[Osx-nutters] Denial

[David Cake]

At 6:33 PM -0700 13/8/07, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>On Aug 13, 2007, at 6:05 PM, Stefano Mori wrote:
>
>>  Nevertheless, the 6% quoted above is over 100 million, just for
>>  modeling in the US.
>
>Thanks for showing me your sources, Stefano.  I still have a hard 
>time accepting the figure though. If the us really  spends $108M on 
>modeling per year and if a full time modeler costs $100,000 with 
>overhead, then there must be more than 1,000 full time climate 
>modelers in the US alone. If they publish once a year, there must be 
>1,000 articles a year just on results of climate models.

	I used to work in an environmental science place that did a 
lot of modelling. Lest this cause Stefano to right off all my future 
comments as institutional bias, they had almost nothing to do with 
AGW, they were a water science place who modelled lakes a lot. And 
also, I thought the head of the place was an ass, who treated the 
professional opinions of his highly trained non-academic staff (which 
included me) with about the same respect as most of us would the 
opinions of a talkative cabby.
	They buy big computers. The computers themselves can cost 
millions (they didn't have supercomputer access when I was there, 
they do now, but had experimented with a lot of specialist 
'mini-super' type gear). The really serious computing stuff (super 
computers, really big clusters) requires specialist physical 
facilities, which get very expensive, just like any major data 
centre. They have admin staff doing all sorts of random faff, but who 
take up a big percentage of the budget.
	All this could be counted as overhead, but if they are, the 
figure of $100,000 with overhead is way too low. $100,000 just gets 
everyone an office, super, a machine for email, health funds etc, 
normal stuff. It costs a lot more to get them super-computers.

	The computers have hardware and software guys (who generally 
don't publish) and grad students (who do publish, but not significant 
solo publication) doing most of the care and feeding, and writing 
code.

	They generally work on data collection as well. Modelling 
people always want bits of data they don't have. Data collection 
means there are bunches of techs building things, sometime very odd 
things.  Data collection projects can involve sending people to odd 
bits of the world, which takes up a lot of time and effort. Even if 
the centre isn't doing major data collection themselves, they'll be 
devoting quite a bit of effort liasing with people who do, and 
probably have data collection experts on staff.

	There are also scientists who work in the climate modelling 
centre, but never publish directly the results of models (they 
publish their tweaks to numerical analysis algorithms, or their data 
from from particular new means of data collection, or comparisons 
between results of different data sets). And there are probably quite 
a few projects going on that involve much more specific climate 
modelling projects (ie predicting likely micro-climate conditions for 
your local agricultural industries) that are perfectly valid 
modelling science, but don't have a direct impact on AWG and global 
climate science.

	To inject another bit of personal anecdotage, I have a few 
friends who are professional scientists, and who deal with what could 
be called climate science. None of them directly work on AGW science. 
They do, however, work in fields that have something to do with the 
climate, and its not a big stretch to imagine their careers taking a 
turn so that in 5 to 10 years they get dragged into the AGW debate. 
Its just that right now their careers have little to do with it. When 
you look at specific examples, it seems pretty obvious that the idea 
of climate science funding as funding for the AGW culture war is 
nonsensical. For example, one is a geographer, with a professional 
specialty in remote sensing. It seems perfectly plausible that she 
might end up, in a few years so she is in a more senior position, 
being drawn into the public debate about the extent and economic 
effects of AGW. We are going to make those estimates from satellite 
data, and she is a scientist who is an expert in climate-related 
satellite data (she went to visit with the European Space Agency just 
a couple of weeks ago), and the exact interpretation of satellite 
data has come up in the public debate several times. But what does 
she do right now? Well, currently she spends a lot of time tromping 
about in fields collecting grass, as part of a project that 
correlates satellite estimates of vegetation density with field 
(hah!) data, and even more time crunching the satellite data to 
compare. Is this perfectly good academic preparation for offering her 
professional opinion as a contribution to a public debate about 
climate data gathered from satellite data at some later point? Sure. 
Does it constitute political indoctrination into the AGW cabal? No.

	No field is immune to politics. Science isn't special in this 
regard. But like many many fields, ideology is more or less unrelated 
to advancement within the field, and professional competence - and 
bucking the orthodoxy is often a career shortcut. Stefanos base 
position seems to be that ideological indoctrination is part and 
parcel of being involved in climate science - and its just not the 
case.

	Cheers
		David