IF ICELAND CANNOT SEND CASH, IT SENDS ASH

The ash crisis and the financial crisis have much in common. Both result from the fact that almost all decision makers do not understand mathematics and science, even in a rudimentary level, while most mathematicians and scientists have no feel for the real life implications of their calculations.

Both camps refuse to admit their failings.

"Financial engineers" created complex mathematical instruments, neglecting to emphasize unavoidable assumptions they had to make. At the same time, senior bankers and regulators did not admit that they had no idea what these papers really meant, and never asked whether there were undisclosed hidden assumptions, lurking behind new quick ways of profiteering.

Theoretical scientific model builders convinced authorities that the ash cloud is here or there, without bothering to measure anything, while no one asked whether the computer model was based on realistic assumptions.

In both cases, decision makers, with good training in standard scientific thinking, could smell trouble immediately, even if they knew nothing about derivatives or volcanoes. The fingerprints of a sophisticated pyramid scheme should be obvious whenever one claims he can always win, and a "killer cloud" that no one can see, affecting an entire continent, based on no actual measurements, should have raised any intelligent pair of eye brows.

The world is discovering that an important profession is missing: Scientifically trained political decision makers. Neither a good scientist lacking management experience, nor a smart politician with no scientific training, could spot the trouble. We need people who have both qualities.

A THEORY OF /CLOUD/
LEARNING FROM HUBERT DAMISCH

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth. — Benoit Mandelbrot

What does art history have to tell us about the cloud of volcanic ash that obscured the sky bringing European air space to a weeklong standstill? 

In the history of Western painting the cloud is a recurrent element that as the visionary French philosopher Hubert Damisch contends is the most fleeting of all masterpieces: they can be found everywhere from Giotto to Constable and onwards to Modernism. Damisch wrote in his 1972 book, A Theory of /Cloud/ that the cloud is found exactly at the point in the system where it escapes. It vanishes within the graphic system only to discover itself again. Cloud archaeology is a science for angels.  If the cloud is the zero degree of painting geometry defaults where it meets the sky: The system of linear perspective cannot take into account the full complexity of visual experience and hence generates the cloud as a sign, as an agent, as a counter force with which it is in dialectical interaction. The cloud introduces something that has no place in painting but at the same time is painting.  Damisch concludes that painting is itself defined within this paradox. 

Perhaps we have learned that air travel is defined within another paradox; the control of the uncontrollable. The cloud introduced something that has no place in air travel but at the same time is air travel.

ON ASHES AND EMOTIONS

Uncontrollable forces of nature outside ourselves, are similar to those inside of us: Geological phenomena are similar to strong emotions, feelings and psycho-pathologies. We cannot control volcanic eruptions, and most of the time, we cannot control strong anger or strong fear.

"Nature is more powerful than us", comes to mind when we see a huge cloud collapsing our technological wonders: Airplanes and global transportation. With this idea the dichotomy between us and nature becomes deeper, and we easily forget that nature is a continuum that transcends humanity: From star dusts to genes and neurons. Two ideas should be kept in mind when dealing with this epistemological and methodological entity called "nature".

First, we do not have the "real" image of nature, and maybe never will. We only have models, theories and simulations, in which "facts" are defined by a partial number of variables.

Second, we need more integrative thinking: Scientists working together will recognize the complexity of nature, have a more accurate image of it, and will stop proposing naïve models. This applies to understanding volcanoes, brains, markets and stars.

We cannot surrender to the complexity. When we stop trying to explain nature through science, we try it through religion or myth. Curiosity is also a force of nature, and science is the best tool available to understand the world — and maybe, just maybe, even control it without damaging it. That's the best we can do with uncontrollable forces of nature: From volcanic ashes to emotions.

I was in Budapest with my plane (a Falcon 7x which is the most modern business jet, the equivalent to top airline technology) when the cloud came. I've heard of the closure on the radio 2 hour before it was to occur, I alerted the pilots, and we rushed to the airport, taking off for Palma in the South with 15 minutes to spare otherwise we would have been stuck. I am still in Palma, where I can comfortably work, but I am closely monitoring the situation since soon I need to rejoin my wife in Sweden and return home in Seattle.

There is no question that ash, when present, is a danger to aircraft. To actually crash an airplane you would need lots of it — the known scary encounters (no lives were lost however) occurred at night, before this danger was recognized.

