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Michael Tobis
Michael Tobis has a bad habit of studying whatever he finds interesting and important. After earning his master's degree in the mathematical descendant of cybernetics, communication engineering, and a doctorate in physical climatology, he has proceeded to try to apply information theory to climate science. Of late he has managed to land in a scientist position in Austin, Texas, where information theory and climate modeling actually come together. Michael reads and writes and blogs constantly, listens to jazz, blues and swing, plays improvisational piano and aspires to the clarinet.
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It's been an interesting experience.
by So long and thanks for all the fish!
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Out of Balance
Climate change can't be avoided in any way except by stopping our changes to the atmosphere.
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The River of Energy
Wherein we tackle global warming at last...
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Clouds from Both Sides Now
As much energy leaves the earth into space as arrives from the sun. As much energy reaches the surface of the earth as leaves the surface. But these are not the same! Does the earth somehow make something from nothing?
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What Goes Down Must Come Up
The earth emits almost exactly as much energy as it receives. This is not a coincidence.
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Energy in the Climate System
We discuss a diagram which is the first step toward understanding the climate system.
Is an Elite Elitist?
On matters of consequence, there are ideological predictors of who believes a particular piece of science. This can't be good news.
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Beauty and Truth
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" said the poet. I am not sure that is as true as it is beautiful, but scientists do find their work beautiful.
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Thank You for Smoking
Confusing the public about evidence that matters to the society is lying on a very large scale. Just like individual lies, though, it takes two to tango. Somebody has to do the lying, and somebody has to do the believing.
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Taking Precocious Too Far
A famous mathematical thorem about the number of colors needed to cover a map has been solved since, but I took it up seriously in my childhood. Or so I thought. A cautionary tale for those who think they "know better"...
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Erratic Boulders
Over a hundred thousand years ago on a normally quiet tropical island, a multi-thousand ton rock, the size of a large house, was suddenly transported a half mile horizontally and about twenty feet uphill. What natural force could possibly account for this?
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The Unforeseen
The idea that each person is responsible for their own fate and is justified in the fiercest resistance to anyone who implies otherwise has no deeper resonance anywhere than in Texas. Yet, water is a key to the landscape and water obeys no boundaries. A remarkable clash emerges between the individualist, historic and literate, geographic views of Texas, which is examined in the remarkable film "The Unforeseen".
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On being an outlier
Some people can't abide broccoli. Myself, I cannot swallow a brussels sprout. I have had severe side effects from common drugs. Am I an outlier, or should I suspect that there is something wrong with the drug? What if the drug appears in the news?
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Continental Drift and Global Warming
Fifty years from now, when the seriousness of climate change becomes obvious, will scientists be blamed for soft-pedalling their message?
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Reaching the Right Audience
Science communication needs to convey that there is something cooler than breezy-cool. There is deep cool, a sort of cool that can be obtained only by careful contemplation, whose rewards are greater the deeper you go.
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Whudder Ya Doin' HERE?
Why should a scientist try to be a science writer?
Impacts of the Science Blogosphere
Science blogging may be gaining deserved influence. Here's another case in point.
The Science Fair Problem
Lots of earnest kids may be trying to detect a heating effect from CO2 as science fair experiments. Neither they nor their teachers fully understand the principles involved, so they get null results. Is there a way to help them?
Do-It-Yourself Supercomputing
A little-known fact about me is that I once built a supercomputer from scratch and then used it to do supercomputing. Do-It-Yourself Month finally offers me an occasion to brag a bit.
The Third Branch of Science?
Some people these days are saying that computing has become so important to science that it constitutes a third branch. Even though computationally intensive science is what occupies my time, I am not sure that this is the right way to think about it philosophically. To some extent computing brings the theoretical and computational branches closer together. People interested in climate modeling whether as skeptics or as enthusiasts should consider how this works.
Climate Models Don't Predict Climate
We know the radiative properties of the atmosphere are changing as a result of human activity. We know that such changes are a primary factor in how the atmosphere behaves. We have, therefore three choices (you can pick all in combination, or just one, but you can't pick none of them) 1) accelerating climate change 2) large cutback in emissions and 3) artificial mechanisms to remove greenhouse gases from the air. The climate models don't really have much to say about how much, when, or how, which are really the big questions. So what are the models for?
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44 Orders of Magnitude
What a ridiculously large number 44 orders of magnitude is! Yet that is the span of science; the number of the smallest subatomic scale phenomena that we are interested in that span the largest cosmological scale.
