Dynamics of greenhouse effect

Saturated confusion of RealClimate.ORG

Originally posted on 6/27, moved to the top for the discussion to continue

The Gentlemen at RealClimate.ORG have decided that my article about

climate sensitivity

and similar articles by others are too dangerous because they show that every new molecule of CO2 causes smaller greenhouse effect than the previous molecule: the absorption rate gradually approaches saturation. Such a conclusion could diminish the holy power of the enhanced greenhouse effect and undermine the global efforts of scientists of good faith - and their friends, politicians of good faith, lawyers of good faith, singers of good faith, and publishers of good faith - to globally regulate the greenhouse effect.

Update: Why is the warming proportional to the logarithm of the amount of CO2?

They must be applauded for giving others the opportunity to study and discuss this question more carefully because the more people know, the more they will see why the hysteria is unjustifiable. So what do these eleven climate scientists think about the dependence of the strength of the greenhouse effect on the concentration? Well, they live in the state of scientific consensus which means, in this case, that none of them has any idea what the answer could be. So they invited an expert to clarify the situation.

Who is the expert? Well, it is a noted historian of science whose name is

Spencer Weart, a guest blogger at RealClimate.ORG.

Ray Pierrehumbert has helped Weart to reduce excessive hyphenation. Weart is the author of a painful book that celebrates a greedy group of researchers who were dreaming about grants and who finally got them after they constructed the man-made global warming theory.

Weart writes in such a way that the text is well-readable and looks insightful to superficial readers. If you read it carefully, however, you can see that Weart has no idea what he is talking about at the technical level. First of all, the text is completely non-quantitative. All assertions are binary and dogmatic, Yes/No, and no quantitative laws or functional dependences are ever given, not even sketched. His text makes it impossible to decide whether one effect or another effect is important or not, or whether it has already been included or not.

You may also see that methods such as differential equations or dimensional analysis - and order-of-magnitude estimates - go well beyond Weart's abilities when he repeatedly says that having "many layers" of gases makes the whole situation extremely difficult. It is not that difficult and a good physicist knows how to solve the differential equations that arise in this context.

Weart's "wise" comments about the layers have no relevance for the question whether the basic dependence on the concentration exists or not but he's not able to see this fact because you can't really see it without some understanding of the method of rough estimates and without understanding basic features of differential equations. A technically skilled physicist knows that the effect of the CO2 layer - imagining nothing else for a while - doesn't depend on its density distribution as a function of altitude but only the overall, integrated "thickness" which is why Weart's ideas about the altitudes are irrelevant.

But when you don't know how to calculate things, you are tempted, much like Mr Weart, to think that every detail that you don't understand - the layer structure of the atmosphere, in this case - will surely confirm your beliefs and move the predictions in the right direction.

In a crowded "Blaník" cinema, Václav Klaus introduced Durkin's "The Great Global Warming Swindle" into Czech movie theaters

Spencer Weart's main goal is to deny or somewhat diminish the importance of the following two observations:

• the greenhouse effect gets weaker as the absorption of the appropriate spectral lines gets saturated
• the overall greenhouse effect from several gases is smaller than a simple sum if their spectra overlap

Needless to say, informed readers know that whatever Spencer Weart writes can't change the fact that the two statements above are correct and important for a detailed treatment of this physics problem. Let us sketch the basics of the greenhouse effect and look at some of the basic consequences of the underlying mathematics.

ABC of greenhouse effect

The greenhouse effect is the absorption of thermal, infrared electromagnetic radiation emitted from the surface of Earth by the gases in the troposphere - between the surface and a dozen of kilometers above it. These photons would otherwise escape to outer space and leave the Earth cooler than it is because of their existence. The effect is a part of a more complicated energy budget, click the picture.



The absorption only occurs if these relatively low-energy transitions are found in the spectrum of a given molecule: recall that the wavelength of ordinary atomic spectra is typically much shorter and the photons carry much higher energies, corresponding to higher temperatures. The requirement that low-energy transitions must be allowed within the molecule is why the mono-atomic inert gases such as argon or even di-atomic molecules such as nitrogen are not greenhouse gases. Those absorbed infrared rays that are relevant for the greenhouse effect are quickly transformed to kinetic energy of the atmosphere and this energy is either re-emitted in the downward direction or it is not re-emitted at all.

Choosing the greenhouse candidates

It turns out that the relevant greenhouse gases are water (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and a few others. We will also include oxygen (O2) and ozone (O3).

The graph below shows the absorption spectra of selected molecules for wavelengths between 100 nanometers and 100 micrometers.



Click to add methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O).

The y-axis shows the relative absorption by the actual layer of the gas that is found in the atmosphere. If you're skillful enough, you could calculate all these graphs from quantum mechanics, at least approximately.

You can see that water is by far the most important greenhouse gas. We will discuss carbon dioxide later but you may also see that we have included oxygen and ozone, for pedagogical reasons. They don't have too many spectral lines but there is a lot of oxygen in the air, a thousand times the concentration of carbon dioxide! So you might think that the precise concentration of oxygen or ozone will be very important for the magnitude of the greenhouse effect, possibly more important than the concentration of carbon dioxide.



The figure above also includes Rayleigh scattering that influences UV rays - that's why the sky is blue - and the location of Earth's thermal and solar radiation.

The reason why it's not true is that there is actually so much oxygen in the air that the radiation at the right frequencies is completely absorbed - 100% - while the radiation at wrong frequencies is of course not absorbed at all - 0%. At least ideally - when you neglect the collisional broadening and the Doppler width of the lines and other effects - it should be so. That's why the greenhouse effect of he oxygen doesn't depend on the concentration of oxygen in any significant way.

