The Reference Frame

WSJ: 16 scientists urge a critical review of climate investments

2012-01-27T17:48:00.002+01:00

Everyone is talking about this article in the Wall Street Journal:

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

The subtitle says that there's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy. Sixteen prominent authors who are close to the climate science present some details about the era of Lysenkoism. Ivar Giaever, who is not a co-author, is their top example of the opposition of contemporary scientists against the climate change ideology.

The article was signed by many great folks whom we know (and I know several of them in person), namely Lindzen, Armstrong, Shaviv, Schmitt, Happer, Rutan, Tennekes, and 9 others. While this set of names as a whole is a symbol of a very serious science, it's true that the text could have been signed by dozens of other comparably prominent people, too.

When you look at the scientists who present their opinions about the climate "problem", you will probably agree that the number of "believers" and "skeptics" is roughly comparable.

Al Gore expects to see thin ice in Antarctica

2012-01-26T19:12:00.002+01:00

After the successful 24 hours of virtual reality – Al Gore's online project in Fall 2011 that was watched by dozens of people in the whole world, mostly by the readers of WUWT, the world's most followed climate website – Al Gore has prepared another fascinating event that deserves to be promoted.

He will take a couple of his employees – such as James Hansen and Kevin Trenberth but also a cleverly named minister of human settlements, Tokyo Sex Wale (it's surely a part of his job so he will plan a human settlement for some of the citizens of South Africa in Antarctica) and 112 other world's top warriors against global warming – and between January 29th and February 5th, they will make a trip to Antarctica with the pretty National Geographic Explorer above which replaced the MS Explorer. (Note that it was MS Lindblad Explorer, not MS Internet Explorer, so Al Gore didn't invent the previous cruise ship.)

MS Explorer (1969-2007) sank in November 2007 when it hit a few-inch-large object. National Geographic Explorer hasn't sunk yet so it is eagerly waiting to host Al Gore and his hired guns. Al Gore is already getting ready for the frying hot weather he will surely experience in as little as 3 days.

In his article

Living On Thin Ice (Climate Virtual Reality Project)

Copy (at Manbearpig's Journal)

Thin Ice (expedition's web page)

he tells us that Antarctica lives on thin ice. I am not kidding: it's the name of the expedition. If you want to know, the average thickness of ice in the Antarctica is 7000 feet (over 2 km): very thin, indeed. He was there already in 1988 when he noticed... – no, he clearly hasn't noticed the ice which was already to thin to be seen by naked eyes, but he noticed that Antarctica "stood at the frontier of the global climate crisis" which is a "defining crisis of our age" and which is already causing "momentous changes" at places such as Antarctica. LOL.

Al Gore plans to declare that there are no polar bears left in Antarctica. Maybe they were destroyed by the Pittsburgh Penguins and their SUVs. More seriously but not quite seriously, polar bears originally wanted to live near both poles but they decided that they would get mad if they were bipolar. :-)

Let me suppress the remaining kilobytes of Al Gore's text because you have surely gotten my point. If I copied just 1/3 of Al Gore's text, it would be so extreme a parody that I would jump the shark in this way. The word "crisis" appears 6 times in his article. Maybe if he repeated it 994 extra times, it would become the truth, as a major role model of Al Gore has calculated. ;-)

Meanwhile, in the real world that ignores Al Gore's lies that he produces 24 hours a day, at least in the last 30 years, as the Cryosphere chart above shows, ice area around Antarctica was increasing when you look at the trend over the period. Ice is above the normal now, too.

Steven Goddard is telling us that the temperatures in Antarctica are currently 10 Celsius degrees below the normal (animated map) so the Gore effect so far seems to be working over there, too. Just to remind you: the Southern Hemisphere experiences a summer right now. But the average temperature in Antarctica doesn't surpass the freezing point in any month. The lowest ever recorded temperature on the ground took place over there, of course, and it was –89.2 °C.

Let me admit something that not too many people admit – but I surely do want these crooks and liars to do something stupid or unfortunate and freeze over there. Too many pretentious and stupid people of this kind have already been saved and it may already be the right time to repay the debt to Mother Probability Theory. Wouldn't it be hilarious? Al Gore surely deserves the Darwin Award much more so than all the previous candidates – and we have covered the stories of quite many people who were surprised by cold weather near the poles.

Maurizio Morabito is afraid that Al Gore could become a martyr. But it would be a very amusing martyr, indeed. He would become an eternal apostle of arrogance.

Ushuaia is the southernmost city of Argentina and the world and that's where most cruise expeditions to Antarctica begin. Gore's trip will probably be no exception because National Geographic Explorer is just moving from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia.

Lake Fryxellsee, Antarctica

Mayan "end of the world": in 2116

2012-01-25T19:55:00.000+01:00

But it gets repeated every 394.3 years

Czechia may be the most atheist nation in the world but be sure that it doesn't prevent the Czechs from believing any kind as well as all kinds of superstitious crap you may think of. In fact, it's plausible that the almost complete absence of Christianity or another rigid religion gives the people the freedom to believe any nonsense they hear or receive in the mailbox. Human stupidity knows no limits and atheism isn't a universal cure against it.

So some of the most well-known Czech scientists, especially astronomers, actually organized a couple of recent press conferences (plus interviews on TV) in which they tried to deny the widespread reports that the world will end on December 21st, 2012. ;-)

Some of the most courageous Czech musicians claimed that they are not afraid to get pregnant because they belong among the freaks who don't believe in the end of the world in 2012. Last night, Prima Cool – which otherwise broadcasts The Big Bang Theory, Top Gear, Futurama, Simpsons, and lots of other programs – also offered a visually striking "document" from the Discovery Channel, Apocalypse, that is embedded later in this blog entry.

Of course, even if some ancient civilization had believed in such a doomsday scenario, it would mean exactly nothing for a rational person or for science. Millenniums ago, people believed in many kinds of wonderful things that are undoubtedly preposterous. But a thing I want to explain here is that the claims about the end of the world don't even reflect what the Mayan sources said and what this civilization believed to be the case, as Dr Grygar, the most famous Czech astronomer, and others emphasized.

Discovery Channel: Apocalypse (2011). Warning: the full movie contains 44 minutes of Algores on steroids, doomsday crackpots from Scientific American and lots of other loons whom you may have believed to be impossible. Billions of people will die on December 21st, 2012, when the Moon collides with the black hole at the galactic center and with the Pentagon, with a solar flare, and with an invisible Planet X blah blah blah. Now I understand the phone interview about the 2012 apocalypse: it's a whole "science"! ;-)

So what does the Maya calendar actually say about the end of the world?

Nothing. It's a calendar designed to divide time into periods and combine these periods into longer periods, and so on. This is true for any calendar. But every calendar has different periods. How does the Maya calendar look like? Well, they had several of them. The basic two calendars ignored the Moon; the information about lunar stages was only included in a "supplementary series" and I won't discuss it here.

One of the major calendars was tzolk'in, a religious calendar. It ignored the seasons and its very short year contained 260 solar days divided into 20 trecenas (minimonths). The year's length was arguably chosen to coincide with the Mayan pregnancy. How many days are there in a trecena? Well, you should know some Spanish because the term "trecena" is Spanish (invented by the invaders from the PIGS) and it obviously means thirteen, like in tri-cento. The best mathematicians among the TRF readers will even be able to check that 20 times 13 equals 260, indeed. ;-)

It wasn't difficult to decode these things from the Mayan culture because they actually left us whole books of pictures such as this one:

It looks like a pretty modern kitsch, doesn't it? Those Maya astronomers could have been hired by Walt Disney right away. This picture symbolizes one particular trecena, the 13th one. The 20 trecenas had their names and each of them was represented by a 50 times 47 gravatar PNG image, ready for an operating system, displaying an animal on a TV screen. It's pretty clear from the design that the Mayan civilization was using Microsoft Windows before the Spaniard conquered them and brutally forced Linux upon many of them (those who were not killed).

The second major part of the calendar was one that did care about the seasons; it was known as haab'. Note that 365 is approximately 360 which is 18 times 20. So there were 18 short months ("uinal": each of these "uinals" had an icon as well) each of which contained 20 days ("kin") plus a micromonth composed of 5 bonus days (which were actually called "five unlucky days" or "wayeb'" whose avatar was an iron because you may have to do some ironing during these days) in every solar year.

It seems to me that they didn't have leap years so it had to drift pretty badly - by a month each century. Note that the number 18 is forced upon you by the approximate length of the year, 365 days or so. But everything else in their machinery to measure time is based on the base-20 system!

So here are their units of time, with English descriptive names added by your humble correspondent:

1 kin = 1 day

1 uinal = 1 short month = 20 days

1 tun = 1 shortened year = 18 short months = 360 days

1 ka'tun = 1 bidecade = 20 tun = 19.7 years

1 bak'tun = 1 quad century = 20 ka'tun = 394.3 years

1 pictun = 20 bak'tun = 7,885 years

1 kalabtun = 20 pictun = 157,808 years

1 k'inchiltum = 20 kalabtun = 3,156,164 years

1 alautun = 20 k'inchiltum = 63,123,288 years

Note that the longest unit of time that these ancient folks were using was over 63 million years long. It was enough to measure continental drift. To compare, many degenerated people in the West of the 21st century can work at most with the quad century, or "bak'tun", which is 394.3 years long. Or they don't work with numbers at all.

These are the only two explanations why people started to say that there would be the end of the world in 2012. How does it work?

Beginning of time

Before we return to the end of the world, we must understand the beginning of the world. Every calendar has a natural point called "zero". The Jewish calendar started about 6,000 years ago when God created the Heaven and the Earth etc. (plus minus six days or so, and plus minus three minutes for nucleosynthesis), at least according to Isaac Newton's cosmological calculations. The Muslim calendars started about 1400 years ago when an aggressive medieval Arab populist did something famous but I don't know what it was. Similarly, the Western calendar started when people began to be looking forward to the birth of Jesus the Savior in 4 years or so. ;-)

The Maya calendar had a particular beginning, too. The Mayan day zero was believed to take place on August 11th, 3114 B.C. according to the back-extrapolated Gregorian "proleptic" calendar. What happens if you add 13 quad centuries or 13 bak'tuns?

–3114 + 394.3 × 13 = 2011.9

Because of some rounding errors, leap years, and/or missing year zero in particular, this really means December 21st, 2012. So this day is nothing else than the beginning of a new quadruple century according to the Mayan calendar!

Moreover, it seems that the new quad century won't start in 2012 at all. The precise timing of course depends on the correct additive shift, i.e. on the beginning of the Mayan time as expressed in our Western calendar. I said that it was in 3114 BC. The uncertain additive shift is known as "correlation" in these studies and the particular estimate that puts the beginning in 3114 BC is the GMT correlation (Goodman-Martinez-Thompson).

However, there exists some pretty strong recent evidence that the right beginning of time is actually 104 years closer to our age: it was in the year 3010 BC (plus minus one). This is based on papers by Böhm and Böhm from 1996 and 1999. Their names sound German but these men are actually Böhmisch, i.e. Czech. And their research was supported by a paper with many more Czech authors, including the boss of the Czech Astronomical Society Mr Vondrák (as well as Mr Klokočník, Mr Kostelecký, and Mr Vítek), in 2007:

Correlation between the Mayan calendar and ours: Astronomy helps to answer why the most popular correlation (GMT) is wrong (Astronomical Notes 2007, abstract)

First page for free (PDF)

If they're right, the actual end of the world doesn't come in 2012: it arrives in 2116. Moreover, it's not really the end of the world. It's just the beginning of a new quadruple century, something that happens every 394.3 years, anyway.

This was the basic picture. I think you must agree that the number of misconceptions about the Mayan calendar and its hypothetical implications is stunningly high. People are saying things that are wrong at every conceivable level – from historical errors about the Mayan interpretations to confusions between a new cycle and the end of the world, to incorrect ideas whether it would mean something, to underestimating the knowledge of long periods of time by the Mayans, to complete ignorance about maths, science, astronomy, and history.

Hundreds of millions of people who parroted this story about the end of the world haven't made the simplest possible checks they could instantly make. If they invested 5 percent of time that they invest into promoting this fear and concept into some research instead, they would know that the doomsday story is ludicrous at every level and why. They just prefer to take similar rumors about the apocalypse seriously or semi-seriously. As Dr Grygar said, people apparently love to scare themselves. They are also much more uninformed when it comes to numbers and astronomy than the average people in the Mayan civilization. Sad.

At the bottom, you may insure yourself against a December 21st, 2012 catastrophe. If more than 1 million people (in the world) die on that day and it's shown that it wasn't a deliberate human genocide, I will send you 100 times the money you send me by PayPal today or this month.

Sustainable conference in Rio finds AGW panic unsustainable

2012-01-25T08:11:00.000+01:00

Reuters: Environmentalists throwing global warming under the bus

Twenty years ago, Rio de Janeiro organized the Eco [June] 1992 Earth Summit which created the Convention on Biological Diversity and, more importantly, The Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The latter body was the first global political octopus that gradually led to the top-down, politically driven creation of a nasty tumor inside physical sciences, the climate alarmism "research".

However, you shouldn't forget that in 1992, the AGW propaganda was just one of several environmental topics – in Rio as well as in Al Gore's first bestseller, Earth in the Balance, published around the same time. The AGW ideology was just destined to experience much more striking a growth rate and overshadow all other topics and misconceptions that the environmentalists liked to talk about (a few of which were legitimate) within a decade or so.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Hundreds if not thousands of immoral corrupt pseudoscientists and ideologically fanatical loons were increasingly promoting indefensible statements about the climate on Earth and its evolution. The destruction of the capitalist industrial economy as we know it was their proposed "cure" and the organized clique of loons got remarkably close to realizing their goals. This scary social phenomenon peaked about 15 years after the Earth Summit.

All of us remember these recent events very well; in fact, even today, in 2012, some of the AGW climate alarmist zombies are still occasionally walking on the streets of our cities or they are trolling in the comment sections of our blogs.

Now, the Associated Press, Reuters, and others are informing us about a June 2012 conference that will take place exactly 20 years after the Earth Summit and will therefore be called "Rio plus 20":

UN conference returns to Rio with new emphasis (AP)

U.N. sustainable development summit shifts from climate change (Reuters)

The conference is called

United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20 website)

The press agencies inform that the organizers have acknowledged that the climate hysteria is "too controversial" and "intractable". It is not sustainable so they have shifted to a topic that "everyone" must agree with, namely "sustainable development". The Center for American Progress, a communist tank in D.C., already labeled the Rio+20 conference as "a missed opportunity" because it seems unlikely to the comrades that it will manage to destroy capitalism (see the Reuters report above).

Well, I happen to have a huge problem with comments about a "sustainable development", too. Fortunately, this cliché is much less specific than the global warming ideology, so it is much less effective as a tool to control the people and change their behavior according to an ideological template.

But what does it really mean, sustainable development?

By definition, development really means that some quantities are changing. The "productive ones" should be growing. For quite a long time, they may grow exponentially. This exponential growth may change many quantities by many orders of magnitude.

The exponential real (inflation-adjusted) growth of the GDP may actually continue indefinitely as we're shifting our money to new categories of products and all the products our ancestors had to pay for become unbelievably cheap.

The exponential growth of many other things, like the amount of a particular metal that is mined annually, cannot continue indefinitely. But what's important is that in almost all cases, this fact doesn't imply any tragedy. It just implies that an exponential description of the evolution of a quantity, while it may be sufficient at a certain time scale, ultimately becomes inadequate.

But it's just a description that breaks down, not Nature or the civilization!

There's nothing wrong about the requirements for life on Earth or human civilization to be sustainable. But what's being deliberately hidden in this ideology is that these things are pretty much tautologically guaranteed. In particular, sustainable development doesn't require us to leave the exponentially growing train of coal or oil consumption in 2012. And not even in 50 years. All the arguments claiming that we have to do so are wrong or completely non-existent.

