Astrophysicist Grygar on global warming and everything

This blog entry is directly relevant for 3% of the readers only who are Czech; but others may learn something about the intellectual atmosphere in our nation.

Radio Impuls – which I happen to be listening to right now (and sometimes) because it has an OK Vista Sidebar Gadget :-) – is just interviewing Dr Jiří Grygar, who is arguably the most publicly famous scientist in the Czech Republic. I had the pleasure to meet him several times during recent years, at the christening events of "Magpie in the Land of Entropy", Ms Markéta Baňková's award-winning book of physics fables.

His fame rose in the early 1980s when he became the host of a long TV serial about astronomy, "Windows to the Universe Are Wide Open". It was shot in the Slovak TV studios (Bratislava) which were more tolerant than those in Prague. The screenplay was written by Dr Vladimír Železný (who was banned in Prague and) who later became the founder and owner of the post-socialist Europe's largest commercial TV station, TV NOVA.

Grygar was just describing his cooperation with Železný. He was driving him to Slovakia in his Wartburg, a *hitty East German car, and they shared an apartment in Slovakia. Due to Dr Železný's detailed knowledge of TV markets, state-of-the-art video tricks, and other things, many people had predicted that Železný would later become a director of a TV station when the socialist regime collapses; their predictions turned out to be precious. ;-)

I add that unfortunately, Železný was even later robbed by a major and rogue U.S. investor, Ronald Lauder, the son of Estee Lauder, who owns and controls the station today.

LHC lunch

From Utah to CERN's cafeteria

The U.S. LHC network has launched a P.R. project called The LHC Lunch. They catch various members of the set of 1700 U.S. scientists in the CERN's largest cafeteria, the so-called Restaurant I.

Siberia swallows Europe

UAH AMSU has announced that the January 2012 global temperature anomaly was negative, -0.09 °C. The month was cooler than their average January!

However, in some relatively important places on the globe such as Europe and America, it was hard to tell that the globe was relatively cold.

In comparison with some chilly winters in recent years, the 2011-2012 winter could have looked balmy so far, at least in the NATO member states. However, that changed this week when a chilly continental wind brought some cruel frost to most of Europe.



Temperature anomalies across the globe in °C right now, averaged over 8 days. Central Europe is 15 °C colder than the normal for this season; note that even 2 °C of warming – some people with big eyes expect in a century – wouldn't make a difference. A favorite map of Ron de Haan (hat tip); see many other maps by Ryan Maue.

The title contains the word "Siberia" and not "Arctic" because it's actually a wind from the East, and not from the North, that is bringing us the reduced energy per degree of freedom.

WSJ publishes a collective letter disagreeing with Lindzen et al.

Comparison of dentists, climate scientists, astrologers

The Wall Street Journal just published a letter to the editor

Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate

which was signed by a few dozens of climate alarmists. It is meant as a reply to an op-ed by 16 scientists that WSJ previously published.



Ms Katharine Hayhoe, a typical religiously obsessed woman with IQ around 80, is an important co-author of the letter in the Wall Street Journal. Her chapter called "How It Is Crucial for the Survival of the Planet for the Future U.S. Presidents To Sleep With Nancy Pelosi On Al Gore's Couch" has been removed from Newt Gingrich's future book. For years, media would paint a surrealistic picture in which Ms Hayhoe and similar "experts" beat folks like Richard Lindzen.

The new published letter is somewhat less hysterical than the responses by the alarmist blogosphere; but it is arguably even more pretentious than the comments by the alarmist bloggers.

Why?

The Physicists: Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I just returned from the theater. They were playing The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a top Swiss playwright. Our Pilsner actors are sort of amazing – and it's a happy coincidence that the EU has agreed that Pilsen is the right city that will become the European Capital of Culture 2015 – but I am afraid that I can't convey these qualities to the dear readers, especially because 97% of them don't speak any Czech. ;-)

Instead, the rest of the text will be dedicated to spoilers and some historical overview.

CMS sees a hint of a 700 GeV hadrino

Or is it a shadron or NLSP?

Eva Halkiadakis of my graduate Alma Mater, Rutgers, has presented the newest results of the CMS searches for physics beyond the Standard Model:

Update on Searches for New Physics in CMS:
Seminar web page, poster, PDF, video

Yes, the number of female experimental particle physicists with ancestors from a particular country (she is otherwise American!) is proportional to the country's present public debt expressed in the U.S. dollars.

In the PDF file, you find new graphs – sometimes using as much as 5/fb of data – relevant for the availability of any monster you may think about, from leptoquarks to extra dimensions, black holes, and of course lots of supersymmetric particles, among tons of other stuff.



Shadron, a particle from the World of Warcraft

Phil Gibbs has checked all the graphs and saw almost nothing surprising, no hints of new physics. However, one graph seems to be a provoking exception.

Britain, Czechia resist euro cartel treaty

The eurozone has agreed to establish a fiscal union and all other EU countries except for Britain and Czechia have joined this ill-conceived plan. The countries essentially agreed to pay a fine, 0.1% of the GDP, if they fail to have an essentially balanced budget (less than 0.5% of GDP). The fine will be "enforced" by the European Court of Justice; I am not sure whether they have a sufficient number of cops and soldiers to guarantee such an "enforcement" because billions of dollars in fines are still lots of money.