You can see that changes of the concentration matter for the absorption of a frequency "f" if the absorption rate at this frequency is comparable to 50%. If it is too close to 0% or too close to 100%, changes of the concentration don't have too strong an effect. Also, you can see that if two compounds share spectral lines, they "fight" for the same photons and the net effect is smaller than the sum of the greenhouse effects in two fictitious atmospheres where only one of the compounds exists. It's roughly because the absorption can't ever surpass 100%.

Calculating absorption

With this wisdom, you can reconsider which concentrations of gases will be the most important ones for changes of the strength of the greenhouse effect that can be induced by changes of the environment. This step - focus on the gases and frequencies where the absorption rate significantly differs from 0% as well as 100% - will effectively eliminate oxygen and ozone. You end up with the standard gases - water, carbon dioxide, methane, and a few others.

Moreover, you can use the approximation that the concentration of water in the atmosphere rapidly converges to values dictated by other quantities. This is the sequence of steps that will single out the "usual suspects". You can see that we have made a lot of assumptions, especially about the mechanisms that control the water cycle. Many sane scientists think that whatever we do, the effects of water will decide about most of the weather and most of the climate.

Carbon dioxide: painting your room sixteen times

Fine. So let us focus on the carbon dioxide. You might think that as you increase its concentration (=effective thickness of the layer) to "C", it will only allow an exponentially small amount of the radiation at the right frequencies, "exp(-AC)" where A is a constant, to get out of the atmosphere. That would mean that the impact of a new molecule would be exponentially decreasing with the concentration "C", too, making the whole effect insignificant.

That's almost what happens but not quite. The reason why the decrease of the strength of the greenhouse effect with the concentration "C" is not exponential but rather a power law is that you can't strictly divide frequencies to "right ones" and "wrong ones". As the concentration "C" increases, the most important frequencies that determine the strength of the greenhouse effect - those where the absorption rate is close to 50% - keep on changing. The result of this game is summarized by the Arrhenius greenhouse equation that says that

• the temperature increase from the concentration "C" of a greenhouse gas equals "B.ln(C/C0)" where "B" is a constant and "C0" is the original concentration.

In words, the greenhouse effect becomes weaker at higher values of "C": recall that the derivative of "ln(C)" with respect to "C" equals "1/C", a function that decreases as "C" increases, but it decreases less quickly than "exp(-AC)". What does it mean numerically?

The conventional quantity that usually measures the strength of the greenhouse effect is the climate sensitivity defined as the temperature increase from a doubling of CO2 from 0.028% of the volume of the atmosphere in the pre-industrial era to 0.056% of the volume expected before 2100. Currently we stand near 0.038% of the volume and the bare theoretical greenhouse effect, including the quantum-mechanical absorption rates for the relevant frequencies and the known concentration, predicts a 0.6 Celsius degrees increase of temperature between 0.028% and 0.038%, roughly in agreement with the net warming in the 20th century.

This bare effect can be modified by feedback effects - it can either be amplified or reduced (secondary influence on temperature-driven cloud formation etc.) - but it is still rather legitimate to imagine that the original CO2 greenhouse effect is the driving force behind a more complex process (see Larry's warnings in the fast comments). The basic facts about the dependence on the concentration are not modified. The bare effect is probably rescaled by a universal factor. That's why we should know how the bare effect depends on the concentration.

In terms of numbers, we have already completed 40% of the task to double the CO2 concentration from 0.028% to 0.056% in the atmosphere. However, these 40% of the task have already realized about 2/3 of the warming effect attributable to the CO2 doubling. So regardless of the sign and magnitude of the feedback effects, you can see that physics predicts that the greenhouse warming between 2007 and 2100 is predicted to be one half (1/3 over 2/3) of the warming that we have seen between the beginning of industrialization and this year. For example, if the greenhouse warming has been 0.6 Celsius degrees, we will see 0.3 Celsius degrees of extra warming before the carbon dioxide concentration doubles around 2100.

It's just like when you want your bedroom to be white. You paint it once, twice, thrice. But when you're painting it for the sixteenth time, you may start to realize that the improvement after the sixteenth round is no longer that impressive.

Above, we have argued that the extra expected warming in the next century should be around 0.3 Celsius degrees but special nonlinear feedback effects may modify this number significantly. But you shouldn't forget that our present theories behind these feedbacks haven't been successfully validated. The models have been largely constructed by interpolation of known data, and whenever you interpolate data, the extrapolation tends to explode out of control even though reality clearly doesn't (recall the discussion about polynomial interpolation and extrapolation of functions).



Once again, physics doesn't predict any exponential escalation of the warming from the greenhouse effect or something like that. Quite on the contrary, physics predicts a rather significant slowdown of the rate of warming. The only thing that Spencer Weart and Ray Pierrehumbert can do against this law of physics is to emit fog - which is precisely what they are doing.

Summary for policymakers

Now, the 20th century warming, even if it were real, hasn't caused any problems for the society at all, so it is reasonable to expect that an additional one half of this warming won't cause problems either which is why we should abandon any attempts to "fight" climate change, whatever is its origin and numerical magnitude, at least until the year 2100.

And that's the memo.