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The Anthropocene
The Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky noted 60 years ago that "Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a powerful geological force." In honor of this change, the present (starting perhaps in 1900, or 1945 or 2000) era is already informally called the "anthropocene" in some circles. This may become the formal name for our time soon enough. Here's an interesting example of an unprecedented geological process that could not have happened before our time.
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Obesity and Greenhouse Gas Addiction
Andrew Dessler makes an analogy between weight problems and greenhouse gas emissions, suggesting that greenhouse gases are to society as overeating is to individuals. As a fat person obsessed with climate change, the analogy has not escaped me.
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Overgeneralizing
Sometimes things we learn in one walk of life can apply to another, and sometimes not...
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Relating and Correlating
Michael celebrates the improved cohesion, energy and vision of the Correlations team and then messes it all up by foolishly starting an argument with the on-air talent.
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Save the Earth, Sacrifice a Tree!
Can carbon capture work? Yes, it seems unlikely, but think about it. This is actually what plants do. They capture carbon from atmospheric CO2 when they grow. The problem is that they release it when they die and decay back into earth. Chopping down a forest puts CO2 into the air. Regrowing a forest takes CO2 out of the air. A mature unmanaged forest breaks even. So, what if we buried some of the fastest growing plants before they decayed?
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She Swallowed the Spider to Catch the Fly
Some people look at how volcanoes episodically cool the planet and see the possibility of artificial volcanoes as a potential cure for global warming. Is there hope for this idea?
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The Sirens of Titan
Sometimes it isn't obvious why scientists study the things we study. Usually we have more reasons than meets the eye. A study of one of Saturn's moons, for instance, has managed to shed a great deal of light on the climate of the earth.
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The Sideshow (and also the circus)
The American Geophysics Union meeting got a fair amount of press coverage, notably for a deliberately high-profile talk by Jim Hansen, and a couple of other climate change related talks by Lonnie Thompson and Richard Alley. Each of these talks took place in huge and packed rooms, and the speakers certainly had interesting points to make. The problem with this sort of thing is that it may leave people with the wrong idea of what a scientific conference is and what it is for.
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Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow
Viewed from space, we see various white, frozen parts of the Earth's surface, but they are very different in nature. Understanding the past and the future of the world involves understanding these forms.
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Chaos Part 2: Chaos Doesn't Matter
I've stirred up some old controversies with my article about chaos and climate here. I think my correspondent is genuinely one of those people who don't believe that predictive climatology is possible. I wonder if he thinks that gives people license to change the atmosphere without limits. It always baffles me that some people argue that the less we understand about the atmosphere, the more liberties we ought to be willing to take with it. Anyway, the tack he's taken isn't very relevant. Here's why.
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1904: Meteorology Becomes A Science
In 1904, at the peak of classical physics, meteorology as a physical science was just being born.
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The Storm King
While the large scale behavior of the atmosphere is complex and hard to grasp, it occurred to me that the basic ideas for understanding a rainstorm cloud were in place by the early nineteenth century. I wondered if history had captured the story of the person who had put the pieces together.
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The Elephant's Trunk: Meteorology and the Origins of Climatology
Meteorology is clearly the scientific tradition that best gets the story of climate science started. It's the trunk of the elephant, the most notable feature, aside perhaps, from the hugeness of the beast.
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Like a Model on the Cover of a Magazine
Climate science depends on climate models. There is nothing odd about that. All science depends on models.
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Climate, Chaos and Confusion
We climate scientists often hear the case made "If you can't predict the weather next week, how could you predict the climate in a hundred years?" The answer to the question is hidden in the question. The weather and the climate are not exactly the same thing, and so what you can say about the one and what you can say about the other are also different.
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Scientific Group Wins Peace Prize
The Nobel Committee announced the award of this year's Peace Prize jointly to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Gore is cited by the committee as " probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted." Much attention will be duly given to Gore's role in doing exactly that, especially in the US. Still, it would be a shame if the attention to Gore's contribution completely distracts attention away from his co-recipient, the IPCC.
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Tortoise vs. Hare
Politics, business, culture, and sports can be relied upon to provide some fodder for the news media every day, yet there's not that much sense of long-term improvement. Day to day changes in science are very small, and rarely newsworthy. We science writers have a lot to write about, but it's not usually about current events.
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Climate Science is the Most Important Science!
A scientist on the pilot of WIRED Science makes the claim that stem cell research is the most interesting and important of all possible questions. Of course, as a climate scientist, I think she is wrong!
The earth's climate system is important because it is just on the limits of complexity and understandability. It is exactly the point where the pure, cool rigors of physical sciences intersect with the deep unfathomable complexities of the biological science. It draws from both and contributes to both. I'm very pleased to be a participant in this important work.
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