Analog SFF, October 2008 Read online

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  Analog SFF, October 2008

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.analogsf.com

  Copyright ©2008 by Dell Magazines

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  Cover Art by Scott Grimando

  Cover design by Victoria Green

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  CONTENTS

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: RSVP by Stanley Schmidt

  Novelette: NEW WINESKINS by Richard A. Lovett & Mark Niemann-Ross

  Science Fact: HERE BE THERE DRAGONS: THE IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER AND OTHER MYSTERIES OF AN EXPLORED PLANET by Richard A. Lovett

  Reader's Department: BIOLOG: MARK NIEMANN-ROSS by Richard A. Lovett

  Novelette: STEALING ADRIANA by Dave Creek

  Short Story: THE MEME THEORIST by Robert R. Chase

  Short Story: STARSHIP DOWN by Tracy Canfield

  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: TRACKING ADOLPH by John G. Cramer

  Probability Zero: WHERE CREDIT IS DUE by Edward M. Lerner

  Short Story: VITA LONGA by Carl Frederick

  Serial: TRACKING: PART III OF III by David R. Palmer

  Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

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  Vol. CXXVIII No. 10, October 2008

  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

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  Published since 1930

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  Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXVIII, No. 10, October 2008. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2008 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

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  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: RSVP

  by Stanley Schmidt

  One of the things that make editing Analog (and writing editorials for it) fun is that our audience is very generous with feedback. I get lots of letters, and even more commentary on our online forum (at analogsf.com), much of it argumentative. Fair enough; much of what we publish is argumentative, too, partly because argument (if approached with the right attitude) is fun, and partly because our world needs lots of answers. We're more likely to find good ones by looking for flaws in all suggestions than by embracing any of them with unbridled and uncritical enthusiasm.

  One particularly interesting series of letters came from a gentleman asserting that the debate about global warming was “over,” though the popular wisdom about who had won it was wrong. “Science has spoken,” my correspondent stated flatly, going on to assert that the decisive experiments had been done and proved conclusively that human activity had not contributed significantly to global warming. Hardly anybody admits this, he claimed, because too many governments and business have a vested interest in having people believe otherwise. He attached a couple of published articles (by other people) in support of his view, and went on at some length through at least two letters. The first I answered, though not at comparable length. Later ones (I don't remember how many there were) I ignored (with slight reluctance because I consider it usually more polite to answer than not to) except to note that they reminded me of a couple of things that perhaps I should discuss in an editorial.

  The first of these items is the basic flaw in his reasoning and his misunderstanding of how science works. Before getting into that, I'll concede that he, and the articles he enclosed, do make some valid points. A consensus does not constitute scientific proof; that comes only from quantitative comparison of observation and theory. Major advances, almost by definition, start off as minority views that eventually become widely accepted because of such testing. And there are indeed other causes of climate change than the carbon dioxide that humans have added to the atmosphere, such as volcanic activity and the natural fluctuation of the Sun's output.

  However, the fact remains that carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse effect gas, absorptive enough to have significant effects even in very small concentrations, and that its atmospheric concentration has increased quite significantly over the last couple of centuries. It's also true that minority views can't expect to become generally accepted until they have accumulated strong support from new observations. That's how the current majority views got that status: because they were seen by a majority as providing the best fit to the data available when they were formulated. They may have to be modified or replaced in the light of newer observations, but that can't happen until the new observations have been made and confirmed, and a new model has convinced enough workers that it provides a better explanation of both old and new data.

  My correspondent claims that all of this except the new consensus has already happened for his dissenting view of global warming, but he gets off to a poor start with his pat
ently false opening claim that “the debate is over.” He, and the authors of his supporting articles, are still debating it, so the debate is clearly, ipso facto, not over. The claim that it is is particularly ironic in view of the fact that the person making it is on what's widely considered the “losing” side.

