Blogotional

Remember those Australian wildfires a while back? Well, The Denver Examiner looks at some of the root causes:

Last week in Arthurs Creek, north of Melbourne, angry residents blamed the ‘green’ policies of the area council which prevented them from properly controlling vegetation surrounding their properties. In a debate similar to what we have seen played out here in Colorado, deep undergrowth and a lack of proper forest management can cause wildfires to burn hotter and faster than what they would otherwise.

There are really two factors at play here - assuming you see everything and bad modeling - they are actually related.

Short sightedness is when we interpret local phenomena on too broad a scale. Example: Many people feel that landfill waste will overrun the planet. Some landfills do get full and unsightly, but that does not make the concept of landfilling invalid. In his famous book The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg calculated that all the waste for the next several centuries, with allowance for expansion in waste production, could be landfilled in a single county in Oklahoma. Just becasue your landfill is having problems, does not mean that landfilling in general is a problem.

Bad modeling is when we think we have a system figured out and we do not. Consider weather predictions - right now, weather uses some of the most computationally complex modeling in human history and yet it is still not all that accurate. Any computer model is only as good as the data that goes into it. Often times, particularly on large systems like weather, we are dealing with limited data sets. Yes, we know the weather at the Atlanta airport really well, but out in the Georgia countryside, we know much less, and out in the middle of the Atlantic we know even less. Part of the improvement in weather forecasting in recent decades has been building a system that collects sufficient weather data in remote places.

But weather suffers from being reasonably well understood, and a natural phenomena. The former advantage means we pretty well know the factors that influence weather and the later means it is repeatable. But when we try and model systems that incorporate the inherently unrepeatable - like human (or animal) behavior, or where we do not have handle on all the factors - the economy, our predictive capabilities lessen significantly.

An ecological system is first of all arbitrarily defined. The boundaries on the system are fuzzy and difficult to define. But within any such system there are literally thousands of factors at play, the vast majority of which involve inherently unrepeatable phenomena since it is animal behavior.

So, back to the fires. You no longer have cute wallabies hanging out in the front yard becasue the vegetation is too thin. The ecological system that is your yard could have cute wallabies in it if the vegetation were thick enough. So you let it grow. You built a model, motivated by your short-sightedness, on an arbitrarily defined ecological system. You neglected the fire factor in your model which would have caused the wallabies to move on anyway.

And now for a spiritual lesson. The essence of being a Christian is to sacrifice your will for God's. But that is a good thing becasue only God has both sufficient data and broad-sightedness to see all the factors and build complete models.

There are no unintended consequences with Jesus.

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