Here are my sources:

• All the 2010 weather information was compiled from official/reputable sources by meteorologist Jeff Masters
• Minot evacuation (Jeff Masters)
• Tornado damage estimates (AIR Worldwide)
• Nuclear regulator investigation (AP)
• Radioactive tritium leaks (AP)
• Government response to leak investigation (GAO)

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– Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform)

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Almost all Americans are familiar with Sarah Palin (SP) and Froot Loops (FLs), but not everyone notices the similarities:

• Both SP and FLs are good to look at.
• Both SP and FLs come in a variety of colors.
• Both SP and FL’s look sweet but have little “nutritional value.”

SP was and is a fanatic supporting “drill, baby, drill.” FLs (and Kellogg’s) are, I gather, silent on this issue.

SP continues her rants in support of big oil and regularly repeats this in paid speeches.

Glibness is easy. Specificity, not so easy.

Taking cheap shots at the President is also easy. Creating alternative economic policies for the country is not so easy.

SP is still a very young woman who has (for whatever reason) captured the “hearts” of many Americans; however, in my view, she will never capture those who as a rule do not consider eating FLs. I’d prefer some granola, oatmeal, or Cream of Wheat.

Bottom line: Had either Al Gore (AG) or John Kerry (JK) been elected President  our dependence on foreign oil would have been reduced. AG has spent a lifetime warning about the polluting and economic dangers of dependence on foreign oil. JK is battling today to wage war against climate change and unshackle the potential of new energy sources. They were right all along. They should have been heard long ago. They should be heeded today.

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This fall, I started studying for my Master’s degree in Aeronautics at MIT. One of the first things we had to do when we arrived was to take the Technical Writing Exam. I was obviously extremely excited to write two essays on a presumably dry and pointless topic, remembering how much fun the GRE and SAT were. However, the topic turned out to be something very relevant to an incoming class of engineers, and especially the Aeronautics/Astronautics students: the debate between manned and unmanned space exploration, which I touched on in an earlier post.

We read two articles, one for manned space exploration and one against, and had to write a summary of the two articles as well as an analysis of what further questions would need to be answered in order to make an informed choice on the issue. In no time at all, pencils were scribbling away at paper.

While the topic was interesting, it was the structure of the test that made the most impact on me. It was not until halfway through the first essay that I noticed that in my supposedly impartial summary of the two articles I was in fact writing my personal opinions on the subject. I went back and removed my opinions (hopefully), and continued to write while focusing more on trying to be neutral on the subject. It was much harder than I expected.  

The second essay was also trickier than it appeared, forcing you not to argue for or against a chosen position, but to identify and justify the most important issues on both sides of the argument. Afterwards, I realized while talking to my fellow graduate students that many of them did not pick up on this subtlety in the assignment.

Our generation has become inured to the constant barrage of opinions: from the media, Twitter, Facebook and especially the blogosphere. I think that many of us are so used to this that it has become hard to avoid expressing our own opinions in what we write, even when expressly told not to. This is especially troublesome in science and engineering for two reasons.

First, science is based on reason and logic. Inserting personal opinions into a paper or research article lowers credibility and reveals a personal bias. Having a preconceived notion of what a result should be from an experiment can cause a scientist to try to obtain that result, instead of seeing what falls out of a properly conducted experiment.

Second, opinions are more and more becoming the basis that the public judges science on. Space is not the only sector where public opinion helps to drive funding and progress. Climate change and evolution also are often viewed as debatable issues with different, opposing viewpoints instead of as hard science. This lowers the level of discourse and helps to obscure the true costs and benefits of, for example, trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Scientists aren’t the only people who should learn how to communicate without biases. The general public is often confused and misled by all the opinions floating around; learning how to pick through them and find the underlying truth is vital for an informed population. When many people think that scientific theories are still up for debate, the world ends up with artificial controversies that muddy the names of all involved.

Science is both the driver and the marker of human progress, but it is dependent on fact, not opinion. The difference between those fact and opinion should be self-evident, but I fear that currently it is far from it.

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In his latest book, Keynes’s biographer Lord Robert Skidelsky argues that you just can’t insure against some risks. In fact, some expectations shouldn’t be called risks at all. One of Keynes’s least appreciated contributions, also voiced by his contemporary Frank Knight, was the importance of uncertainty, events in the future that we can’t measure or predict because we don’t have enough information or computational capacity.

Markets depend on prices, and prices depend on information, rational behavior, and predictable distributions of random shocks. When those foundations break down, governments are the only institutions that have the ability to restore order, from central banks injecting liquidity during credit crunches to regulators preventing or monitoring new innovations (be they financial derivatives or oil rigs) with uncertain social costs.

One important example that I haven’t spent enough time talking about is…  

Earthquakes and oil spills are rare, but at least we can estimate how many to expect. Fair enough, but what about climate change?

With record-breaking ocean temperatures this year, climate scientists expect an active hurricane season. [S]houldn’t the government do its part to prevent greenhouse gases from clouding insurers’ ability to predict weather disasters?

Now economists Simon Dietz, Geoffrey Heal, and Antony Miller have joined the club with a new paper showing how standard probability theory doesn’t account for uncertainty properly and how many economists therefore underestimate the need for “immediate, rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.” They list 3 important reasons for uncertainty (a.k.a. 3 assumptions that standard economic theory ignores):

The first is futurity, in particular the uncertain future socio-economic trends that determine the path of emissions, as well as how numerous and well off we will be when the impacts of today’s emissions occur.

Second, there is the considerable complexity of the climate system, not to mention its linkages with ecosystems and the economy, which means that it is hard to know whether our models are a reasonable simplification.

Third, there is the fact that the system is non-linear. This greatly increases the significance of model misspecification.

Other economists’ predictions, when compared as a group, confirm these weaknesses:

First, notice that, irrespective of what model is applied, the distribution is wide, and skewed to have what we might loosely call a “fat tail” of low-probability, high-temperature outcomes. This means that any cost-benefit analysis of emissions cuts that abstracts from uncertainty by working solely with a best guess of the climate sensitivity is likely to be misleading.

Second, notice the obvious fact that the various models disagree on what the distribution looks like precisely and that the spread between some sample pairs of models is wide.

They go on to explain that seemingly “irrational” behavior is actually the correct response to uncertainty. But that’s a conversation for another day…

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