When it comes to energy, fossil fuels remain the most acceptable solution which is cheap and has other advantages. Because of various "conceptual" findings when it comes to new types of fossil fuels, I extended my estimate of the time scale at which the growth of fossil fuels will continue from 100 to 200 years. In the future, the estimate may be raised again – by me or anyone else who looks at these issues rationally.

At some moment, people will run out of fossil fuels. Will it mean a catastrophe? It wouldn't mean a catastrophe even today. We would need years to convert most of our economy to electric power which could be provided by lots of solar panels, wind turbines, and – which is preferred – nuclear reactors. (Thorium or thermonuclear reactors may materialize in a few decades.) The price of electricity would jump 5-fold, it could become 1/2 of our expenses and the factories' expenses, and the GDP per capita could drop by 50 percent or so. It would be tough but it would be far from an unsolvable or fatal problem.

In reality, we will never run out of fossil fuels overnight. The price of fossil fuels will chaotically change and at some point, we will gain the hindsight to see that there will have been a growing trend (due to the fluctuations, you can't really be sure about such statements when the trend is just getting started). Alternatives will be gradually getting more acceptable and by the time there are almost no fossil fuels left, it's obvious that the alternatives will be more feasible than the fossil fuels.

But this is not what is happening today. And it is totally irrational to try to speed up the convergence to that point. Instead, we should behave rationally today. And the rational behavior means that we prefer fossil fuels over solar, wind, or another ludicrous source of energy that is 5 times more expensive.

What I want to emphasize is that by behaving irrationally today, we would not be helping future generations. Even if we consider the interests of the future people to be on par with ours, it's better to use the fossil fuels today because the future generations will be much more capable of replacing them with something else.

Just think about your ancestor who lived in the year 1400 and who wanted to work all his life to be able to donate you – a distant descendant – 100 cubic meters (60 tons) of wood so that you have enough energy and you're rich. Your ancestor believed that the humans would expand, the forests would shrink, and wood would become exponentially expensive. How grateful would you be if I tell you that wood currently costs between $200 and $700 per cubic meter? You will tell him that you don't know what to do with the wood and its market price is equivalent to a year of your income so the gift won't really make you rich. It would be much better for your dynasty if you were able to send him a gift back in time. And it wouldn't necessarily be wood that you would send. You may want to send him a solar electromobile instead. Or a $5 laser pointer (or $100 gun) that your ancestor could use to impress or kill all enemies and become the Roman Emperor. ;-)

The Rio plus 20 summit may be the first large summit that acknowledges that the global warming hysteria has peaked and there is a very tiny potential that its downtrend will get reverted and the meme will become able to significantly influence the political landscape of the world in coming years or decades once again. But it's clear that when one fad is over, the people who have enjoyed this AGW fad – an assorted mixture of Marxists, investors dreaming about supereasy profits, journalists who can make living by repeating the same tendentious sensational fearmongering all the time, pseudoscientists who dream about a universal scientific consensus and about easy grants, Islamic terrorists, and people who belong to several of these groups at the same moment – will be looking for another fad.

Some lessons that the people have learned from the global warming hoax are more general and will hold for any future environmentalist fad, too. Others will not generalize. It's important for the people to understand that both groups of insights exist. People shouldn't jump into another superstition which is almost identical to the AGW nonsense. But people should also avoid the idea that everything that sounds remotely similar to the AGW nonsense must also be nonsense.

We will see how the environmentalist movement and our reactions to it will mutate and evolve in coming months and years.

State of the Union Address

In his third annual speech, Barack Obama mentioned "climate change" in one sentence only: he acknowledged that there's no consensus among the lawmakers to fight it. But one can still talk about clean energy standards and innovation, he believes.

Obama wants to raise taxes for the rich and for companies that outsource jobs.

Some Boston Bruins meet Obama

2012-01-24T22:09:00.002+01:00

I must admit that during the 6 years in Greater Boston, I have never attended an ice-hockey match. After all, my Boston patriotism was very limited. If New York Rangers (then) with Jaromír Jágr came to Boston, be sure that I would root for the victory of the guests.

Of course, an even more brutal description would apply to baseball which I am not quite getting. When the Red Sox won the 2004 Galactic Series (or whatever is the modest name of the competition) and breached 86 years of the curse (they also won in 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1918, 2007), I was mainly affected by the necessity to use the ear plugs from the airplane to be shielded from car horns during the following night. ;-)

Apologies to baseball enthusiasts. (Boston Celtics won the basketball championship in 2008 and New England Patriots won the football championship in 2004 and the conference in 2011. So Boston seems to be a dominating city of U.S. sports.)

At any rate, the Boston Bruins just won the Stanley Cup (that's an ice-hockey trophy) and some of the players visited Barack Obama in the White House.

When you look at the current roster, you may see that the composition is a sort of mirror image of HC Pilsen 1929. Most players are actually Canucks. Aside from 17 Canadians, there are also three Americans, to emphasize that Boston belongs to America rather than Canada. And then you have one German guy, one Finnish guy, and two or three Czechoslovaks in the team, starting from Zdeno Chára, the big Slovak captain who has brought the cup to the Trenčín castle.

The Czechs are currently represented by David Krejčí only. But Obama was actually visited by two Czechs: Tomáš Kaberle – a man on the left side from the president who is studying Obama's buttocks on the picture above – is already playing with Montreal these days but he started the season with the Bruins.

However, not all players have agreed to come to the White House. Tim Thomas, the goalie, wrote the following explanation on his Facebook page:

I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.

This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.

This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT

So TT probably hosted a local tea party instead of the White House picnic. At least 2,000 users "liked" the comment. Good for him! ;-) Needless to say, the dignitaries of the team immediately distanced themselves from their goalie and emphasized that they are eager to climb into the buttocks of any government that may come in the future, too.

Tim Thomas' mask. Yes, the rattlesnake is a Tea Party's flag.

Of course, a witch hunt against Tim Thomas was immediately launched in various corners, such as around a notorious fat communist arse hole. See e.g. Diehard of CBS Local in Boston. This inkspiller screams "shame on you" because TT brought "politics" and "political divide" and all these things.

Except that the White House is all about politics, whether you like it or not. So the people who visit the White House are doing politics. What TT meant by not being political was that he doesn't give any clear preference to either big party in the U.S. these days. That's apparently exactly the attitude that is "maximally" politically incorrect. However, TT has never pretended that he didn't care about the public matters – about politics in the general sense. Of course that he does. Hysterical politics is being played by those who think it is politically incorrect for a player to snub a politician whom he doesn't support.

TT is paid as (and, given his being the league's best goaltender in 2009 and 2011, extremely competent as) a goaltender, not as a participant of friendly picnics with any politician who may be powerful. So any criticism of his absence is really an assault against his basic right not to endorse an acting politician. And I am sure that most of the critics of TT wouldn't produce a vowel of a protest if an athlete (or, to be very precise, Red Sox' general manager Theo Epstein or basketball player Michael Jordan) refused to go to a picnic with George W. Bush. It's mostly hypocrisy.

A Matt Gurney of National Post even claims that TT lacks "class and gratitude" and if you want to know what TT should be grateful for, it's "President's generous invite". Holy cow. Why should it be generous? Should TT be grateful that Obama stepped down from the heavens and invited an ordinary best NHL goaltender (hundreds of millions of such goaltenders are surely walking on America's streets)? TT earns 10 times more money than Obama and he's arguably more skillful in a wide variety of respects.

The idea that citizens must be "grateful" for invitations from a leader reminds me of my childhood when kids like me were forced to wave to our communist exponents during May 1st rallies. I usually didn't, either: it was already possible to survive such sins in Czechoslovakia of the 1980s so I hope it's still possible in America of the 2010s. ;-)

I have absolutely nothing personally against Obama, he looks pretty pleasant to me. But quite generally, I find his cult to be a giant kitsch.

Clinton and Jágr are teaching one another

This blog entry is about sports, a very light topic, so let me end with an explanation of three videos and their relationship. Jaromír Jágr of Philadelphia Flyers is known for the Jágr salute. The following video is an example of the ritual he used 3 weeks ago when he scored against Pittsburgh Penguins, his club a decade ago that didn't renew his contract, and after a penguin fan showed him a finger:

Ex-president Bill Clinton learned the Jágr salute as well and used it after he received a souvenir puck:

However, that doesn't mean that Bill Clinton is always the student and Jaromír Jágr is always the teacher. Jaromír Jágr has been a student as well. He has learned several classic Bill Clinton's pieces from the late 1990s. The only difference between the teacher and the student is that Inna wouldn't allow Jaromír the same equipment as Hillary allowed to Bill. So Jágr had to perform the Clinton salute without any Monica:

Armenian genocide: Turkey doesn't belong to Europe

2012-01-24T09:37:00.000+01:00

The French lawmakers passed a bill that makes it illegal to deny the Armenian Genocide. Nicolas Sarkozy's signature was considered to be a formality; a week ago, most French senators in a committee voted against the bill because it violates the freedom of speech. They were overruled on Monday. If the bill ever comes to force, genocide deniers may pay $60,000 or so and/or spend a year in jail.

Turkey is suspending most of its ties to France and threatening further "sanctions".

The Armenian Genocide is the second most widely known and studied example of a genocide after the Nazi-organized Holocaust against the Jews.

Ralphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" in 1944: it was a word that was badly needed and filled a gap in the people's vocabulary. The word is built out of "genus" which is Greek for race/kind/birth (or the number of handles on a Riemann surface) and "-cidius" which means killing or cutting in Latin. While it's always a matter of precise definitions what we consider to be genocide and what we don't, one should still maintain some consistency in his definitions.

I personally reserve the word "Holocaust" for the events in the Second World War that influenced the Jews. However, it is silly to think that such things may only occur to the Jews. If some Jewish readers think that this is the case then apologies: but you don't have this "monopoly".

It seems obvious that the events taking place in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1923 should be classified as genocide. The Wikipedia article brings us lots of details what was taking place. About 0.6-1.5 million Armenians (Christians) were killed. Many of them died during "deportations" and this "coincidence" was really a part of the Turkish design. The people were forced to walk for hundreds of miles without food or water, and so on.

But you may see some examples of more concentrated massacres in the Wikipedia article. Whole villages of women and children were burned on a pile; one could smell human flesh for days and the Turks who witnessed it were psychologically hurt for years. Most of the people on many boats were drowned. Schoolkids were gathered in the mezzanine of the school and treated with toxic gases, in a predecessor of gas chambers. Morphine overdose and deliberate typhoid inoculation were reported, too. I don't want to continue because it's scary.

The official opinion in Turkey is that those people just happened to die and they were victims of the war. Sorry but a Holocaust denier may say the same thing about the victims of the Holocaust, too. In both cases, most of the victims were just not fighting so you can't consider them legitimate victims of a war. It is irrelevant whether they belonged to an ethnic group whose majority sided with the (Tsar) Russians against the Turks (in the war). That's also why Turkey's allies and neutral countries denounced the policies, too. A war is a somewhat routine event which doesn't give governments the moral right to do anything. One may argue about the terminology but what we shouldn't argue about is that the Turkish state and establishment did things that were intolerable and that should never be repeated.

A similar genocide has been directed against other Christian ethnic groups in the Islamic Ottoman empire. The purpose of these events and their official blessing seems totally obvious. In those cases, the victims had been second-class citizens for centuries. Before the worst massacres, the Ottoman Empire did lots of milder crimes against the Christian population. For example, it forced the Christians to pay taxes (many modern countries are still committing this crime).

Centuries ago, my ancestors were helping our relatively cultivated empire – Austria-Hungary – to stop the expansion of the Turkish Islamic anticivilization into the European continent. At the end, they were pretty successful. Thank God.

Europe as well as the Christian churches have made lots of progress. Christianity is the primary religion that became compatible with the modern world. A problem is that this isn't true for the Islamic anticivilization. It's as full of bigotry, hatred, forced submission, and dreams about a complete control over the world as it was 1300 years ago.

Apologies, bigots, but this is just not an acceptable attitude in the 21st century. You must either learn to accept that in the global scheme of things, Allah is just another (un-American) idol, just like Lady Gaga or Barry Kripke or anyone else, or you must be considered a security threat for peace and freedom in the world and you must be fought against.

There are people who believe that Europe should become a country. And many people also believe that Turkey should be a member of the EU. The two sets are far from being disjoint. But just imagine how crazy such a co-existence would be if the union tried to penetrate into the judicial issues. In France, one has to pay $60,000 and spend a year in jail if he denies the Armenian Genocide.

A Frenchman would expect that "somewhat similar" laws and moral standards apply in the whole Europe if Europe really resembles a country. On the other hand, if Turkey were a member state, pretty much all the population would deserve to be jailed for a year and to pay $60,000 per capita. It means that Turkey already owes about $4 trillion to France but I guess that France will have to spend exactly this amount of money for the extended prisons. ;-)

Some people, including Czech president Klaus, support the further territorial expansion of the EU because such a process may slow down the deepening of the integration process. He surely has a point but I find this attitude risky. We could easily see how the EU elites get smoothly reconciled with the Islamic bigots and genocide deniers in Turkey. Individual freedoms would not be winners if the two strange bedfellows ultimately slept in the same bed. And indeed, much of the EU hierarchy has features that resemble the characteristics of the "leaders" in Islamic totalitarian regimes.

Also, I think that the new controversy about the Armenian Genocide will reinforce the opinions that there are no moderate Muslims. It's my belief that almost everyone who proudly considers himself to be a Muslim is going to deny the Armenian Genocide. Anecdotal evidence supports my assumption. The logic behind this thinking is that these people are unwilling to admit that something may be totally and systematically wrong about the way how the human society is directed under the supervision of Islam. They're not willing (or they're not allowed) to admit that Allah has really been imperfect, or a nasty primitive killer. It's politically incorrect to say such things in the Islamic world even if they're demonstrably true.

This situation is much worse in Islam than it has ever been in Christianity because Christianity has always primarily been about the individuals' relationship to God and its attempts to influence every aspect of life have been nonzero but self-restrained. Islam knows of no such limits. It's a fascist system that aims to dictate everything to the people.

One may discuss whether or not the French law violates the freedom of speech. Well, it does. But it is designed to protect an even more vital freedom, the freedom to live. The idea is that the denial of genocide is the last stage of the genocide – guaranteeing a faked status of "innocence" to the perpetrators – and that's why it's also a step in the planning of future genocides. I agree with this logic that's been promoted by the U.N. at least since the late 1940s. Freedom of speech is a holy principle as long as it is about the speech only. I think that the suppression of evidence showing organized killings of an ethnic or religious group isn't just about the speech; it contains the component of an actual collaboration in such despicable acts. You may say whatever you want as long as you are actually not helping contemporary or future killers or would-be killers in committing crimes. I happen to think it's impossible to deny past crimes without this "side effect".

Finally, the denial of two genocides would be outlawed in France: the Holocaust is already "undeniable". Compare Turkey and Germany in these rather analogous situations. Can you imagine that Germany would break its diplomatic ties with France because the Holocaust can't be denied in France? Well, it can't be denied in Germany, either. The evidence is comparable in both situations but the institutional life of present "mainstream" Turkey still depends on lies about important historical events.

Why "semiclassical gravity" isn't self-consistent

2012-01-23T20:20:00.000+01:00

Sabine Hossenfelder recently discussed various gedanken experiments showing that "semiclassical gravity" can't be a consistent description of Nature:

Backreaction on Eppley-Hannah's thought experiment

Backreaction on this and Page-Geilker's thought experiment

While she admits that "semiclassical gravity" can't be right for various theoretical reasons, she still irrationally criticizes the two thought experiments above. In this inconsistent treatment of hers, she seems to misunderstand that the very purpose of gedanken experiments is to give us those "theoretical reasons" to know that Nature can't work in certain ways.

