OFF: UK's premier green awareness festival under threat from police and local council.

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Paul Mather wrote:

 	<snip>

> Are you claiming that computer modelling isn't scientific?  The Virginia 
> Bioinformatics Institute and various other research groups here on campus 
> make heavy use of large-scale computer simulation and modelling (large-scale 
> network simulations; epidemiological analyses; etc.) and they would argue 
> very, VERY vociferously that what they are doing is science.

 	It is possible for computer modelling to be unscientific: just 
witness the kind of modelling used to plot grand financial strategies by 
large international banks for the last few years, based on continuous 
growth axioms and so on. It's also possible for modelling to be 
scientific, but wrong. Which if either we are seeing with the climate 
stuff, I don't know, though I find this article sympathetic largely 
because it seems to me that we're trying to model a chaotic system by 
leaving out all the awkward bits:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/15/if-you-cant-explain-it-you-cant-model-it/

I also think that data quality is a *serious* issue here. And, finally, as 
well documented by now and now I'll shut up, I think this is a far less 
serious problem than our energetic reliance on non-renewables at the same 
time as a substantial increase in energy use in developing countries looks 
inevitable. Surely that's the real immediate problem, and solving it will 
likely address anything we are doing to the climate too! I just don't get 
why global warming is somehow more emotive, but I do see it being used as 
a sail to pull more necessary measures along. Yours,
 						     Jon

-- 
       Jonathan Jarrett, Cambridge    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
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  "With Capitalism, man exploits man.  With Socialism, it is exactly opposite"
 	                 -Robert Anton Wilson