Update: Ray Pierrehumbert has added Part II. It contains more physics but it is still largely non-quantitative. A relatively non-controversial description of these effects including facts about saturation is summarized by breathtaking statements that the saturation argument is "fallacious". It's like believers who are looking at the very same orbiting planets but who see, unlikely you, an old man - God - with long white hair. I just can't understand how someone can be so entirely irrational about things that are as ordinary as the weather undoubtedly is. There are things in between Earth and the Heaven and the troposphere is apparently one of them. :-)

Other well-known climate articles on The Reference Frame

• 1998 no longer the warmest U.S. year, 1934 wins
• Monckton & fears about warming
• Dr Oreskes & illusion of consensus on global warming
• Temperature determined CO2 ppm numbers, not the other way around
• IQ2 US duel: deniers beat alarmists
• Correlation of the sunspots and cosmic rays - and temps
• 2006: a not too strong year for little chickens
• 2006: coolest year after 2001

TASI 2007: video

Videos from the summer school in Colorado:

• Kenneth Intriligator, SUSY breaking:
  part I, part II, part III, part IV
• Raphael Bousso, Cosmology and the landscape:
  part I, part II, part III, part IV
  

Bald eagle no longer endangered

Bald eagle has not only survived hunting and DDT but is thriving and will be removed from the U.S. endangered list today.



Let me admit that with this favorite hat of mine that I bought in the New York City about 4 years ago, it was very easy to feel endangered in the People's Republic of Cambridge, too.

Of course there have been dozens of other threats, too. :-)

Is Witten working on loop quantum gravity?

In this text, I would like to analyze the methods and logic of PW, a well-known critic of string theory, in one particular context.

Relevant sources for this article:

Frame: Monstrous symmetry of black holes
Frame: Witten's paper is out
Wrong: Assorted news
Musings: Report on Witten's talk
Witten: Preprint
Witten: PDF for his talk

This text will be exclusively dedicated to the analysis of the description of Witten's work by PW which I find rather incredible (see "Assorted news"):

• Witten’s talk is entitled “Three-Dimensional Gravity Revisited” ... So, at least one talk there will be about a non-string theory approach to quantum gravity more along the lines of the LQG program.

Wow. ;-) The picture below is a refined version of a photograph by Chehak and symbolizes how sane, natural, and correct the statement of PW approximately is:



Let us start with a simple question:

Why does PW write such a statement that will be shown to be a flagrant absurdity?

Well, the answer is obvious. If you read his blog or his book, you will learn that he believes that decisions in science do reflect and should reflect the emotional power of authorities. Edward Witten is such an authority, even according to PW, which is why PW thinks that if he manages to convince others about his interesting "story" that Edward Witten has largely switched from string theory to loop quantum gravity, it will have a dramatic impact on the scientific community.

Well, I happen to think that if Edward Witten started to work on loop quantum gravity, as defined by the existing contemporary methods and standards of the loop quantum gravity community, it wouldn't mean that physics is undergoing a phase transition. Instead, it would simply mean that Edward Witten would be getting senile. We all admire him and love him, if you want me to say strong words, but he is still a scientist, not God.

There have been many cases in which his opinion had much weaker impact on other scientists than what I would have found appropriate. And there have been cases in which quite many people started to do things because Witten did. On the other hand, it's clear that if Witten were saying things that don't make sense and can't be used by anyone to do logically coherent research, no one sensible would listen to him.

The motivation of PW is clear so let us ask another question:

Is PW's statement true?

No, it's absurd. Let's start with a simple, sociological description of the situation that should be comprehensible to non-experts.

If you open the preprint, you will see that most papers that are being cited were written by string theorists. You will see names like Maldacena, Strominger, Kachru, Dixon, Ginsparg, Harvey, Dijkgraaf, Moore, Seiberg, Verlinde, Friedan, Shenker, Gukov, Maloney, Vafa, and, indeed, Witten, among many others. They are related to physics of conformal field theory, AdS/CFT correspondence, partition sums, black hole physics. Their results and methods are used throughout Witten's paper.

On the other hand, one paper about loop quantum gravity by Ashtekar is cited in a footnote on page 3 of Witten's preprint as a curiosity and no results from that paper or any other loop quantum gravity paper is ever used by Witten. That would be really impossible because all of these results are wrong. They're simply results of faulty math.

Even without a deeper knowledge of physics, the reader should be able to verify that Witten is not doing anything that is "more along the lines of the LQG program", as we were told by PW. But let us analyze some details a bit more carefully.

Spacetime dimension and loop quantum gravity

Witten talks about physics of three-dimensional gravity in the anti de Sitter space. Is that the same dimension as loop quantum gravity? The answer is No. Loop quantum gravity is only loop quantum gravity if the spacetime dimension is four.

Neither Witten nor any other sane physicist I know of thinks that it is possible to define four-dimensional or higher-dimensional gravity - i.e. general relativity - as a pure gauge theory in the same number of dimensions. Witten, just like other big shots, thinks that the loop quantum gravity people have no standards. Physicists like Witten, Gross, and others would never discuss loop quantum gravity in a polite company. It's been a polite standard to allow the loop quantum gravity people do whatever they want, and simply ignore them.

What we're talking here, in the context of Witten's recent work, is another possible reinterpretation of a gravitational theory - namely three-dimensional gravity - in terms of gauge-theoretical degrees of freedom, namely using something that has also been called Chern-Simons-Witten theory. Fine, so let's ask:

Is Chern-Simons-Witten theory equivalent to three-dimensional gravity?

We must realize that the bulk of this question is vacuous.

Three-dimensional gravity is very different from gravity in higher dimensions because it has no local excitations. Why? Because Einstein's vacuum equations, namely Ricci flatness, imply complete flatness because in three dimensions, both the Riemann tensor R_{abcd} as well as the Ricci tensor R_{ab} have three independent components. These two tensors can therefore be calculated from one another. It follows that no gravitational waves are allowed. By quantizing this empty set, we obtain an empty Hilbert space of gravitons. There are no gravitons. There is no S-matrix to calculate. The situation is vastly less interesting than it is in four dimensions.

