Will Happer: CO2: friend or foe?

A comprehensive physicist's introduction to CO2 and climate

I would say that most of the competent physicists at good universities who have spent enough time to study the climate change issue are climate skeptics. A good example is Will Happer, an atomic physicist of Princeton.

Today, I checked the list of Berkeley physics coloquia and picked the following November 2010 talk:

CO2: a friend or a foe (MOV video, 90 minutes)

Lots of achievements by Prof Happer are enumerated at the beginning; you may want to listen to it carefully and compare with some of the scientific niemands who promote the climate alarm. As soon as the talk begins, it's fun.

Seventh Heartland Climate Conference: schedule

Between next Monday and next Wednesday, the Heartland Institute organizes the ICCC-7, its seventh climate conference. The schedule is available here:

Schedule of ICCC-7

The composition of speakers looks interesting enough. Czech President Václav Klaus – who has had some complaints about the Heartland billboards – will be responsible for the dinner keynote speech on Monday. The logistic good luck seems almost incredible: on May 20th and 21st, Klaus attends the NATO summit in the very same city of Chicago! Was some intelligent design involved?

Many other well-known names attend ICCC-7, too.

Does hard work guarantee discoveries and answers?

The short answer is No.

In his newest article,

SUSY: A Matter Of Prior Beliefs,

Tommaso Dorigo of CMS argues that many people at CERN have worked hard so they deserve to cause a paradigm shift in physics – in his case, he believes that phenomenologists should stop the research of supersymmetry in order to appreciate the contributions of the experimenters. Tommaso's opinions are a combination of utter irrationality, dishonesty, self-brainwashing, and victimism.

Why?

Czech socialist politician: $350,000 in a shoe box

On Wednesday, they found extra $1.5 million (CZK 30 million) in a special hideout in the floor of his house (and probably submachine gun model 58)

It's been a stereotype that Mr David Rath, the current governor of Central Bohemia (a disk around Prague without Prague), a former socialist healthcare minister, and one of the most aggressive social democratic politicians in the Czech Republic is one of the most immoral and corruptible politicians in Czechia.



It turned out that it hasn't been a stereotype. It's been a fact since the very beginning. I've heard many stories about his previous methods to get lots of money (he was very poor right after the fall of communism) but what we got yesterday and publicly today sounds much more specific. Details will be investigated but the conclusion that he is a criminal without any moral restrictions to speak of seems pretty much unassailable at this point once he was taken into custody by police. The police president who informed the interior minister last night claims that they have worked hard – 100 investigators were involved – and they feel very certain about the case.

Someone who has seen into Dr Rath's cards has spoken (Mr Paroubek speculates it was Mr Filip Bušina, an entrepreneur who had similar legal problems in the past) and for about six months, police have investigated accusations of bribery, negotiating advantages in public procurement (i.e. manipulating public tenders), and misappropriation of EU funds that is related to Dr Rath, a female director of a Central Bohemian hospital, and about 6 other people (5 men, 3 women). Contracts linked to the hospital in Kladno and/or the reconstruction of the Buštěhrad chateau may be involved. Today, the cops finally decided to catch the rat on the street, near a sewer in front of his house in Hostivice, Greater Prague, a mile from the Prague Havel Airport (calm video from the event, rap). What did they find?

Focus point supersymmetry

The mass of the soon-to-be-discovered Higgs boson, \(125\,\GeV\) or so, is below the threshold of \(135\,\GeV\) which means that it is compatible with the MSSM, the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, where the observed Higgs boson could be the lightest one among five faces of the God particle.

It is definitely the mass region that favors the SUSY particle content in its simple form – and it's this MSSM form that is known to lead to gauge coupling unification which means that there exist other reasons aside from "simplicity" (which is a problematic, aesthetic guide) why a significant fraction of the phenomenological research into supersymmetry should be spent with the MSSM. (Non-minimal models of SUSY allow the Higgs mass to be larger but they usually destroy the gauge coupling unification miracle and have other undesirable effects.)

However, \(125\,\GeV\) is still a bit larger than in the most naive attempts to incorporate SUSY via the MSSM.

LQG calculates the correct black hole entropy

Not really but the stupidity of the LQG proponents has reached levels that are utterly comical

Just a week ago, I discussed the incompatibility between the black hole thermodynamics and loop quantum gravity. In a new paper, Ashoke Sen updated the list of black holes whose logarithmic corrections to their entropy are calculable.

For the Schwarzschild black hole in \(d=4\), the right formula contains terms such as \((212/45-3)\ln(a)\) while the LQG folks have confidently claimed that their theory predicts the coefficient equal to \(-2\) or \(-3\). Sorry, guys, that didn't work well. ;-)

But a "slightly less intelligent" paper was pointed out by Backreaction and Physics Forums:

Entropy of non-extremal black holes from loop gravity

The stupidity of this paper by a young Gentleman called Eugenio Bianchi – no, he is not Luigi Bianchi (1856-1928) of the Bianchi identities fame – has reached such celestial levels so that even Sabine Hossenfelder was able to notice. Let me extrapolate some of these lessons (including her justified yet not really novel arguments against Lee Smolin that the nonlocality implied by "doubly special relativity" means an inconsistency) in a more respectful way: I think that her IQ could be some 10-20 points above the IQ of an average LQG researcher such as Lee Smolin.

The paper goes approximately like this.

