Science and data, ii

The atmospheric and oceanographic data used in climate modeling have a couple of key characteristics that a lot of other scientific data sets do not have: Sparsity and scarcity.

The sparsity of the data means there are too few measurements to fully determine the global oceanographic and atmospheric state at any point in time, much less over time. Various analytical and numerical techniques are required to fuse disparate data and interpolate between points.

These techniques may or may not be controversial, and they may or may not be sound. Most of them, though, will be chosen over other techniques for the use of which there is at least some justification.

If you want to know what techniques are used, and the justification for using them rather than others, then you have to read the scientific papers describing them. Emails, particularly informal emails of a political rather than scientific nature, don't cut it.

Which brings me to the scarcity of this data. A relatively small number of organizations have ownership of most of it, and there are legitimate reasons for them to control its dissemination. If I own a certain set of raw data, then I am to some extent answerable for any conclusions anyone else draws from that data. The concern some people have expressed over data processing shenanigans on the part of the CRU would apply equally to any other organization that processed the same data.

That said, the processing of the raw data into releasable products has to be done in a manner open to verification by an independent party. If you want to verify my data processing, then I should describe what I'm doing to you at a level of detail such that you could produce the same product given the same raw data. (Ideally, at least one independent party would be given the same raw data, to complete the verification.)

Of course, we want both the data processing to be done right and the right data processing to be done. And the second question, whether the raw data was processed appropriately, is at least as technical a question as the first. We don't emerge from the womb knowing when it would be scientific malpractice to use anything less than cubic splines, so simply pointing out what processing was or wasn't done isn't an argument against it.

To sum up, climate modeling is by its nature substantially different from a lot of other scientific work. There are unconstrained choices to be made of a kind that doesn't apply if, say, you're trying to determine the boiling point of a chemical solution at one atmosphere. This means, on the one hand, that we would expect to find differences of opinion in which choices are made, and on the other hand that the conclusions are not as certain as they were in our high school science labs.

And finally, a hermeneutic of suspicion cuts all ways. That two models produce different results tells us nothing about which model is better; that two scientists disagree tells us nothing about who is more correct. It's not just that most of us don't know enough to form an independent opinion on climate change, but we don't even know enough to form an independent opinion on whose opinion on climate change we should adopt.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Science and data, i

A lot of people are spun up over the material stolen from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Some are spun up over the material, some are spun up over the stealing, some are spun up over others being improperly or inadequately spun up themselves.

I don't know from the CRU, and I've forgotten pretty much everything I learned in the numerical weather prediction class I took in grad school. So I'll just offer a few thoughts as data for reasoning about all this.

First, climate science differs from the kind of science most people have experience with from high school (or even most undergrad science labs). The scientific experiments conducted by students tend to be done more or less directly on the physical system of interest. If you want to see how inelastic collisions work, you make things collide; if you want to see what K + H2O ->, you drop some potassium in some water and take notes. A hundred years later, someone else can do the same experiment and compare their notes with yours.

For the most part, though, climate science experiments aren't experiments on the climate itself; the subject of the experiments is a particular climate model. The question the experiment is designed to answer is whether the model can be used to correctly answer questions about the real-world climate.

And if the questions we want correctly answered are about the real-world climate fifty years from now, there's really no way of knowing for sure today that a model is adequate.

What can be known, though, is whether a model is adequate to answer questions about the future if certain assumptions are true. Then the work is to determine whether those assumptions are true (even better is to change the model to reduce the amount of assuming that has to be done).

Link | John da Fiesole
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Through grief to grace

As its subtitle suggests, Jantsen's Gift: A True Story of Grief, Rescue, and Grace is a book in three movements.

The first movement is the life of Pam Cope, a middle-class Midwestern housewife, from her childhood through the loss of her son Jantsen when he was fifteen. I say "through the loss" although, of course, that's not a loss anyone ever gets through.

The chapters on Jantsen's death and Pam's subsequent depression are not easy to read. But along with the sorrow and pain, there were moments of growth, as when Pam comes to a new understanding of God:

But the more I engaged in these quiet conversations [with God], the more I began to realize that maybe he wasn't the scary, judgmental, punishing force I had thought. Maybe, in fact, what I was coming to find was what I had spent so long searching for: grace.