  It's worth emphasizing again that which view currently gets the most “votes” does not in any way determine what view is correct. But neither does it make any sense to claim, as one of my correspondent's supporting authors does, that there is “no scientific consensus.” He'd be right if he said there's no scientific unanimity; there hardly ever is. Many questions, and this one is an extreme example, involve so many variables interacting in such complicated ways that it can take a very long time to achieve true unanimity. The last time I checked, there was still a Flat Earth Society, despite the ease with which that proposition is disproved many times every day. I doubt that you'll find any scientists in that society, but you can round up a few to support almost any slightly less absurd proposition you can think of. The fact that a few scientists say they believe something doesn't mean it's true. Neither does the fact that a lot of them do—but it at least suggests that, until stronger proof to the contrary comes along, the smarter money would go on the view held by many who've examined the data rather than on those held by only a few. In the particular case of global warming, while opinion is still not unanimous (and some debate continues), there is a strong and growing consensus that we should act as if human-produced CO2 emissions have contributed significantly to the observed warming.

  And it would be imprudent to dismiss that consensus as “just politics.” Some of those who shrug it off seem to believe that politicians are generating the numbers and scientists are rubber-stamping them. That's a serious case of “cart-before-horse disease.” Yes, scientists are human and not immune to political considerations; but I've known a lot of scientists and very few (if any) of them would be inclined to generate false data just because some politician wanted them to. What I've observed instead is that many scientists have been warning of the possible effect of CO2 on climate for years, and their attitude toward the current wave of political interest in the subject is, “It's about time!”

  I have two specific objections to my correspondent's “disproof.” The less important one is that in making his self-contradictory claim that “the debate is over and the generally accepted answer is wrong,” he places a disproportionate amount of emphasis on a very small number of articles and authors among the many that have been published. They certainly don't all agree with the couple that he likes, so why single out those as The Last Word?

  The answer to that is the basis of my stronger objection. He says that all the computer models that have been set forth fail to accurately predict one detail: the way in which atmospheric temperature varies with altitude in the tropics. This may well be true; I haven't personally checked this detail of all the models. If he has, I'll tentatively take his word for it. But even if it's absolutely true, I can't at all accept his claim (and that of the one author he relies on most heavily to back him up) that that proves that human production of greenhouse gases has no significant effect on global warming. That's a classic example of a logical non sequitur.

  As I've already said, we're dealing with a very complex system, and a rather simple hypothesis about the contribution of one factor to its behavior. That factor, to the extent that it affects the system at all, will have effects that ripple through many parts of it. My correspondent seems to believe that if a model fails to accurately predict every detail of those effects, it must be totally wrong and should be thrown out in its entirety. We lose a lot of babies along with bath water that way, and that's not how good science is done. If a model fits some aspects of the data but not all, it certainly means that the hypothesis has not yet been proved in a fully satisfying way. It may even be that the whole thing is wrong and has to be scrapped—but it could be dangerous to jump too casually to that conclusion. The disagreement in one detail, even if it occurs in several models, may simply mean that the models need more refinement to come up with one that fits all the details. That's especially likely if most of the models fit most of the facts well. In such a case, yes, we need more work on the theoretical models—but that's a far cry from assuming that everything about the basic premise is wrong.

  This is a case where we need to try to understand, as well as possible, what's going on, and what, if anything, we can and should try to do about it. Doing the wrong things could be at least as dangerous as doing nothing. (We've already seen, for example, that the fashion of diverting corn into ethanol production definitely drives food prices up; we don't yet know whether its overall effect on climate is good, bad, or negligible.) But we need good data and models, and we won't get those by latching too eagerly onto claims that seem to support what we want to believe, no matter what that might be.

  The other thing that this exchange reminded me to comment on concerns not the specific question of what causes global warming, but the broader one of how scientific and philosophical dialogue is conducted. My correspondent obviously wanted me to continue discussing the matter with him (preferably by admitting I was convinced and he was right). But anybody who works in a field like this (e.g. editing or doing science) gets lots of letters like that, and has to decide how his or her time would be best spent. Would answering more of this gentleman's letters, or answering them at greater length than I did, further any cause, or just consume time (for both of us) without resolving anything? I face this sort of question often, especially on the website forum. In general, I've found that it's best to avoid being drawn into prolonged discussions with individuals. Once that's started, it's hard to stop, and if only one person shows a strong interest in a particular question or topic, nobody else gains much from the exchange. The time it would take is better spent on other things.

