The Reference Frame

Google Chrome extensions

2009-11-27T17:24:00.000+01:00

Google Chrome 4.0 Dev that you can download by clicking this link has become very serious about the extensions (known as plugins or addons elsewhere), software constructs whose absence has been the greatest disadvantage of this fastest browser so far.

Cooliris for Chrome. Shift-click any screenshot to zoom in into another window.

You may want to run Chrome with some extra arguments such as

C:\Users\Luboš\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --lang=cs --enable-sync --enable-extensions --show-extensions-on-top

Clearly, the path should be replaced by yours. You won't need the lang=cs language option (I don't need it, either), and the other options may have become automatic or will become default very soon.

Chromeextensions.org seems to be the most serious website with collections of dozens if not a hundred of extensions at this moment. The official website for extensions, chrome.google.com/extensions, is so far open to developers who want to submit extensions only.

Extensions have gotten a pretty nice yet simple official page with the list where you can enable them, disable them, update them, or set the options. See also part 2 and part 3.

AccuWeather is an efficient way to see your local weather.

Feedly.com is a pretty gadget to generate a "journal" out of your favorite feeds.

Otherwise, the screenshots show a couple of other random extensions that were enabled in my Chrome at the moment. The red envelope "19" counts the number of unread Google messages. The blue up-arrow goes to the folder at the higher hierarchy (like "cd .." in DOS).

The blue "a" icon is "Aviary", a gadget that allows you to take screenshots and immediately edit them with a built-in photoshop. The green rotated square is Feedly, discussed above. The magnifying glass is a search engine with various adjustable search engines (this can be done via the omnibox, with keywords, without the magnifying glass). The blue-and-green squares are Cooliris.

The black disk is Pendule, giving you additional developer tools (such as viewing a page without CSS etc.). The Sun with clouds is AccuWeather. The following line starts with a notepad: it runs "sticky notes", a minimalistic text editor with a fixed file. The blue circle with a small magnifying glass is searching through the open tabs.

At any rate, it's pretty clear that if the missing plugin technology was a reason for the limited propagation of Chrome, this reason is already being evaporated.

Blood and Gore on death of short-term capitalism

2009-11-27T08:40:00.006+01:00

The Financial Times have humiliated themselves by printing an article by two crackpots, Blood and Gore (no kidding), called

Time is up for short-term thinking in global capitalism.

Let's ignore the fact that one of the authors is a criminal and a template for all hypocrites who should have been sitting in a jail for years, and look at their "ideas" instead.

They say that we have been hard-wired for short-term thinking and it's bad. These mechanisms have to be replaced by a "sustainable capitalism", i.e. communism where the people are rewarded for "long-term thinking".

What a pile of shit!

Different questions in science as well as the real life are linked to different time scales - all time scales you can think of - and there exists no "universal moral advantage" of one time scale relatively to another. Both short-term and long-term thinking can be altruistic, greedy, right, or wrong. But in particular situations, one of them is more likely to be wrong than the other.

In fact, a vast majority of the world's economy only works because the players apply short-term or very short-term thinking most of the time. Certain decisions and strategies may depend on long-term thinking and long-term speculations but once these things become dominant, it's guaranteed that we face serious problems, bubbles, and crises.

Short-term thinking is often paramount. Let me explain why.

Imagine that someone sells milk in his supermarket. These products last for a few weeks - he knows how much - so all his decisions how much milk he should buy etc. and what the price should be must reflect the expected demand for a couple of weeks. Any other strategy would simply be counterproductive - for the retailer as well as the society - and no amount of vacuous clichés about "sustainability" can change it.

Various types of food and beverages "last" for different periods of time. For farmers, the annual time scale is the most important one because of the most important cycle that affects agriculture. Producers of memory chips who decide about a particular product focus on a similar time scale because the product will be superseded by others in a few years.

A very small portion of the things that people produce - such as the nuclear power plants or huge bridges - may require thinking at the decadal time scale - largely because it takes a lot of time to build them (and an extra time to make them profitable). But there exists virtually no content that would justify planning for more than 20 or 30 years into the future.

The ideal time scale that a player should keep in mind is determined by the free markets. People can err on both sides and they get punished for this error. Do I have to explain what happens to a supermarket that would plans the milk on its shelves for 20 years? Do I have to explain what happens to the societies where most supermarkets employ long-term thinking in situations that manifestly require short-term thinking?

Short-term thinking is also essential to make a vast majority of the people work. Average people possess savings for a few months or a year of life and many people are waiting for each salary. This is not a bug of the system. This is an essential feature of the system that is needed for the system to work and for various services and products to be offered without an interruption.

If most drivers in the public transportation system didn't care whether they get their salary this month, the probability would increase that they just decide to leave the passengers without the service they expect today or tomorrow.

Emergence of long-term thinking and its interactions with short-term processes

It should have been obvious by now that processes and decisions that only depend on short-term information inevitably have to dominate within a properly functioning economy. This statement is analogous to what we can see in physics. In physics, all material objects around us are made out of atoms and all the processes may be reduced to microscopic processes involving atoms.

Of course, there also exist "emergent" processes that depend on a larger length scale or a longer time scale. In the context of the economy, they're usually linked to rich individuals, companies, institutions, and countries (analogy of "large length scale"). These rich players can naturally use some long-term thinking. Because they have a lot of resources, they can use them to buy a certain "fixed" activity for a long time.

The average time scale associated with a typical amount of money "M" is clearly an increasing function of "M" although the increase is slower than the linear one. In fact, it may be just a logarithmic dependence when "M" is large.

But it's important to realize that the emergent processes are still composed out of the more fundamental, short-term processes. In the same way, a long-term entrepreneur must still appreciate that the mechanisms that make his company moving are short-term, "fundamental" mechanisms, and he is only creating the external environment for them. The microscopic processes must be left to their short-term logic, otherwise the company is screwed much like the supermarket that stores a "long-term milk" that I discussed above.

But I want to discuss one more general negative consequence of more long-term thinking than what is appropriate: bubbles and crises.

Long-term thinking is behind most bubbles and crises.

OK, imagine that you're one of those wealthy individuals or institutions whose assets justify some kind of a very long-term investment, perhaps longer than 20 years. And imagine that someone codifies a blood-and-gore system of policies with a bias that pushes you to use long-term criteria to estimate the value of things and to make your investment. What will happen?

It's easy to answer this question because such a thing has occurred many times. The estimates get detached from any reality and any observations, as perceived at the daily, monthly, or annual scales. They get replaced by long-term speculations that are likely to be shared by many people who are detached from the short-term reality in a similar way.

After all, ordinary bubbles are always manifestations of this misapplication of the long-term thinking. Imagine that it's 2003. The previous financial downturn in the U.S. is over. People want to make a new investment. Way too many start to buy lots of houses and/or give loans to others to buy houses. Their logic often said:

Real estate is a great place to invest. The value never goes down in the long run.

Of course, everyone suddenly "knows" this not to be the case. Suddenly, many people realize that the long-term growth of the housing prices is unlikely to differ from the long-term GDP-per-capita growth much because a house is likely to stay at a nearly fixed fraction of an average person's life income. But at some moments in the past, most people and institutions didn't "know". So they were buying, borrowing, and lending.

Clearly, the logic responsible for the subprime crisis was a form of the long-term thinking that shouldn't have occurred. The logic was wrong: the buyers should have thought about the next month or two, whether they will be able to repay the loan. The long-term developments always depend on the short-term changes, at least to some extent. Long-term evolution can never be predicted with certainty without appreciating the complexities of the short-term dynamics.

Dubai in the future. Long-term plans such as the Death Star above shouldn't lead you into thinking that you may skip your loan payments for months. By the way, and this is unrelated to my article, I think that people overreact to Dubai's woes. Dubai is still just 1/1,500 of the world's economy and the bankruptcy is still far from certain - in fact, it's probably unlikely.

Budget deficits that last for decades are a result of long-term arguments, too. People conveniently apply Keynes' myths and say that it's OK to borrow from the future during a crisis or after a crisis. The debt will be repaid later, in a rosy future. Except that the recent decade indicates that in the U.S., the "crisis" (or "post-crisis") periods are permanent if they are defined in this way. ;-) Again, it is a wrong long-term thinking - the people's willingness to ignore the immediate effects and imbalances - that prevents the people and nations from balancing their budgets.

And I don't have to explain you the catastrophic bubbles that could be created and burst if the fraudulent trade with carbon permits became a substantial portion of the world economy.

Sustainable capitalism

Blood and Gore also use the term "sustainable capitalism" for the form of communism (with an elite of communist billionaires, building on the achievements of Saddam Hussein and others) that they try to build. It seems to mean that various things - consumption of various products and prices - are supposed to be constant while it is assumed that such a constancy may be extrapolated into the future. What else the "sustainability" could mean?

However, this is just a recipe to delay the collapse of things or booms a little bit and to make them more intense. Certain processes - such as the growth of subprime mortgages - were simply not sustainable and a correction simply had to arrive. One couldn't genuinely "hide the decline".

This principle is valid in all parts of the economy. Prices and consumption must be allowed to change, they will always change, and various crashes, declines, and downturns must always be allowed to materialize and they will always materialize. Analogously, the dominant sources of energy, their reserves, and their prices (among similar quantities) are also guaranteed to change after some time and in fact, technology makes these changes faster. There can't be any "sustainability" here.

By the very nature and definition of capitalism, the detailed economic events in this system are simply not sustainable and they cannot be. The only true "constant" of all these developments is the principle that the economic objects must always be allowed to freely adapt to their changing desires (regardless of their preferred or relevant time scales), their perception of value, and the changing environment.

The only threats to the real "sustainable capitalism", as defined by myself, are ideologies that want to liquidate its fundamental principles and freedoms. If the creative power of capitalism and freedom has to be temporarily reduced to prevent the start of communism or "Gore's capitalism" or Nazism or anything like that, it may make sense to think about such a reduction of capitalism.

But to deliberately liquidate the freedom of people and other economic players to choose their priorities, consumption, and prices of their products means to become the enemy of capitalism. And Blood and Gore seem to be two of them.

Ideology and political correctness

I noticed that in the U.S., or at least in the U.S. Academia, it was kind of "politically correct" to promote "long-term thinking" and "sustainability" as dogmas, regardless of any detailed data. I have always been baffled by this sort of stuff. People and institutions doing things where long-term thinking is justified should think in the long term. But others should not. And whenever someone exceeds the proper time scale, he is becoming arrogant.

Communists used to have five-year plans and sometimes even longer plans. They were never fulfilled. They were a matter of wishful thinking. There have never existed rational reasons why they should have been fulfilled and why e.g. their GDP growth should have been close to the capitalist countries' GDP growth. Certain things simply can't be "planned". The free markets optimize the GDP growth but making more detailed predictions about its magnitude in the future is always a speculation, a bet, and it is always wrong to pretend that such a speculation is a fact.

Boasting about their long-term plans - e.g. their "Plans until 2015" that the Czechoslovak communists liked to talk about in the mid 1980s, just a few years before their idiotic house of cards collapsed; a Thousand-Year Empire of Adolf Hitler; carbon emissions pledges until 2030 if not 2050 - are always speculations of people who are sufficiently arrogant to pretend that their fantasies are facts.