The second movement is the beginning of Pam's work with Vietnamese orphans, and the establishment of the Touch a Life Foundation, which grew out of the $25,000 dollars people donated in Jantsen's memory.

While on her first trip to Viet Nam, traveling with a friend who was already involved in charity work there, Pam learned of the desperate plight of so many poor children in that country. She was reminded of a passage about a boy who had died alone, from the book The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson:

It certainly cannot be God's will that any child die alone and abandoned. Surely God placed a particular set of interests and abilities in one person, somewhere in this world, and put that person in a time and place where great things could happen -- should have happened -- for that boy.

This experience unsettled some of Pam's long-held beliefs:

I had always believed that the only children I had been assigned to care for were my own. But that idea, and so many others I had about my place in the world, had begun to shift, and I was coming to understand my responsibilities as much larger.

This eventually came to mean not only adopting two Vietnamese children herself, and helping a number of friends to adopt other children, but running a charity to support a safe home for Vietnamese orphans.

Fundraising in her home town of Neosho, Missouri, was not easy:

Why Vietnam? Why not Neosho, or Newton County, or somewhere in America? We certainly have our fair share of problems, Pam. It's not that I didn't expect this question, or understand why people felt drawn to ask it; it just didn't make sense to me anymore. Because, that's why. Because a child is a child regardless of where they live....

Because is also why Pam got involved in supporting The Place of Rescue in Cambodia.

The final movement of Jantsen's Gift tells how, prompted by nothing more exceptional than a newspaper article, Pam expanded her work to include caring for Ghanian children who had been sold into slavery by their parents. She had read the article in The New York Times, on a trip to New York she took just after her family moved into a smaller house in part to save money for her work. She writes:

Randy [her husband] had recently read a quote to me by the author and poet John Ruskin: Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness....

And I know... I know... that it is only because I had unburdened myself -- financially, emotionally, spiritually -- that everything that happened [in Ghana] was able to, well, happen.

Jantsen's Gift, then, really is a story of grief, rescue, and grace. It's also something of a public service announcement regarding the plight of children in three very distant countries, and an effective introduction to the work of the Touch a Life Foundation.

More than that, though, the book is an invitation to readers to open themselves to the opportunities for rescue and grace that God has placed in their own lives. As Fr. Philip Powell, OP, writes in a comment below, "God gives me X, but X is not a gift until I receive it as one." Whether the reader receives this message of Jantsen's Gift as a gift is the reader's own choice.

(And just for the record, I received Jantsen's Gift as a review copy.)

Link | John da Fiesole
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Salvation by works

I don't understand Mark Shea's hostility toward diagrams.

Be that as it may, a recent commenter at Catholic and Enjoying It! wrote:

I remember very well the time when I, the recovering Calvinist, went deep into the night attempting to create a nice flow-chart of how salvation "worked" in the Catholic system. I wish I still had it. I remember getting frustrated at how messy it seemed. Kinda like life.

I think this fellow's mistake was to attempt a flowchart, where a state diagram is clearly called for:

Link | John da Fiesole
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Humble service

Last week, Fr. Philip Powell, OP, wrote a good post on discerning whether your service to others is sacrificial in the Christian sense. He proposes asking these three quesitons:

1). Why am I doing this work?

2). Is this work good?

3). Am I perfecting my gifts?

The post was in response to the many women who have asked him how they could tell whether they were being good Christians in giving of themselves or merely "being a doormat."

Ever helpful, I left a comment referring to Bl. Henry Suso's embrace of a doormat as metaphor for his own spirituality of service. You can be both a good Christian servant and a doormat!

Or, well, maybe you can. At any rate, Bl. Henry could. As a religious mendicant, he was free to think nothing of himself to a degree we'd probably consider irresponsible of someone living in the world. And, as a personally holy man, he wasn't likely to do the wrong thing very often (which isn't to say he was prudent in worldly terms).

Maybe the distinction is between not wanting to be taken advantage of and not wanting to be taken for granted. Being taken advantage of is bad because it implies there are other things you could be doing that will use your time and effort to better advantage. This is the problem Fr. Philip addresses in his post.

Being taken for granted, though, is the expected consequence of being a servant:

"When you have done all you have been commanded, say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.'"

Of course, it's not good to take someone else for granted, but correcting that fault in another may not always belong to the one being taken for granted.