If there are no scattering amplitudes to calculate in this theory, what do we mean by the equivalence of two systems of equations both of which predict zero objects? Well, we mean that there must exist some other mathematical objects that can be mapped onto each other. Is it true?

Is Chern-Simons-Witten theory equivalent to three-dimensional gravity in some more general setup?

Sloppy physicists like to say Yes because at the classical level, one can make a field redefinition that changes the three-dimensional metric to a gauge field. Witten and more serious physicists have been explaining for quite some time that the answer at the quantum level is No. The Chern-Simons-Witten action and the gravitational action are not globally equivalent, they imply different ranges of path-integration, and absolute values from the gravitational action are not included in the Chern-Simons-Witten action.

Witten has also explained that the Kodama state, a popular formal solution of four-dimensional gauge theory occasionally employed for loop quantum gravity with a positive cosmological constant, is unphysical for a variety of reasons.

So is his new work finally confirming the LQG-like description?

The answer is "Just on the contrary." One of the main messages - or, using the words of Jacques Distler, the main message - of the work is that the gauge degrees of freedom simply don't give the right & full description of the quantum gravitational system.

The three-dimensional gravitational theory has no gravitons or other local excitations but it has black holes that macroscopically look like BTZ black holes. However, the precise quantum character of these black holes is not included in the Chern-Simons, gauge-theoretical description of the system. For example, the Chern-Simons gauge field gives us no hint that the black hole microstates transform as representations of the monster group, at least for some values of the curvature, even though this fact can be argued to be the case by other methods.

So Witten's point is really the opposite one than what PW wants his undemanding readers to believe: Witten argues that even in systems that can superficially be written in terms of bulk gauge fields and nothing seems obviously wrong - such as the case of three-dimensional gravity that predicts no light local excitations - the bulk gauge-theoretical description is always a bad language to talk about the theory at the quantum level.

The boundary conformal field theory whose existence is postulated via string-theoretical arguments always gives a more accurate description of the full quantum theory and the sloppy LQG-like formulae should never be viewed as the full story, not even in the cases where it's harder to show that they're inconsistent.

The three-dimensional anti de Sitter background is not connected with the ten-dimensional and eleven-dimensional vacua in any obvious way but such a fact never means that a given background is not a part of string theory: we already know a lot of islands where moduli are frozen which makes decompactification and other processes impossible. However, what's important is that the basic framework in which the physical laws are formulated and in which the observables are calculated and the consistency of the theory is deduced is the standard framework of string theory - including the AdS/CFT correspondence, one of the main topics of string theory in the last decade - and it has nothing whatsoever to do with loop quantum gravity as we know it.

Summary

You can see that one needs to write many kilobytes of text to carefully debunk vicious lies that PW can compress into one short sentence but I hope that it should now be clear to virtually everyone that these particular statements by PW are lies.

However, consider that PW has been intentionally generating tens of thousands of such lies on his blog for more than three years. Virtually everything he has ever written is junk and he's been probably preparing to do this dirty job for decades. And many people are so uneducated and uninformed that they are ready to buy some of these lies. If they don't buy all of them, 1% is enough because it is still hundreds of vicious lies.

You can't be surprised that using Bush's jargon from 9/11/2001, I think that we should make no distinction between the individual who generates these lies and those who harbor him. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Mitt Romney & new Marshall plan

An occasional reader of this blog who is a Mormon located in Massachusetts liked our musings about a possible new Marshall plan that we proposed in May. Because he just happens to be running for POTUS, he decided to invent a fresh new idea called

a new Marshall plan

or equivalently, "Partnership for Prosperity and Progress", with a special focus on the modern world infrastructure in the Muslim world which is exactly what I had in mind.

Even though the idea didn't get the best reviews from the readers of The Reference Frame, mostly because the present conditions are not as favorable for such projects as they used to be, I still feel that it is not such a bad idea, after all. Not sure whether it is catchy enough for Mitt to beat Hillary because Mitt is sometimes nicknamed a new Kerry. ;-)

Chile: coldest months in 20 years

May and June 2007 have been Chile's coldest months in the last 20 years. Correspondingly, natural gas consumption hit a record, too. You may also read about the brutal cold May 2007 in South America.

During the weekend, parts of Australia have experienced the chilliest June day on record. Last week, record cold temperatures had to be edited in Queensland, too.

Another continent that overlaps with the Southern Hemisphere is Africa. What weather do you associate with Zimbabwe? A few days ago, they recorded -7 Celsius degrees. Several people froze.

Strings 2007: website

Update: Jacques Distler is live-blogging: Monday

The official website of Strings 2007 (Mon-Fri)
Strings 2007 video blogspot site

There are menus under the nine Spanish aristocrats on the painting by Goya. The Reference Frame is the only place in the world where you can learn that the painting is "Blind Man's Buff", 1788. No, it's really not "bluff" as the page indicates.



Because I have learned that not everyone understands the painting, let me tell you that the blindfolded female aristocrat in the middle symbolizes the bulk of M-theory and the similarity with the hexagon drawing is no coincidence. We haven't been told whether the participants will play this M-theoretical game after the talks. :-)

Witten's monstrous paper is out

It has 82 pages. The previous blog text about the topic was

Monstrous symmetry of black holes.

Properties of the CFTs dual to pure AdS3 are considered. The allowed central charges are identified. The discussion of the Chern-Simons description may look a bit overblown given the fact that this description can't be made non-perturbatively exact in any known way.