No one knows what empires will exist on the German territory in the year 2938; no communist knew what economic system would exist in Czechoslovakia in the year 2015; no one knows what the carbon emissions will be in 2030 or 2050. A person who invests his own honestly earned billions of dollars into such speculations is a gambler if not a lunatic. A person who invests the resources of others (or resources that he fraudulently acquired from others) into such long-term speculations is a dangerous criminal.

It's extremely important for the capitalism to continue as we know it and for the people to actually care what's happening in the short run and at other time scales that are relevant for their decisions. It's extremely important to realize that the arrogant long-term ideology that Al Gore is trying to sell is just another copy of similar memes by his friends from the dumping ground of the history such as Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

And his own arrogant statement that his long-term, green investments were more profitable only looks plausible now, before the criminal actually spends his life in prison (or is executed) and before the money the jerk stole is confiscated.

And that's the memo.

UAH in November 2009: around 0.51 deg C

2009-11-26T19:32:00.001+01:00

Based on the daily UAH data, the global UAH anomaly for November 2009 will be 0.51 °C, plus minus 0.2 °C, up sharply from 0.28 °C in October 2009. A significantly strengthened El Nino may be partly blamed for the development.

The official 2009 Atlantic hurricane season will be completed at the end of November, too. So far, we have seen

9 named storms, including
3 hurricanes, including
2 major hurricanes
ACE index: 50.8

If this score remains the final one, the season will be below normal, below the predictions, the ACE-weakest season since 1997, the 14th ACE-weakest season among the 59 seasons between 1950 and 2009, twice as ACE-weak as the mean 1950-2005 season (the mean is 102.3), five times ACE-weaker than the 2005 season (whose ACE was 248), but stronger than the average prediction of our August 2009 poll.

At any rate, the data above are enough to explain why sleazy, greedy, and immoral environmental opportunists choose different backgrounds for their photographs than a hurricane in 2009.

LHC at CERN: first collisions

2009-11-25T08:08:00.004+01:00

ALICE's inner tracker

Over the weekend, the Large Hadron Collider smashed the first pairs of protons. Ever. See

CERN press release, DVICE, Physics Central, The Independent, The Latest News

As The Independent mentions in another article, the current center-of-mass energy was 1 TeV, so we have another Tevatron right now. ;-)

They're watching the LHC beams, not baseball!

Before the Christmas, the center-of-mass energy sqrt(s) should be raised to 2.4 TeV, bringing the LHC its global hegemony for the first time (the Tevatron collides at 1.96 TeV). Just a week or two after the Christmas, Brian Cox expects first collisions at 7 TeV (half the maximum capacity). Such collisions may already boast their huge discovery potential, of course.

Michio Kaku did some vulgarization of the LHC at Foxnews. ;-) He talked about Reagan's dream and his daily job of string theory research (for "living") - which, after 1999, seems slightly exaggerated to me. ;-)

Holography: unitarity implies chronology protection

2009-11-23T08:32:00.002+01:00

Previous article about the topic: Time travel: reality and myths

Closed time-like curves lead to all kinds of problems with causality: no one knows whether you can kill your grandparents before they met and what should happen if you kill them.

Remotely related: 30 neat new hi-res pictures from the LHC

However, Kurt Gödel has shown that rather mundane distributions of matter have the potential to produce such closed time-like curves because general relativity makes space and time more dynamical than you might think.

But the paradoxes shouldn't exist, should they? That's why in 1992, Stephen Hawking formulated his Chronology Protection Conjecture. In Nature, allowed processes can't produce closed time-like curves, he postulated.

But can we prove such a hypothesis? Do we really know where it comes from? In various supersymmetric theories and vacua, people managed to prove the "specialized" proposition. The proofs always relied in supersymmetry.

But what happens if it's broken?

In the most interesting hep-th paper today,

Joris Raeymaekers (Prague), Dieter Van den Bleeken (Rutgers), Bert Vercnocke (Leuven): Relating chronology protection and unitarity through holography,

the authors show that exactly at the point where a dust ball in AdS3 would begin to create closed time-like curves, the unitarity condition "M+1 ≥ J" gets violated.

In other words, there exist no states in the dual CFT that could represent the dust balls capable of producing chronological paradoxes and only arguments based on AdS/CFT correspondence, not those building upon supersymmetry, are needed to see it is the case.

Hacked: Hadley CRU FOI2009 Files

2009-11-20T07:56:00.141+01:00

Climategate is not a smoking gun;
it is a mushroom cloud. [Pat Michaels]

Off-topic: the LHC beam at CERN is up and running again!

The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), usually working together with the Hadley center (recall HadCRUT3 global temperatures), has been hacked.

Speculations thrive that the data were actually obtained and posted by an insider - a whistleblower - rather than a generic Russian hacker (whose IP would be 82.208.87.170, Moscow, mts-nn.ru, Volga Telecom, if he were a Russian).

If you want to download an interesting 61.9-megabyte ZIP file, which unpacks to 156 megabytes or so, here are some links:

Junk Science (fast, direct: ZIP, RAR, unpacked)
File dropper (captcha only)
RapidShare (free user, wait)
A Swedish server (direct)
Warwick Hughes (instant download; web)
Megaupload (captcha, wait)
Get via torrents (Mininova)
Original URL (FTP in Russia, defunct)

Search through the 1073 e-mails
... (h/t: Shug, quotes don't work):

BBC story (confirms hacking, nothing about the content)
The Guardian (confirms; says skeptics think it proves a collusion)
Foxnews (similar)
The Telegraph (climate scientists accused)
Lord Lawson calls for public inquiry!!! (update, Monday, Telegraph: join his GWPF)
And so do Jim Inhofe & other GOP MPs...
George Monbiot (a top AGW champion): shaken by a "major blow"; Jones should resign
Hans von Storch: they should resign, science fixes itself (moderate climate boss, read the "News")
Zorita, Hans's close colleague: Why Mann, Jones, Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC
Boston Herald, CBS, Reuters, CNN, UPI, AP/ABC (similar)
Wall Street Journal, Russia Today (tougher, more details about the content: 1st most read and 2st most e-mailed WSJ article at least in Europe)
Additional newspapers (Climate Depot)
Real Climate (confirms hacking, suggests that the climate scientists are frustrated angels)

Don't worry. Those 4,556 files in various directories contain no viruses or malware; I have tested it. Bloggers' stories and discussions:

Anthony Watts (selected correspondence)
Steve McIntyre ( - || - )
Real Climate (interesting comments: glasnosť has arrived to RC for the first time)
SlashDot (a discussion of IT types)
Terry Hurlbut (Examiner)
Rush Limbaugh's take
Jeff Id (The Air Vent, the first story; original hacker's message)
Other blogs (Blog Search)
Google News (Hot Air, a WSJ blog, American Thinker...)

The files have been confirmed to be authentic.

Glenn Beck about ClimateGate.

Since the very beginning, no clear errors had been found and your humble correspondent would have bet that the files had been authentic. Why? Well, it's just pretty difficult to type 156 MB of stuff that looks so legitimate. (See the end of this article for Jones' confirmation of authenticity.) When you unpack the ZIP file, you create two directories, "documents" and "mail". For example, "documents" has these files and subfolders:

Click to zoom in.

So far, the most interesting file I found in the "documents" directory is

pdj_grant_since1990.xls (Google preview, click)

which shows that since 1990, Phil Jones has collected staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants. The major amounts came from HEFCE (6.6 million pounds) and NERC (2.7 million pounds). Later, we will get some idea whether he has used the money to do proper science and whether the truth and objectivity was kept as the key principle, beating a possibility to double the amount. ;-)

What is my reaction to these financial amounts? These numbers are difficult for me to comprehend so I just borrow a reaction from Jeff Id: Big Oil My Ass. :-)

There are many other interesting files in the "documents" directory. So far, people only focus on the "mail" directory but once they get bored, the "documents" will become the next focus. As an example, "TheRulesOfTheGame.pdf" explains 20 recommendations for a good propagandist - use emotions, connect your alarm with "home" not with "faraway regions", and so on.

The file HARRY_READ_ME.txt and the funny programmer's comments in it show that the CRU programs/models are complete mess, with ignored error messages and hundreds of ad hoc fixes to improve the agreement with the reconstructions.

At any rate, the files were clearly real. You really don't want to type all these files by hand. Each subdirectory contains either numerous subfolders or dozens of DOC, PRO, TXT, no-suffix, ARS, CRN, CRNS, DAT, RAW, and other files. I don't know anyone who could create such an amount of authentic things in a finite affine time.

The only alternative explanation to veracity is that the bulk of the files is real and some "cherries" have been added or edited. But that would still require a collaboration of a good hacker with a good person who follows climate science (a well-informed skeptic), or the unification of these two roles in one person. Somewhat unlikely. In my opinion, the most likely story is that all these files are 100% legitimate. Also, Steve McIntyre has confirmed that all e-mails in the hacked file that were sent from/to him are 100% genuine.

Finding gems in the "mail" folder

The 7-MB "mail" subfolder contains 1073 TXT files with e-mails and it is the main focus of most people who want to look. ;-) There are lots of e-mails in between Briffa, Mann, Revkin, Singer, Peiser, and many other people you know. Before you read the e-mail messages, I recommend you to merge all the TXT files into one TXT file, e.g. by the DOS command "type *.* > ..\hademail.txt" launched in the "mail" directory.

An entertaining music video about the situation by Popular Technology.

There are many things to love about these e-mails. For example, the word "funded" appears roughly 66 times over there. Stepan Shiyatov instructs his colleagues about the optimal ways to commit tax evasion:

... That is why it is important for us to get money from additional sources, in particular from the ADVANCE and INTAS ones. Also, it is important for us if you can transfer the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts which we gave you earlier and the sum for one occasion transfer (for example, during one day) will not be more than 10,000 USD. Only in this case we can avoid big taxes and use money for our work as much as possible. Please, inform us what kind of documents and financial reports we must represent you and your administration for these money....

Russian journalists seem to be happy about the "huge conspiracy" and about the fact that it started on a Russian server. But they could be wrong that a Russian hacker was behind it. See also an RT interview with a British MP and an RT program with Benny Peiser and others about ClimateGate and RT's estimate who will resign and RT's Kokorin vs Corbyn battle.

But I liked the following description of Phil Jones' 1999 methodology, taken from Michael Mann. He is proudly telling the MBH authors:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxxxx.edu, mhughes@xxxxx.edu
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@uxxxxx.uk,t.osborn@uxxxx.uk

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uxxxxx.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK

"Hide the Decline" by Minnesotans for Global Warming (M4GW). Very funny!

When we talk about tricks, this message is even more entertaining by its honesty and chosen vocabulary:

From: Gary Funkhouser <gary@xxxxxxx.edu>
To: k.briffa@uxxxx.uk
Subject: kyrgyzstan and siberian data
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 15:37:09 -0700

Keith,

Thanks for your consideration. Once I get a draft of the central and southern siberian data and talk to Stepan and Eugene I'll send it to you.

I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. It was pretty funny though - I told Malcolm what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating the response functions - he laughed and said that's what he thought at first also. The data's tempting but there's too much variation even within stands. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just are what they are (that does sound Graybillian). I think I'll have to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is.

Not having seen the sites I can only speculate, but I'd be optimistic if someone could get back there and spend more time collecting samples, particularly at the upper elevations.

Yeah, I doubt I'll be over your way anytime soon. Too bad, I'd like to get together with you and Ed for a beer or two. Probably someday though.

