Is ‘I don’t have an opinion on AGW’ a valid scientific position?

Posted on November 14, 2007 by Chris Rowan

In amongst the sound and fury which accompanied last week’s fight to the death between Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy and Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit in the 2007 Weblog Awards (which was eventually declared a draw), I noticed an interesting attitude amongst the Climate Audit supporters invading certain threads around here (the more polite ones, anyway). In response to the characterisation of McIntyre as a ‘AGW (anthropogenic global warming) denialist’, most argued that he offered no opinion on the question of human influence on the climate, and furthermore, that this was a good thing. For example:

Well no. He makes no statements about [AGW] and rightly so, because he only makes a statement about something that he checked thoroughly. So he doesn’t deny it nor confirm it.

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Categories: antiscience, climate science

Mount Kelud calms down

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Chris Rowan

The Indonesian Centre for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation has downgraded the alert level for Mount Kelud, and allowed villagers evacuated from the slopes of the mountain to return to their homes. Since I can’t translate Indonesian, I can’t give you the full technical details, but it seems that there have been two major developments since the intense seismicity of two weekends ago:


Before everyone gets too comfortable, though, the soothsayers are still predicting an eruption within the next week. One of them apparently feeds the spirit of the mountain coffee. What a waste.

Categories: geohazards, volcanoes

An interactive map of UK geology

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Chris Rowan

The BGS have put up a nice interactive map of the UK’s geology (flash required). You can select and deselect rocks of different geological periods to see where they are distributed around Britain and Ireland, and if you hover over the information symbols it will show you their absolute ages and stratigraphic subdivisions.

BGSgeoUK.jpg

It’s not as pretty as William Smith’s effort, but it’s a neat tool, and nicely summarises the larger-scale geological patterns such as the obvious increase in the age of the exposed rocks as you strike northwest from Dover (there’s a nice story behind that, which I need to get around to posting one day). The BGS also provides online access to higher resolution data, although the implementation is a bit more fiddly (you have to zoom in a bit before you can display basement geology, too).
(Via the Isles Project)

Categories: geology, links

Testability in Earth Science

Posted on November 12, 2007 by Chris Rowan

Geology is to a large extent the study of unrepeatable events which happened in the very dim and very distant past. As Kim rather nicely puts it:

That 1.4 billion-year-old granite whose contact aureole I’m studying? It’s done intruding, it’s cold, it’s eroding. It’s not going back to the mid-crust any time soon.

Superficially, this conflicts with the idea that rigorous science is grounded in testing and replication of your results (and, taken to extremes, culminates in the ‘where you there?’ bleating of the more virulent creationists). After all, we can’t run the Earth again to see if we’ve got it right; so how can you ever truly test a geological hypothesis?
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Categories: basics, geology

Incomprehensible? Moi?

Posted on November 8, 2007 by Chris Rowan

I’m not quite as “longwinded and incomprehensible” as James, it seems:

I’m not sure exactly how useful this little tool is. Not only does it not give any indication of exactly how your ‘readability’ is calculated, but it also seems to be a little bit indecisive: when I tried it before the last post went up, it claimed that I was writing at the undergraduate level (I presume it just scans the front page, so this post will probably change it again). But it does raise an interesting issue: my main motivation in writing this blog is to make science more accessible, which means presenting information in terms that the non-expert can understand. If this thing is right, I may not be succeeding.
So, some questions for you lot: what level of education do you have? Science or non-science? How much of what I write do you actually understand? Feedback (particularly from lurkers) would be appreciated.

Categories: bloggery