Now, I must tell you what we mean by "semiclassical gravity". Quite generally, the adjective "semiclassical" in physics means that certain parts of the physical system are being treated in the framework of quantum mechanics; others are treated using classical physics. If the two parts influence each other (in both directions), this is really an inconsistent approach, as I will discuss, and it doesn't make sense to develop the "semiclassical approach" too accurately.

In particular, the term "semiclassical approximation" is often applied to electrons in an external potential. The potential, e.g. the electrostatic potential induced by the atomic nuclei, is assumed to be a source of classical external forces. This is justifiable as an approximation because the nuclei are much heavier, and therefore "more classical", than the electrons and the same comment applies to the field they exert.

However, such a treatment automatically denies the existence of virtual photons etc. so it can't possibly be right at the quantum (loop) level. Only the leading quantum effects influencing the electron, those proportional to $\hbar^1$, may be considered in this treatment. That's why the first quantum corrections to classical physics, e.g. one-loop diagrams in various quantum field theories, are often called "semiclassical" as well; some people view "semiclassical" and "one-loop" to be synonyms. The WKB approximation is a typical example of a semiclassical treatment in non-relativistic quantum mechanics.

In the context of gravity, people use the term "semiclassical gravity" either as a legitimate approximation that is aware of its limitations; it's the approximation that was used e.g. by Stephen Hawking to derive the thermal radiation emitted by black holes. Alternatively, some people use the term "semiclassical gravity" as a proposed "hybrid" quantum-classical picture of physics. Reasons why this idea is wrong will occupy the rest of this blog entry.

As the Wikipedia page clarifies, the "semiclassical gravity" is a hypothetical theory describing the real world in which matter such as protons and electrons obeys the rules of quantum mechanics but gravity doesn't. Instead, the gravitational field is a classical field and it evolves according to a "classical projection" of quantum Einstein's equations:
\[ R_{\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2} R g_{\mu\nu} = \frac{8\pi G}{c^4} \left\langle \hat T_{\mu\nu} \right\rangle_{\ket\psi} \] What you see are almost ordinary equations of classical general relativity. However, because the energy and momentum density is composed of "quantum matter", one must extract a classical value of the full stress-energy tensor – the latter is an operator – and the seemingly natural choice is the expectation value.

If you take quantum mechanics seriously and you use a proper "positivist" interpretation of it, you immediately see that the equation above can't be right. Why? It's simple. The metric tensor is an "objective variable". However, the right hand side depends on the wave function $\ket\psi$ which describes the state of knowledge of an observer. It's therefore subjective. Even the expectation values are subjective. An equation claiming that an objective variable such as the Einstein tensor is equal to a subjective variable – such as a function of the state vector – is as inconsistent as the claim that the surname of the president of your country coincides with each citizen's wife's first name.

The only way to keep the mixed equation alive is to assume that the wave function is an objective real wave, too. Consequently, you must assume that it collapses at some objectively determinable point and the collapse is an objective process, too. That's a big problem. Indeed, because the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor sources the gravitational field, you will be able to measure the time when the collapse occurred, at least in principle. At that moment, the gravitational field abruptly changes.

This assumption already contradicts the internal logic of quantum mechanics. The collapse of a wave function is otherwise a completely immaterial process. It's the process in which new facts are taken into account and the original probabilities are "abruptly" replaced (in your head) by conditional probabilities with the new known facts' being added among the conditions.

Even if you believe that the wave function is a tangible or classical wave, you must agree that quantum mechanics and anything that is empirically equivalent to it – anything that hasn't been ruled out empirically – unambiguously predicts that the precise moment of a collapse is unobservable. As TRF has discussed many times, Wigner's friend closed in a box together with Schrödinger's cat may "feel" that certain quantities already have sharp outcomes. But a more accurate observer outside the box treats Wigner's friend as another quantum object that evolves into linear superpositions as well. Such a treatment is necessary to correctly calculate various extreme interference processes that Wigner's friend himself may participate in in the future. Consequently, Wigner's friend and the external observer inevitably disagree when the "collapse" occurred. That's a sign of its being a subjective process.

But, as Hossenfelder correctly points out, the problem of the collapse's becoming an objective process is even more pathological and leads to more tangible problems if you try to design a classical gravitational field that reacts to the expectation values. Why? Well, the collapse changes the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor "instantaneously". It follows that if you allow the wave function $\ket\psi$ to "physically collapse" at a certain moment, the expectation value $\langle \hat T_{\mu\nu}\rangle$ calculated from the wave function will discontinuously change, too: a part of the Schrödinger's cat's mass disappears from a place once you determine whether it is dead or alive. It will violate the local conservation law, i.e.
\[ \nabla_\mu \left\langle \hat T^{\mu\nu} \right\rangle_{\ket\psi} \neq 0. \] That's too bad because the left hand side is locally covariantly conserved. The equation
\[ \nabla_\mu \left( R^{\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2} R g^{\mu\nu} \right) = 0 \] is an identity, a tautology: one can prove it just by cancelling all the terms (various products of the metric tensor's components and their derivatives) regardless of the values of $g_{\mu\nu}(x^\alpha)$. So the Einstein tensor can't possibly be equal to the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor: they have different covariant divergences! Consequently, the defining equation of "semiclassical gravity" has no solutions if you allow the wave function $\ket\psi$ to "physically collapse" and that's needed to agree with the empirical facts if you want to claim that the wave function is an "objective object".

In the case that you think that this is an insurmountable paradox of any physics, I must tell you that proper quantum gravity has no problem. At long distances, the proper quantum equations of gravity are
\[ \hat R_{\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2} \hat R \hat g_{\mu\nu} = \frac{8\pi G}{c^4} \hat T_{\mu\nu} \] There are no expectation values here. The Einstein equations hold as operator equations at the full quantum level. Only the expectation value of the Einstein tensor are linked to the expectation values of the stress-energy tensor. Both of them behave discontinuously in the moment of the "collapse" – more correctly, in the moment when you learn about the result of a measurement. And they are allowed to behave discontinuously. If you calculate the expectation value of both sides of the equations above, both of them will depend on $\ket\psi$ which changes abruptly which is why there won't be any contradiction. However, the covariant divergence of both sides always vanishes at the operator level.

Gravity can't be classical in a quantum world. Classical and quantum objects can't be combined. If the fate of an object – e.g. the gravitational field (and the Earth whose journey is affected by it) – depends on some quantum objects and variables, it must be described by quantum, probabilistic variables as well. There's no way to escape this simple argument.

Hossenfelder tries to claim that the gedanken experiments showing that "semiclassical gravity" isn't a consistent theory can't be promoted to real experiments. The same meme is promoted by a self-described philosopher or, equivalently (using physics terminology), crackpot, named James Mattingly (who didn't even manage to fix the grammar in his title). Well, I disagree with that. It could be hard to design an experiment that would actually see some interference that depends on the quantum character of the gravitational field. But the equation of "semiclassical gravity" may be experimentally falsified, anyway.

When the Solar System was created, the Earth appeared at a pretty random direction relatively to the Sun (close to the ecliptic, as determined by i.e. perpendicular to the initial angular momentum of the Solar System). But it's fair to estimate that the expectation value of the position of the Earth was zero, near the Sun. Nevertheless, the Moon seems to orbit an Earth of the right mass that has a well-defined location, instead of a mixture of Earths that are distributed along the whole orbit.

If you wanted to claim that it is because the wave function of the Earth has already "objectively collapsed", you will find other things that contradict the experiments, too. Such an equation would predict lots of nonlocal phenomena and related violations of special relativity. But as I have explained above, the equations of "semiclassical gravity" won't have any solutions at all because the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor isn't locally conserved if you allow the state vector to collapse. So if you allow me to think, and physicists must be allowed to think, the equation of "semiclassical gravity" is empirically excluded. I don't really need any expensive observations at all. That's often the case. Most random ideas someone proposes as theories of physics are stillborn.

These basic questions about quantum gravity have been settled for a very long time. It is very obvious that e.g. Richard Feynman understood them in the early 1960s and probably earlier than that. After all, he constructed the simplest Feynman rules for the quantized general relativity which directly reproduces the low-energy limit of the rules in string theory.

Some people doubt that there are gravitons. But these doubts are silly. First of all, Einstein's equations – which have been verified in quite some detail – predict gravitational waves. We haven't seen the gravitational waves "quite directly" but the Scandinavian folks have already awarded a Nobel prize, namely the 1993 physics Nobel prize, for an experimental detection proving their existence. A pulsar was seen to change its frequency. The change accurately agreed with the prediction of general relativity that says that the accelerated motion of massive bodies produces gravitational waves which carry a calculable amount of energy away. With the calculable energy loss, the objects become increasingly bound and the frequency of the orbiting is therefore going up.

So let me assume that you understand that the gravitational waves exist and have been "almost directly" observed. Now, are they composed of gravitons in the same way as electromagnetic waves are composed of photons? They have to be. Imagine you have a monochromatic gravitational wave. Various observables in this wave are changing with frequency $f=\omega/2\pi$ and periodicity $t=1/f=2\pi/\omega$. But if you accept that the whole Universe, including its gravitational fields and bodies affected by them, is described by the same apparatus of quantum mechanics, you may derive other inevitable consequences of these assumptions.

In particular, every wave function may be decomposed into a linear superposition of energy eigenstates which evolve as
\[ \ket{n(t)} = \exp(E_n t/i\hbar) \ket{n(0)} \] If you take a general superposition of such states $\ket{n}$ and if you assume that all expectation values and other things are periodic with period $2\pi/ \omega$, then you may easily see that all the energy differences $E_m-E_n$ between states $\ket{m}$ and $\ket{n}$ included in the superposition (with nonzero coefficients) have to be multiples of $E=\hbar\omega$. That's the only way how the observables may be periodic: after the period $\Delta t =2\pi/\omega$, the phase factors differ by the multiplicative factor of
\[\begin{align} \exp(E_m \Delta t/i\hbar) / \exp(E_n \Delta t/i\hbar) =\dots\\ \dots = \exp\left[\frac{(E_m-E_n)\Delta t}{i\hbar}\right] = \exp(2\pi N) \end{align} \] for $E_m-E_n=-N\hbar\omega$ and they only return to the same "relative phase" if $N$ is an integer. It follows that the energy isn't changing continuously; in a monochromatic wave or any periodic system in Nature, the energy has to respect the spacing $\Delta E = \hbar\omega=hf$. This relationship between the energy and time doesn't apply to photons only; it applies to all systems in Nature. We just use the terms "photons" and "gravitons" for the changes of the frequency $f$ electromagnetic and gravitational field (respectively) that increase the total energy by the minimum allowed step, namely by $\Delta E = \hbar\omega=hf$.

At the one-loop level, there's nothing wrong about quantum gravity where the gravitational field is quantized in the fully analogous way as the electromagnetic field in QED. For example, linearized equations of general relativity are enough to determine the number of physical polarizations of a graviton (two in $d=4$). Quantum gravity is still conceptually harder because there are no rigid God-given slices of spacetime on which we could define our wave functions etc. But when we do the right calculations that may be generalized from QED, they work. The problems only occur when we try to calculate multiloop corrections because we encounter the non-renormalizable divergences hiding in quantized Einstein's equations. Only at this point, we realize that string theory is paramount.

At any rate, the goal of this blog entry was to convince at least some TRF readers that the idea that one could completely deny quantum mechanics in the gravitational sector (or any other sector) is one of the ideas that may be classified as bad physics. The people who are trying to advocate such theories never respect any high standards – because no consistent equations of this kind can even be written down – and their unusual constructions are symptoms of their broader misunderstanding of modern physics, including special relativity, locality, and the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics.

Leap seconds may be abolished in 2015

2012-01-23T19:36:00.000+01:00

When the new year began, I was discussing the subtle issues of leap years and the methods to approximate the tropical year by a rational number.

The key number, 365.242189, was the ratio of the mean tropical year and the mean solar day. Note that both of these periods are defined astronomically.

Dial of the Prague Orloj which celebrated 600th birthday a year ago

However, there is one more number and one more "leap object", namely a leap second. It sometimes has to be inserted because the number of seconds per solar day is something like 86,400.002, also different from an integer. How is it possible?

Well, it's simple. A second was originally defined as 1/86,400 of a solar day: a solar day is divided to 24 hours per 60 minutes per 60 seconds. However, a few decades ago, people became able to measure time more accurately than by counting the revolutions of the Earth. In particular, our atomic clocks are able to measure irregularities in the duration of one solar day.

In fact, when the definition of a second switched from the astronomical crutches to the atomic clocks, the atomic clock-based one second was already a bit shorter than the "current" astronomical second, meaning 1/86,400 of the latest year's mean solar day. That's why a solar day just takes slightly more than 86,400 atomic-clock seconds. We can measure it.

We want to measure the universal time by atomic clocks but we also want the noon at a holy place in Greenwich :-) to occur exactly at 12 p.m., within a second. This has been achieved by inserting a leap second at the very end of June or very end of December in most years since 1972, as a Wikipedia text on the leap seconds explains.

In those 40 years, people have inserted 25 leap seconds at various points, so that the deviation of the astronomical noon from the noon-shown-by-atomic-clocks never exceeds one second (or even half a second). Where do you exactly insert a leap second and how?

Well, it's the added last second of the universal time. For example, on December 31st, 2008, you would see 23:59:59 in Greenwich for a second. What was shown by the clocks during the following second? Well, a clever guy could say 0:00:00. But a stupid one could say 23:59:60. And this would the one of the moments in which the stupid guy is right! That's exactly what happened. Analogously, in Chicago, Central Standard U.S. Winter Time, the official clocks suddenly showed this curious scene:

Chicago is 6 hours behind Greenwich so it works. The extra anomalous second was added just like February 29th will be added this year at the end of February which mostly has 28 days only.

Now, some politics

Nature discussed a gathering of self-important apparatchiks from many countries whose task was to decide whether or not the leap seconds should be completely abolished. You may imagine the pain in the neck that results for software makers, banking transaction or space flight planners etc. because of the extra leap second. Many things may go wrong. Isn't it better to simply cancel it?

Nature asks: Why do we still care about some painful, provincial, and pathetically obsolete objects such as the Earth and the Sun? ;-)

In a radical version of this attitude, some people even say Why can't we have noon at 4 p.m.? :-) Well, I would personally oppose this system. It's great if the time shown by clocks is kind of predictable and connected with the perceptions of the Sun that many of us still tend to see almost every day. :-)

Of course, this is largely an academic discussion. As I mentioned, the discrepancy only grows by less than 1 second every year so you would need more than 3,600 years for the noon to move by 1 hour in this way. But in my opinion, the gap simply shouldn't be allowed to become as large as one hour!

On the other hand, if there's a gap of 30 seconds, no one will notice (except for those who work with some accurate equipment and they should know about these subtleties). So I would propose a compromise: a leap minute that may be added at the end of February 29th every year **48 or **96 (I cleverly concentrate all this leap mess into the leap days of leap years). Moreover, it would be decided 5 years in advance whether there would be a leap minute on those years or not. We would avoid all the hassle for 36 years now and a 30-second discrepancy between the clocks and the astronomical noon wouldn't hurt anyone.

I was thinking about other ways to deal with this problem, for example "slowed down days" in which all the clocks would be slowed down by the factor of 86,400/86,401, so that 86,400 slow (atomic) seconds last 86,401 (atomic) normal seconds. But that could be even harder to properly incorporate into clocks. And I don't even want to know about a permanent redefinition of a second that would make it unnecessary to insert leap seconds (positive or negative) for quite some time.