Cheers, Gary
Gary Funkhouser
Lab. of Tree-Ring Research
The University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA
phone: (520) 621-2946
fax: (520) 621-8229
e-mail: gary@xxxxxx.edu

Gary Funkhouser has tried and done a lot but his stomach capacity for fraud is apparently smaller than in the case of Jones, Mann, and similar thugs, so you can't be surprised that Funkhouser is less famous a climate scientist and he has probably collected less than Jones' 13.7 million pounds in grants. The rules of this game are tough.

By the way, do you think that the CO2 projections by the IPCC synthesis team are supposed to be realistic, according to their own guidelines? Dave Schimel provides us with a resounding "No" answer (via Jeff Id):

From: Dave Schimel (schimel@xxxxxxxxx.xxx)
To: Shrikant Jagtap (sjagtap@xxxxxxxxx.xxx)
Subject: RE: CO2
Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 09:21:35 -0600 (MDT)
Cc: franci (franci@xxxxxxxxx.xxx), Benjamin Felzer (felzer@xxxxxxxxx.xxx), Mike Hulme (m.hulme@xxxxxxxxx.xxx), schimel@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, kittel@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, nanr@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, Mike MacCracken (mmaccrac@xxxxxxxxx.xxx)

I want to make one thing really clear. We ARE NOT supposed to be working with the assumption that these scenarios are realistic. They are scenarios-internally consistent (or so we thought) what-if storylines. You are in fact out of line to assume that these are in some sense realistic-this is in direct contradiction to the guidance on scenarios provided by the synthesis team.

If you want to do 'realistic CO2 effects studies, you must do sensitivity analyses bracketing possible trajectories. We do not and cannot not and must not prejudge what realistic CO2 trajectories are, as they are ultimatley a political decision (except in the sense that reserves and resources provide an upper bound).

'Advice' will be based on a mix of different approaches that must reflect the fact that we do not have high coinfidence in GHG projections nor full confidence in climate ystem model projections of consequences.

Dave

You see, Dr Jagtap was out of line and in direct clash with the IPCC because he or she assumed that scientific predictions should be realistic rather than what-if storylines. ;-)

If I return to Phil Jones with all these grants: is the driver that motivates him politics? Well, money is not quite the same thing as politics. Jones wrote the following text to John Christy:

...If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish. Cheers, Phil

It makes sense. Also, the treehuggers have been saying that the skeptics were paid by ExxonMobil for years. But who is actually being fed by ExxonMobil?

From: John Shepherd <j.g.shepherd@sxxxxxxxx.uk>
To: t.d.davies@uxxxxx.uk
Subject: Re: ESSO
Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 13:00:43 +0100
Cc: Mike Hulme <m.hulme@uxxxxxx.uk>

Trevor

I gather you're going to collect the free lunch(?) with Esso ! I agree witrh Mike's analysis : i.e. there's room for some constructive dialogue...

See you on the 1014 from Ipswich (0940 from Norwich), for a kick-off at 12 noon ??

John

Imagine that the year is 2005 and you want to define the "normal temperature" from some data that begin in 1961 or so. Will you choose the normal temperature to be the average of 1961-1990 or 1961-2000? David Parker of the Met Office has an answer, including the right justification agreed upon by a whole IPCC atmospheric chapter:

Neil [Plummer, Australia],

There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted. Also we may wish to wait till there are 30 years of satellite data, i.e until we can compute 1981-2010 normals, which will then be globally complete for some parameters like sea surface temperature.

Regards, David

Yes, the right choice is always such that the impression of global warming never seems muted. ;-) Also, for years, skeptics have been suggesting that Michael Mann's method to deal with the Medieval Warm Period starts with the 1) desire to get rid of it, followed by 2) tricks to justify the decision afterwards. Speculations are over; here's a proof:

From: "Michael E. Mann" (mann@vxxxxxx.edu)
To: Phil Jones (p.jones@uxxxxx.uk), rbradley@gxxxxxx.edu, Tom Wigley (wigley@uxxx.edu), Tom Crowley (tcrowley@dxxx.edu), Keith Briffa (k.briffa@uxxxx.uk), trenbert@cxxxxx.edu, Michael Oppenheimer (omichael@pxxxxxx.edu), Jonathan Overpeck (jto@uxxxxx.edu)
Subject: Re: Prospective Eos piece?
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 10:17:57 -0400
Cc: mann@vxxxxxx.edu, Scott Rutherford (srutherford@gxxxxx.edu)

Thanks Phil, and Thanks Tom W and Keith for your willingness to help/sign on. This certainly gives us a "quorum" pending even a few possible additional signatories I'm waiting to hear back from. [...]

Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back--I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back [Phil and I have one in review--not sure it is kosher to show that yet though--I've put in an inquiry to Judy Jacobs at AGU about this]. If we wanted to be fancy, we could do this the way certain plots were presented in one of the past IPCC reports (was it 1990?) in which a spatial map was provided in the center (this would show the locations of the proxies), with "rays" radiating out to the top, sides, and bottom attached to rectanges showing the different timeseries. Its a bit of work, but would be a great way to convey both the spatial and temporal information at the same time.

Many even juicier things have been deleted but be sure that they were enough to make even e.g. Raymond Bradley "puke" or "vomit" (h/t: Willie and David).

By the way, "FOI" in the file name stands for "Freedom Of Information", a bill in the U.S. And "FOIA" is the Russian (?) hacker's nickname. The e-mails are full of Phil Jones' and other tricks how to circumvent the FOIA legislation: search for "FOIA". For example,

At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:

Mike,
I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc! Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McKitrick, McIntyre] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere to it ! ...

Yes, this behavior actually looks not only immoral but illegal and if you know how to activate the U.K. police, you're kindly asked to act. By the way, if you still believed that Jones was just "planning" to delete the e-mails or joking (or if you were told this weird explanation by Gavin Schmidt), here's another e-mail:

From: Phil Jones (p.jones@uxxxx.uk)
To: "Michael E. Mann" (mann@mxxxxxx.edu)
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers Phil

The climate scientists also synchronize their efforts to block certain papers from being published, or even eliminate a journal (Climate Research) from a de facto list of peer-reviewed journals. How do Mann and Jones, the captains of the hockey team, make sure that they control the situation and that other reviewers - and even "2nd class hockey players" such as Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn, Jones' colleagues - don't influence the composition of published papers and the content of the reviews? It was easy for Jones (and Mann) to transform the peer-review process into a joke:

From: Phil Jones To: "Michael E. Mann" (mann@vxxxxxx.edu)
Subject: Crap Papers
Date: Thu Feb 26 15:59:12 2004

Mike,
Just agreed to review a paper for GRL - it is absolute rubbish. It is having a go at the CRU temperature data - not the latest vesion, but the one you used in MBH98 !! We added lots of data in for the region this person says has Urban Warming ! So easy review to do.

Sent Ben the Soon et al. paper and he wonders who reviews these sorts of things. Says GRL hasn't a clue with editors or reviewers. By chance they seem to have got the right person with the one just received.

Can I ask you something in CONFIDENCE - don't email around, especially not to Keith and Tim here. Have you reviewed any papers recently for Science that say that MBH98 and MJ03 have underestimated variability in the millennial record - from models or from some low-freq proxy data. Just a yes or no will do. Tim is reviewing them - I want to make sure he takes my comments on board, but he wants to be squeaky clean with discussing them with others. So forget this email when you reply.
Cheers, Phil

This e-mail has surely been forgotten but it has also been copied roughly 1,000,000 times yesterday. ;-) By the way, in a 1999 e-mail called "CENSORED", Raymond Bradley defended Osborn and Briffa against Michael Mann and even mentioned that it was "arrogant" that Mann wanted to suppress all papers that were "unacceptable" to him (and Jones). "Science moves forward whether we agree with individiual articles or not...," Bradley added. Good. However, you shouldn't imagine that e.g. Keith Briffa has been a faithful angel on the side of science, despite the political pressures. Quite obviously, he wasn't:

From: Keith Briffa (k.briffa@uxxxxxx.uk)
To: mann@xxxxxx.edu
Subject: Re: quick note on TAR
Date: Sun Apr 29 19:53:16 2007

Mike, your words are a real boost to me at the moment. I found myself questioning the whole process and being often frustrated at the formulaic way things had to be done - often wasting time and going down dead ends. I really thank you for taking the time to say these kind words . I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC , which were not always the same. I worried that you might think I gave the impression of not supporting you well enough while trying to report on the issues and uncertainties. Much had to be removed and I was particularly unhappy that I could not get the statement into the SPM regarding the AR4 reinforcement of the results and conclusions of the TAR. I tried my best but we were basically railroaded by Susan [Solomon]. I am happy to pass the mantle on to someone else next time. I feel I have basically produced nothing original or substantive of my own since this whole process started. I am at this moment , having to work on the ENV submission to the forthcoming UK Research Assessment exercise , again instead of actually doing some useful research ! Anyway thanks again Mike.... really appreciated when it comes from you very best wishes
Keith

Keith Briffa is a grey zone figure who may have been under a huge pressure (which is why he is being mentioned as the top candidate for having done something that I can't even publicly speculate about). You see that even according to the IPCC members, the interests of science are different from the interests of the IPCC. And mentioning the uncertainties and the "issues" in general means not to support Michael Mann enough. ;-)

I am afraid that if any climate scientist in the group is a de facto ethical guy who posted the data in order to reveal the dirt and if the suspicion among the likes of Mann and Jones will grow, he or she will have to rely on Jones' and Mann's getting an electrical chair - otherwise his life will never be safe again because this would be no treason but high treason.

By the way, you may also find e-mails that they need to get rid of German mainstream climate scientist Hans von Storch:

From: Tom Wigley (wigley@uxxxxxxx.edu)
To: Timothy Carter (tim.carter@yxxxxxxxxxx.fi)
Subject: Re: Java climate model
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:17:29 -0600
Cc: Mike Hulme (m.hulme@uxxxxxxxxx), Phil Jones (p.jones@uxxxxxxx.uk)

Tim,
I know about what Matthews has done. [...]
Matthews is doing the community a considerable disservice.

Tom.

PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.

I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.

Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.

While top scientist von Storch had to be gotten rid, letters by alarmists such as Mike Hulme et al. were authored or at least co-authored by friendly folks at Greenpeace:

From: "Wallace, Helen" (helen.wallace@uxxxxxxxxxxxace.org)
To: "'t.mcmichael@lshtm.ac.uk'" (t.mcmichael@lxxxxxxxx.uk), "'m.hulme@uxxxxx.uk'" (m.hulme@uxxxxxxxxxx.uk)
Subject: Letter
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 18:21:04 +0100

Dear Tony and Michael,

The final draft of the letter to the Times is attached, incorperating your changes (I hope I have combined them in a way that you are both happy with).

Brian Hoskins and Adrian Jenkins have both decided that they prefer not to sign the letter, although agreeing with its message. I haven't been able to contact anyone else in the short time available, so I leave it up to you to decide whether you are still both happy to go ahead.

If so, Mike could you please reply to both Tony and myself and let us know, and Tony could you then send it as agreed?

Thank you both very much for your time and trouble.

Best regards,
Helen

Dr Helen Wallace
Senior Scientist
Greenpeace UK

Greenpeace, Canonbury Villas, London, N1 2PN

Tel: +44-171-865-8241
Fax: +44-171-865-8202
---------------------------
FINAL DRAFT

Letters Editor
The Times

Fax: 0171-782-5046
Email: letters@the-xxxxxxxxxx.uk

21 June 1997
Dear Sir,

Without wishing to comment on the dispute between BP and Greenpeace (Editorial, 20 August), we would like to remind your readers of the seriousness of the potential threat caused by our continued use of fossil fuels. This damage occurs both locally - as evidenced by the deterioration of air quality in UK cities in the past few weeks - and also globally.