Fr. Philip had incidentally mentioned that it is always women who ask about whether they're being taken advantage of. My guess at an explanation, in thirty words or less, is that the greater fear for a woman is to refuse to help when she should, while the greater fear for a man is to be taken advantage of.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A mite hard to see

Today's Gospel is the story of the Widow's Mite, in which Jesus says:

"I tell you truly, this poor widow put in more than all the rest; for those others have all made offerings from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has offered her whole livelihood."

What can be missed, just going by the Lectionary, is that both Luke and Mark put this story immediately after Jesus gives this warning to His disciples:

"Be on guard against the scribes, who like to go around in long robes and love greetings in marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers. They will receive a very severe condemnation."

I usually think of this story as a straightforward (if difficult) lesson in heroic virtue. But Jesus doesn't call attention to the widow merely to point out her faith, hope, and love; He points out her virtue in comparison with the virtue shown by "all the rest."

There is a lesson here in the hiddenness of the ways of God. Sure, if we noticed what the widow was doing, we would recognize her virtue. For the most part, though, we don't recognize such things. What is there in her appearance or actions that would draw our attention to her?

What we notice are long robes and seats of honor; if we didn't, then the scribes of our day wouldn't care about them. We may take such things at face value, thinking that whoever sits in a place of honor must be honorable. We may be cynical about such things, cynicism being the besetting virtue of the adolescent.

Odds are, though, we won't be seeing things as God sees them. Maybe this scribe isn't far from the Kingdom of God; maybe this widow is a miser. Even when they saw the same thing, the disciples needed Jesus to interpret it for them.

In addition to the good example of the widow herself, then, we might gain from this very brief story a little humility regarding our own understanding and judgment of the events and people around us.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A short story

Today's Gospel reading is the story of Zacchaeus, the wealthy chief tax collector. Which means it's also the story of the crowd around Zacchaeus.

The best that can be said about the crowd around Zacchaeus is that, unlike the crowd around the blind man, they didn't tell him to get down from the sycamore and stop trying to see Jesus.

What they did, after Jesus invited Himself to Zacchaeus's home and Zacchaeus quickly received Him with joy, was this:

...they began to grumble, saying, "He has gone to stay at the house of a sinner."

Such grumbling in the Gospels is usually understood as a knock against Jesus' own morals.

Note, though, that it also implies Jesus has not gone to stay at the house of any of the grumblers. They, after all, came out to see Jesus, too, and they weren't (we may presume) infamous for their crimes against Israel.

So their grumbling may not be purely idle scandal at the actions of a purported prophet. They're good people; why can't they be graced with the prophet's presence? Or, if not them, then why not someone even better than they?

Jesus has an answer, though I'm not sure how satisfying it was to those who heard it: "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost."

To those in the crowd who would be His disciples, the message was clear: You, too, have to seek and save what was lost. You have to go to the descendants of Abraham I won't get to, and tell them that salvation has come to their house today. Don't keep Me in your houses for us to admire each other. Bring My word out to the people who haven't already heard it.

The grumbling of Zacchaeus's neighbors is similar to the grumbling of the Prodigal Son's brother. All that God has is theirs, if they but knew it, and that includes His joy in Zacchaeus's return to life.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Don't know much about art

Kathy Shaidle defines "social justice" as "the stubborn application of unworkable solutions to imaginary problems."

There's some truth to that; any fool can claim they're "working for social justice," and many of them do.

This is a shame, as I've said before. It keeps good Christians from learning about and supporting workable solutions to real problems of social justice.

I was reminded of this when I came across this prayer service proposed by some Dominican Sisters for use (inter alia) in celebrating the Feast of St. Martin de Porres, Patron of Social Justice.

To me, it reads more like a fundraising letter for a pacifist political action committee than a prayer service, but what really stood out for me was the interpretation of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Mother and Father, who art in heaven...

I guess this has been going on for as long as people have been daft enough to think calling God the Father "Mother and Father" is a good idea, but I just noticed it now:

Is there a less happy conjunction than the neologism of "Mother and Father" with the archaism of "art" (with, no doubt, all the "thy"s that follow)?

If you're going to rewrite a prayer to make it sound like 1989, why would you keep the parts that make it sound like... well, every other year since Modern English emerged?

Link | John da Fiesole
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