Almost missed this little piece in yesterday’s NYT:

When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto
an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand
they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will
move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal
storms and erosion.

Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at
Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and
dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not
last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not
usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull
anyone into false mathematical certitude.

Now Dr. Pilkey and his
daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State
Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack
on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex,
they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood
or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of
cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.

 Their book is titled, Useless Arithmetic, perfect for The Useless Tree.  "Nature is too complex" – a line that could come directly from the Tao Te Ching or Chuang Tzu.  Their humility is refreshing.

    They are not playing into the rigth-wing war on science, which emanates from either religious fundamentalism or political ideology.  Rather, they are pointing out the limits of scientific thinking and proposing other observation-intensive methods for discerning natural patterns and processes.  Thus, they are not debunking the obvious reality of global warming; indeed, they believe that mathematical modelling may keep us from attending to other, more obvious indicators:

Two issues, the authors say, illustrate other problems with modeling.
One is climate change, in which, they say, experts’ justifiable caution
about model uncertainties can encourage them to ignore accumulating
evidence from the real world. The other is the movement of nuclear
waste through an underground storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada,
not because it has failed — it has yet to be built — but because they
say it is unreasonable to expect accurate predictions of what will
happen far into the future — in this extreme case, tens or even
hundreds of thousands of years from now.

 Large chunks of the polar ice cap falling into the sea should tip us off that the atmosphere is heating up.  (And, by the way, I blogged on the Yucca Mountain thing here).

    "If you give up learning, troubles end" the Tao Te Ching (20) says.  In this instance, that might mean give up the abstract models and theories and concepts that take on a life of their own and distract us from opening our eyes and apprehending the complex and vast world around us.   The authors of Useless Arithmetic do not want to reject modelling altogether (they are geologists, after all), but they do want to downgrade the importance of theoretical formulas and return to human senses:

So the authors offer some suggestions for using models better. We
could, for example, pay more attention to nature, monitoring our
streams, beaches, forests or fields to accumulate information on how
living things and their environments interact.

 Makes me think of the Tao-esque Walt Whitman:

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
   in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to
   add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.