As scientists studying the impacts of climate change, we consider the global threat from greenhouse gases to be serious and to need addressing. Adverse effects on human populations are likely to result from changes in weather patterns, shifts in storm frequencies, rises in sea level and the spread of certain pests and infectious diseases. A wide variety of ecosystems throughout the world will be at increasing risk.

We have little idea whether or not we can manage such adverse effects and therefore the prudent course of action is to limit the cause of the threat.

Major shifts in investment away from fossil fuels will therefore be required to make the necessary reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Large companies like British Petroleum seem to us to be well placed to take an active part in investing in these changes. There is no doubt the need for precautionary, preventative action is urgent.

Yours sincerely,

Prof. A.J. McMichael
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
University of London
Keppel Street
London
WC1E 7HT

Dr. M. Hulme
Climatic Research Unit
University of East Anglia
Norwich
NR4 7TJ

Was Briffa a victim who decided that an offensive is the best defensive? Click here for the full screen of Alan Becker's cool animattion.

Don't try to look for a few e-mails containing the word "confidential": it actually appears 107 times in the e-mails. :-) But it may be more interesting to look at "highly confidential" things:

From: Phil Jones (p.jones@uxxxxx.uk)
To: "Michael E. Mann" (mann@vxxxxxx.edu)
Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004

[...] I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers, Phil

Well, it's easy to keep peer-reviewed papers out of the IPCC report: you just redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is! As you have seen, Jones and Mann have redefined it in all conceivable ways.

And by the way, Pat Michaels should hire some bodyguards:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted. [Ben Santer]

So far, Michaels survived. See him talking about ClimateGate at Foxnews.

What could they do with the recent "cold-ish years" during their talks? It was easy, too:

From: Mick Kelly (mick.tiempo@gxxxxxxxx.com)
To: (P.Jones@uxxxxx.uk)
Subject: RE: Global temperature
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:02:00 +1300

Yeah, it wasn't so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, used to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a longer - 10 year - period of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you might expect from La Nina etc.

Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, I'll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that's trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.

Enjoy Iceland and pass on my best wishes to Astrid.

Mick

Read it. (The book on the left is the NIPCC report: recommended.) The conclusion looks pretty clear. These people should be put in jail as soon as possible. Lord Monckton and Alan Caruba agree that they're criminals. You know, these are not just small tricks in an academic discussion. These people have acquired millions if not billions of taxpayers' money by methods that seem to be provably fraudulent and threatened trillions of additional dollars indirectly.

You know, I was a bit skeptical in the morning - about the hints that this is a big story. But let me admit that right now I feel a little bit like at the beginning of the Velvet Revolution 20 years ago, after the students were beaten and a big change was in the air.

Update: legitimate

Phil Jones, the main criminal according to this correspondence, has personally confirmed that the website was hacked and that the documents are authentic. See Briefing Room.

He says that he "can't remember" what he meant by "hiding the decline." Well, let me teach him some English. First, dictionaries say that hide means

1. to conceal from sight; prevent from being seen or discovered: Where did she hide her jewels?
2. to obstruct the view of; cover up: The sun was hidden by the clouds.
3. to conceal from knowledge or exposure; keep secret: to hide one's feelings.
4. to conceal oneself; lie concealed: He hid in the closet.
5. British. a place of concealment for hunting or observing wildlife; hunting blind.
6. hide out, to go into or remain in hiding: After breaking out of jail, he hid out in a deserted farmhouse.

The definition (6) will only become relevant for Mr Jones once the e-mails are fully appreciated so Jones' original sentence meant that if he hadn't done the "trick", the actual data would show a decline (of the temperature, in various intervals, as described in the e-mail). The decline of the temperature is also known as the cooling. There was one cooling period according to the thermometers, between the 1940s and 1970s, but reconstructions of the temperatures via the same trees that are used in paleoclimatology also show cooling since the 1980s in many or most cases. But by doing the "trick" and adding some different data, the decline disappeared. In other words, it was "hidden" by the "trick".

This procedure is also known as "scientific fraud".

Immorality of hacking

Some fine souls among climate skeptics are disturbed by the very fact of hacking - and to a lesser extent, so am I - and by the promotion of the results of the hacker's work - I am not. Well, I fully understand the moral problems with breaking someone's privacy in this way. I have these emotional problems, too.

How many readers play Mafia Wars? Moscow? ;-)

On the other hand, this is just about the privacy of some business e-mails about the climate - which is really a public issue these days and it is paid by the taxpayers in the U.K., U.S., and elsewhere - while the proponents of the carbon regulation want to restrict the privacy and rights of billions of other people, and not only the privacy of their business correspondence.

So there are positive and negative factors on both sides when you consider whether the event has been a good one. In my case, the overall result is that the transparency that has been artificially brought to the extremely secretive Hadley Center is a good thing.

Bonus: Feynman on scientific integrity

Should scientists be honest? I will end up this article with a quote from Feynman's famous 1974 commencement speech at Caltech:

It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked – to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can – if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong – to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Do you think the e-mails indicate that the climate scientists have followed the same principles?

Adolf Hitler understood that something was wrong with the AGW science even before the ClimateGate began. A pretty funny parody.

Mogo list

If you're a truly advanced reader, here's a list due to Mogo of RealClimate.ORG of roughly fifty of the most offensive and embarrassing e-mails in the collection:

* Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)

* Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

* Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!

* Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.

* Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)

* Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)

* Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)

* Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)

* Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)

* Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)

* Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)

* Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)

* Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)

* Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)

* Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)

* Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)

* Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)

* Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)

* Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)

* Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)

* Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)

* Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)

* Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)

* Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)

* Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)

* Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)

* Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)

* Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]

* Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)

* Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)

* Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)

* Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)

* Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)

* Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)

* Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)

* Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)

* Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)

* Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)

* Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)

* Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)

* Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)

* Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)

* Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)

* David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)

* Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)

* Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)

* Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)

A bonus fun story

The French-Irish World Cup confronations have erupted long before the match because Nicolas Sarkozy wanted a VIP box. :-)

Google Chrome OS

2009-11-19T20:35:00.002+01:00

Click to zoom the screenshot in.

As a user of Google Chrome 4.0, I was interested in the newest Google press conference about the Google Chrome Operating System (OS) that was released to the open-source community today.

The conference could be watched by opening the following URL in the Windows Media Player:

mms://a1775.l3402457774.c34024.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1775/34024/v0001/reflector:57774

I don't expect most readers to be extremely interested. But let me just say that Google Chrome OS is meant to be a lightweight operating system

where everything is based on the Internet which offers its creators an alternative, extreme unifying philosophical approach to operating systems
where applications appear in tabs just like pages in the Google Chrome browser
whose philosophy and justification is advocated in this 3-minute video (YouTube)
whose function may be understood as the Google Chrome browser with the essential underlying processes and drivers and with the native client (able to run applications) incorporated in it
that boots in 7 seconds, instead of the Windows' 45 seconds, because most OS "formalities" are eliminated
that is based on Debian Linux
that will focus on light, undernourished netbooks (with flash drives but no hard disk) in 2010 but may be extended to more full-fledged computers afterwards
that was described in this 7-minute demo (YouTube)
that will make you completely screwed if your internet provider or the service provider of an essential service is down
when they're hacked, you're really down because all your data, including a TXT file you just edit in Notepad, is available via the Google cloud

See Google News.

Thought experiments are essential in modern physics

2009-11-19T19:04:00.005+01:00

Backreaction has provoked a discussion about the role of thought experiments in physics.

Well, they have been really important for quite some time!

The gedanken experiments, as they're often called, have been produced en masse since the first examples given by Hans Christian Ørsted who also gave them the name back in the early 1820s. They're situations that we imagine - but don't immediately realize - and that we analyze as carefully as we would analyze a real physical situation, in order to find a paradox, resolve a paradox, find a limitation of the existing approximate laws of physics, or find a universal physical principle.

Don't get me wrong. In principle, physics could make a lot of progress even without this theoretical method.

Except that in reality, the physical phenomena are organized at so many vastly distinct scales that we constantly need to imagine that various quantities are jumping over many orders of magnitude and we're getting to extreme regimes where the extrapolations of the well-known approximate laws and our experience can clash with each other. That's often possible only in theory.

Starting from mechanics

Occasionally, gedanken experiments become actual, real physical experiments when the technology gets much better: the Feynman inverse sprinkler is a well-known example of a thought experiment that can rather easily become a real one (yes, this one, in the air, did rotate in the opposite direction).

Newton's Cannonball is another. However, I think it's equally important to notice that even in the situations when the technology doesn't get that far, we may fully crack a theory that determines what would actually happen if the gedanken experiment were realized.

When people were thinking about thermodynamics, some of them wanted to produce perpetuum mobile devices of the first kind or the second kind. The former violated the energy conservation law while the second violated the second law of thermodynamics, one about the increasing entropy.

In the second category, we find many versions of Maxwell's Daemon, for example the Brownian Ratchet due to Feynman. They're hypothetical devices that have been believed by some people to be able to produce unlimited energy.

However, when you analyze their function properly and in detail, you will find out that they don't work. A crucial aspect of the situation is that you don't actually have to construct the device. It is enough to analyze it purely theoretically and decompose its functions into individual pieces (and their interplays). Once you do so, you will find out that these machines can't work.

Well, if you believe that it's impossible to prove anything about a machine you haven't actually constructed, I can weaken the statement for you. By a detailed theoretical analysis of the gadgets, you may show why another theoretical argument that suggested that these machines should work has been incorrect from the beginning. To say the least, this reduces the probability that such a machine actually can work. ;-)

As you can see, gedanken experiments force us to think more carefully than we would think if we were just satisfied with a vague proposal for a future gadget or with a "null hypothesis" about the physical laws that govern so far untested situations. They often tell us that certain laws - or intuition - can't be extrapolated too far. And sometimes they can.

Modern physics: relativity, quantum mechanics

Einstein's contributions to physics were almost completely theoretical. And because they were revolutionary at the same moment, it's clear that he couldn't have achieved those things without thought experiments.

When he was a teenager, around 16 years of age, he may have been imagining nude women every 50 seconds, or whatever the statistics says. But more importantly, he was also imagining observers who are are trying to catch up with light. Clearly, no available vehicle was able to move by the speed of light, or anything close to it, but Einstein was simply captivated by the question what happens.

Newtonian mechanics would allow the observer to match the speed of light. However, Maxwell's equations indicated that light should be moving by the speed of light - and it looked like those equations should hold even in the observer's reference frame, so the speed should be "c" with respect to anyone and anything. In 1905, Einstein finally solved these matters in the patent office.

He was imagining various synchronization problems with trains that are close to the speed of light, and so on. In the context of general relativity, there's a lot of crucial thought experiments. The Einstein lift sheds light on the equivalence principle. Various configurations of masses that collapse into black holes are modern examples in the context of general relativity.

Quantum mechanics: just a list

Quantum mechanics brings its own collection of gedanken experiments - such as the EPR paradox, Schrödinger's Cat, double-slit experiment, Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-tester, GHZ experiment, Heisenberg's microscope, Popper's experiment, quantum pseudo-telepathy (violations of Bell's inequalities), quantum suicide (in the many worlds picture), Mott problem and Renninger negative-result experiment, Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, Wigner's friend, and others.

