Hansen speaks out, again

During the very hot summer of 1988 James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) sat before a panel of members of Congress and announced, with the authority of his position, that global warming had arrived. By that time Hansen, who is one of our planet's leading climate scientists, was convinced that the trend in our planet's average temperature was up and that Human activity was at least part of the issue. He understood that there were uncertainties, but in his estimation, they were small enough to warrant his confidence. In many ways that testimony launched the global warming debate continues to hog tie political action on this front.

Hansen's team at GISS has been working on the details of how Earth's climate system responds to changes in the amount of heat it holds and to changes in how that heat is distributed in space. He is a careful scientist and I pay close attention to what he says. He is not always easy to understand, but he does appreciate his responsibilty as a scientist to communicate what he knows.

He is about to do something that could make another splash.

Andrew Revkin reports in today's NYT that Jim Hansen is going to make a speach tonight at the University of Iowa in which he will reiterate the importance of coming to terms with climate change, argue that the Bush administration is at best dragging their feet with respect to what the US could and should be doing, and most dramatically, he plans to claim that the Administrator at NASA told him not to talk about the impacts of human activities on the climate system.

Hansen's actions stir up a huge number of questions. The ones that jump to mind first are:

Is the "don't talk about it" bit of his story true?

There is a he said, she said element to the story. Of course NASA leadership deny that they told one of their leading scientists not to talk about bits of his work that are politically sensitive. But in some ways that doesn't matter; if Hansen thinks that he has been instructed not to talk about his work, notions of academic freedom have been trampled upon. But that too puts us on shifting sand. What if Hansen is overly sensitive? I believe NASA's rejoinder along the lines "we never told him not to do the work" but that leaves unsaid "we just told him not to talk about it." etc.

What is the proper relationship between science and politics?

Many (most) scientists would like to think that their science is politically neutral. And perhaps it is on a day to day basis. But the overall distribution of the kinds of science we do and the distribution of the benefits, and losses, is a political decision.

In the past I have had to manage bits and pieces of the relationship beween Columbia and GISS. I know that Hansen and his team can be loose cannons. I don't have an answer to whether what he about to do it a good thing or a bad thing. I do wonder whether Hansen is politcally astute or politically naive.

Evidence of the former,

How is it that Revkin is writing about a speach that Hansen is planning to give at the University of Iowa this evening?

Evidence of the latter,

Did he really think that people would read the black soot stuff closely enough to correctly understand its implications?

This issue deserves alot more attention - I will have to come back to it later...

Scientific and Engineering Failure

Not long ago, the Genesis spacecraft came tumbling back to Earth. It didn't go entirely as planned:



Everything had gone pretty well up to that point, but the dramatic "Catch by the Hollywood Stuntmen" failed, not because they missed, but because the parachutes on the spacecraft failed to open. The impact shattered the somewhat delicate plates that had been sieving the voids of space for the last few years.

The question immediately became, "Was the mission a success or a failure?" That question is followed immediately, at least in my mind, by questions of what would determine success. My first cut analysis would be the following. 1) a clear engineering failure; 2) based on the apparent success at recovering samples from the shattered plates, a likely scientific success.

But that is an overly simple analysis. First of all, with the exception of the last little bit, the spacecraft performed quite well. It spent three years following a wierd path through the solar system. It deployed its sampling mechanisms and collected about 10e20 ions, that is individual atoms, bits of matter, that have been spit out of the sun. Not bad really.

Things went wrong on the engineering front with re-entry. And at the time of this writing it looks as if the problem was that the switches that were meant to deploy the parachutes were installed backwards (this interpretation from The Economist, a more official report blames "a design error that involves the orientation of gravity-switch devices"). (Nature also reported on the switch problem...).

Success of the science mission depends upon the ability of scientists to extract new understanding of our solar system from the samples that the spacecraft collected. The Hollywood Stuntmen that were supposed to catch the spacecraft by the parachute were employed because there was great concern that the thing not crash into the ground because of the fragility of the sampling plates. So things didn't look good for scientific success at first. It now appears that samples will be able to be recovered, identified and useful.

So now I would summarize as follows: 1) with the exception of the parachute bit, which clearly was a cock-up, the engineering was pretty good; 2) the science also looks like it is going to tell us something along the lines of what was proposed years ago.

But both of those are hedges, to the Real Question, which is - Was the Genesis Mission a success? And despite the basically happy endings, I would argue that in important ways (beyond the parachutes), the mission failed. It seems to me that "parachutes fail to open" is an obvious late stage scenario. And the importance of considering this option is highlighted by the initial despair on the part of the scientific team. How is it that such an obvious possibility with such a disasterous implication relied on the correct installation of nearly symmetric switch the size of a pencil eraser with no backup?



My guess is that the scientists and the engineers weren't talking to each other as much as they should have been. And that is the real failure of the mission. Despite the decent recover on the part of the science team.


