I rather believe species diversity is governed more by dispersion and chance than by specific mechanism. So it is more about filling up the state space of possible growth paths, leading to a spread in agglomeration values.

BTW, Is anyone following the work of David Mumford on Pattern Theory?

1) attractive to ambitious mathematicians, for example good grad students

yet:

2) eventually relevant to environmental issues.

These goals are somewhat in conflict, since real-world issues tend to involve lots of domain-specific knowledge and number-crunching, which are exactly what mathematicians dislike. Nonetheless there’s a lot of room for mathematicians to develop new formalisms that can eventually be helpful, when applied and adapted by other more practical people. Mathematicians are never near the front of the battle lines. But they can do things other people can’t.

So, I’ve been spending lots of time thinking about complex systems made of many interacting parts, using ideas from probability theory, information theory and game theory. And that’s what the information geometry, network theory and biodiversity posts are about. All these posts are actually about the same big subject. I hope that by the time I go back to U.C. Riverside in September, I’ll have enough material developed that I can run an interesting seminar about it and attract a crew of good grad students.

When it comes to global warming, a lot of programmers on the Azimuth Forum are working to develop simple online climate models for educational purposes. These will appear on the blog. My involvement has been limited mainly because I don’t like to program, but also because I’m busy trying to shift careers. I hope to get back into that in a while.

I wonder, as you learned more about climate research did you become more or less confident man made emissions are the main driver of recent climate change and that global warming is a serious threat to our civilization and other species in the near term (this century)?