#climate guy stuff

hi thanks for asking can we be new best friends <3

FIRST OFF, that the public desperately needs a better understanding of *the scientific method* and how it deals with uncertainty, to be able to deal with things like COVID and climate change (extreme events are, by nature, random and extreme). science was changing constantly and discovering new things, and because people didn't understand that's how it's supposed to work they went "welp scientists don't know jack" (and were able to be manipulated into believing that). better public education of the scientific method would do quite a lot to prevent that sort of misinformation takeover, or the kind that's used by tobacco (now vapes lol) and oil companies. the public has somewhat of an excuse; reporters don't. (or they wouldn't if they weren't underpaid and worked to death. i digress.)

second off... hmm, actually, i've changed my opinion on the IPCC's RCP 8.5 to a more nuanced take (it's an extreme carbon emissions pathway that *does* perform well in the next few decades on most models even though it's the wrong pathway now that we've reduced emissions/failed to raise them as much as we feared in the 90s, but honestly the fact that it still performs well is terrifying for OTHER reasons... namely, we could be missing something *big* in how our models should work). but also i think we need to be a bit more transparent when using it -- it's no longer the "business as usual" climate change scenario.

third off, SCIENTISTS (and businesses) NEED TO STOP P-HACKING AND TAKE A STATS COURSE OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. See this XCKD comic for an illustration/explanation but essentially p-hacking is when you just keep testing a bunch of things until you find something that passes a "significance" threshold... think of it like rolling different colored sets of dice to get snake eyes and then deciding oh! Blue dice get snake eyes more often than others! Grrrrr. Sound familiar? (Glares daggers at most AI companies. Also a disconcertingly large amount of folks working with geospatial data.) Machine learning is just fancy statistics so you need to like, actually consider statistics when using it.

I just found out a new book is in the works!?! About the Mars colony? I’m so excited.

But anyways. The author described this series as “punchcard punk” which as somebody who makes a living working in archaic computing languages makes my brain happy. And the books make my brain happy. (And sad. And other things. The MC has anxiety and the author does a great but intense job of describing it. And the MC of the third book is anorexic.)

The gist is, an extinction level asteroid impact hits the planet in the 1950s just as the space race is gearing up. Specifically, it hits Washington DC. (Did you know Chesapeake Bay is actually part of an ancient impact crater? Anyways.) This results in an impact winter and then a gradual global warming — because water vapor is a greenhouse gas. (I really, really want to run some models for this myself. But the science of it very much does check out!!!)

Worried about humans becoming extinct, space travel gets kicked into gear. The characters deal with the reality of sexism and racism and fight for women and people of color to be included in the astronaut program and space colonies. It’s so meticulously researched and well done.