Copenhagen begins: interview with Lord Monckton

The 2009 U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen has begun. So far, it's the largest conference of this kind ever organized. Thousands of people will try to reduce the mankind's carbon footprint.



Meanwhile, the Copenhagen prostitutes offered their services to the climate negotiators for free, as a protest against some planned anti-prostitution regulations.

Andy Revkin has mentioned this innocent story on his blog. He hasn't even explicitly explained the obvious fact that the carbon regulators are corrupt prostitutes themselves - but his article was enough for the big alarmist bullies to promise him a big cutoff from those who no longer believe that they can trust him. ;-)

However, the conference also begins two weeks after the eruption of ClimateGate which has already reduced the believers in a climate threat to a fringe minority of mentally unstable conspiracy theorists. And the ClimateGate is not yet over. However, I guess that the representatives of political blocs such as the EU don't care that they're completely detached from reality. The German chancellor already knows that he's in trouble but Rajendra Pachauri apparently doesn't.



This is a pretty insightful interview with Lord Monckton. I assure you that he could tell you all these things and many others in Aramaic, German, Russian, Latin, and many other languages, too. ;-) He told me/us many interesting stories about his work as the adviser to Margaret Thatcher etc.

Incidentally, Al Gore has finally accepted the offer to debate Lord Monckton: rap style. ;-)

In Copenhagen, Saudi Arabia has called for the investigation of the ClimateGate. I am sure that this topic dominates a significant portion of the private discussions, too.

ClimateGate after 3 days

Update: Eduardo Zorita and Hans von Storch, mainstream yet not hysterical climatologists, have a new climate blog, Klimazwiebel (Climate Onion). Try it.

I was away from the Internet for 2.5 days. The conference in Berlin was great fun, the participants except for your humble correspondent were fascinating (other speakers included Lord Monckton, Fred Singer, Henrik Svensmark, Nils-Axel Mörner, and others) and I have neither time nor energy to report everything that happened although there would be a great deal to report.

The discussions with the other famous skeptics were very interesting, too.

The trip was tiring especially because of my broken rib 12 days ago (by a tip of a hockey stick: I am sure that Mann is ultimately going to be punished for this one, too), very cool temperatures on Friday (the Greenpeace protesters against us were quite brave because they had to be freezing), and various small glitches.

Of course, lots of e-mails were waiting for me at home etc. It was also important to see how "qualitatively" the ClimateGate has jumped in those 2.5 days. BBC (U.K.) and CBC (Canada) did some great pieces, Michael Mann has thrown Phil Jones under the bus, waiting for a truck.

Please feel free to discuss about anything here.

U(1)_{PQ} non-GUT exotics restore unification in F-theory

In the first hep-th paper today, Joe Marsano, Natalia Saulina, and Sakura Schafer-Nameki study the detailed impact of the Peccei-Quinn U(1) symmetry in the realistic bottom-up F-theoretical models of string phenomenology.

In a previous paper, they appreciated that a new U(1)_{PQ} symmetry is almost necessary to ban the dimension-four proton decay: the new U(1) charges prohibit a tree-level mu-term. However, with such a new symmetry, one also obtains some non-GUT "incomplete" multiplets that may spoil the gauge coupling unification if the low-energy spectrum contains MSSM fields only.

However, there has been another problem that some of us have kind of missed. Even without such U(1)_{PQ}, the gauge coupling unification is distorted in the F-theory models because of an extra term, "int C_0 tr(F^4)", integrated over the GUT 7-brane.

So there are actually two similar problems that destroy the gauge coupling unification. Now, you may be able to guess how the gospel is going to continue. ;-) The authors make detailed calculations of the impact on the unification and find out that the two distortions of the unification exactly cancel!

Building on their April 2009 geometry, they find a handful of three-generation models, including some of those where anti-D3-branes are not needed to cancel the tadpole (and such models are arguably prettier and more likely to be stable and healthy). The new non-GUT matter may be good not only for preventing unwanted interactions but also for communication of SUSY breaking although the latter statement may contain some wishful thinking because the detailed mechanism of these would-be messenger fields has not yet been analyzed.

Some SU(5) singlets may be good as right-handed neutrinos or as tools to lift the exotics and the authors explain a method to count their zero mode in the semi-local framework.

