Quote of the day

From Stephen Pacala's MacArthur lecture this morning:

Never have so many been asked to predict so much while knowing so little ...

He was referring to the models he works on to provide ecological feedbacks to global climate models. He also gave an excellent discussion of some situations where ecological models have been used to support policy decisions, and identified some attributes of the circumstances where they worked. I'm looking forward to seeing the written paper later this year, as he mentioned there is a much longer list of models.