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.

Al Gore expects to see thin ice in Antarctica

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



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

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

Mayan "end of the world": in 2116

But it gets repeated every 394.3 years

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

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

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

Sustainable conference in Rio finds AGW panic unsustainable

Reuters: Environmentalists throwing global warming under the bus

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

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

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



Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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

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

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

UN conference returns to Rio with new emphasis (AP)

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

The conference is called

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

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

Some Boston Bruins meet Obama

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

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

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



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

Armenian genocide: Turkey doesn't belong to Europe

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

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

Why "semiclassical gravity" isn't self-consistent

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

Backreaction on Eppley-Hannah's thought experiment

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Backreaction on this and Page-Geilker's thought experiment

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

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

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

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

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

Leap seconds may be abolished in 2015

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

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



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

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

Climbing inside a Fukushima reactor

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



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

Miller’s grizzled langur goes unextinct

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



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

Cambridge, Mt Auburn cemetery

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



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

Quantum field theory variants

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

GISS: how to defend a 2.3 °C climate sensitivity

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

Megaupload shut down: SOPA unnecessary

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



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

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