Climate, science and sensationalism

Once again, the invaluable RealClimate site smacks down an exaggeratedly apocalyptic interpretation of scientific results. There's much helpful information in there about the meaning of the climateprediction.net results and the question of whether we are nearing a "point of no return"; in the process, there is a helpful summary of why the scientists think what they do about the sensitivity of global climate to the products of human activity.

It's important to do this not just as a service to the truth, but, given the truth, as a spur to practical action as well. Were some of the scariest public statements of the past week correct, it would be essentially impossible to avoid the impending wreck of human civilization. Given that, there would be little point in incremental efforts to limit CO₂ production; a more appropriate response would be to start figuring out how to deal with the End Times. But the best evidence is actually that things are not this hopeless; anthropogenic global warming is real and probably dangerous, but reductions in CO₂ emissions can help and will continue to help.

Having previously ascribed a bit too much significance to the climateprediction.net worst-case scenario (which seems to be simply the consequence of large error bars for that particular set of models), Chris Mooney linked to this with the embarrassed phrase "score a point for Michael Crichton", but, as commenters immediately pointed out, he's wrong about that. Crichton and his allies imagine a massive, nefarious collusion between the climate science community, activist groups and the media, in which scientists who do not toe the line of environmental extremism are denied funding or intimidated into recanting. The above link is clear evidence that this is not happening: activists and the media do sometimes produce sensational exaggerations, but people in the climate-science community are perfectly willing to criticize them for it, and the consensus on global warming is not one of them. It also gives the lie to the notion that climate scientists are blindly trusting numerical models without comparing them to real-world data. Were Crichton's complaint that the news media are sometimes sensationalistic, it would not be very controversial.

Also: John Fleck explains what the climateprediction.net project is really attempting to do, and why the large range of its climate forecasts at this point should not be taken as evidence of "even greater global warming than we had thought". This does not mean that the models are useless, just that the current work with them is a preliminary attempt to explore their parameter space, not to produce likely predictions.

Unsharp universe

The Cassini Picture of the Day finally gets around to showing a version of the recent Rhea photos processed for public consumption (they promise a true-color version, but it doesn't seem to have materialized; here are my attempts).

I probably shouldn't pick on these people, as they are very busy and are doing a pretty good job of getting pretty pictures out in between the actual scientific work. But what's the deal with the extreme unsharp mask they put on these pictures? It's so intense that it's creating a weird-looking bright band at the horizon. (For those who are not digital-photography buffs, the unsharp mask is a type of sharpening technique that you can do in Photoshop or equivalent; it apparently has origins in traditional photography, something I did not know until just now.)

They did the same thing with Iapetus. I suppose it does make the topography stick out more, but at the cost of some unrealism, and they probably could have done just as well with a smaller mask radius. I'm pretty sure that my quasi-true-color picture (the really gray one) is closer to what you'd see if you were out there looking at Rhea.