Science in the Triangle

True to its mission, the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute in Research Triangle Park took on a tricky data- and model-driven scientific challenge in the first public talk it organized for a lay audience.

Douglas Nychka

SAMSI, a collaboration of the RTP area’s three main universities, the RTP-based National Institute of Statistical Sciences and the National Science Foundation, picked climate change as a topic for the talk on Feb. 15 and invited Douglas Nychka, a leading statistician and climate expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., as its inaugural speaker.

Nychka didn’t go into the depths of the criticism that has dogged data-driven climate change modeling for more than a decade and has left most Americans convinced they can’t do anything to change global warming.

Only 18 percent of Americans strongly believe global warming is real, harmful and caused by humans, according to the 2008 American Climate Values Survey.

“This is an argument about cause and effect,” Nychka said.

He did, however, say that it was very difficult to statistically reproduce the global warming trend without including greenhouse gases from fossil fuel consumption. Read more…