However, tiny amounts can also damage the engines, not that they would stop working, but their maintenance costs would go up greatly. There seems to be a rational willingness on the parts of scheduled airlines to accept a fair bit of economicrisk and fly, instead of a much greater economic risk of not flying.

My engines are on warranty which is worth a lot of money. We are told considerably more stringent limits of where we can fly without losing the warranty, even though we could legally and presumably safely fly outside of the designated areas — we just have to be an extra 100 miles or so further and 10000 ft higher to keep the warranty.

I was shown a NASA report where a research aircraft flew a few years ago pretty far from an Icelandic volcano yet it suffered engine hot section damage that required expensive repairs. The skin of the plane was not affected at all and there was not indication during the flight that the damage occurred.

Having said this, it is rather mysterious where the daily detailed maps of the cloud limits come from — how many direct measurements are taken, how many interpolations and extrapolations are made. It is not communicated well at all.

I can foresee that detecting volcanic dust in the air will one day be a part of aircraft instrumentation (in my early days with computers, "large" car-size disk drives of tens of megabits in capacity had a "sniffer" attached to them that looked for dust that preceded a disk crash so that the heads could be withdrawn). Once we have direct measurements the maps (and models) will be much more reliable, and they would be used for planning only, not as hard fly/no fly areas. For example we do not close down airspaces for thunderstorms even though they are extremely dangerous, because planes have weather radars and other instruments (lightning detectors, wind shear detectors) to detect the proximity of the danger and avoid it.

The ash cloud reminds us of the risks of risk aversion. Shutting down Europe's airspace removed the risk of an ash-caused crash, but it also increased all sorts of other risks: the risk of death to a patient because an urgent medical operation might have to be postponed for lack of supplies, the risk of poverty to a Kenyan farm worker because roses could not be flown to European markets, the risk of a collision between ferries on extra night-time sailings in the English Channel. And so on. Risk decisions cannot be taken in isolation. The precautionary principle makes too little allowance for the risks that are run by avoiding risks — the innovations not made, the existing suffering not alleviated. The ash cloud, by reminding us of the risks of not being able to fly planes, is a timely reminder that the risks of global warming must be weighed against the risks of high energy costs — the risks of poverty (cheap energy creates jobs), of hunger (fertiliser costs depend on energy costs), of rainforest destruction and indoor air pollution (expensive electricity makes firewood seem cheaper), of orangutan extinction in subsidised biofuel palm oil plantations.

Oh, and remember the lessons of public choice theory: if you set up a body called the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, don't be surprised if it over-reacts the first time it gets a chance the demonstrate that it considers itself — as all public bodies always do — underfunded.

The ash cloud demonstrates that when it comes to major explosions in our interconnected world, there is no such thing as 'local' or 'regional'.

A recent set of scientific studies by Alan Robock of Rutgers University and Owen Toon of the University of Colorado at Boulder and their colleagues, and reported upon in Science demonstrates a more pernicious impact of even a limited nuclear exchange, in what, for North Americans, would seem to be a remote corner of the world. The studies conclude that a "regional" nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, in which merely 100 Hiroshima-size weapons were exploded in these nations would significantly disrupt the global climate for at least a decade. Up to 5 million tons of smoke would rise above cloud level and within days form a global stratospheric smoke layer, which would block 7-10% of sunlight reaching the earth for years. 

Compare this to the current situation in Iceland. Recent estimates suggest that the Eyjafjallajökull eruption has spewed perhaps a million tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere thus far, slightly smaller in magnitude than the amount predicted to result from such a limited nuclear weapons exchange. But the particles of soot from the intense fires arising from nuclear explosions are much smaller, and therefore rise higher into the atmosphere. At the same time they reflect more light than the larger silicon particles emitted by Volcanoes. The net result is that this soot would remain in the atmosphere far longer, and have a far greater climate changing effect, affecting agriculture world-wide.

The lesson we should draw from this is simple. If a simple volcano in Iceland can immobilize much of the world even a small scale nuclear conflict has the capacity to affect all of humanity so profoundly that mere airline flight cancellations would be the least of our worries.

LESSONS FROM AN ICELANDIC ASH CLOUD: WATCH OUT WHAT YOU ARE SPEWING!