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By the way, Marc Henneaux, Axel Kleinschmidt, Gustavo Lucena Gómez just wrote the most comprehensive paper yet explaining why the Hořava gravity is inconsistent. So far, the people who were looking at various solutions always focused on symmetric or otherwise special solutions.

But the present authors show that if one considers generic configurations, it's possible to prove that the lapse equals zero at infinity. For some coupling constants, they can solve much more about the system. They find out that the lapse must actually vanish everywhere. In other words, all constraints are second-class (and the time-reparameterization symmetry is a "trivial gauge symmetry"). Consequently, "everything" must dynamically equal to zero. The theory can contain no interesting physics.

Their derivation makes some previous observations that the phase space is "odd-dimensional" (and can't be paired) more comprehensible. The only way to fix the problem is to add new brutal constraints that oversimplify the theory and make its agreement with GR at long distances impossible.

I wonder whether all those people who have been producing not-quite-cautious papers with spherically symmetric and/or cosmological and/or black hole solutions will dare to notice that the theory actually doesn't contain any non-special solutions, or whether they will continue to push their increasingly dumb bandwagon and run rats through all kinds of mazes without paying attention to the actual conditions that are critical for the consistency of theories of gravity.

Saddam planned to attack RFE in Prague

Many people like to say that Saddam Hussein's regime wasn't a threat for the civilized Western world. The following story speaks a different language.

The building above used to be the communist federal Czechoslovak Parliament (The Federal Assembly). After the Velvet Revolution and the Velvet Divorce, the original purpose disappeared and the building became the headquarters of the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe in 1998. The station focused on various Muslim countries around that time.

It's located near the National Museum at the top of the Wenceslaus Square, the main commercial avenue in Prague: Google StreetView. The main railway station is 400 meters away on the other side and the state opera is 10 meters away, across the street.

As AP and lots of Czech media report, Saddam Hussein ordered the attack against the building in 1999 or 2000. The Iraqi spies have successfully smuggled in weapons for the attack, including an anti-tank (rocket grenade propelled) missile RPG-7, six machine guns (more precisely, four Kalashnikovs and two Heckler-Koch submachine guns), pistols, and 2,000 rounds of ammunition in a diplomatic vehicle. The attack was planned from a particular (rented) apartment window, 80 meters away from the radio building. Lots of money were paid for the plan.

Our BIS (the Czech FBI plus CIA plus Superman plus a few former KGB agents combined) managed to uncover and thwart the attack, much like some attacks against Jewish targets in Prague at the same time. Good job. The result was that in April 2003, weeks after the U.S. invasion to Iraq began, the Iraqi embassy in Prague voluntarily gave the Czechs all the weapons that should have been used.

Power like wind and tides: swimming biosphere

The physics arXiv blog summarized an interesting preprint about the impact of swimmers on the oceans,

Stirring by swimming bodies

Jean-Luc Thiffeault and Stephen Childress begin with a rather surprising fact: the motion of all swimming animals and plants transmits the energy of nearly 1 terajoule per second to the ocean, i.e. 1 TW, close to the power of all the wind and tides!

How much are these swimmers actually contributing to the mixing of the oceans and to their diffusivity? The authors' first order-of-magnitude estimate ends up with a huge number that beats the thermodynamic molecular diffusivity by 3 orders of magnitude. On the other hand, their following models suggest that the mixing is negligible. But the result is very sensitive on detailed properties of the models and it can go both ways.

So even the very question whether the swimmers are more important for the mixing of the oceans than the molecular chaos remains unanswered. This result highlights the complexity of the phenomena in the ocean. Who would have thought that girls and jellyfish may influence the mixing of oceans which could also have consequences for the effective thermal conductivity of the oceans and predictions of the future warming? ;-)

Phil Jones "temporarily" fired: ClimateGate lags behind Velvet Revolution by 4 days

Picture: Daily Express became the first U.K. paper that put the climate change manipulation on the front page. Click the thumbnail for a story.

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Today, Phil Jones was replaced by Peter Liss, the new acting director. Liss studies gases in the sea.

I have used the term "Climate Velvet Revolution" for "ClimateGate" in a newspaper article (EN) of mine that was printed at a few places.