Also, we could return to an astronomical time, and there would be some public-domain algorithms on the Internet that would be able to translate between the atomic-clock time and the high-precision astronomical time. I don't know what's the best solution. At any rate, if we just abolish leap seconds for 30 or 50 years, no one will be hurt. And people could benefit – they may be hurt by the leap seconds that we use today.

What did the apparatchiks decide? So far, the leap second was kept; the proposal to kill it hasn't reached a decisive stage so far. There will be a vote about the fate of the leap second in 2015. ;-) Stay tuned.

Climbing inside a Fukushima reactor

2012-01-23T18:13:00.000+01:00

Four days ago, a friend in Japan who is a good mountain-climber teamed up with 40 Japanese workers, drilled a hole into the reactor, took an Olympus-made endoscope, a few ropes, and shot this short and simple 1-minute movie from the 2nd reactor of Fukushima I.

The white mottles are gamma rays – which is just friendly light whose color is somewhat more violet than violet, if you haven't heard of gamma rays – while the white strings are water droplets.

He said that the air inside the reactor was very fresh – it reminded him of the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, Colorado – and he enjoyed the visit. It's not clear why some people, some of whom are tens of thousands of kilometers away from the facility, are scared about the gadget. And if M-theory were allowed to show its muscles in their full glory, the amount of radiation would decrease with the 9th and not just 2nd power of the distance from the reactor. ;-)

More seriously, it still seems to be the case that almost one year after a rather large earthquake and the resulting tsunami damaged the power plant, there hasn't been a single casualty related to the nuclear technology. But the fear of the "invisible killer" has been spread so efficiently that it is de facto hardwired in the brains of most of us – in some sense, the list of victims includes your humble correspondent.

The analysis of the interior of the reactor through a 13-millimeter hole showed that the radioactivity and humidity is probably very high over there and many things can't be seen too well. At the same moment, the systems of cables, tubes, and the structures supporting them don't seem to be damaged. Because one can see things that are 4 meters above the floor, it follows that water in the containment isn't going this high. The temperature was confirmed to be 44.7 °C.

Various major steps in the deconstruction and decontamination of the facility could be completed as early as in 2012. Japanese authorities have asked the international nuclear agency to create a permanent observatory on that place. The average citizen of Fukushima only received 0.25 mSv; for about 100 people, it's been 1-3 mSv. Note that the TRF rule-of-thumb quantifies death as 5 Sv.

Japan was continuing its process of turning the reactors off; 54 reactors running a year ago were reduced to 5. However, the deficit of energy and growing energy prices obviously strengthen calls to restart some of the reactors.

Meanwhile, Iran is working hard to build its own nuclear industry, probably one capable of producing weapons as well. The European Union approved an immediate EU-wide Iranian oil embargo. You can't sign new contracts; previously signed contracted may continue for 6 more months. Whether this policy will be efficient is to be seen: China, the #1 importer of Iranian oil, won't join any sanctions and could even buy the oil that would be otherwise sent to Europe.

I am sure that the sanctions are already hurting Iran – much more so than they are hurting the West, despite some propaganda claiming the opposite. The weakening of the Iranian rial from 10,000 per dollar a month ago to 20,500 per dollar today is pretty brutal and it may continue.

A banknote with six zeroes, if I count the bigot who is copied at every single one of them, regardless of the numerical value, doesn't exactly emit the scent of a hard currency. ;-)

It is also pretty clear that these powerful sanctions must have crossed some "red line" as defined by the Iranian apparatchiks. The same thing has taken place on the U.S. side. Both sides obviously have all the evidence they need to start a siege of Strait of Hormuz or any other act of a "hot war". But no one seems to be willing to do so right now so all the threats look kind of ludicrous.

That doesn't mean that there won't be any war in Iran. I still think it's "more likely than not" that a war in Iran will erupt in less than one year from now.

Miller’s grizzled langur goes unextinct

2012-01-22T10:05:00.001+01:00

The disappearance of species and biodiversity fears belong among the classic themes of the environmentalist movement – it has been talked about since the beginning and every new mutation of the environmentalist movement has recycled the concept in a new way. Global warming alarmism is no exception.

Washington Post and lots of other media run the story about Miller’s grizzled langur [P.h. canicrus], a large grey monkey. It was believed to be extinct for some time. In 2004, some people decided to look for it. They didn't find it so they did something they were eager to do: they declared the species extinct.

It was a little bit too fast. Now, in 2012, the monkeys reappeared and they are doing very well. Thousands of pictures have been taken. The news about their demise have been a little bit exaggerated. They were found in the rainforest in the Western parts of Borneo.

When I read the logic behind the surprises, I can't get rid of the impression that this field of biology is incredibly sloppy. For example, we "learn" that those folks "believed" that the primates had to live in the Northeastern Borneo only, in the jungle. So that's probably the only place where they looked.

The species is also known as the Dracula monkey because of the collar of fur (ouch).

But that's just stupid. There's no physical principle that would prevent the monkey from living a few miles further to the West. It may live hundreds of miles away, too. Fugitive millionaires often move by tens of thousands of miles – greetings to Viktor K. to the Bahamas – and humans live in pretty much all types of climatic zones so why wouldn't monkeys sometimes do the same thing? If someone saw a monkey in the jungle sometime in the past, it doesn't force all relatives of this monkey to live in the jungle only – although some people apparently think it does.

They're not so different from us even though some of the members of homo sapiens whose behavior is actually closest to the monkeys sometimes arrogantly love to think that they're qualitatively different than the monkeys. Well, you're not. If you, an environmentalist, are capable of moving to a different part of an island, be sure that your fellow monkey can do the same thing.

If we find a dead body and make a DNA test or something like that, we may declare the person dead. But to declare a whole species dead is a very subtle and risky enterprise. There's always a big chance that we have just overlooked some representatives. We haven't looked at the right places. We skipped the right places because of various prejudices that turn out to be wrong later. Those organisms want to survive and sometimes they may be creative about the ways to survive. They don't just commit harakiri because a place that an environmentalist "reserved" for them is no longer optimal. And sometimes, they don't really need to be creative at all. It's very simple to move from one place to another.

Humans have influenced the Earth, no doubts about it. But if you have ever been far away from the civilization, you must also know that some places are pretty much unaffected. And even some of the things we consider "clear harmful signs of the civilization", like some chemicals in the air, may turn out to be harmless for most of the species. There's really no good scientific reason to think that the extinction rates are vastly different from those that have been seen centuries or millenniums ago.

I believe that much of this science about the "super-accelerating extinction" is as superstitious as the catastrophic global warming theory.

Cambridge, Mt Auburn cemetery

2012-01-22T10:03:00.000+01:00

I wonder how many TRF readers recognize places in this video:

I just randomly posted an unedited people-free May 2006 11-minute video to YouTube. It didn't happen earlier because the YouTube limit was only raised from 10 minutes to 15 minutes some time ago.

Of course, there are TRF readers in Greater Boston but I guess that even many people who don't live there are familiar with this people's republic.

See also Fort Independence, Boston (short).

Quantum field theory variants

2012-01-21T21:25:00.000+01:00

Jimi asked: I am a math guy, so sorry for the naivety. When I peruse the wikipedia I see many "variants" of quantum field theory... conformal quantum field theory, topological quantum field theory, axiomatic/constructive quantum field theory, algebraic quantum field theory, etc. Whether or not these are actually variants of something is unclear to me. I don't really have a specific question, but I was wondering if you guys could help me understand what these different things are and/or point me to somewhere to get a clearer picture.

LM:

They're variants, different kinds of quantum field theory, but they're not mutually exclusive. The different adjectives you mention separate quantum field theory to "pieces" in different ways. The different sorts of variants you mention are being used and studied by different people, the classification has different purposes, the degree of usefulness and validity is different for the different adjectives, and so on.

Conformal quantum field theory is a special subset of quantum field theories that differ by dynamics (the equations that govern the evolution in time), namely by the laws' respect for the conformal symmetry (essentially scaling: only the angles and/or length ratios, and not the absolute length of things, can be directly measured). Conformal field theories have local degrees of freedom and the forces are always long-range forces, which never decrease at infinity faster than a power law. They're omnipresent in both classification of quantum field theories - almost every quantum field theory becomes scale-invariant at long distances - and in the structure of string theory - conformal field theories control the behavior of the world sheets of strings (here, the CFT is meant to contain two-dimensional gravity but the latter carries no local degrees of freedom so it doesn't locally affect the dynamics) as well as boundary physics in the holographic AdS/CFT correspondence (here, CFTs on a boundary of an anti de Sitter spacetime are physically equivalent to a gravitational QFT/string theory defined in the bulk of the anti de Sitter space). Conformal field theories are the most important class among those you mentioned for the practicing physicists who ultimately want to talk about the empirical data but these theories are still very special; generic field theories they study (e.g. the Standard Model) aren't conformal.

Topological quantum field theory is one that contains no excitations that may propagate "in the bulk" of the spacetime so it is not appropriate to describe any waves we know in the real world. The characteristic quantity describing a spacetime configuration - the action - remains unchanged under any continuous changes of the fields and shapes. So only the qualitative, topological differences between the configurations matter. Topological quantum field theory (like Chern-Simons theory) is studied by the very mathematically oriented people and it's useful to classify knots in knot theory and other "combinatorial" things. They're the main reason behind Edward Witten's Fields medal etc.

Axiomatic or algebraic (and mostly also "constructive") quantum field theory isn't a subset of different "dynamical equations". Instead, it is another approach to define any quantum field theory via axioms etc. That's why it's a passion of mathematicians or extremely mathematically formally oriented physicists and one must add that according to almost all practicing particle physicists, they're obsolete and failed (related) approaches which really can't describe those quantum field theories that have become important. In particular, AQFTs of both types start with naive assumptions about the short-distance behavior of theories and aren't really compatible with renormalization and all the lessons physics has taught us about these things. Constructive QFTs are mainly tools to understand the relativistic invariance of a quantum field theory by a specific method.

Then there are many special quantum field theories, like the extremely important class of gauge theories etc. They have some dynamics including gauge fields: that's a classification according to the content. QFTs are often classified according to various symmetries (or their absence) which also constrain their dynamical laws: supersymmetric QFTs, gravitational QFTs based on general relativity, theories of supergravity which are QFTs that combine general relativity and supersymmetry, chiral QFTs which are left-right-asymmetric, relativistic QFTs (almost all QFTs that are being talked about in particle physics), lattice gauge theory (gauge theory where the spacetime is replaced by a discrete grid), and many others. Gauge theories may also be divided according to the fate of the gauge field to confining gauge theories, spontaneously broken QFTs, unbroken phases, and others. String field theory is a QFT with infinitely many fields which is designed to be physically equivalent to perturbative string theory in the same spacetime but it only works smoothly for open strings and only in the research of tachyon condensation, it has led to results that were not quite obtained by other general methods of string theory.

We also talk about effective quantum field theories which is an approach to interpret many (almost all) quantum field theories as an approximate theory to describe all phenomena at some distance scale (and all longer ones); one remains agnostic about the laws governing the short-distance physics. That's a different classification, one according to the interpretation. Effective field theories don't have to be predictive or consistent up to arbitrarily high energies; they may have a "cutoff energy" above which they break down.

It doesn't make much sense to spend too much time by learning dictionary definitions; one must actually learn some quantum field theory and then the relevance or irrelevance and meaning and mutual relationships between the "variants" become more clear. At any rate, it's not true that the classification into adjectives is as trivial as the list of colors, red, green, blue. The different adjectives look at the framework of quantum field theory from very different directions - symmetries that particular quantum field theories (defined with particular equations) respect; number of local excitations; ability to extend the theory to arbitrary length scales; ways to define (all of) them using a rigorous mathematical framework, and others.

GISS: how to defend a 2.3 °C climate sensitivity

2012-01-21T19:55:00.000+01:00

NASA's GISS has completed their 2011 global temperature dataset. According to GISS, 2011 was the 9th warmest year. The average warming trend in 1880-2011 was 0.60 °C per century; in the satellite era 1979-2011, it was 1.58 °C per century, not too much greater than those 0.14 °C per century according to the satellite teams.

GISS is an anomalous source because it considers 2010 to be the warmest year while 1998 – the warmest year according to pretty much everyone else – is 4th according to GISS. That's quite a difference. Here is their hitparade, as I calculated it with Mathematica:

{2010, 0.63083333},
{2005, 0.61916667},
{2007, 0.58416667},
{1998, 0.58},
{2009, 0.5675},
{2002, 0.56333333},
{2003, 0.55583333},
{2006, 0.55333333},
{2011, 0.51416667},
{2001, 0.48333333},
{2004, 0.4825},
{2008, 0.44},
{1997, 0.41},
{1995, 0.39083333},
{1990, 0.36},
{1991, 0.35083333},
{2000, 0.35},
{1988, 0.33},
{1999, 0.32833333},
{1996, 0.29583333},
{1987, 0.2775},
{1981, 0.265},
{1983, 0.26166667},
{1994, 0.23583333},
{1989, 0.21166667},
{1980, 0.19916667},
{1944, 0.18583333},
{1973, 0.13916667},
{1993, 0.13583333},
{1977, 0.13416667},
{1986, 0.1275},
{1992, 0.125},
{1953, 0.098333333},
{1979, 0.0975},
{1938, 0.096666667}

Apologies: I forgot to round the figures and I kept the braces not to waste too much time with formatting.

But there's some new manipulation I want to share with you: an argument for a "medium" value of the climate sensitivity, namely 2.3 °C per doubling, which is a mean value reached by a calculation in Trenberth et al. 2010 as well as Schmittner et al. 2011. It's in between the mean IPCC climate sensitivity and the climate sensitivity believed to be the most accurate one by skeptics like myself. It's pretty high.

Imagine that you look for the best fit that links the observed GISS temperatures in the month $x=1\dots 1584$ corresponding to the 1880-2011 period to the CO2 concentrations given by my formula (units of ppmv are omitted)
\[ c = 280 + 22.3 \exp\left(\frac{{\rm year}-1920}{57}\right) \] You get this:
\[ T = -0.415 °{\rm C} + 1.972 °{\rm C}\times\log_2 \left(\frac{c}{280}\right) \] The coefficient 1.972 °C in front of the base-two logarithm is the estimated climate sensitivity associated with the doubling. The value of 1.97 °C per doubling directly extracted from GISS is high – the largest one you can get from similar operations – but it's still lower than the IPCC lower bound of 2 °C.

But you could try a more contrived fit. Imagine that you allow a term proportional to the logarithm of the concentration but you also add another term linear in time – corresponding to some sources of temperature change that are very slow and that kept pretty much a constant rate for more than a century, maybe from the Little Ice Age. The idea is that the non-CO2-related faster processes average out so only the non-CO2-related (mostly natural) very slow (and thus linear) processes are important.

Then you get a more complicated interpolation:
\[\begin{align} T &= -0.411 °{\rm C} - 0.0011\times \Delta{\rm year} °{\rm C} + \\
&+2.302 °{\rm C}\times\log_2 \left(\frac{c}{280}\right)\end{align} \] Here, $\Delta{\rm year}={\rm year}-1880$. This extended formula may a priori be more sensitive to the expected "acceleration" caused by the higher growth of CO2 in recent decades. Note that we obtain a very small extra linear term that corresponds to a cooling trend by 0.11 °C per century. It's very small. Because the non-CO2-related terms are decreasing, the predicted CO2 sensitivity is raised to 2.3 °C per doubling to provide you with a compensation. The smallness of the extra linear term, regardless of the sign, may also be interpreted as a sign of "good correlation" of the temperature with the CO2 concentrations.