As a climatologist and lecturer, it is not surprising to get all kinds of questions from your audiences about the elements. Recently, though I was formally talking about how to value environmental goods and services in economic models, the audience pushed me on the big news weather story of the day — the Icelandic volcano. One said: "Nature still bats last and we should be humbled by her power and not provoke her with pollution, for she can be a dangerous adversary". But another kid had a totally different line, more like what you hear daily from the coal industry — "see, we can't really be a big force in the environment because nature is so much more powerful; we are puny and the media and environmentalists just exaggerate our impacts."

So who is right in this dichotomous set of metaphors? Actually, speaking like a typical academic, they are both right — or to be more correct, partially right. Indeed, it is well established that for non-linear systems when they are forced to change rapidly that they are prone to potentially risky, disproportionate responses. Furthermore, as this eruptive event reminds us, we are still quite vulnerable to Nature on a tear, whether of her sole doing or provoked by us using the atmosphere as a free sewer to dump our wastes. But the more conservative kid had a good point too — nature can be much more powerful than us. But what he forgot is the scale issue. For a while, yes, we are puny Nature is powerful. But our emissions of pollutants that are long lived — like CO2 — are continuous and cumulative, whereas most powerful natural events like hurricanes and volcanoes are one shots. Furthermore, many deniers of the seriousness of human impacts on climate use the argument that volcanoes put more CO2 into the air that humans — totally false by the way on an annual basis averaged over decades.

So let's take this recent volcanic story as a good case in point. In its first week of spewing, the volcano was estimated to emit daily about 10,000 tons of CO2. That's a thousand times more than the average US citizen causes to be dumped in the air each year. But we do it year after year and we are over 300,000,000 strong — so we, not Nature dominate in that scenario. Moreover, because of the grounding of 60% or so of the Euro air fleet for many days, which daily emits something like 350,000 tons of CO2, the volcano actually reduced global warming emissions a tiny bit by forcing some 200,000 tons of CO2 a day to stay in fuel tanks on the ground and not get injected into the atmosphere.

Of course neither that tiny amount of CO2 relative to human annual injections, nor the relatively tiny amount of ash associated with the eruptions so far, will have more than a barely detectable influence on climate. The real lesson here is to check out the credibility of your clichés before your utter them. And double check your numbers before issuing ostensibly generalizable assertions. Emotionally tangible metaphors make a good storyline; the media love them. But very often they prove to be a poor way to inform a literate and numerate society so desperately in need of credible assessments of scientific problems.

Our society is too much dependent on computers. Firstly, the whole volcanic ash cloud story shows us that decision makers rely too much on computer models, however good they might have been. For the first few days, nobody bothered to check whether the predictions of these models were correct or, if correct, applicable to the safety of airplanes. Nobody likes to make real decisions any more. A decision is characterized by the very fact that there is not enough evidence to make it into a logically compelling conclusion. Furthermore, our society has come to believe too much that everything can be controlled and all risks can be checked, no matter what the cost. There is no absolute safety.

Another critical dependence on computer technology became evident during the volcanic ash incident. I was trapped in Oxford, trying to get back to Vienna. There was not only no possibility to reserve train seats for the Eurostar, the train underneath the Channel, or for regular TGV trains from Paris to Germany. It was not even possible to obtain via Internet or telephone any information whether the trains were completely occupied or not. All relevant Web sites simply collapsed. This was the hour of personal black market solutions to finally get a train ticket to Paris and the hour of last-minute personal decisions. It was actually fun to finally end up in a shared taxi with seven others, mostly students, driving through the night from Paris to Frankfurt in Germany, an experience I wouldn't like to miss.

Ironically I was on Mt Etna collecting volcanic ash when the aviation chaos ensued so I enjoyed a three day return to the UK from Sicily instead of a 3 hour flight.

However what occurred in Iceland is not entirely surprising in a geological timescale. Icelandic volcanic ash layers from explosive eruptions occurring over 10,000s years are known to exist across western Europe and the North Atlantic, from Scottish lochs to Swiss lakes, to the Greenland ice cores and to North America. Ash dispersal can be mapped according to where it is found and the distribution patterns are in many ways similar to what was observed/modeled for Eyjafjallajökull Iceland last week.