The monster symmetry of the minimum choices is supported by numerology based on the dimensions of irreps of the monster group and applied to some partition sums - I have almost no doubt that the conclusion of this numerology is correct - but the dimensions of the irreps seem to be the only property of the monster group that is ever used which I find somewhat disappointing: someone else will have to find something more about the importance of the monster group and its rich properties in this gravitational setup later.

And that's the memo.

Graviweak unification

I was also intrigued by two papers by Fabrizio Nesti who is incidentally also the author of the JHEP LaTeX macro. The second of these papers was written with Roberto Percacci. Unfortunately, the excitement lasted for 140 seconds only (and that's more than it would be otherwise because I have looked at it with a 56k modem).

They want to unify the Lorentz group with the gauge group - namely a Pati-Salam group - using some magic with spinors. Well, this seems to violate the Coleman-Mandula theorem. They make a funny argument that the theorem doesn't apply because the Lorentz indices are internal - this argument is complete nonsense, as far as I can say (if this loophole existed, one could always use it to humiliate Coleman and Mandula) - and what they have is only a pure bookkeeping device how to organize all the spinor components. There is no sign of genuine unification of gravity with the gauge forces here, for example a unification of the Einstein-Hilbert action with the Yang-Mills action.

I think that all such methods to unify must look like Kaluza-Klein theory or a different limit of string theory. Everyone who has proposed any other logic that "also" unifies the forces - including Alain Connes - is confused about some pretty elementary facts about the identity of forces, the different roles of groups in physics, and about the meaning of the word "unification".

And that's another memo. :-)

IQ: oldest brothers' 2-point edge

A survey in Norway shows that the oldest brothers' IQ is higher by about two points relatively to their younger brothers. The article proposes some sociological theories based on interactions between the brothers. Your humble correspondent thinks that this theory is mostly bogus.

In fact, it's also known that younger brothers are more likely to be gays. Their brains are correspondingly less male in average. There is a good reason - a likely mechanism - behind these facts: mother's womb gradually develops a certain kind of immunity against the male foreign intruder that acts on the younger brother's foetus.

Note that this action of hormones and the antibodies requires time. That's one of possible explanations why similar considerations can't influence the very sex of the child. Indeed, as far as I know, there exists no indication that younger siblings are more likely to be girls or more likely to be boys. In fact, the data are good enough that it is known that the existence of older sisters doesn't enhance a man's probability of being a gay, unlike the existence of older brothers.

A lot of facts are already known today and many more may be found in the future. Some of these facts are very sharp and a generic explanation of these observations based on social interactions may be instantly falsified.

Much like crackpots in high-energy physics such as Smolin or Woit, the defenders of social explanations of these effects don't appreciate how difficult and unlikely it is to create a theory that is consistent with all the available data. They think that it is always possible to emit fog and argue that things are complex and theories with arbitrary underlying ideas are hard to be falsified. But in reality, it is easy to falsify almost all proposed theories simply because a lot of non-trivial facts and regularities are known. And that's true both in quantum gravity as well as the science about intelligence.

And that's the memo.

The Huffington Post and DailyKos endorse Václav Klaus

If we exaggerate just a little bit, there exists a universal consensus by now that Czech president Václav Klaus is right about global warming in his Financial Times article. (See also my synopsis of the Q&A session.) The consensus includes the progressive website called

The Huffington Post (thanks, Willie!)

where they have decided that Václav Klaus is one of their two most favorite people in the world: Greg Gutfeld analyzes the influence of terrorism on global warming and challenges Sheryl Crow, Laurie David, and Leo DiCaprio who behaves as an ecowhacko even though he has played your humble correspondent in the String Kings. And the consensus covers even DailyKos:

DailyKos: Václav Klaus is not wrong

Well, it's true that among the commenters, you find a few contrarians or, as Hamas calls them, mutineers. ;-) But if you had doubts that DailyKos as an entity loves Klaus' article, you may see another reaction:

DailyKos: Unbelievable, extremely useful article

Fine. This guy was somewhat less friendly but he was still excited! :-)

If you find DailyKos insufficiently radical, you can see that even William Connolley :-) reacts in a rather friendly fashion. It seems that most Americans want Klaus to become the U.S. president.

Investor's Business Daily

describes Klaus as the leader of respected scientists who risk their reputation. In the last few minutes, the list of excited reactions includes:

• Posh Boy (Klaus for president)
• Max Borders (come be our president)
• Brussels Journal (Klaus for president of France)
• Three Sources (Klaus to lead the U.N.)
  
• Free Republic (Klaus for POTUS)
• Stone Heads (Czech sense)
• Rob Boyce (this guy is great)
• Danny Adams (hat off to Klaus)
  
• St. Louis blogger (good fight again)
• Mike's America (Klaus did it again)
• Subtle Oak Flavor (declaration of independence)
• Roy Cordato (support from an environmentalist)
• Flaggman (God bless Klaus)
• Nate (there's still wisdom)
• Okie on the Lam (he couldn't agree more)
• Bally Blog (now, this guy gets it)
• L. Graham Smith (a very timely comment)
• Yuppie Horror Picture show (favorite head)
• Perfunctory Hero (AGW is about socialism)
• Logosphilia (VK is an amazing realist)
• Blue Crab Boulevard (it's the freedom, stupid)
• Crowded Frontyard (VK is best friend forever)
• A cool look at GW (nice manifesto)
• Therosered (this article was awesome)
• Frank Warner (special credibility)
• Allen's Image Adjustment (freedom fighter)
• Wizbang (Bush should listen to Klaus)
• Dakota Voice (a bit of sanity survived)
• Conservation Bastion (gem)
• Jeremy Hatfield (thought-provoking)
  