"We Shall Overcome" ("Jednou budem dál") was one of the popular songs sung at the Velvet Revolution rallies in Czechoslovakia. Two weeks ago, Havel was employed as a clamp holder of Joan Baez's guitar when she attended the 20th anniversary concert in Prague. In the talk above (I have no idea how old a talk it is: maybe November 2009 - his "transcendental" but pretty irrelevant topics have really nothing to do with any particular moment), Havel asks how Czechs' and Slovaks' lives would look like in another 20 years.

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The analogy is obvious. The Velvet Revolution - the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia - was started when students were beaten by the communist cops. The Climate Velvet Revolution began when it turned out that the key IPCC scientists who pumped the alarmist "consensus" into the reports - East Anglia's CRU climatologists plus a couple of their friends - have been using hopelessly messy datasets, were fraudulently "improving" the data, and were hurting everyone who obtained inconvenient results by behind-the-scenes pogroms.

The timing

The Velvet Revolution began on Friday, November 17th, 1989, when the students were beaten at a rally in Prague. The Climate Velvet Revolution began 20 years and 3 days later, on Friday (the same day of the week), November 20th, 2009, when the world really learned about the leaked documents (which were already posted on the previous day).

Remotely related: the champions of the irrational alarm go ballistic. According to The Guardian, if Australia doesn't silence its skeptics, the continent will become uninhabitable because camels will siege the remaining towns in the country. Well, medical help is recommended here.

The general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Mr Milouš Jakeš, a comedian against his will who was also known as a self-described lonely fence post (from his most famous talk given in Greater Pilsen in July 1989), resigned one week after the revolution began, on Friday, November 24th, 1989.

The obvious analogy should imply a resignation of Phil Jones ;-) and my schedule dictated that it should have occurred on Friday, November 27th, 2009. But it only took place today, on December 1st, 2009, i.e. 4 days later than my model predicted. Too bad. ;-) Moreover, they say that the resignation is just temporary, before an "independent investigation" is completed. Let's believe that it will actually be completed.

LHC: ALICE collects data, publishes preprint

The LHC is the largest experiment ever built. The circumference of the tunnel is 27 kilometers. And there are thousands of physicists working on it.

How much time does it take for the physicists to collect a sufficient number of events, evaluate them, calculate the charged particle pseudorapidity density, get the approval of a thousand of collaborators, write a 14-page preprint in LaTeX, and submit it to arXiv.org?



The first event counted as a pp-collision at the LHC; the distances are in centimeters. The paper contains a very high-res picture. Click to zoom in.

Recall that for a comparably large collaboration in climate science, the IPCC, a similar task takes 6 years and the result is just a political diatribe without any new quantitative results. So what's the required time scale in particle physics?

The correct answer is actually "five days." Yes, it's kind of incredible. On Wednesday, November 23rd, both beams were running at 0.45 TeV per beam (it was before the energy was raised to 1.18 TeV per beam). They really didn't plan it ;-) but some proton-proton collisions occurred, too.

Well, so the ALICE collaboration took these 284 events and sent them to a computer code that has probably been ready for quite some time. The result was submitted on November 28th:

ALICE: First proton-proton collisions at the LHC as observed with the ALICE detector: measurement of the charged particle pseudorapidity density at sqrt(s) = 900 GeV

The previous data from CERN's SppS collider are confirmed, suggesting that the LHC works perfectly. Note that the center-of-mass energy, sqrt(s), was 0.9 TeV: one half of it comes from each beam. Right now, they can do similar things at sqrt(s) = 2.36 TeV. After (or around) the Christmas, this number should be raised to 7 TeV before it reaches the projected LHC maximum, 14 TeV, later in 2010. However, the luminosity will have to be boosted quite a bit, too.

The first preprint hasn't discovered any new physics, of course, but the speed we have seen could be a remote indication of the speed with which new physics will actually be discovered. I guess that they may have prepared detailed plans - including subplans for various scenarios depending on what will be observed - so the discoveries could be pretty fast, indeed.

The most shocking discoveries are likely to be made by ATLAS and CMS which is another reason why ALICE's leadership in disciplines like "the first paper" is a good idea. ;-)

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P.S. String theorist Ashoke Sen won one of the five "Indian Nobel" (Infosys) awards, including a $100,000 cheque. Well deserved, congratulations.

Scientific American answers to "contrarian nonsense"

Breaking news: Thankfully, Phil Jones "temporarily" steps down as the director of CRU at East Anglia University until an investigation of the ClimateGate is completed: Associated Press.

