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THE WAY OF CERTAINTY. Think you know what facts are? Think you know what reality is? Are you sure? Then answer this: Can the ghost of a technological 'hoax' past contribute substantially to the credibility of a scientific 'truth' present? Before you bet the farm on your opinion about that, you should probably take the time to read this post.
The graphic above is borrowed from a site called Universe, which also explains today's headline:
Of all the storied elements of our great folkloric misunderstanding of Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect has undoubtedly suffered most from popular conception. It was born innocuous, a slight allegory to explain how changes in a mathematical situation's beginning coordinates have an unprecedented effect on its outcome, and yet the Butterfly Effect has somehow mutated into a beloved believe-it-or-not tenet of pop science. A butterfly flapping its wings on a balmy midwestern afternoon, many of us believe, can cause typhoons on the coast of Japan. The image is lovely, of course, and gives us a world that is wildly interconnected, multifarious, and dangerous. However, any mathematical concept which finishes its career as the title of an Ashton Kutcher movie should be immediately fact-checked.
Although the Butterfly Effect is mathematically, conceptually, solid as a rock, the actual dusty-winged butterfly is only an image, and nary more. [emphasis added]
This is an outstanding introduction to my topic for several reasons. The terse definition of the Butterfly Effect is correct, the references to 'pop science' and 'image' are apt, and the "Yes, but..." endorsement of the underlying math is perfectly in tune with the story Glenn Reynolds linked the other day about "the warmest year of the past century."
The Universe blogger is at pains to tell us that while the principle is valid, the butterfly analogy is not. In his view, the butterfly really is too small to precipitate a typhoon. But he's talking about hard-core science, not pop science, or (perish the thought) the preternaturally tumultuous climate of publicity. If a social butterfly flaps her wings in Beverly Hills, can it cause a worldwide hurricane of media coverage and public obsession? Yes. It can. That's an interesting distinction in light of the Global Warming axiom brought into question by IntaPundit's link:
Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record
My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.
McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.
NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now alloccur before World War II.

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