Happy weekend everybody!
You know, I read something in the magnitude of 180(ish) security blogs, a handful of mailing lists, and 2 print magazines as a way of trying to keep up on new (and good) thought in the profession. Now I’d like to think that this keeps me on top of publicly available security related information. One thing that I find, is that we tend to be myopes, focused on our situation like it’s a strange, unique problem that the rest of the world cannot help us with. I actually find a lot of value every week in the non-security blogs I read. So I’m thinking that I might try to put out non-security topics that I think are of interest in how they may correlate to the issues we face.
CERTAINTY, UNCERTAINTY, AND CLIMATE DATA
We have lots of uncertainty. I was talking with an industry forum this week in which one of the participants asked me about “detectability”. Their risk analysis methodology uses an estimated metric that essentially describes uncertainty for the ability “to detect” using this term. FAIR, as we use it, forces the analyst to account for uncertainty in every measurement and estimation.
You know who else has uncertainty? Climatologists. I’m going to try to stay away from the political discussion surrounding Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) but the Real Climate weblog I read is a good source of information regardless of what you believe surrounding AGW.
This morning’s post from Real Climate has to do with a new paper in Science magazine that discusses climate sensitivity and uncertainty. I wanted to bring The Certainty of Uncertainty blog post into your attention because it shows how we can use probability, the inherit uncertainty in any data gathering (and interpretation) effort, and still come to valid conclusions. Too many times our “engineering” bent likes to pretend that we can only deal with information that includes “variance” rather than “uncertainty” (of course, they are very similar concepts).
the non-linear relationship between the strength of climate feedbacks (f) and the resulting temperature response (deltaT) … show(s) that this places a strong constraint on our ability to determine a specific “true” value of climate sensitivity, S. These results could well be taken to suggest that climate sensitivity is so uncertain as to be effectively unknowable. This would be quite wrong.
(emphasis mine).
(via RiskAnalys.is)
October 27, 2007, 9:09am Comments
