Gonzo Climate Science and Meteorological Musings . In Frenglish only.
In part 1 we saw how my candid curiosity got me into a Twitter fight of epic proportions. While unpleasant, it did have the positive side-effect of bringing actual experts into the fray, which helped dispel some of my misconceptions, and clarified the reasons for my own lack of enthusiasm for RNA-based COVID vaccines (the […]
Emotions have been riding high this week. Aside from the usual avalanche of awful news, including yet another heinous gun-facilitated hate crime, many are contemplating the one year anniversary of the first wave lockdowns in the US, marked mostly by the epic failures of a science-denying president. Since then, COVID19 has replaced heart disease as […]
Probability is the only satisfactory way to reason in an uncertain world. Dennis Lindley An elementary notion in probability is Bayes’ rule, named after the reverend Thomas Bayes, who probably did not discover it. Bayes rule is about flipping conditionals: if I know the probability of event A given that event B has occurred, what’s […]
A lot of volcanic updates this week (see: part 1)! The academics among you know how slowly its creaky wheels can move at times. What follows is a lesson in patience and persistence. The story starts in 2005, when my PhD advisor Mark Cane suggested that I use his famed model of El Niño-Southern Oscillation […]
Volcanoes are among the most iconic of Earth’s structures, active portals conveying the Hadean depths to the heavens, and all the ecosystems in between. When the topic of volcanoes comes up, most people think of Kilauea’s lavas flows, Eyjafjallajökull’s ash cloud grounding air traffic, or lovers caught in a last embrace at Pompeii. Volcanoes turn […]
a radial survey of topics on my mind in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, continued from Part 1. Risk Perceptions I’ve come to appreciate that most of our fights are fundamentally about risk perceptions, even when they are couched in different words: are we better off with strong social safety net or a strong […]
Oh, you thought coming to this blog would spare you from more coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic? Think again. As a scientist, writer, and all around human, it’s impossible not to observe and reflect on this defining moment, affecting everyone on this planet to varying degrees. How often do such black swans recur? We still speak […]
Everyone loves to hate climate models: climate deniers of course, but also the climate scientists who do not use these models — there are many, from observationalists to theoreticians. Even climate modelers love to put their models through harsh reality checks, and I confess to have indulged in that myself: about how models represent of […]
Happy New Year! In much of the Northern Hemisphere, this time of the year usually brings winter storms and graduate school applications. I’ve gotten enough of those over the years that I thought I would compile a list of do’s and don’ts. I am hoping it will help save your application from a chilly reception, and […]
Sometimes science progresses by overturning old dogmas, covering the minds behind luminaries in glory and celebrating individual genius. More often, however, it proceeds quietly, through the work of many scientists slowly accumulating evidence, much like sedimentary strata gradually deposited upon one another over the immensity of geologic time. The recent PAGES 2k data compilation, which […]