1% of the voters in certain states had changed their mind to the other candidate the outcome of the entire election would have been different."

The last two elections were in this group. According to his analysis, in the 2000 election, had less than 300 voters had a change of heart, the outcome would have been different. From a probabilistic standpoint, the Bush victory in 2000 practically happened by chance.

Now, I bring this up for two reasons. First, as you'll see in future posts, I've been examining how the electoral college system biases our political structure so that the religious right has a greater influence on a national level than their demographic size. Second, since many of the social issues haven't changed, this clearly demonstrates the importance of getting out every single vote in this modern political environment.

Introduction

Welcome aboard to the blog Scientia Publica (the latin for "knowledge open to all" or "science of the people"). This site is meant to be a repository for some of my personal ruminations on the current state of the world, mainly through the perspective of my training as a scientist.

That training was focused in the area of something called Cognitive Neuroscience, in which I received a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. So I've had a blend of training in diverse fields such as psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, statistics, biology, physics, and physiology. Along with obviously guiding my research, this broad background sculpts my perspective on the political and social landscape around me. So this is how the world looks through eyes trained to see the subtle hidden structure natural systems