Facts Uncertain...
Values in Dispute...
Stakes High...
Decisions Urgent...
No, this isn't another climate post. This is about the volcanic ash circulating in the high-altitude jet stream. How much is too much to fly a plane through? There have been successful test flights, but given that the ash dispersal is not being measured directly and instead being inferred by computer models, does this really prove anything? Two hundred million dollars a day is a huge incentive to pressure some poor sot sitting in front of a computer to fudge some numbers and get the planes back in the air.
Prediction: The eruption will follow its historic precedent and continue to blow a column of ash into the atmosphere on and off for months. The envelope will be pushed on air travel. (Not really a prediction as it is already happening, just not with air passengers. Yet.) The computer models will suddenly show that it really is safe to fly, or the regulations will be eased, or some combination of those two until a plane-load of passengers finds themselves free-falling 10,000 feet into the North Atlantic. It will all be our poor sot's fault, of course, when a comment in his computer program is found stating that a given block of code is using "Bob's trick" to "hide the decline" in air quality.
[Surgeon Generals Warning: Do not make important decisions based on predictions made on this blog; my record is like 2 for 2,000 with my only successes being the tech bubble and the housing bubble, which a roomful of chimpanzees pounding on calculators could have predicted. You have been warned.]
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