What To Do With The Data

Alex Steffen over at WorldChanging has a great post - Virtual Seattle, Virtual Puget Sound - on models and their ever-increasing levels of sophistication. He makes the excellent point that unless we act on the data that models can provide they are near worthless:

The question of course remains, as to whether we are getting any better at all at listening to what our tools tell us. Because unless we're willing to use the insight we're gaining to try to think like a salmon stream, say, and act to meet its needs, the danger always remains of what Thoreau called "improved means to an unimproved end." That is, the danger exists that we will simply more finely and accurately document the decline of what love and depend on.

The whole "caring about data" thing doesn't seem to be happening as of yet. For example, the $200 million (which is what - 15 minutes of war-fightin' money?) climate satellite program has been bumped to make way for the 2020 moon missions. This news follows the cancellation of the already built $100 million Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR).

Francisco P.J. Valero of Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego described DSCOVR (aka "Triana"):

Triana will view the Earth in a different way - as an entire planet rather than a patchwork of regions of interest. It will uniquely acquire synoptic (all regions in the sunlit side seen simultaneously) sunrise to sunset, high time resolution data for most points on Earth using state of the art, highly accurate, in flight calibrated instruments.

Triana will collect information on the climate system combining atmospheric dynamics, cloud physics, aerosols, radiation and surface remote sensing.

Before we can listen to what our tools tell us we have to turn them on. I guess Triana is still sitting in a NASA warehouse somewhere - Maybe the next administration will have some use for it.