Interestingly the work of a NERC RESET Consortium has shown some areas like Spain appear to be devoid of volcanic ash (over long time periods) and so the plan in April 2010 to use Spain as a hub to repatriate European travelers stranded overseas may have been sensible. Of course it is size as well as distribution of ash that is important and the ash particle size decreases significantly along the plume axis so particles arriving in the UK (1000km from Iceland) last week were <100 microns whereas larger and denser particles would have been sedimented out much closer to Iceland.

So guidance to aviation is very different dependent on how close you are to the erupting volcano, the further away the smaller the particle size so less of a hazard. Near or proximal to the volcano there is a serious hazard. Aviation chaos resulted in April 2010 but in 1783-84 a major eruption from Laki Iceland, lasting months, led to a dry sulfurous fog across Europe that triggered crisis mortality rates and crop failures in western Europe.

We wait to see if (as has been the case in the past) the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull indicates a reawakening of Katla, one of the most explosive volcanoes in Iceland, known to have dispersed volcanic ash across Europe, Asia and North America.

Old technology — propellor-driven planes — would not have been grounded by ash.
More efficient, more vulnerable.

PEACE, TRANQUILITY, AND DENIAL

I live right in the heart of Europe. Here, millions of people — at least those that were at home and didn't get stuck — had a very different experience: Not only a wonderful spring weekend, but also mysteriously different. Somehow more relaxing. Decelerated. A slightly deeper sleep, and more vivid dreams at night. Spontaneous childhood memories during the day. More bird song. Somehow different.

It certainly wasn't absence of the noise individual aircrafts make over your head, or the bright blue sky for once being completely without condensation trails. It was more like the sudden disappearance of some subliminal stimulus, something implicit, something that you have ceased to consciously experience long ago.

Have you ever experienced the unconscious background hum of the refrigerator suddenly coming to an end, because a fuse has blown? Suddenly you become more aware of the present moment, unexpectedly. But there was more to the ash cloud experience, because it also had something to do with the implicit spatial frame of reference: Freedom above — an unexpected, distinct, but subtle sense of liberation.

For decades now we have gotten used to the subliminal experience of yet another layer of traffic added on top of us, a lid on the pot in which we live our daily lives, still as embodied selves, but not "on top" any more, a subtle feeling of being encased from above. A layer of non-biological noise above us has emerged, permanently closing us in. Human agency, technology, and therefore implicit danger is right over our heads. And all the time. This is a brand-new environment, one our brains never had to face in the course of evolution. It subtly shapes our spatial perception, adds a sense of boundedness, and it has an emotional component: We have lost the freedom, the openness and the infinity of the space above. What a beautiful weekend that was!

And then my 6:25 flight to Berlin on Monday morning was cancelled; plus two important appointments. It made me think, and check my records: In 2009 I have created 15.19 tons of CO2, and I paid € 492,50 to compensate it. To go from Frankfurt to Sydney to give a keynote to the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, roughly, is like driving a car for 6 years — or more than 4 times an individual person's climate compatible CO2 budget. Here is something I would really like to know: How many tons of CO2 do the more than 150 Third Culture Intellectuals annually emit into the atmosphere, just by flying alone? If one had a number for every Edge author, would one find interesting relationships from the size of their CO2 footprint to book sales, to efficiency of reputation management, or to established parameters of academic success (like impact factors and citation indices)? And who would come up with the most clever and elegant argument for why all of this doesn't really matter?

CLOUDY THINKING

This episode presents an interesting case study in thinking about how societies want to deal with risk. There has been considerable grousing about the decision to shut down the airlines, and this grousing is understandable from those who were stranded away from home or were making a living in the airline business. But here is a question to ponder: What system would be better?

A libertarian might suggest that airlines (and owners of private jets) should decide for themselves whether to continue flying. I am not sure whether the airlines would really welcome this freedom to choose. Suppose that the cloud "merely" risks damaging expensive engines as opposed to inducing crashes. How much of this risk should the airlines bear? And, are they entitled to raise prices if they choose to fly? (Imagine the uproar if airlines offered to take off at five times the usual price!) What if there is also a small increased risk of a crash. How small does that risk need to be for it to be considered acceptable?

Personally, I have no basis for deciding whether the decisions about when to close and open airspace were made correctly. But now that we have seen that this can happen, it is clearly important that scientists (including social scientist) weigh in on how such decisions should be made.