• Brian in Seattle (this is brilliant)
• Josh Martin (right on point)
• Cassandra 2004 (quote of the day)
• John Lott (VK sets the record straight)
• Canis Libertas (Czechs are lucky bastards)
• South Child (intelligent leader exists)
• Jason Hayes (Amen to that)
  

and more than 2,500 other world's leading pundits including Brit Hume at FoxNews who read two quotes of Klaus and Lindzen (wait for 1 minute). The debate is over, global warming is crap. Even Al Gore now agrees with Klaus and your humble correspondent that the G8 climate deal is a disgrace. And that's the memo. :-)

Moving Victorian houses: in progress

Update 06/23



Click the picture to see a slideshow with 53 photographs (MSIE preferred)

Mass Ave - a long road that goes to $+\infty$ (Atlantic ocean) in the East and $-\infty(0.6-0.8i)$ in the West has decided to reduce its carbon footprint. So they have built a Victorian house in the middle of the road. It's actually a great idea. Drivers may get discouraged and take a different route which will lower the CO2 emissions near the Harvard Law School which is a good thing, as consensus of scientists thinks. Amen.

Selling

Today I learned that at craigslist, bikes are much more hot than furniture. With 7 excited potential buyers in 1 hour, I should have started with a double price for the bike. ;-) The buyers were nice people but the Boston area is Boston area. The buyer of the kitchen table was a girl who studies environmental policies at Tufts and the buyer of the bike was a student activist of the Democrat Party from BU. :-)

Original text 06/16

These guys across the street have a much more straightforward approach to moving than your humble correspondent.



The Ukrainian House (see the picture), the Baker House, and the carriage house will be moved from the Harvard Law School area - where they want to build the Northwest Corner - to another street one block to the North - where they needed to demolish a part of the North Hall dormitories. The houses will be transferred on the wheels.

It's impressive but it's nothing like the Church of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary (built 1517-1532) in Most, a Czech city, that was transported by 841.1 meters within 28 days by Czechoslovak engineers from Škoda Pilsen and Průmstav Pardubice, heroes of socialism, in 1975.

The speed was about 1-3 centimeters a minute and the whole operation gave communist Czechoslovakia a lot of new dirty brown coal to burn. The coal contains a lot of uranium so when you burn it, you release more radioactivity than any nuclear power plant except for Chernobyl ever can.



The building was mentioned in Guinness book of records as the heaviest building ever moved on wheels.

EU: voting rights & Polish population

Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski - on picture with his brother Lech, the president, both obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics - argued that the number of Poles would be 66 million instead of 38 million today if Germany didn't initiate the Second World War. He suggested that this fact should perhaps be taken into account when the new voting rights of the EU are being calculated. Let me say a few things about it:

• Strictly speaking, his calculation may be rather accurate and he can hardly be blamed for not saying the truth.
  
• It is dangerous to revive the past. Many extremely bad things have happened in the past and we shouldn't repeat them. The cleanest way not to repeat them is to avoid similar kinds of disputes and to accept the status quo as legitimate initial conditions for the future, ignoring the complicated history that have led to the status quo in the past, a history that is open to many potentially contradictory interpretations. Attempts to compensate for events that occurred 60 years ago or more may be seen as attempts to revenge and they won't lead to good outcomes.
  
• Polish war casualties of 5 million have been huge, if counted relatively to the net population: 18.5 percent. Such high casualties often lead to a different kind of thinking. I feel that e.g. 350,000 Czechoslovak casualties which were about 2% don't give the Czechs and Slovaks the credentials to speak about the same situation. Because history is important, we shouldn't forget that Poland was one of the main victims of the war. I think we should always allow the Poles to express somewhat more emotional reactions than what we expect from others. This special treatment of the Poles should only exist at the moral level and shouldn't be incorporated into new laws.
  
• Dead people and people who were never born - like the children of the dead people who didn't have children when they died ;-) - can't have voting rights. No one knows how they would actually vote. Maybe, if Germans hadn't killed them, they would be so grateful that they would vote for whatever the German chancellor wants. Sorry for a stupid joke. ;-)
  
• The proposed modifications of the voting rights represent a significant change of the mechanisms how the European Union works. It is somewhat conceivable that various referenda should be repeated because the previous ones decided about the membership in a different union, under different rules and circumstances.
• Voting strength that is proportional to the population can clearly be used collectively by big nations to negatively influence smaller nations and it shouldn't be surprising if some smaller nations dislike such a change.
• If the voting rules include a proportional system together with a system where every member country has the same power, it will diminish the influence of the medium nations. In the votes where every country matters, tiny nations such as Luxembourg can easily and naturally join the powers.

In the list above, you will find several good reasons why Poland could veto the agreement about the new voting system. I would personally have a good understanding for such a decision: they certainly have a right to do it. They should also realize that such a veto would make many other people upset. They shouldn't be surprised that Merkel tries to find an agreement without Poland which is effectively an attempt to eliminate Poland from the EU under certain circumstances (if its position continues to be inconvenient). So far, the German plan to screw Poland was rejected by Britain & France: similarities with 1939 are purely coincidental.

Nevertheless, Poland may want to think whether Putin will be more fair than the EU once Poland outside the EU appears in his sphere of influence again. I certainly don't think that exit from the EU would be a disaster for Poland but my guess is that the net result would still be negative for that country.



You can also see that the Poles will probably be unhappy when the Czechs betray them even though they still believe in unity. Unfortunately, Czechs can't use similar population and related arguments for similar goals and it is more likely that Czechia will quite the extreme Polish game.