In the context of quantum gravity, most well-known experiments deal with the information loss paradox, in one way or another. People are imagining a lot of observers doing ordinary as well as crazy things while falling into black holes, and so on.

Again, it's important to note that some of those experiments have actually been realized while others have not. In the cases that have already been observed, the correct answer is typically viewed as a fact that everyone is forced to accept, even if her expectations were different.

However, that doesn't mean that the results of the gedanken experiments that have not been made yet are unknown. They're often equally - or even more reliably - known than the results of the realized gedanken experiments. The correct answers follow from the same well-known theories.

And of course, some people who don't quite understand these theories often end up with wrong answers or at least wrong interpretations of these gedanken experiments and "facts" can't immediately convince them that they're doing something wrong because the "directly known facts" are very indirectly connected with the theoretical questions we want to ask. They are connected by chains of logical and mathematical reasoning and only good enough theorists can safely walk on these chains.

In fact, most of the thought experiments I listed above were proposed and are still being abused as memes to promote misconceptions about physics most of the time. The known answers to the question "what actually happens" is often very different from the "popular" answer that is being associated with the meme by most pundits.

String theory

I have mentioned that people have prepared many gedanken experiments concerned with the black holes, even in the quantum regime where the information loss paradox has to be addressed. Some of these experiments have been fully understood - for example, we know for sure that the Hawking radiation of AdS black holes subtly depends on the initial state - while others have not - we don't have e.g. a "quasi-local" algorithm how to decode this radiation and it's conceivable that no acceptable method exists and no "sharp paradox" can ever be localized.

A lack of thought experiments

However, I kind of feel that the black hole information paradox is not the only class of conceptually difficult situations that must be fully understood for us to crack the theory of everything in its entirety. In other words, I feel that we haven't seen a sufficient number of thought experiments in high-energy physics.

This is not a problem that began in string theory. It began in normal quantum field theory. And this problem is actually the "other face" of the extreme reliability and completeness of the framework(s). Quantum field theory is a framework that produces "theories of almost everything", using Lisa Randall's terminology. It shouldn't be shocking that a "theory of almost everything" answers many more questions than it opens.

And indeed, that's the case of QFT and perturbative string theory, too. They're just telling us what kinds of questions are legitimate and how to answer them. Usually, we are led to believe that all meaningful physics is encoded in scattering amplitudes. And QFT as well as string theory are giving us recipes how to calculate them.

Scattering amplitudes follow a very universal logic and seem to be straightforward and paradox-free in consistent theories. Nevertheless, they're probably not the only types of questions we should really master before we deserve a PhD in the theory of everything. ;-) While the full information about the dynamics may be encoded in the scattering amplitudes or correlators, the exact ways how this information is linked to answers to various non-scattering questions and generalized scattering questions can still bring us some surprises.

While we know that the space (and time?) are kind of emergent in string theory i.e. quantum gravity, we don't really have too many good yet unanswered thought experiments that would attack our ignorance about some remaining conceptual puzzles of string theory. People haven't considered too many sufficiently difficult yet sufficiently well-defined situations in excited states of well-established stringy vacua whose resolution would tell us something we don't know about the birth, death, and radical transformations of space and time.

In this sense, I would argue that physics has a lot of solid answers to many questions - questions that seem unanswerable to a huge majority of the laymen (we have already made quite a few steps beyond the "theory of almost everything") - it is lacking some good new questions. It may be more difficult to find the right questions than the answers to these questions. And once we do so, we may do the next big - and perhaps final - steps to our complete mastery of the theory of everything.

And that's the memo.

EU president: Herman Van Rompuy

2009-11-19T15:13:00.013+01:00

You have probably never heard about this guy, Herman Van Rompuy, a Flemish Christian democrat, but he is now extremely likely to become (update: has become) the "permanent" (non-rotating) president of half a billion of somewhat civilized people, the citizens of the European Union:

Google News

His greatest achievement is that he saved the unity of Belgium - an artificial conglomerate of two completely different de facto countries that should have been split years ago - for 11 months while in office.

Nothing against him - I have no idea who he is, what he thinks, and whether I would agree with anything he thinks (he is almost certain to be a colorless "consensus-builder", an opportunist who always goes with the wind and he may really be good at that) - but the method how it became certain that this particular Mr Nobody would suddenly become our confederate leader is just bizarre and has nothing to do with my ideas about democracy.

Catherine Ashton of the U.K. Labor Party is likely to join him (update: has joined him) as the minister of foreign affairs of the EU - I have forgotten how this term is said in the Eurospeak.

She used to be the EU trade commissioner who, surprisingly, opposed protectionism (BBC HardTalk). However, that didn't prevent her from supporting "protection" (different from "protectionism") and subsidies for local producers. ;-) For example, she believes that Sarkozy's policies to move the production of French cars from Czechia to France don't eliminate jobs in Czechia: what an entertaining crackpot.

If you have a problem to understand his English accent, here's the transcript:

"When saying him in party: we don't sudden taint the leather. And we have an enormous feelings whom you will. And if you inform me double, then we will insert in the hill a Bulgarian campaign. This is where Reagan felt and dared to sow a professional, not a marketing bureau. So the Soviets had an egg till the goose entered the hill."

His point is that the EU officials should find their inspiration in the Soviet Union where the government could steal things like eggs and get away with it, as long as other politicians - including the Bulgarian ones - were campaigning in the Gulag somewhere in the hills. These campaigns prevented the geese - the owners - from getting back to their assets too quickly. Following a similar recipe, the European Union may keep is leather clean, respect the emotions of all of its politicians, and feel as Ronald Reagan at the same moment.

Some of our politicians - e.g. ex-EU minister Mr Alexander Vondra - say that the Czechs should naturally prefer unknown candidates from middle-size countries like ours because they may be more tolerant towards interests of nations like ours and less imperially arrogant.

Well, that's probably a valid argument. Tony Blair would be much more visible in the world but he could behave as a bull in China.

But what bothers me is the question: shouldn't we (or at least a majority of Europe, counted according to a self-consistent rule) actually have some positive reasons to like the EU president? There are many reasons why I would prefer Tony Blair.

It seems to me that right now, almost no Czech citizen (not even a representative of ours in the EU, and similarly for other similar EU members) knows that Van Rompuy should be a candidate - or that he is almost certain to lead the EU. How did it happen? Who was actually choosing the guy? How is it guaranteed that the EU citizens won't lose all of their influence over the composition of the EU institutions? Haven't they already lost it? Does anyone besides your humble correspondent care?

I am simply baffled. At least, in this Russian roulette (or EUSSR Roulette, to be more accurate), we may feel lucky that they (whoever they are) didn't pick Herman's sister, Christine Van Rompuy, a communist politician.

Just a punch line. The English transcript under the video above was a joke. Let me admit that I almost exploded in laughter when I was constructing it because the Dutch language really does sound compatible with English, doesn't it? It's almost as funny as trying to understand another Slavic language.

California bans TVs above 183 Watts

2009-11-19T11:57:00.013+01:00

The Toronto Star, The Tech Herald, and most other media (including the Czech ones) have informed us that the green police in California has focused on flat TVs.

Well, you wouldn't expect such a ban in California - the state that is most heavily overrepresented in its contributions to the global film and TV industry. But don't forget that the Hollywood Left and de-facto Left has a lot green activist types in it and one of them has become the governor, too.

Big plasma and LCD screens have to consume at most 2/3 of the current average electricity consumption of the same-size TVs by 2011 - less than 183 Watts for the most typical 42-inch (107-centimeter) screens -, otherwise they will be banned in the shops. Since 2013, devices will have to sit at 1/2 of the current consumption - below 113 Watts in the case of 42-inch screens. Note that plasma TVs typically consume roughly twice as much power as the LCD screens of the same size.

Watts up with that? ;-)

Well, look at Froogle (Google Products). What kind of plasma TVs does it offer? Well, the first 42-inch plasma screen in the list is Panasonic TC - P42S1, FullHD, for $745. The operational power consumption is 485 Watts which is 2.5 times the limit. Just to have a clue about the realistic numbers. ;-)

Of course, you will also find more modest screens. For example, LG - 42PQ30 costs $550 or more and gets to 181 Watts, marginally below the 2011 limit.

But I am not sure whether you will find any screens on the market today that would pass the 2013 limit. Will they be constructed at all? At the end, the restriction may mean a complete ban of all plasma TVs. You know, there exists a certain physical limit how much the power can drop. A bright, sharp, large enough image simply requires a certain power and a wishful thinking can't beat the laws of physics. Moreover, getting close to this physical limit may be pretty expensive.

Much like in the case of the light bulbs in the EU (which lose 22% of their luminosity during their lifetime in average, as BBC and others reported today), I have nothing whatsoever against the power-efficient models in general. But I can have something against them in particular contexts. Their disadvantages in special situations are enough for any universal restriction to be highly counterproductive.

Even if all TVs became 33% more efficient than today, California's power consumption would drop by 0.7% only because the total power consumption of all TVs only makes about 2% of California's electricity consumption. Are those 0.7% really worth the terror? And in reality, only a tiny fraction of the TVs will be affected (and many people will continue to use their old TVs, anyway), so the true magnitude of the savings is guaranteed to be orders of magnitude below those 0.7%.

Note that the average U.S. price of electricity was 12 cents per kWh in April 2009.

If you buy a new TV that consumes 100 W less than your previous one, you will therefore save 1.2 cents per hour. If you watch TV for two hours a day in average, you will save 9 TV dollars a year for your electricity bill. You will need to accumulate these savings for your whole life if you want to pay for a 113-Watt TV that was more expensive e.g. by 700 dollars, and be sure that the 113-Watts big TVs may be even more expensive than that. And by the way, a significant portion of the extra expenses needed to make an energy-efficient device may be spent for energy during production ;-), so that the overall savings - even when you only care about energy - may be much smaller if not negative.

Whether this comment is relevant or not, one thing looks obvious to me. Because the savings seem to be symbolic in nature, I would say that the purpose of the restriction may be interpreted as an exercise designed to prepare the people for the future totalitarian society where all human activities are controlled by the government.

Schwarzenegger's California is getting qualitatively similar to another C*a country, namely Hu Jintao's China that just banned the Microsoft Windows sales because of some doubts about a font contract. However, Microsoft doesn't expect its sales to be affected. ;-)

Fermilab: muon collider gains steam

2009-11-18T17:33:00.007+01:00

Last week, between November 10th and 12th, a Fermilab workshop focused on a possible future muon collider as a successor to the LHC (where, by the way, the full beam will circulate again before Saturday 8 a.m.) and a potential weapon to keep the U.S. particle physics in the game:

Muon collider workshop (click)

Today, Nature reported that

Muon collider gains momentum (subscription)
Symmetry Magazine (click)

We are talking about a 1.5 TeV or 3 TeV center-of-mass muon-antimuon collider. See the following Fermilab resources:

Recall that the hadrons are heavier which means that they can be accelerated to higher energies. Leptons are lighter but they don't interact by the strong interaction which means that their collisions are cleaner and more accurate, especially when you look for new physics.

A hybrid that unifies both advantages would employ heavy leptons - namely muons which are heavier cousins of the electron. The disadvantage is, of course, that they decay quickly. In the rest frame, the mean lifetime of a muon is 2.2 microseconds which is the time that light needs to travel 660 meters.

