How to Have a Winner Try Again and Loser Feature on Scratch Mit

I thought I'd seen the end of this subsequently we outset saw it back on May 26th of this year. I wrote so:

How not to brand a climate photo op

You have to wonder- what were these guys thinking? The only media visual they could take called that would send a worse message of forecast certainty was a dart board…or mayhap something else?

MIT's "wheel of climate" – image courtesy Donna Coveney/MIT

But no, they obviously didn't go enough press the kickoff fourth dimension effectually. I mean, come up on, it's a table top roulette wheel in a scientific discipline press release. Today we were treated to yet another new press release on the press mailing list I become. It is recycled scientific discipline news correct down to the same photograph series higher up which you can run into again in the press link below. The guy on the left looks slightly less irritated in the new photograph at the link. Next, to get more mileage, I think we'll see the online game version.

So what I remember nosotros need now is  a caption contest for the photograph above . Readers, start your word skills. I'll mail the all-time 3 captions from comments in a  new mail later.

Oh and if you lot want to read about the press release, here it is beneath:

From MIT Public Release: 2-October-2009

There's even so time to cutting the adventure of climate catastrophe, MIT study shows

A new assay of climate risk, published by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, shows that even moderate carbon-reduction policies now can essentially lower the chance of time to come climate change. It also shows that quick, global emissions reductions would be required in order to provide a good risk of fugitive a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level — a widely discussed target.

How to limit risk of climate catastrophe

To illustrate the findings of their model, MIT researchers created a pair of 'roulette wheels.' This wheel depicts their gauge of the range of probability of potential global temperature alter over the adjacent 100 years if no policy change is enacted on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Photograph – Image courtesy: MIT Joint Programme on the Science and Policy of Global Modify

Comprehensive analysis of the odds of climate outcomes under dissimilar policy scenarios shows pregnant benefits from early actions.

David 50. Chandler, MIT News Office

October 2, 2009

A new analysis of climate risk, published past researchers at MIT and elsewhere, shows that even moderate carbon-reduction policies at present can essentially lower the hazard of time to come climate change. Information technology also shows that quick, global emissions reductions would be required in club to provide a good hazard of  avoiding a temperature increase of more than two degrees Celsius to a higher place the pre-industrial level — a widely discussed target. But without prompt action, they found, extreme changes could before long become much more than hard, if non impossible, to control.

Ron Prinn, co-director of MIT's Articulation Program on the Scientific discipline and Policy of Global Modify and a co-author of the new report, says that "our results show we still have around a 50-50 chance of stabilizing the climate" at a level of no more than a few tenths above the ii caste target. However, that will require global emissions, which are at present growing, to start downward almost immediately. That issue could be achieved if the ambitious emissions targets in current U.S. climate bills were met, and matched by other wealthy countries, and if Cathay and other large developing countries followed conform with merely a decade or two filibuster. That ii degree C increase is a level that is considered likely to preclude some of the virtually catastrophic potential effects of climate change, such as major increases in global ocean level and disruption of agriculture and natural ecosystems.

"The nature of the problem is one of minimizing risk," explains Mort Webster, assistant professor of technology systems, who was the lead author of the new report. That'south why looking at the probabilities of various outcomes, rather than focusing on the boilerplate outcome in a given climate model, "is both more than scientifically correct, and a more useful fashion to retrieve about it."

Too ofttimes, he says, the public give-and-take over climate change policies gets framed as a debate betwixt the most extreme views on each side, as "the globe is catastrophe tomorrow, versus it'due south all a myth," he says. "Neither of those is scientifically right or socially useful."

"It's a tradeoff between risks," he says. "There's the risk of farthermost climate change simply there'due south also a take chances of higher costs. As scientists, we don't choose what's the right level of chance for society, but nosotros bear witness what the risks are either way."

The new report, published online by the Joint Programme in September, builds on one released earlier this year that looked at the probabilities of diverse climate outcomes in the issue that no emissions-control policies at all were implemented — and institute high odds of extreme temperature increases that could devastate human societies. This one examined the divergence that would be made to those odds, under four different versions of possible emissions-reduction policies.

Both studies used the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activeness and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Plan on the Science and Policy of Global Alter since the early on 1990s. The new research involved hundreds of runs of the model with each run using slight variations in input parameters, selected so that each run has about an equal probability of existence correct based on present observations and knowledge. Other inquiry groups have estimated the probabilities of diverse outcomes, based on variations in the physical response of the climate organization itself. But the MIT model is the just one that interactively includes detailed handling of possible changes in human activities as well — such every bit the degree of economic growth, with its associated energy utilisation, in different countries.

Quantifying the odds

By taking a probabilistic arroyo, using many different runs of the climate model, this approach gives a more realistic assessment of the range of possible outcomes, Webster says. "One of the common mistakes in the [scientific] literature," he says, "is to take several different climate models, each of which gives a 'best estimate' of temperature outcomes, and accept that equally the doubt range. But that's not right. The range of doubt is actually much wider."

Because this report produced a straight estimate of probabilities by running 400 different probability-weighted simulations for each policy example, looking at the actual range of uncertainty for each of the many factors that go into the model, and how they interact. Past doing so, it produced more realistic estimates of the likelihood of diverse outcomes than other procedures — and the resulting odds are often significantly worse. For example, an earlier written report by Tom Wigley of the National Middle for Atmospheric Research estimated that the Level one emissions control policy — the least-restrictive of the standards studied -would reduce by 50 percent the odds of a temperature increase of more than than 2 degrees C, merely the more detailed assay in the new study finds only a twenty percentage chance of fugitive such an increment.

1 interesting finding the team made is that even relatively modest emissions-control policies can have a big touch on on the odds of the about damaging climate outcomes. For any given climate model scenario, there is e'er a probability distribution of possible outcomes, and it turns out that in all the scenarios, the policy options take a much greater bear upon in reducing the virtually farthermost outcomes than they do on the most likely outcomes.

For instance, under the strongest of the four policy options, the boilerplate projected result was a 1.7 degrees C reduction of the expected temperature increase in 2100, but for the almost extreme projected increase (with v percent probability of occurring) in that location was a iii.2 degree C reduction. And that's especially significant, the authors say, because the nearly damaging effects of climatic change increase drastically with higher temperature, in a very not-linear way.

"These results illustrate that even relatively loose constraints on emissions reduce greatly the adventure of an extreme temperature increase, which is associated with the greatest damage," the report concludes.

Webster emphasizes that "this is a problem of run a risk management," and says that while the technical aspects of the models are circuitous, the results provide information that'due south non much different from decisions that people face every day. People understand that past using their seat belts and having a car with airbags they are reducing the risks of driving, but that doesn't mean they can't however be injured or killed. "No, merely the run a risk goes downwards. That's the return on your decision. It's not something that's so unfamiliar to people. We may make sure to buy a automobile with airbags, but we don't refuse to get out the house. That'due south the nature of the kind of tradeoffs we have to make as a lodge."

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UPDATE: WUWT commenter Deborah via Jim Watson implies in comments that she has too much time on her hands 😉

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Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/02/wheel-of-silly/

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