An older draft also planned to force the countries with the debt-to-GDP ratio over 60% to reduce the excess above 60% at least by 1/5 every year, by running big surpluses, but this rule was removed for unspecified reasons in the final version. So countries with a negligible debt are now subjects to the same severe constraints as countries with a giant debt with is crazy and unfair by itself. It was one of the "essential points" whose deletion helped to decide that Czechia would stay away from the pact.

You know that I may in principle agree with the legally binding law requiring budgets to be balanced – although I am no "fanatical" supporter of this principle (the balance has to manifest itself in the long run but short-term balancing is an unnatural prohibition of some borrowing and lending: in particular, the one-year time scale is totally artificial and arguably too short). But I find the legislation they agreed upon scary and stupid, for many reasons.

Alarmists hysterically react to WSJ op-ed

After the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed signed by 16 prominent scientists that has urged the politicians and policymakers to stop panicking about "global warming" and start to review the money flows directed to climate change alarmism and that has warned about the striking similarity between climate disruption alarmism and Lysenkoism, several alarmist whackos have predictably gone ballistic. They know that the article was influential; the WSJ comment section under the op-ed attracted 2,300+ comments as of today.

If you want to be entertained by these loons who have entered an era in which the newspapers are no longer obliged to pay lip service to their pseudoscientific misconceptions, see e.g.

Peter Gleick (a Forbes blog)

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Joe Romm (Think Progress)

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Skeptical Science (Dana1981 via John Cook)

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Tree Hugger (Mat McDermott)

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Greg Laden ("Science" Blogs)

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Media Matters (Dentists Do Heart Surgery)

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Peter Frumhoff (Union of Concerning "Scientists")

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Dot Earth (Andrew Revkin and William Nordhaus)

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Brian Angliss (to Burt Rutan)

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Grant Tamino Foster (to Burt Rutan)

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Trevor Macomber I (II: Brutish Short)

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Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy)

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Chris Mooney (De Smog Blog)

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Jamie Vernon (on Mooney's Intersection)

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Jess Zimmerman (Grist)

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Get Energy Smart Now (Whacking 16 Moles)

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Michael Tobis (Planet 3 Beyond Sustainability)

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Ed Kilgore (Washington Monthly)
Martin Leggett (Earth Times)

Finally, see a less emotional but equally pretentious answer by Katharine Hayhoe, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and a few dozens of fellow alarmists published as a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal (TRF discussion).

It's good to see that after a couple of years in which insanity thrived in the absence of sufficiently powerful natural foes, the pages of influential dailies are suddenly dedicated to the conclusions of prominent scientists while unhinged conspiracy theorists and hardcore commies may use their reserved spots in irrelevant weblogs, before they will be given more permanent beds in the mental asylums.

HadCRUT3: 2011 was 12th warmest year

The dataset produced at the center of the Climategate scandals, HadCRUT3 (weather stations), differs from UAH AMSU (satellites), RSS AMSU (satellites), and GISS (weather stations).

If you click at the previous links, you will see that unusual coalitions have developed: both GISS (weather stations) and UAH AMSU (satellites) saw 2011 as the 9th warmest year while both HadCRUT3 (weather stations) and RSS AMSU (satellites) decided that the right climate ranking for the previous year was at the 12th spot.

Spain abolishes subsidies for new renewable energy sources

Benny Peiser has pointed out the following good news coming from Bloomberg:

Spain Suspends Subsidies for New Renewable Energy Power Plants

Spain is finally doing something about its fiscal sustainability. The state-backed borrowings that funded ludicrous (i.e. "renewable") sources of energy have reached €24 billion. That's something like 1/15 of the Greek public debt or, equivalently, 1/15 of an infinity. ;-)



This impressive Spanish solar power plant uses molten salt to store energy overnight.

Spain is currently controlled by the People's Party, a conservative party, and Mariano Rajoy Brey is the prime minister. Fortunately for Spain, the years of socialist comrade Mr José Luis Rodríguez Zaplaťpéro (whose last name translates as "Pay for the spring, pen, and pri*k" from Czech: you see that their government has paid for lots of useless things) are over.

ATLAS sees some multilepton excess, too

In recent months, many TRF articles were dedicated to the CMS' search for multilepton (and multijet) signatures of supersymmetry or similarly behaving new physics. Quite many of them reported some excesses.

See e.g.

TRF: CMS sees SUSY-like trilepton excesses

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TRF: Trijet and nonajet excesses

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TRF: Multileptons are only "mostly consistent" with SM (CMS)

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TRF: Searches for \(R\)-parity violating multileptons at CMS

Finally, five days ago, CMS' friends and foes at ATLAS published a preprint about the same question based on a reasonable amount of data, about 2.1/fb:

ATLAS: Search for Anomalous Production of Multilepton Events and \(R\)-Parity-Violating Supersymmetry in \(\sqrt{s}=7\,\,{\rm TeV}\) \(pp\) Collisions

What did they find?

Has science refuted materialism?

The Guardian, a top British left-wing daily, became an unlikely place that launched a war against materialism in science. In his article

It's time for science to move on from materialism,

Mark Vernon promotes a new book by Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion. In synergy with some quotes from this book, the Grauniad article argues that most contemporary scientists are confined in the 19th century materialist ideology when it comes to topics such as matter and soul.

Of course that most readers of the Guardian went instinctively ballistic (see the comment section) but we should ask: Are these comments true?

WSJ: 16 scientists urge a critical review of climate investments

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

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

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