Let me admit that I think that this simple fit is the most robust empirically rooted argument in favor of a sensitivity above 2 °C that I have ever seen. All other trustworthy calculations, including the calculation without the extra linear term, yield values of climate sensitivity that is below 2 °C. All calculations yielding results above 2 °C were flagrantly biased, skewed, or they were not calculations at all. Could the climate sensitivity be around 2 °C?

Of course, as far as I can say, it could. It would probably mean that we will continue to see some underlying warming trend by 1.5 °C per century we are seeing today, reaching the "total warming by one sensitivity" a decade or two before 2100. At that point, the correlation of temperatures would probably become self-evident. Also, people would already know that a degree of warming isn't something to be afraid of.

Germany abolishing solar subsidies

Bloomberg and Business Week are among those offering the news that Germany will gradually decrease and by 2017 completely terminate subsidies for photovoltaic panels. The prices of solar companies' stocks all over the world dropped after the decision was publicized. Because Germany is also in the process of banning nuclear power plants, it seems that King Coal is returning to Deutschland as an Emperor Coal.

Megaupload shut down: SOPA unnecessary

2012-01-20T19:45:00.004+01:00

I am sure that most TRF readers have heard of MegaUpload.COM. It was one of the servers where some people uploaded the ClimateGate files, among other things that were vastly more important for the accounts of the people behind the server.

Megaupload.com was the 72nd most visited site on the Internet. It was headed by Kim Dotcom; at least that's how most people called Kim Schmitz (originally from Germany), probably because he resembles a dotcom bubble.

American authorities decided to arrest Mr Dotcom a few weeks ago and the dream came true in New Zealand today. I must proudly add that the most important collaborator of Mr Dotcom is Július "Juice" Benčko [Yoo-lee-yoos "Juice" Bench-kaw], a webdesigner born in [Czecho]Slovakia in 1977. This author of the Megaupload.com graphics issues managed to earn about $1 million in the last year. Not bad. More precisely, it is very bad.

When I read the Wikipedia page, it erased all my doubts that Dotcom is a villain. These people have undoubtedly lived as parasites. Dotcom has done many financial things in the past that are either illegal or at least flagrantly immoral. Benčko may receive up to 55 years in the prison.

The copyrights holding companies are saying that they have lost more than $0.5 billion in revenues because of Megaupload.com. I suppose that this figure is obtained by adding the prices of all the copies of the movies etc. that were distributed via Megaupload.com. Well, I find such calculations tendentious or misleading because if the people who have used Megaupload.com couldn't have used it, most of them would never buy the movies or music or whatever the people were getting there. So I am convinced that the profit of the companies owning the copyrights would be much smaller than those $0.5 billion. In other words, a transaction has two sides and any calculation that assumes the price to be determined by one side only is skewed.

In the past, we could hear some poor U.S. students who were suddenly caught and demanded to pay tens of millions of dollars etc. I feel almost sure that many other people are doing similar things and those unlucky folks were chosen as scapegoats – although what some of those folks have done seemed extraordinary to me, too.

In my opinion, when the owners of the copyrights compute the losses, a fairer formula should be
\[ {\rm Loss}_{\rm eff} = \sum_{i}^{\rm products} \frac{{\rm Price}_i\times N_{{\rm copies\,would\,be\,bought},i} }{\rm Probability(caught)_i} \] The summation goes over different kinds of products. For each product, the price, as required by the seller, is multiplied by the estimated number of copies that would be bought if they were not offered by the copyright violators. However, each term should also be amplified by the inverse probability that a similar culprit gets caught.

Quite generally, I think that the fairer formula above would be yielding smaller amounts than what the copyright owners claim but they could still be big in many cases. You probably understand the reasoning behind my "fairer" formula; its aim is to balance the flow of money at least at a macroscopic level. (The accounting based on debits and credits is also known as "he should give, he has given" in Czechia, but this type of accounting was replaced by "they've stolen from us, we have stolen" [ukradli nám, ukradli jsme] during socialism.) Much more generally, I think that people should adopt a fairer formula. Copyright infringement shouldn't be something that allows the copyright holder to effectively kill the copyright violator. When someone steals a chocolate in the supermarket, it doesn't give the supermarket manager the right to kill the thief, either.

Things should be fair and balanced. This is not just an aesthetic requirement. I believe that an excessive copyright law – in either direction – creates an instability because too many people may want to abolish it completely, sometimes for their legitimate or justifiable feeling that the law is too cruel and the copyright holders have too much power and too convenient a life.

However, I want to tell those foes of any copyright laws that artists are legitimate workers, too. There are other occupations that their business needs as well. They are creating some values and they have to get their money for the work (unless we want to live in the society which only produces worthless arts – coming from the people who aren't good at anything so they wouldn't earn any money in their free time, anyway). If someone creates values that are considered high by the viewers or listeners, he should naturally get more money for that. But the production of intellectual assets is a work like another one, it may be hard work, and some people may be extremely good at it.

If someone says that artists etc. have no right to demand any money for their creative works or protect the mechanisms that are needed for them to get some money, he is effectively saying that he demands everyone to respect the idea that the market value of intellectual assets and creative works is zero. But that's not what the market says. The market says that it's not zero. People are ready to pay for certain things which proves that the value isn't zero. There's a supply of money to be paid on the demand side. Once you admit it isn't zero, then I think you should also agree that the money that the consumers are willing to pay end up in the pockets of the genuine owners of this immaterial but nonzero type of wealth.

And in my opinion, it is obvious that the artists and the people who directly cooperate with him or her, and not people like Kim Dotcom, deserve to be given the money that the people are willing to pay for the movies and other things that were being and that are still being stolen by various websites. Kim Dotcom and Július Benčko only created a simple website that only became important by the content and most of the content has been posted against the will of the primary originators of the content, e.g. the artists. It makes a difference. The copying of the files at/from Megaupload.com isn't really what we want to pay millions of dollars for, do we?

Mark Zuckerberg also created just a rather simple website (relatively to the price over $50 billion) whose value depends on the content that people contribute – but in this case, one could say that the people contribute the content voluntarily (well, in most cases). I think that these differences are self-evident to most readers; I still need to emphasize them because they're being deliberately overlooked by those who believe that the artists or inventors or authors have no right to assume that they're the owners of a monopoly to deal with their inventions or other creative works. Those folks use the loaded word "monopoly" to explain why they hate any copyright law. But any full-fledged ownership is a monopoly; it doesn't mean that we should share everything.

If I return to the title, this successful raid of the FBI against Megaupload.com shows that no special new legislation is needed. Because the FBI attacked a server whose violations of the copyright law seem obvious to most people, it's likely that the courts will confirm that it was legitimate. Most of the voters won't harass the current U.S. administration for this event, either. Some of them surely will (Alexa says that 1% of the Internet users visited Megaupload.com often). But if the FBI did a similar assault on a relatively innocent server, people would protest, courts could declare the raid illegal, and voters could even punish the government doing such things.

These are the checks and balances that do exist now and that should exist in the future. With a SOPA-like law that gives the copyright owners a total power that may precede any decision by the court and that may even circumvent it, the checks and balances would be destroyed.

Mullahs fight against Barbie

Today, the mullahs closed all shops that were selling Barbies. That proves that the mullahs are nothing else than feminists on steroids. Britain's media supervisory body, Ofcom, retaliated against the harassment of Barbie by Iran by terminating the license for the Iranian Press TV in the U.K. which was run by hardcore British Marxists and environmentalists.

Some decades ago, feminists only managed to ban one type of a Barbie, one that admitted that the math class is tough. However, young U.S. girls today already tend to understand that Barbie has always been right. She mentions a new research showing the non-psychological origin of the girls-boys math IQ gap which was even reported on the Huffington Post. Geary and Stoet invalidate claims that there existed "evidence" that the gap was due to the girls' low self-esteem. All the papers that have promoted the low self-esteem theory had general flaws; for example, none of them has ever applied the same tests to a male sample group. See University of Missouri press release.

Too bad that such obvious research couldn't have been routinely published when Larry Summers was in hot water.

Madrid IFT inaugural conference: slides & videos

2012-01-19T15:56:00.000+01:00

Luis Ibáñez sent me links to an impressive high-energy physics conference that took place in Madrid's new theoretical physics building right before the Christmas:

IFT Inaugural Conference & Xmas Workshop (Madrid, December 13-16th, 2011, main web page)

Transparencies and videos

Among others, you may find talks by D. Gross, T. Veltman, S. Glashow, A. De Roeck from CMS (with the first Higgs results 3 days after CERN anouncement!), N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos, and others.

Veltman, Glashow, Gross in Madrid: how to hit three Nobel prize winners in one shot: click to zoom in. © El Pais

Three days earlier, they organized their Christmas workshop with many other prominent speakers (e.g. Dvali, Antoniadis, Lüst, Nilles, Rabinovici, Lipatov, Ross, Kallosh, and so on), see the web page.

The meeting was very exciting since in its first day the audience saw the CERN presentation live, and the Higgs results marked many of the presentations.

(If you can't play the MP4 videos e.g. in Chrome, right-click and copy the video URL and open it in Windows Media Player.)

The link with the transparencies and videos above captures talks by Gross, Glashow, Veltman, De Roeck, Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos, to mention some of the especially interesting ones. The questions asked after these talks were quite inspiring, see for example those after the talks by Gross (on landscape versus uniqueness) and De Roeck...

Hat tip to and summary by: Luis I.

L.M.: Luis forgot to boast that he and Angel Uranga are just publishing a new book focusing on string phenomenology so I added the link and I hope that some readers will instantly pre-order it. It will be out at the end of January.

Image of Madrid: © Michel Bricteux, winter 2011

Václav Klaus: notes from Saudi Arabia

2012-01-19T11:25:00.000+01:00

Czech president Václav Klaus has wrapped up his visit of Saudi Arabia. TRF brings you his observations published at klaus.cz, as translated by your humble correspondent.

Click to zoom in.

Part I: January 17th

It's extraordinarily interesting to visit Saudi Arabia at the time when many Western European countries experience their frustration caused by the lost AAA rating. Even the European reactions were interesting: the Austrian prime minister (in synergy with the Austrian dailies) positively says: "We've got a homework to do"; the French prime minister, on the contrary, says: "A rating is just an opinion!". The German chancellor adds resolutely but unconvincingly: "We need the growth and innovations." I have to add that the communists have already relied upon innovations, too.

In the past, I have made two short visits to Saudi Arabia. One of them included an economic forum in Jeddah (on the coast of the Red Sea), the other was the funeral of King Fahd in Riyadh. The two most impressive experiences of the first visit were the hall in the luxurious congress center where I gave a speech: the hall was divided by opaque glass to the male and female parts of the audience (only the speaker could see both parts from the podium); and the chill in the excessively air-conditioned hotel room which had no buttons to control the air-conditioning.

A specific feature of the royal funeral was that only Muslims were allowed to join the funeral itself and dozens of top world's policiticians were waiting in empty halls of the royal palace for several hours. After a few hours they brought us some baguettes – probably from a nearby mall. After that, we were allowed to wait in a very long queue and to express our condolences to the future king. We had two spare hours before the departure so I wanted to see a café in Riyadh and drink their Arabic coffee. It was right before 6 pm, the temperature was 42 °C, and we received a coffee just when the evening prayer was getting started. We were sitting outside, all shops as well as cafés closed their doors, but they allowed us to sit and drink coffee. Clerks and employees were looking through the doors but no one was praying. I am curious what we will see today.

The flight was peaceful, except for some turbulence during one moment we spent above Greece, but it looked appropriate: it is a country going through turbulent events so why they shouldn't be 6 miles above the surface as well?

This time I am going to Saudi Arabia as the first speaker on a GCC Industrial Forum attended by "who is who" of the Arab world – from ministers of industries to bankers, from industrialists to journalists, in a hall with 1,000 people who will listen. The topic is the question how to modernize the Arab world's economy so I don't even know why they wanted me as the "keynote speaker" if I would be much more capable of explaining why Europe has lost its ability to be an effective and functional economy. Already in the aircraft we have to fill some entry forms and we are frightened by the terrifying and threatening sentence on a form: "smuggling of drugs is punished by immediate death." I am from a generation that has never touched any drugs but this sentence still sounds ominous.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. I sent my condolences in 2005 to the current King Abdullah when his predecessor died. The king is the highest representative of the executive and religious power; a somewhat shocking sentence says – if I quote the materials from our embassy – that "all other institutions of the state are advisory bodies." Moreover, the Parliament or "Consultative Assembly" is appointed. So far, it doesn't work in the same way in our corners of the world but the European Parliament is gradually converging to a consultative role.

In 2005 they had the first elections ever and they were only local elections. Only men could vote. There are no political parties in the country.

It is unbelievable – but it is something I already know well – how much time one spends above Saudi Arabia during a flight. The country's area exceeds 2.2 million square kilometers (I admit I can't say on the top of my head what is the area of Europe without Russia and Turkey!) which is about 70 Czech Republics. There are 28 million inhabitants over here, including about 1/3 of foreigners. Riyadh's population is over 5 million people. I was looking forward to a warm weather but even the weather isn't what it used to be. In Riyadh, the temperature was only 18 °C today and at night, the temperature is forecast to drop to 8 °C. They would need to add a bit of CO2 and to warm the Earth. It seems that a small amount would be sufficient – at least this is what our global warming prophets are telling us.

Václav Klaus, Právo, January 17th, 2012

Click to zoom in.

Part II: January 18th

Yesterday, I didn't have time to write that immediately after our arrival, we attended a meeting with our compatriots living in Riyadh which was organized by our embassy. They're no emigrants but rather people who are working and earning money in Saudi Arabia – businessmen, bankers, doctors, nurses. I didn't expect their number to be this high. I have gone through many similar meetings in the world but this one was really different – by the structure of the participants. And a bit strange. They would like to see better conditions when they return and the Czech Republic should take care of it. They primarily want the same salaries as in Saudi Arabia. ;-)

Click to zoom in.

Tuesday is dedicated to a conference which is the reason of my visit here. In the huge congress center, just like expected, only 1 person it 10 wears a European outfit. The theme is how to proceed with further industrialization of the Arab world. They are trying to diversify their economies away from the exclusive dependence on oil industry. They believe that the future lies in the "knowledge economy", something I tried to explain to them not to be the case (see other texts at www.klaus.cz). Oil is still providing them with the money to pay for huge state-funded projects. Thank God that our homeland doesn't have these resources: we would live in a country flooded with empty industrial zones and with "centers of excellence".

Click to zoom in.

I've had an interesting and very factual discussion with the Saudi finance minister whom I have known from the early 1990s. It seems that he understands the current European problems well. I was trying to convince him that our two countries should sign a treaty against double taxation.

The weather got sensible and after the chilly day yesterday, we have balmy 24 °C. The transportation through the city is difficult even with the police escort: the streets are crowded with cars. A reason is that this huge city has no public transportation – and the main reason behind this fact is that they haven't invented a method that would allow men and women to share streetcars, buses, and subway trains. Segregation at public places remains very strong. In the mall, you won't find any female clerks because they would have to come in contact with men. Female clerks may only be found in special parts of the shops. Women can't drive cars, either.

Click to zoom in.

You won't find almost any older house in the city. 100 years ago, about 10,000 people lived here; the number jumped to over 5 million today. To see photographs of Riyadh of the 1950s in the museum is as exciting as to see some ancient history. One of our diplomats says that while we count history in centuries, they count it in decades. This is reflected by Riyadh's architecture, too. We live in an unbelievably extensive and luxurious hotel Ritz-Carlton which was completed recently but it is far from fully occupied.

Click to zoom in.

Five times a day, the local life is interrupted by a prayer when everything stops but it doesn't look like everyone is praying. During the last prayer we visited the largest mosque where the highest religious representative of Saudi Arabia arrived (and greeted us). Abd al-'Aziz al-Ashaikh, the grand mufti, is a counterpart of the Czech cardinal or archbishop of Prague. The mosque is next to the headquarters of the powerful religious police and near the square where public executions take place. Next to the square, children are skating on rollerblades. All these things are a bit strange.