However, the rest mass of muon, which equals 0.106 GeV, is inflated up to 1,500 GeV in the more ambitious collider, i.e. 15,000 times, which is the Lorentz factor that also slows down the decay. At these maximum velocities, the mean path before decay would jump to 10,000 kilometers.

So even at the intermediate velocities during the acceleration, you can achieve a lot. Of course, the radiation has to be safe, too. Muons mostly decay to electrons and a pair of (anti)neutrinos: the latter are almost invisible at low energies but behave almost like electrons if the energies are above the electroweak unification scale: that's a part of the meaning of the electroweak unification.

However, the decays are actually not the most difficult technological challenge: the security issue can be dealt with by building the tunnels 100 meters underground while the main problem of the decays is that they create additional fog in the detectors. But cooling is even harder. Muons are usually not created too peacefully - one needs a pretty high energy for them to be born. Methods to cool them down, especially in the transverse direction, have to be refined so that they can be squeezed into the tunnel and accelerated longitudinally.

Once this is done, muons and antimuons can be accelerated in several stages - first to 20 GeV and then to a TeV or so - by a combination of circular accelerators and linear segments.

We will see whether the muon collider becomes the next benchmark in experimental particle physics and whether it replaces another linear collider, The International Linear Collider. However, don't expect the muon machine to be ready before the end of the world in 2012. Adam Yurkewicz's guess is 2028.

The Adhesive Duck Deficiency

2009-11-18T15:05:00.005+01:00

After some time, I have to embed the newest a TBBT video because the episode 3x08 was excellent, especially the Penny-Sheldon part.

Via Megavideo. The icon in the middle, with the left-arrow in the full rectangle, switches you to the full screen mode.

Rajesh, Leonard, and Howard went camping, to watch the Leonids. However, they proved that they were no Sheldons and a couple of marijuana cookies from two hippies of Lee Smolin's age made them behave like three teenage stoners. Just like in the real world today, the Leonid gazers didn't see much.

On the other hand, Sheldon was just enjoying his solitude, going to compute the decay rates of highly excited string modes - which is, by the way, a very interesting class of problems shedding light on the UV behavior of perturbative string theory that gradually changes to the black hole regime and on the character of locality in string theory.

However, Penny was just affected by the reduced friction in her bathtub in general and by the deficiency of adhesive ducks in particular. And after having achieved a shoulder dislocation, she found out that Sheldon was the only available crane, dresser, driver, filler of the medical forms, comforter, and singer of Soft Kitty - and when she summed it up, a very good one at that! ;-)

And of course, you may check who is right and what 湯 on her right buttock means.

HK Climate

2009-11-18T09:55:00.001+01:00

Two Greek Earth scientists, Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis, have written down a couple of pages about the climate on their new server:

HK-Climate.ORG (click)

The co-authors of this and that paper written together with Koutsoyannis argue that there's no reason to worry about man-made warming because it doesn't seem to occur, and that the climate loves to maximize the uncertainty at all time scales (and distance scales), following a kind of critical behavior.

I won't tell you what HK stands for but regardless of this puzzling question, it's a good idea to study Hurst-Kolmogorov processes in the context of the climate! ;-)

Via Maurizio Morabito and the HK-Climate authors

Bonus

By the way, The Breakthrough Institute and others noticed that Al Gore's new book's opening page says:

I'm offering you the choice of life or death, you can choose either blessings or curses.

A true prophet? :-) Well, we should probably offer him the same, especially the latter. At any rate, you have heard the words of the Anti-Christ and thermodynamic crackpot. Amen.

Global warming destroys 9,000 buildings in China

While the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution was a record warm day in Czechia, the typical people of the planet Earth - who are Chinese, as the fans of the anthropic principle know :-) - saw something else.

In North Central China, record snow (since the recordkeeping began in 1949) killed 40 people, smashed 9,000 buildings, and destroyed 2,000 squared kilometers of crops.

Velvet Revolution: 20 years

2009-11-17T08:56:00.008+01:00

A trailer for a CNN program. The square between 0:18 and 0:20 is our Pilsen's Square of the Republic.

Twenty years ago, I was a high school sophomore and a young dissident of a sort. With a few colleagues, we didn't join the Socialist Youth Union and created a small version of Charter 77 instead. We lived in a regime that was largely emptied of the belief in its principles and in its future.

Nevertheless, even in 1989 when governments were collapsing in Eastern Europe and perestroika had been rebuilding the Soviet Union itself for years, the socialist regime in Czechoslovakia looked remarkably robust. Our leaders were forced to talk about perestroika and they even had to do something - but they surely didn't like it.

It was hard to imagine that something could seriously change about the system because most people looked entirely indifferent. However, events that are hard to imagine sometimes happen, anyway.

Back to November 17th, 1939

November 17th has been an important day in the Czech history for quite some time. On October 28th, 1939, students in the new Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia celebrated the 21st anniversary of the birth of Czechoslovakia. The Nazi forces suppressed the rally. A student, Jan Opletal, was seriously wounded and died on November 11th.

His funeral on November 15th transformed into another anti-Nazi student rally. On November 17th, the Reichsprotektor (the German union's commissioner for the Czech lands) sent 1,200 students to the concentration camps, executed 9 of them, and closed all Czech universities.

November 17th, 1989

You may see that anniversaries have played an important role as explosives for new events, providing the Czechoslovak history with a kind of rationally explained periodicity. ;-) It was no different in November 1989.

On Friday, November 17th, 1989, students commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Nazi pogrom against the Czech schools. It was an excellent opportunity for college students to express their dissatisfaction with the lack of freedom and democracy in the socialist Czechoslovakia.

They were marching from Albertov, the headquarters of the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Charles University in Prague: Albertov is pretty much where Albert Einstein crystallized his key ideas needed for general relativity around 1911 and it's about 100 meters below Karlov, one of the four main places of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. The rally was beaten by the police forces. Rumors that one student was killed were spreading quickly. The rumor was bogus it was surely helpful to accelerate the events.

I quickly learned about the events from Radio Free Europe. During the weekend, pretty much everyone knew what was going on. The students were viewed as innocent people, "our kids", so pretty much ordinary people who didn't care about politics became concerned a bit. The actors went on strike. After a few days, other occupations joined them one by one.

On Monday, November 20th, we would return to schools and the revolution was felt in the air.

On that first day, I organized a poll, asking people to guess when the communist boss Mr Milouš Jakeš (who had complained that he stood alone like a fencepost in his famous July 2009 talk near Pilsen: today, he wants to be paid for copyrights just like other comedians) would resign, when the federal government would be replaced. It just happened that your humble correspondent himself correctly and completely accurately predicted that the first date would be November 24th while the second date would be December 3rd. Quite a coincidence - or a prophecy? ;-)

There would be many rallies, especially large rallies in Prague (one of them attracted one million people). Everyone - including our high school - was writing petitions. Almost everyone was hoping that the paradise was coming (which was partly to the naivité of many people), everyone behaved nicely to others. The events were extremely fast. The leading role of the communist party - a key regulation defining the totalitarian system - was erased from the constitution on November 29th.

One month later, on December 29th, Václav Havel would be unanimously elected the Czechoslovak president by the federal Parliament. This really meant that even the numerous communist deputies who would be keeping him in the prison just a few months earlier have voted for him to lead the nation. ;-)

Of course, a friendly as well as not-so-friendly bullying by the Civic Forum was partly behind their decision to vote Yes.

The Civic Forum was the main non-communist party or movement whose main goal was to beat the communists in the first democratic elections in 1990. This conglomerate combined all political forces of all flavors that had some problems with the pre-1989 socialism. You may imagine that it was pretty unreadable.

Eventually, it was decided by the key people that we wanted to avoid third ways, apolitical politics, and similar postmodern constructs. Václav Klaus became the leader of the Civic Forum for a while but his immediately realized plan was to establish a standard conservative party that had much more well-defined (and therefore potentially controversial) opinions but that actually became much stronger politically than the "diluted" remainder of the Civic Forum.

Meanwhile, Miloš Zeman who wasn't terribly left-wing quickly adopted the role of the main democratic opposition politician (against Klaus): for this purpose, he revived the old and conventional Social Democratic party. (I won't discuss another opposition politician, Dr Miroslav Sládek of a racist "Republican" party who was a Mr Bean's lookalike, even though he managed to penetrate to the Parliament a few times.)

Similar developments were occurring in Slovakia where "The Civic Forum" was called "The Public Against Violence" and where the nationalist and separatist plans had always played a much more important role than in Czechia.

Klaus oversaw the economic transformation including liberalization of prices, convertibility of the currency, privatization, and many other essential steps. It worked very well, much like the Velvet Divorce at the end of 1992. Many other events occurred since 1989 but I don't want to enumerate all of them.

Appraisal

Obviously, Czechia and Slovakia are much happier today than they used to be. The citizens enjoy a much higher economic growth rate, the freedom to say and do anything, opportunity to travel, the right to choose politicians from lists of competing alternatives. We live in a cleaner, prettier, healthier, more colorful environment.

There also exist people who are dissatisfied with the new system - usually for understandable reasons: they were parts of the machinery that was benefiting from the previous socialist regime. Many other people also complain in the polls - but that's really because they're free to do so and complaining is one of the activities that Czechs like to do.

Well, there are many things I would like to say about the history, the improvements, the evils of socialism that are being forgotten, especially by the younger generations, and other things, but I didn't plan to write an extensive text today...

Click the picture for a few more images of this kind (press left-right arrow afterwards). Unedited galleries of all pictures I took: Pilsen, Prague.

In Pilsen, the most noteworthy event is that the Smetana Street has been transformed into the Totalitarianism Street where you can buy under-the-counter products for the old socialist prices. ;-) I am just going to look, before going to Prague in the afternoon again.

Update: Prague was very nice, too. Around 10,000 filled the National Avenue (Národní třída). The concert featured Václav Havel, Joan Baez (not John Baez), Michael Kocáb, Vladimír Mišík, Dan Bárta, and others. We redid the Albertov-National Avenue march from 1989, and people had a lot of interesting and/or crazy banners, balloons and so on and so on.

Al Gore: the interior of the Earth is extremely hot, several million degrees

2009-11-17T08:04:00.005+01:00

You may have heard that the stupidity of the people has no limits but you may have thought that the statement was exaggerated.

That's because you haven't heard Al Gore's opinions about the temperature of the Earth's core.

He's told by the host that the geothermal energy looks like a plan to defeat Superman. Gore's defense of this ludicrous source of energy is striking.

He says that two kilometers under the surface, there are incredibly hot rocks because the interior of the Earth is extre-hehehe-mely hot: several million degrees.

And the crust is therefore hot, too. So they have just invented drills that don't melt in these several million degrees, Gore tells us. ;-)

What a breathtaking simpleton. It's very clear that he can't possibly have the slightest clue about physics, geology, and energy flows on the Earth. It's sad that many politicians lack the basic science education.

Just to be sure, the center of the Earth has roughly 7000 °C - the temperature gets warmer by 1 °C per kilometer of depth - and no conventional material can stay solid (or even liquid or an ordinary gas) above a few thousand degrees Celsius.

Every material containing nuclei and electrons becomes a plasma well below a million of degrees simply because a million of degrees is equivalent to 100 eV per particle, more than enough to ionize most atoms.