IT'S A BIG WORLD AFTER ALL

The world, shrunken by smart phones, red-eyes and the Web, is once again immense. The earth has, however briefly, trumped technology. As a gigantic plume of ash has blanketed Europe, we are reminded that for millennia our ancestors were born, lived and died in the same villages, most smaller than Central Park. The fact that you could get word in New York today that your presence was required, or perhaps merely desired, in New south Wales tomorrow, and make it so, that your biggest concerns would be "JFK or Newark?", "The chicken or the fish?" leant you a illusory power, the belief that the earth had been conquered. The ash cloud proves otherwise.

The earthquake that devastated Haiti was horrifying, but for most Westerners it was just a reminder that the earth can kill, not imprison. If anything, the aftermath in Haiti moved people, literally. A single landing strip was the sole rate-limiting factor for those arriving from around the world. Those marooned in Europe this month can still drive from Paris to Prague, yet feel the walls closing in.

Most of the world's people continue to be born, live and die in the same villages, and the rest of us pay dearly for the privilege of a week on an a secluded isle, sworn off HBO, and the Internet, off our Kindles and iPads, pretending the world is as it once was. At least until the helicopter lands on Sunday afternoon. By returning Europe back to the world of small places,  a volcanic eruption has given us back a big world.

Fear that modern science will fail us in ways that cannot be foreseen and predicted has rolled in with the ash cloud, but in the taxonomy of news, this was actually closer to the classic 'man stops biting dog' story.

It is the concept of dependable and safe jet travel that is the black swan event here which was almost impossible to predict. Given the repeated disasters in the mid 1950s befalling the de Havilland Comet (the first passenger jet), it would have made little sense at the time to prepare for the regularity of modern travel. Further, anomalous lack of volcanic activity (particularly from Katla in Iceland since 1918 and Vesuvius in Italy since 1944) appears to constitute a second unexpected "tail event" which no scientist appears to have predicted. Ex post, however, it appears to have been put to excellent use as little treasure was diverted to researching and developing 'volcano proof' engine designs that would have given little business advantage in the long and quiet 1954-2009 expansionary period of North Atlantic jet travel.

Happily, recent test flights of today's vulnerable technology intensive jet aircraft have seen little damage in the current plume despite lack of any specific precautions. Contrast this to robust war tested propeller aircraft designs during the simpler and heartier WWII era when volcanic ash destroyed roughly 80 B-25 planes of the battle hardened 340th Bombardment Group fighting in Southern Europe. Even the pair of dramatic "four engine flameouts" seen by KLM 867 over Mt. Redoubt and BA 9 over Mt. Galunggung in 1989 and 1982 respectively proved more nuisance than nemesis to modern jets given the lack of injury (let alone loss of life.) Lastly, the publicized loss of business in the current crisis is undoubtedly a dent in a larger unreported windfall of "negative opportunity costs" pocketed over a half-century of unusually clear skies (when calculated from whatever sophisticated business plans had budgeted for volcanic interruptions.)

In short Eyjafjallajökull has been less the black swan than the hunter who took her. But stay tuned.

I ASH YOU AGAIN

Steven Wright pondered that he couldn't see electricity, that's why he didn't pay for it. It was a crowd pleasing joke underlining the human condition wherein we deny features of the world that cannot be regarded first hand, an innate predilection that discounts invisible components, even ones that affect us daily. Most likely it is a mental filter developed as a necessity of evolution allowing us to extrapolate fact from the chaotic chimera of daily thought, and by doing so lets us accomplish a day's work.

Now the Icelandic jabberwocky Eyjafjallajokull, north of Skógar and west of Mýrdalsjökull, has belched nature's dye-marker into the atmosphere making us aware that, well, there is an atmosphere. I mean of course we know there is one supposedly, something holds up aircraft, but similar to Mr. Wright oblivious to electric current of all frequencies coursing through his home, there was some lingering doubt about this atmospheric global warming guff, because, well, one can't see it except by proxy, and who can remember their substitute teacher?

Eyjafjallajokull has been shooting tephra into the air since the Napoleonic Wars, but in 2010 it airmailed a modern dose: 110,000,000 cubic meters of debris towering nine kilometers and covering 10 times zones immobilizing a populous continent. The massiveness of this experience and the havoc it created has pushed atmospheric science forward in our mind, into first hand experience, the only place where we act.