You guys see this yet?

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http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speeches/complexity/complexity.html

Very good!
Most people had rather believe the man on the 6' oclock news than get the facts(often bewildering) and use some common sense.

m

First Class!!,................ thanks Blaine.

GTC

Thanks, Blaine!

This reminds me of three things �

� In one of his books, one of my favorite science writers noted that scientists often "explain" global phenomena according to certain known processes and relationships, but then the physicists and mathematicians come along, run the appropriate numbers, and show that those processes and relationships couldn't have done 'em � they don't produce enough effect to explain the phenomena.

� In a conversation with Homer Powley, I mentioned that we often theorize about some cause and effect in ballistics, then find by experiment that their effect is too slight to consider. Homer immediately said "That's true. The moon affects the trajectory but not enough to worry about."

� An oversexed flea was attempting to copulate with a sleeping elephant. When the elephant groaned in her sleep, the flea said "Sorry! Didn't mean to hurt you." <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

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Excellent! Thank you.

In what I think is a similar vein as the article, though dealing with detail rather than sweeping concept, I wrote a satire once called Improving on Nature. It was a spoof on tunnel visioned enviros seeing a bit of nature without understanding where it fit and destroying a lot more in order to "fix" what didn't have anything wrong with it in the first place. My narrator set out to protect those poor little trees he found mutilated and stripped of limbs and bark in the forest. He was sure it was unemployed loggers taking out their tree killing lust on defenseless little saplings. Amazingly, his camera team discovered it was deer killing the trees. He'd seen enough nature films to know that this had to be abnormal behavior, because creatures in nature live in harmony. Hands wringing, he set out to discover what had damaged the emotions of these poor buck deer, and fix them...

I never did get the original published though a local small publisher printed a lesser version of it. Outdoor Life came close and toyed with it for months but it appeared that their lawyer thought it was too hot to handle. Clare Conley was tickled with it and wrote a note I've kept.

As another specific of complexity handled in a linear fashion, a commercial fisherman with a degree in marne biology told me about sockeye salmon. In the 30's the goverment hired crews to clean up the rivers and pitchfork all those tons of stinky dead salmon onto trucks and bonfires. Salmon numbers fell. Finally somebody discovered that the tiny salmon when first hatched feed on the microscopic organisms that bloom in abundance from eating the dead parent spawners. Oops.

Nature is pretty good at managing itself. Don't get my fisherman friend started on hatcheries or fish farms.

Blane,

I have to get to bed. Reading about 1/5 convinces me I need, well I want, to read the rest tomorrow.

I hope BC Brian reads this <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

The point that needs making is the complexity theory is obvious, but it does not say what IS right, only what cannot be proved either way. The suggestion here seems to be saying the earth is too large for anything dumped in the nest to matter... And I do not accept that totally.
art

"...The suggestion here seems to be saying the earth is too large for anything dumped in the nest to matter... And I do not accept that totally..."

Me either. In fact I found that article sorta pointless.

To whit...
1) [map of the US, upside down?] and...

2) [Chenobyl wasn't as big a deal as some feared....] I would argue that fortunately, we had no reference point. Heck, if it was so harmless, go live there. Anyways, for recent on-site review of the place see www.kiddofspeed.com .

3) [A bunch of old verbiage about old percieved threats which proved to be unfounded...] meaning I suppose, if we use the same verbiage about OTHER threats thay must necessarily be false????

4) [Private corporations fixed Y2K....] so what? therefore they'll fix everything else? Y2K was an immediate danger to their financial well being, and merely a software problem.

5) [The birth rate is falling therefore we shouldn't worry about population...] Odd, I was in Africa during them "decline" years and women were having kids about as fast as they could. Then too I live near the border, ain't we getting swamped PRECISELY because of population increase down there? I see lots of kids every time I go. Then again, even with our own insipid US growth, the landscape every place I have been is filling up far faster than I'm comfortable with.

6) [Three molecular diagrams of coal, oil and gas. With the implication that pretty soon we'll use NO carbon at all...]

First off, ain't worrying about carbon content a backhand compliment to the possibility of global warming? Secondly, the implication that he draws of a time/carbon content reduction is totally false. DOLLARS drive our energy choices, not carbon content.