The temperature in the middle of the Sun is around 14 million Celsius degrees. But you know, the Sun is a bit different from the Earth. It is a star and thermonuclear reactions running over there guarantee that it is shining a lot of its own light, unlike the Earth. Believe me, Al: you don't want to build your new house from your green fraudulent money 4,000 miles from something that resembles the Sun's core. ;-)

I also wonder how he can possibly sustain so stunningly incompatible beliefs in his otherwise hollow skull: if the interior of the Earth were several million degrees hot, the average gradient would be around 1 degree per meter of depth. A few additional meters of a rock could therefore screen you from the "cataclysmic" warming.

It just makes no sense. On one hand, he wants others to believe - and maybe believes himself (?) - that two or three degrees Celsius of warming would be a life-killing catastrophe. On the other hand, he believes that the temperature inside the Earth changes by millions of degrees, depending on the location.

Geothermal energy: a few more words

Don't get me wrong, I am no foe of geothermal energy. But it currently produces about 0.3% of the global energy demand. Only near the tectonic plate boundaries, the installation is relatively doable today. That's why geothermal power plants may thrive in Iceland but not in the bulk of Europe or America.

There's surely some room for expansion of this source of energy but it doesn't seem realistic to expect that geothermal energy will replace the fossil fuels in the bulk of their current applications.

If you want to have a sensible idea about the amount of geothermal energy we can get by sensible tools, it's excellent to imagine the "hot water bubbling up at some places" (usually in combination with lots of fart-y gases such as methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, besides innocent carbon dioxide) - exactly the right idea that Al Gore doesn't like because it cools the irrational hype (or downright lies) surrounding the alternative sources of energy.

Hat tip: Anthony Watts

CERN: CLOUD experiment began operation

2009-11-16T11:57:00.009+01:00

CLOUD experimental chamber. More photos.
Click the picture to zoom it in.

The newest article at cern.ch says:

CERN is home to lots of experiments and collaborations. CLOUD is an experiment that uses a chamber to study the possible link between cosmic rays and cloud formation. The experiment is based at the Proton Synchrotron; this is the first time a high-energy physics accelerator has been used in the study of atmospheric and climate science. CLOUD's results could greatly modify our understanding of our planet's climate.

Further links:

Here is the newest interview with Jasper Kirkby, the boss of the experiment, and another member:

The results will arrive "fairly quickly" and detailed quantitative summaries of the experiment will emerge in 2010.

If you have gotten to this point and listened to the interview, I actually recommend you the article at The Register, especially the graphs showing the extraordinary correlation of the cosmic rays with temperature in the last 2,000 and 550 million years, while the temperature and CO2 were pretty much uncorrelated.

Concerning the "really big" experiment, note that the LHC may start collisions as early as next week.

APEC meeting agrees: no Copenhagen treaty

2009-11-15T09:14:00.008+01:00

The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Newsbusters, and other media have reported that the leaders who met in Singapore have agreed that there will be no deal on carbon regulation signed in Copenhagen which increases the chances that there will never be another carbon regulating treaty on this blue planet.

Bye, bye, Copenhagen treaty. Note that comrade Obama doesn't wave his hand because the agreement about no agreement means that this advocate of the climate insanities has become a big loser once again. Click to zoom in.

The gaps between the rich and poor, and between the rich themselves, are just way too wide, especially for 22 days that remain until the summit in the Danish capital. It's not hard to calculate the gap between any pair of countries, X and Y. It's approximately equal to the money that the country with the smaller GDP in the pair wants the bigger country to pay for CO2 emissions reduction. ;-)

In a sane world, this number would be equal (and, hopefully, will be equal) to zero, so any nonzero value of this quantity creates tension. The overall gaps sum up to trillions of dollars. And imagine what happens with your friendship when you disagree with another person whether he owes you trillions of dollars.

The leaders still seem to agree to meet in Copenhagen because tourism paid by the taxpayers is nice for all those thousands of f***ing parasites who are "working" on this kind of stuff even though many of them concede that Bali was a nicer place to meet.

Gore heckled

By the way, Sun Sentinel, WPTV, and Miami Herald I / II described a story in Boca Raton, Florida on Saturday when Preaching Hypocrite Al Gore was heckled by roughly 200 loud climate realists. Hat tip: Noel Sheppard.

Much like in the U.S. - click the graph above - the AGW believers in the U.K. represent 41% of the population only: see The Times for details.

Meanwhile, The Tennessean ran an interview with Al Gore who claims to be convinced that there is an ever greating support of the fight against climate change. I am afraid that until this f***ing jerk gets a proper thrashing so that his mouth is irreversibly modified in a way that he can actually see in the mirror every morning, he won't bother to notice the reality and distinguish the truth from the lies.

I urge you to use all legal tools that are available to you to give him a proper thrashing.

Warm records vs cold records

2009-11-13T10:05:00.012+01:00

MSNBC and others run a story about the asymmetry between the number of daily hot records and the number of daily cold records in the U.S.

Note that in the 1960s and 1970s, the cold records beat the warm records approximately by a 1.3 to 1 ratio.

The latest ratio of warm vs cold records is 2 to 1.
If there were no trend anywhere and whatsoever, you would statistically expect a 1 to 1 ratio, of course.

But what the media don't seem to convey is the sensitivity encoding how much the ratio depends on the number of years on the record and on the ratio between the trend and the annual random fluctuations. Clearly, these are the only two parameters that determine the ratios.

Some simple simulations

Let's assume that there are 100 years on record. Also, describe the temperature on a given day to be an underlying trend plus a random number without autocorrelation (white noise) which is appropriate for local daily temperatures. We want to know whether Friday, November 13th, beats the previous ninety-nine November 13th readings in Cambridge, MA and becomes the warmest November 13th, and the corresponding probability of the coldest reading.

If there is no trend (and the noise is white), both probabilities are evidently equal to 1% because each year among the 100 years has the same chance to be the record holder (both for warm and cold records). From now on, let's assume that the underlying trend is 0.6 °C per century. And we will list the ratios for different standard deviations of the white noise, a random number that is being added to the daily local temperatures in each year.

If the standard deviation is

* 0.0 °C (no noise), you get 100% of warm records, 0% of cool records, and an infinite ratio
* 1.0 °C (small noise), you get 2% of warm records, 0.5% of cool records, 4:1 ratio
* 2.0 °C, you get roughly 1.4% chance of a warm, 0.7% chance of a cold record, and the 2:1 ratio
* 3.0 °C, you get 1.3% warm, 0.85% cool, 1.6:1 ratio (or so)
* many °C, you get 1% warm, 1% cool, 1:1 ratio

The figures are approximate. I could probably calculate them analytically, without my Monte Carlo program, but let's not waste too much time now.

You can see that the standard deviation of 2.0 °C (with the 0.6 °C underlying centennial trend) gives a similar ratio as the 1990s in the U.S. The warm-to-cool record ratio dramatically decreases from infinity:1 towards 1:1 as the noise-to-trend ratio increases.

If you replace a warming trend by a cooling trend, the roles of the warm and cool records get interchanged, of course.

Extending the chronicles

What happens if you change the number of years? Let's go from 100-year records to 200-year records. Clearly, it becomes tougher to beat the records. For no warming trend, you will get 0.5% chance of a warm records and a 0.5% chance of a cold record. Let's keep the 0.6 °C warming trend per century i.e. 1.2 °C warming trend per two centuries. What happens with the table above?

If the standard deviation of the daily noise is

* 0.0 °C (no noise), you get 100% of warm records (unchanged), 0% of cool records, and an infinite ratio: unchanged
* 1.0 °C (small noise), you get 1.6% of warm records (slightly decreased, less than by a factor of two), 0.05% of cool records (hugely dropped, much more than twice), 30:1 ratio
* 2.0 °C, you get roughly 1.1% chance of a warm, 0.2% chance of a cold record, and the 5:1 ratio
* 3.0 °C, you get 0.9% warm, 0.3% cool, 3:1 ratio (or so)
* many °C, you get 0.5% warm (dropped to one-half), 0.5% cool (dropped to one-half), 1:1 ratio (fixed)

So what's going on if the number of years is being increased? Well, if there is a warming trend, it is becoming increasingly likely that the warm record occurs in a "recent year" while the cool record occurs in a "distant past".

Concerning the particular percentages, the probability of a warm record is not changing much. If the "integrated trend over noise" ratio is high enough, the probability of a warm record converges to a constant that is independent of the number of years on the record: that's what you see at the top of the table (small noise).

On the other hand, the probability of a cool record decreases brutally if the number of years on the record is being increased. Well, the temperatures were really lower in the 1880s and it becomes increasingly unlikely for the "current" white noise to beat the coldest readings of the 19th century.

For the cool records that become very rare, their probability starts to depend primarily on the "integrated trend over noise" ratio, regardless of the number of years on the record. And the probability reflects a normal distribution that is suppressed in the Gaussian way if the "integrated trend over noise" ratio becomes substantially greater than one.

So getting a "50 to 1" ratio of the warm records and cool records would be nothing extraordinary. It would simply mean that for many years, the Earth stays detectably warmer than it used to be in the 1880s etc. The large deviation of "50 to 1" from "1 to 1" simply expresses the certainty that the current climate is warmer than in the 1880s.

But the number "50" isn't proportional to any "severity of the impact of warming". On the contrary, the "1/50" ratio is naturally dropping, faster than exponentially (in the Gaussian way) as a function of the integrated warming trend. So it simply can't be shocking that it is large.

Because the warm-to-cool record ratio only sits around 2:1, you might say that even the very statement that the Earth is warmer than it was 100 years ago is supported just by "pretty weak statistics". The "accumulated warming" since the beginning of the records is just becoming comparable to something like one quarter of the "daily temperature fluctuations" (see the more precise data above).

So the underlying trend can already be statistically isolated from the noise, by taking a large number of days and stations into account, but the warming doesn't yet influence a single weather station on a single day because the accumulated warming is still substantially smaller than the daily variations.

Message

I would like to emphasize that one needs to do the maths well and stay rational about all these things. Various statistical quantities that depend on the warming are highly nonlinear functions of the warming trend and we shouldn't blindly identify them. For a fixed standard deviation of the noise, the probability of a new cold record is an extremely quickly decreasing function of the "accumulated warming". This fact follows from mathematics - from basic properties of the normal distribution - and no rational person could see any "warning sign" in this mathematical fact, as MSNBC irrationally screams.

This statistical treatment of warm and cold records can be a pretty convenient way to express and parameterize the statistical significance of the underlying warming/cooling trend relatively to the noise. But one warning deserves a special sentence: none of these data tell us anything about the causes of the underlying trends.

See an extremely simple Mathematica notebook for simulations that generated the numbers above: NB file, PDF preview.

APS fat cats stick to the sinking AGW bandwagon

2009-11-12T22:54:00.003+01:00

Bad news which is however hardly surprising.

The APS has prepared a negative response to the letter by 160 physicists including Ivar Giaever and Will Happer who wanted the society to return to its scientific roots when it comes to the topic of climate change and who proposed a new climate policy statement.

Physics World, Google News

What was the procedure leading to the official APS reply? The current APS chairwoman Ms Merry Cherry (or so) constructed a "reliable" six-person committee that was asked to recommend the APS Council what is the right way to respond.

Not too surprisingly, the committee recommended to say "No," and the APS Council - whatever it means - "almost unanimously" decided to reject the proposal to update the APS statement on climate change on behalf of all the APS members.

The radical alarmist blogosphere started a new campaign to sling mud upon the authors of the proposed new APS policy statement. For example, the not-so-gentle men at a Nature alarmist blog think that Will Happer has been discredited because top scientist Al Gore effectively fired him back in 1993 when Gore was the U.S. vice-president.