I will leave some comments about the Saudi economy for tomorrow.

Václav Klaus, Právo, January 18th, 2012

Click to zoom in.

Part III: January 19th

On Tuesday evening we went outside the city, to a "farm" of prince Meshari, the oldest grandson of the founder of the Al Saud dynasty. It was a green island in the middle of the desert with hundreds or thousands of palms, fruit trees, vegetable, sheep, cows, and especially with a dinner composed of marvelous Arab dainties served in a modernized tent where CNN was running throughout the whole night, however. I was joined by folks from the Czech gas company Plynostav Pardubice who are trying to penetrate to the Saudi oil industry and the son of Prince Meshari – Prince Turki – is a co-owner of the company Plynostav Arabian Ltd. (Plynostav is a Czech word, a composite meaning Gas-Construction; Pardubice is a town in Eastern Bohemia.)

An interesting debate began after my question what is the current main problem of the country. The answer was clear – they think it's the social conflict between the liberals and conservatives. There has to be a shift, all four princes around me agree. However, it shouldn't be mindless Westernization which is an assault on the human dignity because this is what the Saudi society doesn't want to accept. That's why the progress has to be cautious because the traditions have to be respected. The current government is trying to soften this problem by a very generous welfare system.

Click to zoom in.

The newspapers are rather accurately reporting what I said in my talk yesterday and right on the second page, you find a cute picture: a blue wagon powered by a red locomotive marked by the word China. However, the train has the Euro symbols instead of the wheels, so it doesn't move too smoothly or quickly. Along the train, you find freely floating letters A (like in AAA). I always believe in the power of caricatures; this one is marvelous.

Click to zoom in.

In the same newspapers, Arab News, there is an article called "Green Flag – Green Country" with information about the establishing of the Saudi Environmental Society. The Saudi flag is really green but the country itself is closer to yellow. We are going behind the city borders to see the beginning of the desert which is hopelessly non-green but a hundreds of kilometers long fracture (which is as tall as 200 meters) could offer an excellent scenery for potential Arab western movies.

It's always pleasant to eat here. Prince Meshari is telling me that we in Europe have an advantage because one may always notice an extra kilogram of body weight when one tries to button the suit up while their outfits don't register even 20 additional pounds. That's right: we're lucky to have the suits in Europe but it's increasingly difficult to button them up.

Click to zoom in.

The Czech-Saudi economic relationships are not too extensive but they are growing: 20 years ago, our trade was worth 25 million dollars annually, today it is 10 times as much. Our exports exceed our imports by a factor of 20: we don't import oil from this place. Oil represents one-half of the whole Saudi economy and Saudi Arabia is the world's second country in the oil production after Russia. The oil revenues amount to 90% of the revenues of the state budget and that's why they managed to end up with a 14% surplus last year. That would be a dream of the European finance ministers.

Saudi Arabia is observing the developments of the world around it rather anxiously. It has grown unsettled especially by the events in Iran, it considers the exit of the U.S. troops from Iraq to be disputable, and it is afraid of the growing influence of Iran on the politics of Iraq. It also hints that Assad's regime in Syria has lost all legitimacy and a regime change should take place. The debate about this issue is open.

We are completing our journey by another dinner, mostly with the world of business but also with politicians. At night, we fly to Frankfurt and in the morning to Prague.

Václav Klaus, Právo, January 19th, 2012

See also: Klaus: EU membership has little or negative value for Czechia; Klaus expects BRIC and rational oil producing countries to lead growth in the near future.

Bonus

We admire President Klaus but democracy is different and this blog is independent so let me add a music video that really, but really hasn't been approved by the Prague Castle. ;-) It's the Czech version of "Live Is Life [Opus]" by the Heavy Pokondr Band.

The Czech title is "Prejs to čmajz" ("They say you pinched it").

Lyrics (EN)

0:00 [Narration, female host]: One minute was enough and he became a global superstar of the first magnitude. Although not of the type he was imagining.
0:04 [Chilean president speaks in Spanish]
0:18 [Narration, female host]: And during his journey through Latin America, President Václav Klaus also visited Chile where he fell in love with, among other things, a protocol pen.

[Pictures from TVs reporting on the story.]

0:48 Nah nah nah nah nah [2x]
0:55 Václav, what are you doing!?
0:59 Nah nah nah nah nah [2x] vrrrr
1:08 Pinched! Nah nah nah nah nah
1:12 I hear you pinched it. Nah 5x.
1:18 Václav, I hear you pinched it. Nah 5x
1:22 Yup, pinched. Nah 5x

1:28 Everyone knows he's a demon, Václav is the best
1:34 A pretty pen without the case may have confused his head
1:39 This boy is so savvy, Václav is the best
1:44 When an economist attends a briefing, he's immediately thinking... what he could snaffle

1:52 He pinched a pen. Nah 5x
1:56 I hear you pinched it. Nah 5x
2:02 [Skillfully] pinched. Nah 5x
2:07 Václav, I hear you pinched it. Nah 5x

2:12 I hear you pinched it in the center of Chile with no problems
2:18 So you pinched it. In good mood, while sitting, it has an elegance.
2:23 Skillfully pinched. You had a free minute so you swiped it.
2:28 They say you pinched it. In a short minute, whatever.

2:33 Everyone knows he's a demon, Václav is the best
2:39 A pretty pen without the case may have confused his head
2:44 This boy is so savvy, Václav is the best
2:49 When an economist attends a briefing, he's immediately thinking... what he could snaffle

Chorus:
2:58 They say you pinched it. Nah 5x
3:02 They say you pinched it. Nah 5x
3:09 Václav, they say you pinched it. Nah 5x
3:13 They say you pinched it. Nah 5x

[Jay Leno's comments]

Chorus

3:59 In Czechia, every wretch is stealing
4:02 It is one of the ways
4:05 We read about it almost every day, that could confuse his head
4:10 The resulting affair was big, Václav earned arrears
4:15 When an economist attends a briefing, he's immediately thinking... what he could snaffle.

You've pinched it!

4:20 Klaus: Yup, yup, come on, come on. This is no laughing matter! ;-)

Obama will reject Keystone XL today

2012-01-18T19:05:00.000+01:00

Today, Wikipedia, Anthony Watts' blog, and others are protesting against a planned legislation to fight online piracy. In principle, it is directed against servers such as thepiratebay which are not exactly something whose survival is a condition for my happy life.

However, I seem to agree that the bill, as formulated now, could be abused against pretty much any website on the Internet including the vital ones – such as Wikipedia, Google, or TRF – and that could introduce censorship and cripple the Internet to a comparable extent as the Great Firewall of China or the Iran IRNA Intranet.

At any rate, while such legislation could affect us over here, your humble correspondent is not a U.S. citizen so it doesn't seem to be my business to tell the U.S. lawmakers what to do. Moreover, I would bet that the bills will be defeated, anyway. ;-) However, the supporters of SOPA currently beat the opponents in the Congress, 80 to 31 (pretty much across parties).

CATO Institute is obviously against SOPA. They use a map to explain that Americans have the right to speak on a Czech board such as The Reference Frame. However, the dot seems to be in Eastern Moravia if not Slovakia or Poland. ;-)

Because you can't open WUWT, TRF may be the first place where you can learn about the breaking news: this afternoon, Barack Obama is expected to stun many people including myself and reject TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline: The Montreal Gazette, others. The Department of State should release the official report in hours.

As far as I can say, there were many signs that Obama's administration was leaving the ideology of environmentalism and its most radical incarnation, the global warming alarmism. It is not clear to me what has led to this shocking decision. But if Barack Obama plans to secure some Gore voters or Hansen supporters, he may easily find out that there are not too many of them left in America. Obama's White House internship could easily become unsustainable after November 2012.

Gingrich immediately responded to the "utter stupidity of this guy" which is composed of three parts: he kills jobs; he prevents America from achieving energy security; he drives Canada, despite its pro-American conservative prime minister, to the hands of China.

Canada's new fossil fuel reserves are pretty much bound to be tapped in a foreseeable future and they will be exported to nearby territories. Keystone XL was an economical and environmentally friendly way to do so. I guess that any other proposed infrastructure will be suboptimal.

Obama will say that he hasn't had enough time to evaluate the impact of the pipeline. Well, he received the application three years ago and if it is not enough for him and his people to evaluate it (while they only need two years to actually build it), then he should be a president of the Union of Snails, not the United States. Also, he implicitly says that he wanted to screw the Republicans who finally imposed an "artificial" deadline. Well, any deadline is artificial but it is often needed for people not to behave as snails, or not to ignore their job duties at all – which is exactly what Obama is doing. More generally, if he views his role in the White House as one of the maker of inconveniences for the G.O.P., a kind of a little tapeworm in the appendix of the G.O.P., then it's very sad.

Shoah in Pilsen: 70 years

Almost exactly 70 years ago, on January 17th, 1942, the deportation of Jewish citizens of my town of Pilsen began. 2,064 Jews (out of 120,000+ people in Pilsen) were deported in three large groups. All of them were sent to the Great Fortress of the Fortress City Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech), a concentration camp on our protectorate's territory. Only 204 of them managed to see the end of the war. Instead of working for the Third Reich in Theresienstadt itself as promised, they were being transported further to the East (Poland etc.) where they were disappearing.

I've seen some museums and other things: these were horrifying events. Wars are terrible as well but I still feel less uneasy about a conflict in which two sides fight and each of them has the natural right to try to defend itself.

The place where the Jews were concentrated was in the Štrunc Gardens, meters from the soccer stadium which was just upgraded and where Victoria Pilsen is going to play the Europa League in the coming spring. The water tower and the chimney on the right side of the picture belongs to our well-known brewery which is just across the river.

Meanwhile, Samsung's new tablet comes equipped with an application that may be able to save some Jewish lives in 2012 by touching a single button. ;-) Press "CC" (make it red) for English subtitles.

DHCP and SENS service hang, timeout

2012-01-18T07:41:00.000+01:00

Problem that has occurred to me, too

Your computer may get restarted once, after you wake it up from hibernation. At any rate, next time, once you choose your user name to log in, you are waiting for long minutes before you can see your desktop. You're told that some Windows services failed to start.

In the problems waiting to be reported, you find new messages on DHCP and SENS. DHCP is a system to start the Internet and assign IP addresses; SENS is "Systems Event Notification Service". At any rate, because DHCP failed to start (and in services.msc, it shows "starting" all the time), you figure out that this is the reason why the Internet isn't working for you.

All related services and programs that depend on the Internet fail, too. You are planning to reinstall your computer, throw it into trash bin, make a terrorist attack against the mall where you bought it, and declare a nuclear war to 27 countries that may have cooperated with the computer's producer or with Microsoft. But is it the simplest solution to the problem?

Another solution

Patiently get to Windows again, click at the "Start" button, go to "Programs", then "Accessories", then choose the black icon of "Command prompt", right-click it, choose "Run as administrator", and in the DOS window, type

netsh winsock reset

Press "enter". Then write exit and press "enter" again. Reboot the computer. Everything should be fixed.

Explanation

I have surely accused hackers' attacks, AVIRA antivirus' malfunctioning, and various other factors but at the end, I still don't know what caused the problem that made it necessary to restart the network services by the command above. Do you have something to say about it?

How bad science becomes common knowledge

2012-01-17T18:43:00.001+01:00

Two case studies (solar and climate change)
by Eric Dennis

►► The author holds a PhD in physics from UC Santa Barbara and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Industrial Progress. For related posts, see “Go Industrial, Not ‘Green’” by Alex Epstein (Parts 1 and 2). ◄◄

“When we hear of vast numbers of scientists endorsing Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph… What we don’t hear is that the vast, vast majority of them never sought access to the specific data and algorithms claimed to support it (much of which was actively withheld from the scientific community at large). They did not independently evaluate either Mann’s claims or the specific, technical objections raised against them by a few critics who were able to wrest those data and algorithms from Mann’s clenched fist over a period of years. Neither had the scientific media performed any independent, critical review when reporting on such issues for over a decade, most of them simply not being equipped to do so.”

To read the popular media’s account of climate science, it is a certainty that burning fossil fuels is causing an unprecedented and catastrophic warming of the planet. The volume of such claims is so vast that those skeptical of catastrophic warming are often viewed as conspiracy theorists, believing that scientists and the media have formed a secret cabal to foist falsehoods on the public.

But the case for being skeptical of catastrophic warming – and, more broadly, many popular scientific assertions – has nothing to do with conspiracy theories. It is based on knowledge of the mechanism by which new scientific ideas are evaluated and spread by non-experts, who are prone to choose winners and losers on the basis of congenial political ideology rather than scientific merit.

Case 1: Aidan Dwyer as Solar Genius

A recent episode in the science and tech media illustrates this mechanism. The Wall Street Journal, Popular Science, Slashdot, The Atlantic Wire, and Gizmodo all recently lauded a new “breakthrough” at the hands of a 13 year-old “genius,” Aidan Dwyer, first recognized by the American Museum of Natural History with its Young Naturalist Award.

His insight? A “super-efficient solar array” differing from standard arrays in one respect: the arrangement of individual solar cells at various random-looking angles according to a specific mathematical pattern (the Fibonacci sequence) that characterizes the leaves and branches of certain trees.

By all accounts, Aidan Dwyer is a bright, well-meaning boy. But this proposal makes no sense, and he has ultimately been ill-served by the adults lauding it. For good reason, the normal configuration of solar panels has each cell oriented at the angle yielding optimal total exposure to the sun’s day-long path in the sky. Each cell is either oriented at that one optimal angle or at a sub-optimal angle producing less output power—and mimicking a tree is far from optimal.

But notice that the narrative is optimal to two generations of media members steeped in “green” ideology: an innocent prodigy, influenced by the beauty and wisdom of nature, imposes natural order on brute technology to prove the viability of green energy. And so those media members, lacking any particular expertise on solar panels, ran with it.

Aidan Dwyer would never have received the same acclaim had he, say, conducted an experiment in his family’s garage leading him to claim the discovery of a new chemical agent for fracking. Can anyone imagine that the most prominent natural history museum in the country would then give him an award and the media would trumpet the arrival of a budding genius in the field of energy research? Of course not.

This episode is important because it shows, in microcosm, how much of what passes for common knowledge comes to be. From the vast well of concrete events and ideas in science and technology, certain ones are picked up and amplified while others are discarded by the network of influencers and disseminators—from government bureaucrats awarding the grants that academic science lives on, to the mainstream media publishing what it regards as the most important findings.

The vast, vast majority of the network is by necessity non-expert on any given topic. In an advanced, division-of-labor society, there is a division of scientific expertise. That is a good thing, as it enables a staggering total of knowledge to be discovered and applied throughout society. But there is an ever-present hazard of loud or numerous non-experts promoting views as certainties because those views fit their political ideologies.

Case 2: Michael Mann’s "Hockey Stick"

And that is exactly what has happened with global warming. For example, when we hear of vast numbers of scientists endorsing Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph—the rhetorical star of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”—what we don’t hear is that the vast, vast majority of them never sought access to the specific data and algorithms claimed to support it (much of these have been actively withheld from the scientific community at large).

They did not independently evaluate either Mann’s claims or the specific, technical objections raised against them by a few critics who were able to wrest those data and algorithms from Mann’s clenched fist over a period of years. Neither had the scientific media performed any independent, critical review when reporting on such issues for over a decade, most of them simply not being equipped to do so.

From the perspective of those among the green-leaning media who actually are equipped by this point to verify reports of serious flaws in Mann’s approach, why exert all that effort with the hope of merely confirming what is already an ideological pillar, when a positive result would be superfluous and a negative one would be, at best, ominously confusing? This attitude is in fact embraced by climatologists at the highest levels.