We still have a kazillion tons of coal, when/if everything else gets too expensive, back to them big carbon compounds we will go.

Third, the guy totally fails to point out the huge distinction that whereas all them carbon compounds already exist, one has to MAKE hydrogen (by burning carbon compounds prob'ly).

7) [A whole bunch of graphs plotting cyclic awareness/worrying on the part of the public about possible threats...] So what? I could probably plot an exactly similar graph about people's fear of Satan and the likelyhood of going to Hell. Does public perception in this or any other case have any bearing on the reality of the threat, one way or another?

8) [We screwed up at Yellowstone...] and the Indians didn't?.... How can you compare their situation with ours? Also, haven't we learned at Yellowstone, just by recognising the problem?

9) [A whole bunch of complex natural system diagrams and the point that you can't predict the stock market.....] Sure the stock market is complex, but if I buy high and sell low I still go broke.. quite simple. And the stock market IS affected by outside processes, complex as it is. Anyways, a stock market guy worries about predicting daily highs and lows so to speak, not economic climate change. The last one of THOSE was in 1929, and it could have been easily predicted.

10) [We shouldn't worry about global warming and carbon on account of the atmosphere is complex and te earth has always been changing...] OK, but bear in mind some of those changes we have seen in the past could kill millions today (whether or not you plot a graph of how much people worry about it).

So whats his point? We should go ahead and possibly screw with the atmosphere (carbon content) because we don't know what gonna happen anyway?

Lotsa verbiage and smoke and mirrors in this article I thought. I must be missing something.

Birdwatcher

What this guy has occomplished here was create one more fear to be hyped up. The fear of fear and what fear has been doing to us for generations and now we have to stop it.

Crichton is a little late on this concept too.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself". FDR March 4, 1933. Similar things said in both speaches.

I say horse chit.

The only one thing that has driven mankind to any level of demise that we may currently be in, or have suffered in the past, or has put our resilient planet in a state of so called destruction, or the fear there of, is.....

Greed.....

The greed for power, be it power over a group, over a community, over a state, over a nation, over a planet.....

The greed for money, money aquired for personal gain, for the benifit of a special interest group, for the benifit of a research project, for the benifit of a political group, for the benifit of a more powerful army.....

The need for power and money runs rampant in all levels of humanity and quickly turns into greed. It doesn't take an expert to see how this relates to our environment on every level. Both sides of every environmental issue strive for the same thing. The power to control the situation and the money to remain powerful.

If the human race was removed from the equation I think the spotted owl and the alligators would do just fine without us, even with a forest fire or two....

I remember the hype in the 70's about the global cooling now its global warming....

I remember the hype about the depleation of the ozone layer resulting in the elimination of the freon refrigerants, now ozone is a bad thing we do not want...

I'm no scientist but I'm not a DSMFer either. This planet has recovered from things far worse than anything we could ever throw at it and will continue doing so ie, ice ages, meteor strikes, devastating earthquakes. Does that give us licence to abuse things at will? No. Should we be good stewards of our environment, yes.

Birdwatcher,

As long as we are nit picking evidence and sources
Kiddofspeed trip was a flight of fancy.

www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/1026/

I am old enough to remember when:

there was a new ice age coming on, we would all die

The Mississippi River was drying up, We would all die

Sunspots were in a huge increase , we would all die

Swine flu was going to go pandemic.

The earth was going to have a population of 9 billion by 2000

Back about 15 years ago (gosh did I mention I am getting old)
I was a young cop working and listening to NPR.

It was reported that there had been a global survey and the scientist had discovered that the average temperature was 3 deg. higher that it had been 100 years earlier.

No fanfare, no huge announcement. No one had thought up "global warming" yet.

My first thought was, OK 3 deg is nominal...we have better instruments now than 100 years ago. I mean really 3 degrees is margin of error.

Some where a wise man, a man of vision heard that same report. and he had a different thought "I can make money on this" and the global warming seed was born.

Some years later I again on NPR listened to an interview with a Scientist about the Global warming problem.

What he said has always stuck with me.
"Global warming theory comes from the erroneous idea that is is suppose to be 68 degrees in southern California forever."