Aside
A bit more on the ALCS series. The "post-season" modifier is indeed irrelevant. Going 4 straight to win a best of 7 series has only happened on two other occaisions in professional sports, both in hockey (now isn't that interesting, are the statistics of hockey streaks different than baseball?).
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Naive thoughts on Baseball

It turns out that there are a fair number of Red Sox fans in my neighborhood. I know becuase I could hear them cheering tonight. The last time I remember such an auditory signal with respect to a sporting event was when the Giants won the Super Bowl, whenever that was. The time before that was when NC State won the NCAA championship sometime in the mid-1980s (note that at that time I lived in Raleigh, not NYC).

For those of you who don't know, I live in Washington Heights in Manhattan. As I did until tonight, you might expect this to be a Yankees bastion but note: 1) the region of NYC that I live in has the largest Dominican population outside of Republica Dominica; 2) in thanking the fans of the Red Sox Nation, one of the executives listed places, Boston, California and the Dominican Republic; 3) Manny Rameriz grew up not too far from where I live (in NYC terms, "not too far" is measured in city blocks); 4) Pedro Martinez is also from the DR...

Perhaps more to the point with respect to this blog, the Red Sox completed tonight what no team in baseball has been able to do in post-season history, recover from being 3 games down in a 7 game series. Baseball being a game of statistics, I am wondering about this fact.

First of all, does the "post-season" history modifier matter. Are there examples in baseball history of teams going 4 straight to win a 7 game series in the regular season? I expect not, primarily because teams don't (rarely?) play 7 games in a row in the regular season.

Second of all, what are the statistics of baseball streaks like? Are they uncorrellated like coin tosses. Think about this, 3 consecutive coin tosses have yielded heads, what is the probablity that the next toss will be heads? (see A1 below). In baseball terms this would mean that the likelihood of winning and particular game is independent of whether you won or lost the previous game. It also means that the chances of a streak of length N is 1/2eN, so in an uncorrellated baseball universe the chances of winning 4 straight would be 1/16, not all that long odds in a sport that has a history of more than a century.

ahh but, that is more like the likelihood of sweep, doesn't the fact that the long suffering underdogs have lost 3 in a row (1/8 in a purely random world) have anything to do with it? I would say yes - it does suggest that the coin may be biased. That is that the chances of tails on the next toss are better than 50 - 50, in which case the odds of 4 in a row go down pretty fast. (if in fact after 3 games the odds are 75 -25, then the likelihood of 4 in a row is like 1/64).

Alternatively what if the chances of winning the next game depends on the outcome of the previous game. Statistics like that have a name that I can't drag up at the moment and I certainly can't write down. It opens a can of worms as well. If you won the last game is it more or less likely that you will win the next game? If you have won the previous 3 games what is the likelihood? The cool thing about baseball is that if you had the time and inclination, you could figure all this out. (If you do please let me know! I have the inclination, but not the time.)

The Red Sox and the Yankees are incredibly evenly matched these days. They had the two best records in the American League this year. That is the second place team in the American League East (Boston) had a better record than the winning teams in the other two divisions. Before tonight they had played each other 50 times in recent history and each won 25 games. The difference in their run scoring was 2 (I am quoting Tyler Kepner of the NYTimes (sorry can't be bothered with the link tonight) - Tyler didn't say which way it went, but given that fact and his allegiance, I am guessing it was advantage Boston.

OK - it is late, I am out of gas. Any thoughts on the probablity that the Red Sox will win the World Series?

Aside
A1 - 50%
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Hydrogen economy

I think that I have written about the likelihood that we will burn a whole bunch of coal in the future, but if I have I can't find the post. Maybe it was in my forthcoming Energy & Environment piece (a link to that when it is available).

Anyway - one of the things that is often not mentioned, but that is increasinly recognized, is that you have to make the hydrogen and that takes energy and that energy has to come from somewhere. And then we are back to coal. Unless we can do it with renewables...

Nature reports a recent article that argues that wind power will be insufficient to provide all of the hydrogen that a fully developed hydrogen economy will require. Rather than an argument against moving toward hydrogen, I take this an argument for the development of "clean coal" technologies.

Aside
I also suspect that nuclear is in our future, but my long-standing concerns about waste continue. Again I take this as a positive argument for continued effort to solve that problem.
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Big Change at NSF

For years (since around 1940) the NSF has often required cost sharing on projects that it has funded. This was especially true for projects that bought equipment. That requirement has now been all but eliminated.

This is important because it removes a bias against smaller institutions. Equipment proposals are often large and hence the matching portion would be large. This has prevented less well off institutions from competing for important Federal funds and over the long-haul would limit the frontier across which we can advance our understanding.

There is a caveat of course. Another implication is that because NSF must now fund all of its projects, it will be able to fund a smaller number of them and thus the competition for limited funds will become more intense, but it still provides an opening for high quality efforts from smaller institituions.

A final caveat is that this move also frees up a pretty good chunk of discretionary money at larger institutions. How will that money now be used?...

Aside
If the link above has expired and you are a Chronicle subscriber, the article can be found here. If you are not a subscriber, contact me and I will get you the text...
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