What is the optimal voting system in a diverse union?

Of course, if the European Union were uniform and if it were in equilibrium where all parts constantly interact with each other, the proportional voting system would be the most natural and fair system you can imagine. However, the union is not uniform and its parts are largely decoupled, as far as many types of interactions go. There exists a huge percentage of questions where the nationality is the most important factor that decides about the opinions of the citizens about such questions. This fact makes the situation and optimal voting rules subtle. I think it is clear that if there are questions in which the European Union is in full consensus, the policies may be adopted. Any other decision where consensus doesn't exist should be made with extreme caution.

Moreover, there should exist effective mechanisms that allow various kinds of decisions to be moved from Brussels back to the national capitals or regions, not just in the opposite direction. Why? Because there are many cases in which it is better to decide about various things locally. The situation in which everything is decided in Brussels is simply not the optimum even though some people implicitly assume that it is. The policies must work in such a way that the optimum may be found regardless of the relative location of the status quo and the optimum.

And that's the memo.



A possible distribution of votes in the new EU: 40% Germany, 60% Czechia - fair enough ;-)

Financial Times: Klaus answers

The Financial Times' climate expert, Prof Václav Klaus, answers some of the questions that followed Klaus' article, "Freedom, not climate, is at risk":

Ask the Expert (Q & A)

If you don't have much time, here's my abstract of all answers where I tried to make them even more insightful and entertaining than they are:

1. Do you think that the correct economist's approach is to follow hysterical recommendations of IPCC and others who replace cost-benefit analyses by "precautionary principle"?

   No.

2. Imagine that AGW is real anyway, what should we do?

   A detailed analysis shows that the answer is Nothing.

3. How can one predict climate if it's impossible to predict weather?

   That's my point. After having read hundreds of books and articles, especially the human influence seems uncalculable to me.

4. Why do you disbelieve the science and why freedom is at risk if the consensus is supported by capitalism-loving governments of EU and U.K.?

   Science is not the same as national scientific establishments. EU and U.K. elites only support market as the #1 force at a different planet. Moreover, market doesn't belong to policymakers.

5. What the costs of a 50% reduction will be for Czechia?

   I admit I don't know but costs will be not only financial and costs shouldn't be calculated for 2050 because we don't know prices etc.

6. Environmentalists demand responsibility which should be a conservative value but it's not: what happened?

   They don't have any copyright on responsibility, a standard part of human behavior. They only invented a non-existing "damage" and I won't pay for it. Saying that pro-capitalists want to dump waste is like the commie propaganda.

7. Czechia is a victim of powers' environmental decisions, what to do?

   Blaming powers is fashionable but incorrect and wrong & environmentalist tendencies exist in countries of all sizes.

8. Do environmentalist really work on global socialism?

   My experience and oversensitivity says Yes: the arguments seem too similar.

9. Global warming is like avian flu, driven by trillionaires who want global power, do you agree?

   I don't think environmentalism is driven by power-thirsty trillionaires but rather by incapable people, and they only want a global government, not global constructive activities.

10. I agree with you but the left vs right flavor is confusing, what to do?

    I don't believe that the left vs right debates are over. Freedom is a right-wing value but environmentalism has unfortunately swallowed some self-described right-wingers, too.

11. What do organizations and politicians gain if they jump on the bandwagon?

    Power to manipulate, organize, regulate.

12. Is it still freedom when the powerful of the world impose the new climate on others?

    There's no conspiracy to change the climate and the human-climate link can't be taken for granted.

13. How can rational libertarians save our culture from environmentalists?

    Classical liberals should stop being a silent majority.

14. Why do so many people believe in junk science?

    Some people have the same reasons as UFO & witch believers. Others believe in their special abilities to control the rest of us. A third group has a financial interest. My opinions are normal: I don't understand why people think that I am courageous.

15. Does wasting energy strengthen freedom?

    Be fair: attacking environmentalism is different from attacking Nature. Saving energy is rational and a decision about it is naturally made by free individuals. Your statements about the U.S. encouraging wasteful policies are ludicrous.

16. Small temperature changes have led to huge problems: how much more do you have to see (numbers)?

    Read Singer & Avery and Michaels' books. Just one number: the very debatable IPCC predicts 14-43 cm for the 21st century sea level rise. Not scary to me.

17. You criticize Stern for talking about future but you do it, too.

    I criticize Stern for particular errors - choosing a funnily low discount rate - not for aprioristic opinions.

18. There's huge evidence that Man is ruining the planet. What do you have to see more to lead the counter-attack against Man?

    The problem is that I don't see convincing evidence for the damage caused e.g. by AGW. Skiing and warm evenings are still very pleasant. And environment in Czechia is much better than when collective actions were taken: because of freedom.

And that's the memo.

Superspinars

Eric Gimon and Petr Hořava point out an interesting tension between different notions of extremality bounds for black holes. For charged rotating black holes, supersymmetry implies the BPS bound for the mass $M$, namely

$Q^2 \leq M^2$

in some natural units. It is absolutely impossible to violate this bound. However, general relativity implies a stronger bound that also includes the angular momentum $a$ in addition to the charge $Q$:

$Q^2 + a^2 \leq M^2$

One can also calculate the efficiency of energy transfer from accreting matter to radiation. She gets 6% for the Schwarzschild black hole, 42% for an extremal Kerr black hole, and Gimon & Hořava argue that string theory can get up to the 100% efficiency with configurations that obey the BPS bound but not the stronger black hole bound. These configurations would surpass the general relativistic Kerr limitations. They encourage astronomers to look for such efficient objects and realize a new way to prove string theory.