After a critic asked renowned climatologist Phil Jones to release the raw data from which he has generated one of the primary historical records of global temperature, Jones’s famous response was “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

It is now generally acknowledged that Michael Mann’s original claims about a precipitous acceleration in global warming around the advent of industrialization were founded on a broken methodology. As shown originally by two Canadian researchers, and verified by a U.S. Senate-appointed expert panel of independent statisticians, the technique indicates precipitous warming, whether fed with actual climate data or with simulated data designed to lack any underlying trend at all.

Yet it was not until five years after Mann’s original publication—and after the hockey stick graph was immortalized by the ostensible cream of international climate expertise at the IPCC—that the broken parts under its hood were first identified in a scientific journal. And this was accomplished not by any of Mann’s colleagues at Penn State, nor any of his many co-authors, peer-reviewers, or IPCC editors. It was accomplished by a mathematically savvy mining consultant, Steve McIntyre, and an economist, Ross McKitrick, who both took it up essentially as a hobby, receiving not one of the billions of dollars in government climatology funding funneled to academic researchers.

The same basic mechanism that made Aidan Dwyer a star has, on a different level, made Michael Mann a star. The primary difference is the level of technical sophistication—a level in the latter case just high enough to be dangerous in a realm where even expert statisticians (which climatologists are not) have to be on guard against inconspicuous but critical errors.

Enthralling your average climatologist requires something subtler than the mathematics of branch growth patterns, something more like Michael Mann’s novel statistical technique to extract imperceptible trends from a hodgepodge of tree ring and ice core measurements that seem to imply a dangerous acceleration in warming circa 1900 (the “hockey stick” graph), hence an ideologically convenient fatal flaw in industrial capitalism.

Note that this is especially dangerous in a field such as climatology, where there are zero experts who can accurately predict how various important but poorly understood factors will come together to drive the climate. This is a field ripe for ideological grant-givers to make superstars out of intellectually immodest mediocrities.

And just as Aidan Dwyer’s celebrity carries on despite clear technical refutation, so the global warming movement carries on despite the hockey stick having been split asunder by clear proof of the inherent hockey-stick bias in Mann’s statistical technique.

Disseminating Good Science

None of this implies any cognitive determinism for climatologists or pop-science consumers sharing a common world-view. Each one is free to think for himself, to gather new data perhaps through alternative networks, and to assess the totality of evidence available to him. But such tasks require an effort whose mark many want to display without going to the trouble of exerting it, as is demonstrably the case with the denizens of the global warming movement. So arises the wide-spread belief that we’re facing a climate crisis, that the “green” technology is out there to replace fossil fuels, and that it’s just a matter of getting the right set of bright young kids working in the right direction.

To some extent the intellectual division of labor will always mean that there is no guarantee against large-scale, ideologically driven mistakes gaining wide currency. However this is especially probable in the present, monolithic system of government-funded basic research, where bureaucrats carelessly appropriate money they didn’t earn on projects whose benefits they won’t receive, inspired by ideology-laden fads whose underlying accuracy they are not particularly concerned with.

The elimination of the profit-motive does not banish individuals’ pursuit of their own interests; it redirects that pursuit away from honest value creation and into a distorted, unspoken realm of indirect benefits and cynical power bartering among appropriators whose one common goal is the expansion of their appropriation stream.

What we need is to restore the profit-motive in a system of free individuals, pursuing their own goals openly with their own wealth. It is said that such a system will stifle visionary thinkers whose ideas are too long-range to make a quick buck. But this is just a smokescreen obscuring what profit-and-loss in a system of well-defined property rights—profits whose range is much longer than the next election—are uniquely capable of factoring into such investment decisions: the inescapable trade-off between the revolutionary power of basic research and the probability of concrete benefits flowing from it.

Large Stakes

What’s at stake is the lives of billions of people in the present and future. Their lives depend on access to industrial technology that scientifically illiterate politicians around the world are subjecting to the ransom of their regulations and controls. Ransom letters are delivered to us daily in the op-eds, the articles, the talking heads educating us about thousands of experts that have all verified the coming of an apocalypse against which our only savior, conveniently, is more climatology research funding and more concentrated political power.

U.S. classrooms beating unlimited alarmism

2012-01-17T14:56:00.001+01:00

A few years ago, kids could only hear one thing about the climate at school: man-made climate change is making the apocalypse imminent, there is no God who could save us, and Al Gore is His prophet. ;-)

A typical lecture on climatology in the contemporary EU schools.

This description pretty much applies to much of Western Europe even today. However, it is thankfully no longer the case of the U.S.:

Climate change skepticism seeps into science classrooms (L.A. Times)

In the text above, an activist named Ms Neela Banerjee is crying that the "deniers" have succeeded in many states of the U.S. in their efforts to regulate the expansion of the global warming propaganda at schools. At some places, teachers are required to discuss the existence and/or arguments of climate skeptics.

At other places, any talk about a man-made climate catastrophe at schools was pretty much outlawed. At most places, teachers who dare to promote Al-Gore-like delusions about the climate and the mankind's role in it face opposition from the kids and their parents.

Needless to say, the author as well as Eugenie Scott of NCSE compare climate skepticism to creationism. It's just a cheap analogy and if you look at some actual climate skeptics such as your humble correspondent who are as enthusiastic supporters of Darwin's explanation of the origin of species (and its importance) as you can get, you easily erase any doubts about the fact that the attempts to correlate climate skepticism with creationism are complete bogus.

A decade ago, I attended a talk by Eugenie Scott (in Santa Cruz?) – about creationism, strategies of ID advocates to get it to schools, and so on. I agreed with everything she said: apologies to my dear creationist readers. However, when I look into the past, her attitude inevitably looks shallow. Even though she said many things that were true, her viewpoint has always been one of an activist or a "policy woman", not a scientist's viewpoint.

So she decided to adopt some scientific opinions that were transferred to her from others: NCSE tackles climate change denial (press release). Unfortunately, she is apparently doing the same thing with the climate debate. And that's too bad. In science, different questions generally have different answers. Saying that question X is "just like" another question Y – when these questions obviously have nothing to do with one another – is pure demagoguery.

At any rate, I hope that the parents in the U.S. realize that they have the right to protect their kids from brainwashing and pseudoscientific superstitions. This miseducation that peaked a few years ago has been bad for many reasons.

First of all, and this is the most important point for me, the statements that were being taught to kids were not scientifically valid when it came to their technical content. The human activity poses no threat for the climate and at least in the next 100 years, it won't. The untruth makes kids confused about important things and this confusion may later influence their decisions in the practical life.

Second of all, and it is equally important, this miseducation led the kids to totally flawed opinions about the essence of the scientific method in general. The curriculum ultimately boiled down to the opinions of Greenpeace tree huggers who always raise their hand when a bullshit proposal smells green. These people love to talk about "truth by consensus" and other methods that have absolutely no room in proper science even though they are probably essential for mindless activist organizations such Greenpeace.

Third of all, and many people rightfully worried about it, the education was creating a generation of frustrated kids with almost no hope, constant feelings of guilt, and this would arguably be bad for the future of America and the world even if there were something true about the alarmist propaganda – and there's nothing true about it. Many kids may be ready for a psychiatrist because of this doomsday miseducation.

So I hope that all the responsible Americans will continue to go after the neck of the climate alarmists at schools and those who harbor them. And as a guy in a country where climate change remained pretty much a non-topic, even at schools, I hope that the European Union will ultimately get rid of the totalitarian climate propaganda at schools, too.

And that's the memo.

Could the Koide formula be real?

2012-01-16T19:45:00.000+01:00

Warning: the following line contains spoilers
Nope.

That was the compactified version of the article. Below you may find the decompactified one.

The page containing this picture explains how to associate numbers 0-9 with planets and how to remember the author's telephone number. Also, it tells you that numerology is for the people who find astrology too scientific. ;-)

In 1981, a man named Yoshio Koide has made a bizarre observation known as the Koide formula. It has apparently been a source of life energy for more than 30 years for our friends such as Mitchell Porter, Carl Brannen, Alejandro Rivero, and maybe others.

What is it about?

Consider the three physical masses of the charged leptons, the electron, the muon, and the tau lepton:

\[\begin{align}
m_e c^2 &= 0.510998910(13)\,{\rm MeV}\\
m_\mu c^2 &= 105.658367(4) \,{\rm MeV}\\
m_\tau c^2 &= 1,776.84(17) \,{\rm MeV}
\end{align}\]

The digits in the parentheses indicate the error margin. Now, spend a few hours by trying to find some interesting numerical values of various ratios. You won't find any. After some time, you define this rather contrived – but not too contrived – ratio:

\[ Q = \frac{m_e+m_\mu+m_\tau}{(\sqrt{m_e}+\sqrt{m_\mu}+\sqrt{m_\tau})^2} \approx \frac 23 \]

More precisely, the numerical value is
\[ Q = 0.666659(10) \] Within less than one standard deviation, the value of $Q$ agrees with $2/3$. The error margin is $10^{-5}$ but to get the relative one, the absolute one should be divided by $2/3$ so the relative error is $1.5\times 10^{-5}$. Let us describe the agreement as an agreement of "almost five significant figures". Almost five digits match.

Numerological aspects of the identity

We may first discuss some aspects of the identity that are seen from the viewpoint of someone who knows nothing about physics and/or the origin of masses etc.: remarkably enough, this viewpoint seems almost identical to Mitchell Porter's viewpoint. ;-)

First, notice that $Q$ is dimensionless and only depends on the mass ratios. If you changed the units or doubled the values of all the three masses, $Q$ wouldn't change. So $Q$ is a function of $206.76827$ and $3477.1893$, the muon-electron and tau-electron mass ratios, and nothing else.

Second, ask the question: what are the a priori possible values of $Q$? Assuming that the masses are three positive numbers, you may obtain a maximum ratio $Q=1$ if two of the masses vanish (or are much smaller than the third one). In that case, $Q=1/1=1$. On the other hand, $Q=1/3$ if the three masses are equal: $Q=3/3^2=1/3$.

Great. So the actual value of $Q=2/3$ is exactly in between the two extreme limits. You may say that this makes the value $Q=2/3$ very special which should make us more excited. But you may also say something very different: you may say that the probability distribution for different values of $Q$ is almost certainly peaked somewhere in the middle of the interval $[1/3,1]$, so getting a number very close to the middle is actually less surprising.

If you take this fact into account, the degree of surprise will drop to the equivalent of "four matching digits".

You may also express the statement $Q=2/3$ differently, using the angle between two 3-dimensional vectors:

\[ {\rm angle} ( (1,1,1), (\sqrt{m_e},\sqrt{m_\mu},\sqrt{m_\tau}) ) = 45° \]

In this case, 45° isn't really in the middle because the maximum angle is $0.304\pi$, not $0.5\pi$, which is the angle between $(1,1,1)$ and $(1,0,0)$.

Adding the imaginary parts

The Koide formula for $Q$ has an error margin that almost entirely boils down to the value of $m_\tau$ which is not known too accurately. Should you believe that $Q=2/3$ holds accurately which would mean that you may literally calculate several additional digits in $m_\tau$? Well, just like at the beginning, the answer is Nope.

I will eventually jump to the full-fledged physics discussion but before I do so, let us add a purely mathematical improvement. A problem with the precise calculation of $Q$ so far is that the masses in Nature are actually not real numbers. They're naturally complex numbers, with the imaginary parts' being the width (the inverse lifetime, in the $\hbar=c=1$ units):

\[ M_{\rm total} = M_{\rm real} - \frac{i\Gamma}{2} \]

where $\Gamma=1/\tau$ is the inverse lifetime of the particle, the width. Why is there the factor of $1/2$ over there? Well, go to the rest frame and appreciate that the wave function goes like
\[ \psi(t)\sim \exp(-iM_{\rm total}t ),\qquad |\psi(t)|^2 \sim \exp(-\Gamma t). \] The probability is the squared wave function, the factor of $1/2$ doubles, and you get the right exponentially decreasing probability $\exp(-\Gamma t) = \exp(-t/\tau)$ that you expect from the lifetime $\tau$. The electron is stable but if we want to be analytic and accurate, we must add the corresponding imaginary values $1/2\tau$ to the real numbers described above. If you know the lifetimes, the masses become

\[\begin{align}
m_e c^2 &= 0.510998910(13)\,{\rm MeV}\\
m_\mu c^2 &= (105.658367(4)-9.41 \times 10^{-16}) \,{\rm MeV}\\
m_\tau c^2 &= (1,776.84(17)-7.13\times 10^{-9}) \,{\rm MeV}
\end{align}\]

These are the actual locations of the poles you should use; treating the real parts separately would be an extremely unnatural thing to do. So is $Q=2/3$ within the observable error margins even if we incorporate the nonzero imaginary parts?

The ratio of the real parts of the numerator and denominator of $Q$ is $2/3$. We want the ratios of the imaginary parts to be $2/3$ as well. However, we will quickly see that it doesn't work. The imaginary parts are only affected by the imaginary part of $m_\tau$ because only the tau lepton has a significant width. And you may easily check that whatever the imaginary part of $m_\tau$ actually is, the ratio of the imaginary part of the numerator and denominator of $Q$ is actually $0.79$, safely different from $0.66666$.

If we write the most accurate values of the masses, including the imaginary parts, the Koide formula is safely broken. Now, claiming that something should hold "totally exactly" but you should only be using the real values is an extremely bizarre and unnatural statement. In fact, numbers of the form $Z = M-i\Gamma/2$ which are "almost real" can be made "exactly real" in many ways. You may take the real part. But you may also take the absolute value. And you may do lots of other things. In all cases, you get something similar to the real part but none of the rules is more motivated than others and different rules will imply different predictions about the more accurate digits. No doubt, some of the rules how to deal with the nonzero width could produce better results for the (real) Koide formula but the defenders of the Koide formula don't know which one it should be.

I am extremely open-minded so I could imagine that there could be shocking relationships between things that shouldn't be related in simple ways, for reasons to be discussed below. But the failure of the formula to work when the imaginary parts are incorporated closes this question for me even at the level at which I "overlook all of my knowledge of physics".

When we actually take our knowledge of particle physics into account, the idea that a similar bizarre ratio $Q$ should be equal to $0.666666666666\dots$ sounds utterly indefensible. Let's see why.

Stop hiding physics

Consider a messy real world problem. For example, calculate the number of kilocalories in a cheeseburger prepared from particular ingredients bought in Boston which followed a particular recipe. Let me tell you it has 314.159 kcal. Someone notices that the value is $100 \pi$ and predicts that if you measure the calories more accurately, you obtain $314.1592653589793238\dots$ and so on (I memorized 100 digits when I was a kid but you surely don't want to be annoyed by meaningless numbers).

Is there a reason to believe the person? He has offered "almost five" digits that agree as evidence of a remarkable statement – namely that an arbitrary number of digits will agree. Will they? Is the evidence enough? Well, it's surely not. Extraordinary statements require extraordinary evidence. And indeed, one needs to know some physics – either particle physics (a remarkable body of knowledge and the true culture of our epoch that is known as "preconceptions" by the numerologists) or the physics of cheeseburgers – to rationally decide whether the statement is bold, extraordinary, or not. It is very bold.

The number of calories in a hamburger is a complicated function of the properties and concentration of various ingredients and many other things. I hope that I don't have to explain why there shouldn't be any simple yet exact numerological fact applying to the cheeseburger case.

But my point is that the situation with the physical charged fermion masses is analogous. The physical charged lepton masses are very messy and complex functions of some parameters that are more fundamental. If simple rules hold for some parameters, they hold for the fundamental ones. But the physical charged lepton masses are so complicated cheeseburgers that any detailed numerical patterns that could hold for the fundamental quantities get mixed up and the chance that there's still a simple rule left is zero for all practical purposes (and most of the impractical purposes as well).