I would like to go on but an short of time just now.
I am tired of everything being an emergency till the funding runs out.

lewis

Oh yeah, when Mt Pinatubo erupted June 1991
it was reported that the ash from the more than 5 billion cubic meters of ash and debris would darken the sky effecting the weather for the next 100 years.

Of course the rain and wind made quick work of it.
or perhaps I have stumbled on the true cause of global warming. (grin)

Birdwatcher, I have to agree with you that Crighton is doing a lot of "popular science" in that presentation.

Of course, that is what the chicken little's are also doing, so it's the pot calling the kettle black.

The big contribution of Crighton is the emphasis on the effects of chaos, the law of unintended consequences if you will.

Somehow, the environmentalists seem convinced they can stop 2 billion Chinese and Indians from burning fossil fuels by attending a well-catered 10 day conference about global warming. Heck, they can't even keep their kids off pot......

The big concept is that change is the de-facto "normal" state of affairs. Some species will expand their range, some will reduce it. Ocean currents vary randomly, volcanos blow up randomly. Human behavior will drive other changes. The indians changed the landscape in the US, so did the pioneers, and we do now.

There seems to be an innate need in many human beings to fear change far more than rational. Change ain't so bad. Change gave us anti-biotics and smokeless powder.... JMO, Dutch.

crichton long has had the number of the tree-huggers.

THE SKY IS FALLING!


good article.

I suggest reading Chrichton's "State of Fear".
While it is a novel, it is packed with factual data that may explain his point of view a bit better.

What I got from of Chrichton's article was people can make most anything into a crises, and then convince other's action is required.

However, especially with complex systems, these folks aren't engaging in good science. It's more of a "ready, FIRE, aim"....................

Nobody has any answer...worth it's weight in certainty. Too many time dependent variables, macro and micro, too little advance in the scientific tools/concepts necessary to measure things with certainty, and TOO many ppl with agendas, hidden and not so hidden.

I'm gonna agree with Birdy, with regard to the article. Interesting read....but nothing I would, without question, chant a happy dance over.

Nobody really knows what the future will bring.....because, quite simply, nobody can predict the future.

I say act, and move through the world, responsibly....consume in moderation....and act respectfully toward our global ecosystems/landscapes. Collectively, that would at least ensure less impact on natural resources/natural landscapes that we all want to see remain intact.

Just my worthless .02...lol...

HoundGirl

Global warming may or not be true. As a scientifically trained guy I have questions. The reality is there�s nothing we can do about it of much difference without completely changing the life of everyone on the planet. Maybe not even then. What we can do is try and ensure we�re the wisest stewards of air, water and forest and enhance our local environment. We�ve got a bunch of environuts wandering around saying how bad things are. They must not remember the air and water quality of 70�s and just how much better it is now. I live near Baltimore in the middle of numerous millions of people yet I can deer hunt and fish for small mouth and stockie trout three blocks from home in the Patapsco river and can trout fish for native Browns in the Gunpowder in 30 minutes. There were bears sighted (unfortunately during the development of a shopping center) within 10 miles. Frankly I�m more concerned, and have more control over, local development and the loss of habitat and access to hunt and fish than things going on in South America or China so that�s where I spend my effort.

Allen

Good article, but it isn't "complexity theory." Complexity theory is loosely connected to chaos theory in the following way.

If you have a well behaved system, you can specify initial conditions and to within some accuracy, and compute all future behavior to similar accuracy with a short algorithm. In chaos theory, the effect of the uncertainty in accuracy can produce increasing uncertainty over time (sensitivity to initial conditions). It isn't that a butterfly waves its wing in China and you get a tornado in Colorado -- its more like the tornado that would have been in Texas shows up in Nebraska. So, to get more and more precision, you need to increase the precision of computation and the precision of initial conditions... more and more decimal places.

Complexity theory measures complexity in terms of the amount of information required to specify the output. If your program is simply to print the results, you are at unit complexity. Simple systems have short algorithms and simple small-decimal initial conditions to predict behavior for long periods of time -- non-chaotic. For chaotic systems, you need to increase the initial conditions by a multiple (I forget if it is closer to 2 or 10 for weather) just to get an extra unit in time of prediction (that extra multiple in precision of 2 or 10 buys you a day).