That event must really weaken Happer's credibility - especially because in a sane world, prominent scientist Will Happer would strongly influence these matters while Al Gore would be severely punished for his unacceptable political interventions to science.

Joshua B. Halpern of Howard University is also promoting an analysis that tries to show that most signatories of the letter are mature or older (what a sin!) and many of them even dare to prefer the Republican or Libertarian Party over the Democrat Party.

That must be the ultimate crime in the contemporary Obamaland and especially in the APS, right? Is it really hard to see that these climate "scientists" behave just like the brown shirts while Merry Cherry and Barack Obama are giving them a similar type of institutionalized backing as Adolf Hitler was giving to the brown shirts?

Harvard Gazette on Vafa's phenomenology

2009-11-12T21:34:00.001+01:00

The Harvard Gazette published an exciting article explaining what the LHC is all about:

A line on string theory

A few weeks ago, Cumrun Vafa went to CERN to check how the employees are preparing for their most important piece of work which is to test his and Jonathan Heckman's F-theoretical phenomenological scenarios. ;-)

Vafa and Heckman - with their occasional collaborators and competitors - assume that gravity is decoupled and supersymmetry survives to low energies. They're led to F-theory compactifications with gauge fields sitting at real codimension-two manifolds, matter fields sitting at real codimension-four cycles, and cubic interactings arising from the real codimension-six points.

This blog has discussed some theoretical aspects of this approach many times. The article in the Harvard Gazette is original because it extracted some concise expectations about the LHC observations from Cumrun. He thinks it's likely - especially if their scenario is valid - that the gravitino (the dark matter particle in these models) together with the stau are the lightest superpartners.

And stau can be quite a player because if it's produced, it could live up to a minute and imprint Cumrun's and Jonathan's names onto the LHC tunnel many times. ;-)

An expedition to Spooksville

2009-11-12T20:15:00.000+01:00

In the afternoon, I went to Spooksville to see the haunted house. Let me assure you that I have met no poltergeists, zombies, or extraterrestrial aliens.

The following picture is hopefully enough to prove that the "official" science is doing fine: it's an ordinary house, with an ordinary digger digging an ordinary hole, and with tons of thick wires grounding the whole field. ;-)

Click to zoom in.

Recall that the village was named Spooksville ("Strašice" in Czech) because of some scary knights of the roads who were robbing the traders a few centuries ago. Four miles closer to Pilsen, the situation was already safe which is why the other village was named Goodville ("Dobřív" in Czech).

I was surprised how much excavation work was going on in the village. In the vicinity of the haunted house, this activity got to a brand new level. The whole field has been grounded by hundreds of meters of a thick metal. An additional digger is creating a big hole next to the house.

I have spoken to the owner of the house for half an hour or so. With his bottle of Gambrinus beer, he was relatively relaxed. They have lived without electricity (at least during days, when the activity was said to be stronger) since late September. He told me about his experiences and some facts. Besides some new and relevant non-verbal impressions, the only new piece of information was that the neighbors have had some electricity problems, too.

The boy - a seventh-grader - is a pleasant and clever guy who was more shy than I expected. While he's been good in the mathematical and biological olympiads, I learned that the "firefighter contest" that his team has won in the spring was actually a "young paramedical worker competition". My belief that the boy may have been behind all these unusual phenomena has considerably weakened but it hasn't disappeared.

So right now, I am completely undecided - 50:50 - whether some physically unusual phenomena have occurred there or not.

New Scientist on supersymmetry

2009-11-12T12:19:00.000+01:00

Being the only blog on the planet Earth that actually expects supersymmetry to be seen at the LHC (more likely than not) and that has explained the reasons in many ways, The Reference Frame is pleased that Nude Socialist, a magazine dominated by crackpots most of the time, has published a sensible article explaining supersymmetry,

In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for.

Anil Ananthaswamy sketches some history of SUSY, the hierarchy problem, neutralinos as dark matter, gauge coupling unification, scenarios for the LHC results, and relationships between string theory and supersymmetry.

It is a solid introduction to the subject. One amusing misinterpretation does occur in the article: the author argues that the reason why confinement exists is only explained if supersymmetry exists. If you haven't recognized where this statement came from, it refers to the papers by Seiberg and Witten.

Well, confinement in N=2 theories has very good reasons and its properties may be analytically computed because of the enhanced supersymmetry. Things fit together - it is a beautiful calculation that showed how powerful supersymmetry is in simplifying calculations. But it is misleading to say that the "very existence" of confinement has to be explained by SUSY because we know theories, such as pure QCD, that are natural but still able to predict confinement.

By the way, I was once explained by a big shot theorist ;-) that Seiberg and Witten were thinking in terms of stringy objects and phenomena while they were writing the paper but they have erased all the references to string theory, apparently in order to extend their readership. However, this physical system was later naturally embedded in string theory and newer and crisper ways to calculate the results by stringy tools were found.

Even though there could have been a couple of additional readers that Seiberg and Witten have gained by this censorship of their mental processes, it's clear that the people who actually used the insights from the paper during the subsequent decade became contributors to the second superstring revolution.

EU will ban a couple of "E xxx" food additives

2009-11-12T10:36:00.001+01:00

From the middle of 2010, the European Union will ban several food additives.

Recall that in order to regulate these compounds that are being added to food and beverages with the goal to improve their taste or color, and in order to inform the consumers, the European countries have established the "E xxx" number system which was later adopted internationally.

The code "E xxx" really means that it has been tested, included in the database, and at least at some point, it was labeled safe in reasonable amounts. Of course, the consumers tend to view "E xxx" negatively - as a proof that something is wrong with the food. And of course, the scientific evaluation of each compound keeps on evolving.

The E's that will be banned since mid 2010 include

E 102 - Tartrazin yellow
E 104 - Quinoline yellow
E 110 - Sunset yellow SY
E 122 - Azorubine red
E 124 - Ponceau 4R red

Unlike these E's, the E-U has not yet been banned. ;-)

Well, of course, I can't promise you that all E's are harmless. Quite on the contrary, I can assure you it is not the case. But I can assure you that the typical people's understanding of their meaning and impact is completely irrational and the overall reaction is biased in the direction of "irrational fear" rather than "irrational indifference."

Some of these E's may lead to allergies, irritated skin conditions, and hyperactivity of children. But these are reactions that you could observe - and search for the reason after you see some trouble. And most people simply don't have any of these complications.

The main point the laymen seem to miss is that the natural products may also lead to allergies or other health problems. A chemical compound doesn't become "worse" once it gets an E symbol. In fact, I would claim that most people don't even understand that the term "chemical compound" refers to materials found in Nature, too. And they don't understand that chemistry can fully and accurately imitate a huge portion of the compounds that are found naturally.

Polls show that approximately one half of the people are repelled by the E's and they are ready to pay extra money for more expensive natural replacements. It is sometimes much more expensive, indeed. For example, an artificial vanilla essence costs $3 per kilogram. On the other hand, the price of natural vanilla is close to $30.

No doubt, the very cautious consumers have the right to be protected, whether or not their food preferences are based on facts or superstitions. If they want to pay and avoid all materials that have been classified by the "E xxx" system, good for them. However, I also feel that the remaining one half of the consumers - the rest of us who are not hysterical about chemical formulae - has the right to buy the cheaper food which contains "currently passing" E's.

It's clear that a lot of myths is being spread and these myths may always be justified by a type of "precautionary principle". One of the most serious stories involved E123 - Amaranth, a dark red or purple dye. In 1971, some Soviet scientists claimed that the compound has increased the cancer rate of their lab rats.

These results failed to be reproduced by any subsequent research - in Europe, America, and elsewhere. It's very likely that the original link was complete bogus. However, it's a story that will probably never die. The U.S. consumer activists went ballistic and the dye was banned in the U.S. It's also banned in Austria and a few other countries.

E123 - Amaranth shouldn't be confused with E122 - Carmoisine, found in marzipan etc. The latter is known (almost certainly but not quite certainly) to cause allergies and be carcinogenic, especially when it comes to bladder cancer (although you shouldn't expect the effect to be too strong), and is one of the additives from the list above to be banned.

Concerning possible consequences of the food additives, there can exist short-term and long-term consequences. The short-term impact is usually seen easily: for example, allergies to E's don't qualitatively differ from the allergy to peanuts. The long-term consequences are less clear.

However, my chemical intuition dictates me that it is immensely unlikely that compounds that decompose at higher temperatures can have any long-term effects. For example, E123 - Amaranth decomposes at 120 °C. That's its "melting point". That's very different from e.g. benzene, a carcinogenic compound that melts at 5.5 °C and boils at 80.1 °C but doesn't really decompose.

The carcinogenic compounds - or any compounds that are supposed to have a long-term impact - do have to possess some kind of "resiliency". That list includes heavy metals or benzene but not most of the dyes.

I think it's a good idea to have numbers for the compounds, to investigate their effects, and to ban some of them if problems are found. But I think it's stupid to punish a chemical compound just for its having a number. It's also silly to believe that artificially created compounds are "worse" than the natural ones even though they are demonstrably identical as far as all their physical properties go. And I think it's a sort of medieval superstition to consider an organic compound dangerous even though no negative impact has been observed for 50+ years or so.

And that's the memo.

Pachauri: glaciology is arrogant

2009-11-11T17:08:00.036+01:00

A few days ago, Indian government climatologists have released a 60-page paper about the

Himalayan glaciers (PDF).

The document has combined the work of several collaborations that have investigated the changes of the glaciers in the world's highest mountains. They concluded that there was no evidence of local changes that could be attributed to the global climate change.

Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, was led to conclude that "There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers."

If you look at the hierarchy of the institutionalized Indian science, is there a more powerful weapon than large teams of government-funded experts teamed up with the environment minister? In this particular case, there is one. A freaky vegetarian activist is apparently a more important weapon. ;-)

Rajendra Pachauri's message to the authors and to the minister was crisp:

"We [?] have a very clear idea of what is happening [?]. I don't know why the minister [?] is supporting this unsubstantiated [?] research. It is an extremely arrogant [!] statement."

Holy cow. They should feed him with one because the lack of proteins is clearly starting to affect the basic functions of his freaky brain.

Quite suddenly, the "consensus" is no longer important for those people. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that they have replaced "consensus" with "science".

They have - and Pachauri in particular has - replaced "consensus" non-science with even more unscientific unconsensual screams from one weird herbivore. You know, Mr Pachauri, the purpose of science is not to isolate non-arrogant propositions from the arrogant ones. The goal is to find the correct statements and eliminate the wrong ones and whether you or another whacko finds the scientific results arrogant is irrelevant.

See The Guardian, AFP, Anthony Watts

Peter Robinson talks to Václav Klaus

2009-11-11T16:00:00.006+01:00

Czech president Václav Klaus did another tour to the U.S. He has been to many places but here is the interview with Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge (National Review Online):

Part 1/5 (remembering fall of communism),
Part 2/5 (similarities of EU and the Warsaw Pact),
Part 3/5 (Al Gore is wrong on AGW),
Part 4/5 (on becoming a free market fan),
Part 5/5 (drifts since 1989).

For your convenience, the third part on climate change is embedded directly in this short article.

Peter Robinson began this part of the interview with your humble correspondent's translation of Klaus's words that global warming is a myth and every serious person says so. ;-)