Yukawa couplings, corrections, running, mixing

The appearance of the square root of the masses in the formula for $Q$ is strange; one would feel comfortable if the squared masses occurred there. But is there any reason for an identity involving the square roots? They seem very unnatural. Their very appearance indicates that someone has been "mining" for such coincidences. If you randomly write down 10,000 candidate identities, you have pretty good chances that one of them will hold with the accuracy of 4 digits.

However, this complaint about the square roots is one of the milder ones. A more serious complaint is that the Standard Model shows that the lepton masses aren't fundamental parameters at all. In the Standard Model, the masses of charged leptons arise from the Yukawa interaction term in the Lagrangian,

\[ {\mathcal L}_{\rm Yukawa} = yh \bar\Psi \Psi \]

In the expression above, $y$ is a dimensionless (in $d=4$ and classically) coupling constant; $h$ is the real Higgs field; $\Psi,\bar\Psi$ is the Dirac field describing the charged lepton or its complex conjugate, respectively.

To preserve the electroweak symmetry – which is needed for a peaceful behavior of the W-bosons and Z-bosons – one can't just add the electron or muon or tau mass by hand. After all, the electroweak symmetry says that the left-handed electron is fundamentally the same particle as the electron neutrino. Instead, we must add the Yukawa cubic vertex – with two fermionic external lines and one Higgs external line – and hope that Mr Higgs or Ms God will break the electroweak symmetry which also means that he will break the symmetry between electrons and their neutrinos.

And be sure that he or She will. He only gives the large masses to the charged leptons.

In the vacuum, the Higgs field may be written as
\[ h = v+ \Delta h \] Here, $v$ is a purely numerical ($c$-number-valued) dimensionful constant whose value 246 GeV was known before we knew that the Higgs boson mass is 125 GeV. The value of $v$ is related to the W-boson and Z-boson masses and other things that were measured a long time ago. The term $\Delta h$ contains the rest of the dynamical Higgs field (which is operator-valued) but its expectation value is already zero.

The field $h$ has the vacuum expectation value (vev) 246 GeV and its being nonzero is what breaks the electroweak symmetry and what makes W-bosons and Z-bosons massive and what makes the observed properties of electrons and neutrinos so different. The field doesn't want to roll to $h=0$ because there is a potential energy $V(h)$ which is fully symmetric under the gauge symmetry transformations but it has a minimum at this nonzero absolute value of $h$ because the shape of $V(h)$ resembles the Mexican hat. That's why it's known as the champagne bottle bottom potential or Landau buttocks or Mexican hat potential in the prosperous first, socialist second, and poor third world, respectively. Because most of us already use the term "Mexican hat potential", you may predict what is going to happen with our prosperity. ;-)

Fine. So I tried to explain to you that the masses of the charged leptons are not fundamental parameters. They are results of the Higgs vacuum expectation value and the Yukawa interactions between the Higgses and the fermions. You should imagine that $m_e$ is just a shortcut for
\[ m_e = y_e v \] where the Yukawa coupling $y_e$ for the electron and the Higgs vev $v=$246 GeV are more fundamental than $m_e$. If you write the masses in this way, $v$ will simply cancel and you get the same formula for $Q$ where $m$ is replaced by $y$ everywhere.

However, this is not quite accurate because the physical masses are equal to $yv$ up to the leading order (tree level diagrams i.e. classical physics) only. There are (quantum) loop corrections and many other corrections. Moreover, the values of $y$ that produce $Q=2/3$ are the low-energy values of the Yukawa couplings. Even though the Yukawa couplings are more fundamental than the masses themselves, their low-energy values are less fundamental than some other values, their high-energy values.

Once again, the "apparent" strength of the Yukawa couplings at long distances is another example of a cheeseburger. It's very messy and determined from the values of the same – as well as other – couplings measured at high energies, through complicated functions related to the "renormalization group techniques".
\[ y_e({\rm low\,\,} E) = f_{\rm cheeseburger-like} ( y_e({\rm high\,\,} E), \dots ) \] Only the arguments of the function on the right hand side, the high-energy values of various quantities, are players in sufficiently crisp and sharp laws of physics, e.g. grand unified theories or string theory, that have a good reason to be constrained by a relatively "simple" formula. But the low-energy values of the Yukawa couplings are a cheeseburger created from those ingredients. And the physical masses of the charged leptons are a McDonald's menu in which the cheeseburger is being improved by a few freedom fries, some Coke, ketchup, and other things. You just don't expect a random messy function of Coke, beef, potatoes, etc. to be equal to 314.159265358979 or 0.666666666666.

I know that it's unlikely that Mitchell, Carl, or Alejandro will get this point of mine – the point that they are trying to find patterns in cheeseburgers. They have spent years in this fundamentally misguided mode of thinking (or the lack thereof) and it may be hard to admit that one has wasted years with nonsense. But I hope and believe that many other readers will save their own years in the future.

And that's the memo.

Bonus: Koide on steroids

I have prepared a 22nd century research project for our numerological friends. Here is the identity:
\[ \frac{(m_e^{1/8}+m_\mu^{1/8}+m_\tau^{1/8})^{24}}{(m_e^{-1/3}+m_\mu^{-1/3}+m_\tau^{-1/3})^{-9}} = 1.000005 \times 10^{19} \] Within tenths of the experimental error margin, the right hand side is exactly $10^{19}$.

Note that its accuracy is better than $10^{-5}$ in this case! And the numbers such as $3,8,9,24$ are so deep, not to speak about the result's being such a marvelously accurate yet high power of ten. :-)

I needed ten minutes to find tons of such "remarkable" identities but I hope that Mitchell, Alejandro, and Carl will spend a happy century by writing thousands of inspired followup papers. ;-)

NASA: Canada is focal point of climate change

2012-01-16T10:14:00.001+01:00

Comments about frozen methane and doubled fossil fuel reserves added at the end

Canada became the first country that has withdrawn from the Kyoto protocol a month ago. NASA's experts similar to James Hansen and CapitalistImperialistPig have already incorporated this event into their models.

The result is described here:

NASA says Canada in 'hot spot' of ecological change (CBC)

NASA predicts massive ecological change in Canada (Digital Journal)

We are being told that the Armageddon is going to begin in Canada – especially in Alberta (no kidding) and the vicinity of the oil companies' headquarters in particular – and all ecosystems are going to move northward by 2100. Canada is already so hot today that another degree of warming would almost certainly exterminate everything that is alive, NASA implicitly argues.

Another source describes the paper as follows:

NASA Blames Canada for Global Warming (Dallas blog)

How did the NASA "experts" determine that Canada, and not the U.S., is currently the primary villain causing global warming? It's simple. The reason is that Canada has a more conservative government than the U.S. these days, something that is sort of unprecedented in the historical context.

NASA's "experts" and their comrades also insist that a smaller amount of CO2 from Canada as well a few kilograms of methane and soot is now more important for the urgent fight against the global warming apocalypse than everything else. The only way to avert the apocalypse is for Canada to become a province of Cuba, to adopt a Marxist government, and join the Kyoto protocol again.

These commies are so transparent, so predictable, so primitive, and so instinctively driven jerks. And they have always been.

There can be almost no doubt that those folks first decided that they need something catchy that involves Canada – a country that has been so disobedient lately and so dangerous for "the cause" – and then they simply produced this bogus research that was pre-ordered.

If one wants to see what and who is behind similar "research" by NASA, it may be more appropriate to look at the Huffington Post:

If You Care About Keystone and Climate Change, Occupy Exxon

Occupy Exxon and Canada because NASA has already been occupied. ;-) Well, maybe there is an even more accurate primordial source of the research on Canada:

Canada: climate criminal

Greenpeace says so. :-) While Kyoto has made it legal for countries to withdraw, you should have no doubts that Greenpeace's fifth column in the country of the maple leaf is already trying to challenge Canada's withdrawal (Reuters).

Another topic: methane hydrate reserves

Various sources have discussed a potential game-changer when it comes to fossil fuels: there could be lots of methane hydrate deposits everywhere in the world ocean.

Nature says that tests have already started in Alaska where they try to pump CO2 into some holes to get the frozen methane out of the seabed more easily.

Burning ice...

The Sunday Times describes these findings in an enthusiastic way: the world reserves of fossil fuels may have just doubled (or more).

All the champions of the peak oil – greetings to Alexander Ač – as well as various people hoping that the fossil fuels would be abandoned under their supervision will probably have to swallow a bitter pill. Meanwhile, the idea that the CO2 concentration will peak closer to 1000 ppm than 600 ppm is getting more likely.

Via Benny Peiser

Friendship: dog and dolphin

2012-01-16T08:26:00.000+01:00

An emotional video for Monday.

A dog and a dolphin in Croatia are the heroes.

By Jelena of Croatia, peugeot255.

Getting ready for 1100 °C greenhouse runaway Earth

2012-01-14T08:43:00.000+01:00

The current global average mean temperature is about 15 °C. However, Colin Goldblatt and Andrew J. Watson have submitted a preprint called

The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres

to the Royal Society which discusses a balmier temperature that we may expect soon: 1,100 °C. In such a temperature, you won't need a sweater.

Of course, the process by which this outcome will be achieved is the "runaway greenhouse effect". It gets warmer, so some oceans will evaporate and water vapor will get more abundant in the atmosphere. This water vapor will induce extra warming, and so forth. The equilibrium temperature may only be reached near 1400 K because that's where the water vapor no longer absorbs a sufficient portion of the thermal radiation.

The authors expect this great outcome to be reached in 2 billion years because the solar output will increase by a sufficient amount, as the Sun is getting closer to its red giant phase in about 7 billion years. However, may it happen that we will actually switch to the 1100 °C Earth earlier?

Of course, the right way to heat the Earth by 1100 °C is to burn a few tons of fossil fuels. The authors try hard to prove that we may soon warm the Earth by 1100 °C but they fail. Despite all the crazy assumptions they are willing to make, it seems impossible to heat the blue planet this much.

But they had already worked out some mitigation strategies – recipes how to avoid the warming by 1100 °C – so they include them in the paper, nevertheless, for the case that their analysis is wrong and we will get a 1100 °C warming soon, after all. ;-)

You couldn't make it up.

It's remarkable how unfocused similar papers are. Analyzing whether the Earth may start some runaway warming in 2 billion years is surely an interesting and legitimate (albeit purely academic) question. In the case of our planet, the dominant greenhouse gas would have to be the water vapor. There doesn't seem to be a sufficient amount of alternatives available.

But why the hell do they mix this question with some preposterous speculations about the present era which clearly doesn't allow any runaway behavior of this sort and with CO2 that has clearly nothing to do with this hypothetical effect? And why do they discuss "mitigation strategies" for a scenario that contradicts the results of their own research?

Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas and it is even the "executor" of most of the (nonsensically) high climate sensitivity as imagined by the IPCC and similar deluded pseudoscientists. It is needed to obtain the positive feedbacks, to increase the negligible no-feedback sensitivity caused by the CO2 itself.

It is doubtful whether the net feedback is actually positive; effects related to clouds may make it negative and the empirical data are more compatible with the negative sign. However, what is certain is that this feedback isn't in the "runaway" range. Note that the original warming may be strengthened by feedbacks described by a dimensionless constant, $f$. The total factor of strengthening, including feedbacks-to-feedbacks, feedbacks-to-feedbacks-to-feedbacks, and so on, is
\[ 1+ f + f^2 + f^3+\dots = \frac{1}{1-f} \] If $f$ is positive, the factor above exceeds one, so you get a stronger effect than the initial one. If $f$ is negative, the original effect is weakened. However, if $f$ is not only positive but exceeds one, then the left hand side of the equation above diverges and the right hand side, which isn't the "obvious" sum of the divergent series, is formally negative. That's the situation in which the initial perturbations exponentially grow with time instead of being weakened.

We're clearly observing that this isn't happening. It wasn't happening for billions of years. Quite generally, if $f$ were greater than one or even smaller than one but close to one, we would have to see that the climate is extremely sensitive and its temperature brutally changes when the energy flows change just a little. This is not our Earth.

Now, $f$ may be temperature-dependent itself. The "effective laws of physics" may get sufficiently different in very different conditions. But one has to be careful about these calculations and include all other changes that could occur, such as the changes to the albedo and chemical composition of the atmosphere. At any rate, we know that conditions that resembled anything we had in recent billions of years guarantee $f$ smaller than one. And during that time, the concentrations of CO2 were as high as 6000 ppm or higher.

So I guess that the actual calculation of the hypothetical processes in 2 billion years when the runaway greenhouse may or may not materialize isn't really the genuine core and purpose of the paper. The real motivation of all such papers is the fear that the authors induce even if their conclusion says that the runaway greenhouse can't happen anytime soon. It's the very fact that these crackpot scenarios may be considered by people who are employed by universities which is important for the publication of all such materials.

If I were responsible for such issues, I would fire every single researcher who has ever come close to this stunning politically-driven garbage research. For their deliberate promotion of the irrational fears and of the unscientific reasoning in the public and sometimes even the scientific public, these people deserve to die of hunger.

Via Physics arXiv blog

James Annan lost his bet against a skeptic

2012-01-13T19:22:00.000+01:00

Reason Magazine, Benny Peiser, James Delingpole, and WUWT mention an amusing story.

In April 2008, climate skeptic and astrophysicist David Whitehouse – who is currently an adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation – stated that the 1998 record warm year according to HadCRUT3 wouldn't be surpassed in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. He was willing to bet £100. It's not much money but it's still fun.

A somewhat moderate alarmist who was very close to Wikipedia's A.G.W. Goebbels, The U.K. Green Party's William Connolley, whom many of you know, James Annan (now in Japan), thought that it was a great deal. See his April 2008 blog:

More on the 4-year bet

As you might have predicted, the alarmist was going to lose the bet while the skeptic would be going to win; the year 2011 is over and we are very sure that David Whitehouse was right and there would be no warm record set between 2008 and 2011. But it's fun to look at some of the detailed reasoning by James Annan in 2008.

James Annan estimated the probability 30% or 40% that a given year in this era would end up warmer than 1998. With some additional hindsight of 3.5 years, you may see how incredibly unrealistic this alarmist reasoning has been. If it were right, the probability that there would be no record set in these 4 years would indeed be between
\[ 0.6^4 \quad {\rm to} \quad 0.7^4 = 13\% \quad {\rm to} \quad 24\%. \] That would be the probability that Whitehouse wins, according to Annan. Annan had to be unlucky! ;-) Well, I am ready to bet that 1998 won't be surpassed by 2012, either: those who realize that a La Niña is underway and it has a cooling effect after a delay know where I am coming from. If you replace the exponents 4 by 5, you get the interval between 8 and 17 percent.

Of course, Annan's optimism that he would win boiled down to some remarkably reliable positive temperature trend he apparently believes to exist. However, he used a value of the trend that was the maximum one that could be extracted from the historical data, namely the trend from the late 1970s or so. That's not a wise method to get the actual mean value of the trend that is appropriate for a sensible calculation of odds. With a more balanced calculation of odds, one would almost certainly conclude that Whitehouse was more likely than not to win.

In a program of the BBC which "sponsored" the bet, James Annan already said that he was just extremely unlucky. ;-)

It may be appropriate to mention that various politicians and others have bet a few trillions of taxpayers' dollars for speculations that are qualitatively similar – but much less likely – than James Annan's 2008 expectation. What do you think, will the taxpayers see any of these dollars again? I am sure that the taxpayers will be just "unlucky" because they won't. ;-)

Just like a communist is a person who is ready to sacrifice your life for his ideals, a global warming alarmist is a person who is ready to sacrifice your wealth for his delusions.