Most of Crichton's arguments have more to do with the details of feedback loops (some positive, some negative) that tend to buffer the effects of our actions -- like a giant Lavoisier's principle. That's not complexity. BUT it is a very worthwhile observation -- we don't know for sure what our actions will produce. It won't look like "Day After Tomorrow," but I suspect the warming we've observed will lead to harder winters and cooler climates in northern zones -- whether humans caused, or only participated in, amplifying the warming that we've so far observed (for instance). But many of these things are cyclical anyway... the cycle's we're seeing look much like what we enjoyed in the late '20s/early '30s...

Dan

What I can't help wondering about is how closely some of his examples of fear mongering language resemble some of the language used on both sides of the gun control issue.

Lewis... thanks for the website re: www.kiddofspeed.com . The fact that she saw fit to fake a motorcycle ride does cast doubt upon the whole, but...

Are the geiger counter readings false? Why have those barges, helicopters and vehicles all been abandoned? Why don't they let people in? Can you view an exposed reactor core from some distance away (a per the bridge) without getting bathed in radiation?

None of these are argumentative questions, like most on the website you gave I'm just curious as to how much of the situation is as reported.

With regards to the rest of it, I never said that global warming as popularly assumed by the Left is a fact, and I expect I'm older than you.

What does irritate me is when the Right posts a bunch of half-truths and disconnected facts of their own and guffaw (a la Rush Limbaugh et al.) that the familiar straw men; "The Environmentalists" are wrong.

Case in point from Creighton's article; he posts the case of junk science regarding magnetic fields being harmful, and then posts countering junk science about magnetic fields being good for you. What on earth does this have to do with the validity or lack thereof of global warming?

Correctly put, the fact that climate appears to be an exceedingly complex and chaotic system does not mean the "Environmentalists" are "wrong", even a system like that could still be driven by CO2 levels.

If burning fossil fuels really DOES cause global warming we are screwed, this being a problem about like overpopulation; one without a workable solution.

And yes, I do think population growth is a huge problem, and one that is only going to get worse.

Birdwatcher

The fact that the earth is getting warmer is not in dispute. What is in dispute is why. The earth has been warming since man kind was running around in furs with flint tipped spears and before. For man kind to think that he has the power to either cause or prevent it is arrogance.

No, there is still radiation attributable to the accident. The issue is not RADIATION, the issue is the quantity of radiation, which varies from spot to spot. A bit of fall-out in one spot and a whole area is kept off limits.

In other words, the main trouble is not radiation, the main trouble is uncertainty.



Radiation levels above background. Don't let people in because there would be no way to argue they didn't get cancer from the accident (or did, for that matter). Unattainable situation.



I hope so, since we all bathe in sunlight everyday, and that is one bad-arse exposed reactor! Radiation reduces with the square of the distance. FWIW, Dutch.

Dutch... thanks for the info, still a heck of a mess.

I would be interested in knowing just how dangerous a visible, glowing core in a shatered containment vessel would be at what look about a mile maybe 1.5 mile distance. No way to know with out being there and measuring I guess.

Birdwatcher

Birdwatcher, you are entirely right: I strongly suspect there would be no way to measure it. It would be less than the back ground radiation. I'm not a nuke specialist, but I happen to be married to one, so I'll find out for sure.

HOWEVER, "glowing core" in a shattered containment vessel? Don't think so. The physics don't work that way. Maintaining a chain reaction in a nuke requires maintaining a delicate balance: too much, and she runs out of control, too little and she shuts down. That's why they have to adjust the control rods. A "glowing core" a year or three after a meltdown? Nuh-uh. She'd have either used up the fuel, or gone into a near dormant state.

Also, the story is misleading talking about a containment vessel. The Ruskie reactors designs do not have containment vessels. That's why they had Chernobyl and we had Three Mile Island. The accidents were really not all that different; just the outcomes. TMI had a concrete dome designed to contain trouble (and it did), Chernobyl has steel domes designed, basically, to keep the weather out (and it did).

It's funny how nukes and guns give people the same reaction: if they aren't familiar with their workings, the response is to imagine all sorts of evils. The converse is also true: familiarity breeds complacency: the cause for almost all trouble with both of them. JMO, Dutch.