  Such as questions that concern many people. If the same question or complaint comes up repeatedly, from many sources, I'm likely to give it considerable thought, which will eventually surface in an editorial. This should not discourage anybody from writing. I value and give careful consideration to all reader comments, and they all have an effect on what I write and publish in the future. But in general, I'd rather use my limited writing time and energy for a considered comment on a common concern, than on a series of hasty responses to ones of less general interest. So while everybody would like a personal answer, and in an ideal world I'd like to give everybody one, please don't take it personally if you write and don't get a personal response.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Stanley Schmidt

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Novelette: NEW WINESKINS

  by Richard A. Lovett & Mark Niemann-Ross

  Illustration by Laurie Harden

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  People have a knack for finding new ways to do everything....

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  Valerie Akwasi gave a last look in the rearview mirror, checking her makeup before surrendering her car to the valet. She hated these things: mingling with the posh and self-important, pretending to be interested as cocktail conversation yo-yoed from gallery openings to gossip, all while ordering drinks that didn't even allow her to share the cocktail-hour buzz. “I'll just take a tonic and guava juice with a twist of lemon,” or some such silliness that sounded like a real drink but wasn't. The waiters probably figured she was a recovering alcoholic rather than a reporter needing a clear head for her story.

  But tonight there would be no cocktails. The valet bore the crisp, maroon-and-gray livery of Angel's Head Winery, which was hosting this fundraiser for Congressman Blaine's bid for the Senate. The race had opened up a month ago, when eighty-nine-year-old Senator Crooke had had his long-overdue heart attack, and it promised to be the most exciting in ages. But not the fundraisers. Their whole purpose was to tell donors what they wanted to hear, fill them with booze, and wait for them to open their checkbooks. Barely a story unless Blaine t
ripped over the carpet or something, which wasn't likely. As trim and athletic as Crooke had been decrepit, he'd started his first congressional campaign by joining thousands of cyclists on a one-hundred-mile tour of his district, raising money for cancer. Then he'd walked a marathon, shaking hands and smiling, all the way. Not the type to trip over his own feet.

  Valerie sighed and got out of the car. The problem with these things wasn't just that they were dull. It was the certain knowledge that no matter what, she'd be underdressed—which, in her three hundred and fifty dollar off-the-rack dress, she certainly was.

  It didn't help that hers was one of the few nonwhite faces in sight. She'd grown up steeped in her mother's view of American racism: whatever problems there'd been in her native Ghana, blacks weren't second-class citizens, and she'd raised her daughter to think like an African. Usually, it worked: if you presumed everyone else saw you as equal, often enough they did. But now, she looked like a poor relation, and felt it. Which was silly because reporters always looked like poor relations. It was part of the job. You wanted to be an outsider, looking in. Fly on the wall, and all that. The trouble was that the fly wasn't supposed to feel so damn conspicuous.

  Still, her mother had taught her the right moves. Her makeup was as perfect as it would ever be. Her long black hair and delicate features assured she'd never be able to hide. And except in events like this, she'd never wanted to. She'd been top of her class in J-school, on the fast track to a Pulitzer until a stupid marriage and divorce had stranded her at the Bay End Times, which was about as backwater as it sounded. Still, all she needed was one good story as her ticket up and out.

  Not that she was going to get it tonight, so she might as well drink a bit. Especially with Angel's Head hosting. Even in bad years, their cabernet won awards. The good vintages sold for two hundred dollars a bottle, and the new one, to be unveiled tonight, was rumored to be the best yet. Hell, this wasn't just a fundraiser for Congressman Blaine. Valerie would miss the real story if she didn't sample the wine.