[Terrapreta] the most terrifying video...climate change

[MMBTUPR at aol.com]

          from   Lewis L Smith

This discussion brings up a point which historically most human beings have 
ignored, including most scientists.

There is a long-standing tendency going back to the discovery in the 18th 
Century that the heights of French soldiers followed the "normal" curve, to think 
of possible variations from best estimates, mathematical expectations, means, 
medians, parameter estimates and such like as symmetrical or semi-symmetrical 
and at best to be open to alternatives with regard to alternate portrayals of 
the distribution of these variations. For instance, the Gaussian [ normal ]   
and Pareto Levy for the changes in stock prices.

Or we may tolerate mild asymmetries such as the Log normal [ for high incomes 
] , the Poisson [ for the expected lives of wooden utility poles ] or the 
Wiebull [ for wind speed at a given height and location over time ].

But many times in real life, strong asymmetry is the rule. For example, 
people are often much more adverse to monetary losses than they are attracted by 
economic gains. And if we could describe Murphy's Law with a distribution, it 
would have a very long tail in the wrong direction, much longer than that of the 
Poisson !   Finally, here with GW, we are dealing with perhaps the most 
monstrous asymmetry of them all.

Yet emotionally, mathematically and statistically, we are not really equipped 
to deal with such situations.

Cordially. ###


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