Quantum gravity: replies to "top ten"

Backreaction highlights what Sabine Hossenfelder considers ten "most interesting and pressing open problems" in theoretical physics related to quantum gravity. The amount of ignorance – a type of ignorance that is unfortunately widespread – and the depth of the misunderstandings that are visibly contained in the very questions seems very high to me.

Let me try to clarify some of these basic misconceptions that are often apparent in the very way how she phrases the questions.

David Suzuki: humans are 2D maggots

The leader of the Canadian global warming movement has studied fruit flies (much like Alexander Ač whose PhD thesis is about the carbon-enhanced copulation of fruit flies on blue-flowered meadows).

But during his research, he had discovered something that has had huge implications for the human race, too.



He has discovered that humans are fruit flies and maggots because they eat stuff around.

Tommaso Dorigo, cMSSM, and demagogy

Tommaso Dorigo has driven me up the wall by a demagogic article about SUSY, MSSM, and cMSSM, and so have his stupid readers. That has occurred despite the fact that he has already written about a hundred of such dishonest rants.

Because it seems that the Italians weren't sufficiently beaten by us today yet, let me copy my reactions over here.

Richard Feynman: birthday

Richard Feynman was born on May 11th, 1918. If you have never watched his 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell, you should fix it. Here's the first one (one hour):



You may watch all these lectures via Bill Gates' Project Tuva: Microsoft Internet Explorer is needed.

Thomas Bayes and supersymmetry

Phil Gibbs wrote a nice article about an insightful puzzle, Bayes and SUSY, which is relevant for a sensible answer to the question "how much we should change our mind when we eliminate a big chunk of a parameter space", i.e. a big portion of the possible values of some parameters that specify a theory.

EU lawmakers won't go to Rio+20, can't afford the hotel

Next month, there will be a conference in Rio – called Rio+20 or Earth Summit 2012 – which will take place exactly 20 years after the 1992 conference in Rio that helped environmentalism in general and global warming in particular to penetrate deeply into the mainstream media and the mainstream politics.



The policies resulting from the Rio talks and a few related events brought us to the current world, a world which spends several billion dollars a year for climate change research, about ten billion dollars for climate change analysts and journalists, and... about half a trillion dollars a year for the actual policies trying to curb the CO2 emissions (which don't work but still introduce huge and costly inefficiencies to the system).

It may be helpful to write down that half a trillion is $500,000,000,000 dollars. Try to appreciate the number of zeros. For this reason, I was bemused to learn that

MEPs cancel Rio+20 participation (European Voice)

(via Benny Peiser) where MEPs stands for "members of the European Parliament". But it was even more amazing to learn what is the justification why the European Parliament – the only people at the EU level who are actually lawmakers and who could "imprint" some negotiations into reality – won't attend Rio+20: the European Union can't afford $1,000 per night in the hotel which is "too exorbitant". Cool.

Gauginos with Dirac masses and F-theory

The idea that the gauge fields of the Standard Model are extended not just to \(\NNN=1\) supersymmetry multiplets but to \(\NNN=2\) supermultiplets has been discussed a few times on this blog, e.g. in November 2011.

Those blog entries were mostly inspired by phenomenologists who had good enough low-energy if not low-brow reasons to add a chiral multiplet in the adjoint representation to the vector multiplets.

However, I always found such an extension very natural from a braneworld viewpoint. Gauge fields may reside on branes with rather high dimensions and they may preserve the \(\NNN=2\) supersymmetry while the fermion matter multiplets only respect the \(\NNN=1\) supersymmetry, being localized on intersections. This picture becomes particularly natural in F-theory, I thought, and I wondered why no string theorists discussed this scenario.

Finally, Rhys Davies, an Oxford postdoc (and infrequent physics blogger) who worked with Candelas a few years ago, published such a paper:

Dirac gauginos and unification in F-theory

Mars: climate change faster than thought

Global warming on other planets (and moons) is one of the cute scientific observations that have amused many of us many times.



Mars for Martians

The topic got hotter in recent hours once again:

Mars sand dunes show rapidly shifting environment

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Google News

The Martian sand dunes are moving, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has revealed. Just in 105 days, things got totally different: press release.

The observations erase the remaining doubts about the existence of the Martians. They also inform us about their skin color.

Naomi Riley: another victim of PC fascism

Jason has informed me about a very disturbing, new story about the disappearing freedom of speech in America; the story has made it to the Drudge Report. This cute madam became another victim of the organized reverse racism in the U.S. She was fired (see the poor excuse) for having done exactly what she had been hired to do, namely to provide a conservative viewpoint on educational and religious topics.



Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former Wall Street Journal editor, was fired from the Chronicle of Higher Education after she wrote this brief yet convincing essay about the need to eliminate the departments of black studies from the American universities:

The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.

Loud far left activists have vitriolically reacted in the comment section (even though they have arguably been a loud minority) and after a few days and 1,000+ comments, she was fired. The story was described by Reason, Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard, among other sensible sources. The best summary of the virtual story was written by Riley herself for the Wall Street Journal; thanks, Jason.

Do I have some experience of a similar type?

Is everything entangled?

Roman Buniy and Steve Hsu published a preprint named

Everything Is Entangled

which claims that... everything is entangled. Because of the cosmological evolution, everything evolves into an entangled state and the entanglement easily transgresses the cosmic horizon. However, you can't observe this entanglement too easily because the entanglement is "diluted" so a randomly chosen pair of nearby objects won't inherit too much of this entanglement.

Maybe accidentally, maybe because of the preprint, a user named "confused" asked the following question at the Physics Stack Exchange:

Given entanglement, why is it permissible to consider the quantum state of subsystems?