Michael Mann is being investigated by his university (PSU), too, but I guess that they will be extremely soft on him.

Sadly, Scientific American has been hijacked by aggressive ignorant people with a severely suppressed brain activity. One of them, John Rennie, wrote what he calls

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense.

That's quite a title for a publication that used to be something in between the popular and technical peer-reviewed magazine.



Supernova, a new film by Al Gore. ;-) Hat tip: Olda K. By the way, Al Gore will be sold for $1,209 per asexual intercourse in Copenhagen.

The article starts with a picture of James Inhofe, a "climate contrarian". Rennie argues that the common technical scientific terms for the likes of James Inhofe are "contrarians, naysayers, and denialists". Oh, really? I thought that at least so far, these terms were not used by actual scientists but by unhinged environmentalist zealots. At least, Rennie admits that not all the people are like Inhofe. Some of them are honest ignorants.

Fine, let's get to his seven answers. They reveal the brainwashed ink-spiller's breathtaking ignorance about the basics of science and its history.

Bad Astronomer on ClimateGate: nothing to see here. Readers: Huh?

I didn't want to write dozens of posts about the ClimateGate although this event almost certainly deserves them. But there are 12 million pages about the scandal on the Internet and some of them are better than what I could write.

There's much to say but I won't say much. Let me hope that you are watching the developments on Google News and elsewhere. Instead, let me just mention a rather irrelevant non-event. Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, wrote an article called

The global warming emails non-event (click)

in which he argues that you shouldn't look at the documents because there's nothing to see.

The article became the locus of a huge comment activity on his blog, receiving 100+ comments in a few hours. That's not bad for such a non-event. ;-) And most readers actually disagree with Plait and give him decent and thoughtful arguments why the ClimateGate is something one should be concerned with.

Of course, not all readers are climate realists. The following comment is a good representative of the quality of the opposing side's - the new deniers' - thoughts:

T_U_T says:

holy !$!%f ! What a crop of denialists here. Even the arch-crank Motl crawled out of his fetid sewer. Seems every sorry piece of reality denier comes out of the brushwork now.

The other alarmists' comments are analogous and I think that every single one of them uses the word "denier" or "denialist". ;-)

The gap in the intellectual quality between the two sides couldn't be more stunning.

Of course, I have known Plait's far-left political fanaticism for quite some time. Several years ago, we exchanged a few e-mails, learning that we liked the blog of the other. When I suggested we would trade the links, he answered that it was inconceivable that he would ever link to a blog with right-wing blogs on its blogroll.

I was really surprised that someone who is interested in astronomy - or at least pretends so - may be so blinded by an idiotic ideology and so thoroughly unable to separate politics from science and other parts of life. He looked like a guy who was advised by a new "Stalin" not to do inconvenient things. In reality, he has always been a prototype of the totalitarian atmosphere in the contemporary left-wing scholarly circles.

Well, as environmentalist George Monbiot has said, those who claim that the ClimateGate is no problem are the new deniers.

They think that if they won't look, the problem won't exist. Well, while I feel that the ClimateGate is already evolving at a slower pace than the Velvet Revolution did 20 years ago, it is surely continuing and when the dust settles, people will find out that the majority convinced that the case for AGW is not scientifically reliable will be so huge that any projects to regulate the climate will become politically unrealistic.

However, the dust hasn't yet settled.

P.S. FoxNews just reported that since 2007, the United Nations have wanted to establish UNEP, an environmental watch dog, to push environmentalism as a replacement of religion, "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity." Whoops.

I wonder how these things are going to be established e.g. in the Czech Republic where religious officials are considered "black asses" ("černoprdelníci") by the overwhelming (atheist) majority of the population and where the environmentalists are indeed going to follow the religious example. ;-) Also, we have a bill that outlaws "movements attempting to suppress basic human rights and freedoms."

The United Nations, come to visit us in Czechia, you will be kicked into your black asses, too. ;-)

Royal Society: 60 historical papers online

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 so it is going to celebrate its 350th birthday next year. One of its new gifts to the public is their new server

Trailblazing (click)

with 60 of their most famous historical papers. For example, I am just looking at an Isaac Newton's letter about light and colors sent to the editor of Cambridge University Press ;-) in February 1671/72. It describes some Newton's basic but fun diffraction experiments and his conclusions.