Podcast of the Day- Patient from Hell
By Paul
Climatologist Professor Stephen Schneider wrote a book called The Patient from Hell. During his treatment for lymphoma he discovered that the way doctors make decisions is seriously and deadly flawed. Listen to the podcast or see the transcript.
“Q. How does a person use a climate model to predict his own survival?
A. To start with, my wife, Terry Root, a biologist, and I went to the Internet for information. There's a lot of nonsense there, but it gave us a starting point. We then had meetings with my doctor where we'd discuss various treatment options. We used math models to argue for unusual therapies. When you're looking at global warming, climatologists don't have all the facts because certain things haven't yet occurred.
You feed information into a computer, you look to what you know and extrapolate: subjective probability analysis. For years, I have been advising governments to use it for climate change policy. That's safer than waiting for the climate system to perform the experiment on us.
Similarly, I wasn't going to wait 15 years for researchers to gather the data. I'd be dead by then.”
-From NYT interview with Stephen