My personal guess based on our work on the weak gravity conjecture is that the black hole bound is also satisfied in string theory for localized macroscopic objects, up to small corrections. This belief of mine is supported by the observation that Gimon & Hořava don't have any explicit solution for their "superspinar". Of course, superspinars may fail to be associated with a classical solution but I personally find such a belief unnatural: a classical approximation should become valid for any kind of a large enough object.

And that's the memo.

Update: Later I realized that when we relax the black hole condition, we can easily find systems with greater angular momentum than allowed by the mass - for example the Solar System where the distant planets have "J" increasing with the radius "r".

Tanmay Vachaspati: black stars & there are no black holes

A report on this blog about George Chapline's colloquium remains the #1 hit if you Google seach for black holes don't exist. It is a rather popular albeit untrue sentence that many users want to see. ;-) George is a friend of The Reference Frame but his black hole ideas unfortunately don't make any sense.



In the article under the previous link, we have explained that why the event horizon - a "red" hypersurface in space defined as the boundary separating a causally disconnected region of spacetime (the dark blue triangle, the interior of the black hole) - is created long before the black hole reaches equilibrium and long before it starts to evaporate.

In fact, the place where the horizon appears for the first time (the lower portion of the red line) looks completely ordinary and the people who live there don't have any tools to figure out whether they are already behind the horizon or not: they think that they are inside an ordinary star. If they had such tools, they would be extremely non-local, required superluminal propagation of signals, or a time machine. At that moment - when local physics still looks completely ordinary - it is already decided that the future curvature of spacetime creates a causally disconnected region because the evolution of spacetime according to Einstein's equations will inevitably lead to a spacetime whose causal diagram is depicted above: a spacetime with a causally disconnected black hole interior.

We can also prove that no plausible modification of Einstein's equations that keeps them consistent with observations can remove the conclusion about the creation of the event horizon.

This is a rather trivial conclusion of classical general relativity that most students with an A from general relativity will be able to make. It is extremely robust and whether or not we can test it "directly" is secondary. Equations of general relativity have been verified in other but related experiments and everything else we need a solid calculation that is actually more reliable than the experiments even though many people who are not quite sure about the consistency of mathematics and its relevance for the real world have irrational problems with this statement. ;-)

I always wonder whether the people who don't trust mathematical derivations believe that they would get killed if they jumped from a skyscraper. Have they ever experimentally tested this assertion?

New Scientist

Nude Socialist has just promoted a theory of Tanmay Vachaspati from Case Western Reserve University, Ohio. In his 2-page paper, he argues that black holes are never formed in the first place. Instead, the collapse stops in a stage that he calls a "black star" and he even proposes that a new, non-black-hole-like kind of collision of these black stars is responsible for gamma ray bursts.

Now, I find notion that quantum gravity regulates black holes as something that looks like a black hole but is microscopically just another "regular" object - something I called "not quite black holes" - to be a legitimate paradigm. But of course I know why all qualitative conclusions about black hole dynamics will continue to hold when the classical approximation of general relativity is valid i.e. whenever the black holes are large.

What we know today goes well beyond the classical approximation of black holes. We can calculate the entropy of large classes of black holes arbitrarily accurately, among other things. We simply know that these things are correct. It's a matter of doing the math right.

It is not hard to read the whole Vachaspati's paper and it obviously makes no sense. Does he assume some novel quantum gravity effects? No, he is just talking about classical general relativity. We can easily show that event horizons are inevitably formed in this picture. It is a straightforward exercise for those who know the technology. Of course, it is an uncertain, mysterious sea of dragons for those who don't.

We also observe (the effects of) black holes in telescopes - for example one at our galactic center whose mass counts in millions of solar masses - but I won't hide that the theoretical derivation of their existence from other experimentally known data seems even more robust than the direct observations to me (and others).

Vachaspati - whose list of former co-authors includes Mark Trodden and Lawrence Krauss, among others - rejects this result except that he doesn't seem to give a glimpse of an argument that the result should be different - except for saying other things that obviously don't occur such as a new kind of "pre-Hawking superfast radiation". Moreover, the only figure that is included in his short paper is a standard Penrose diagram for a Schwarzschild black hole. It doesn't look like he has gotten rid of the horizon. Quite on the contrary. It is quite nicely seen on the figure: it's the Northwestern diagonal line.

Nevertheless, this paper was accepted for Physical Review D which is why Nude Socialist happily describes it as science: certain papers are simply vastly more interesting for the journalists than others. Moreover, the Nude Socialist formulates the article in such a way that Vachaspati's weird paper must surely be very important and 't Hooft and Giddings are just frozen ultraconservative frogs who inhibit the "progress". Thousands of readers will buy it. New Scientist presents Vachaspati as a hero and for thousands of stupid readers, it's simply enough to become convinced.

Most articles about Vachaspati are located in Indian media which is no coincidence.

Also, in his CCNET, Benny Peiser gave it a title "Black hole denier: another scientific consensus in trouble". Benny is a smart Gentleman but it would be dishonest not to say that his title is significantly less smart. If the real driving force of his climate skepticism were a general tendency to fight against anything that others think regardless of the existence of a rational reason, I couldn't agree with him.

Classical general relativity is a settled theory and it is extremely difficult and probably impossible to invent a description that would - at least barely - agree with the same experimental tests but that would be able to stop event horizons from forming. Also, quantum effects can be neglected in the case of large black holes and the alternative black hole physicists even seem to agree with this conclusion.

There is no scientific consensus about the existence of black holes. The people who understand general relativity and its justification know that black holes must exist while those who don't understand general relativity don't know whether there are black holes and most of them probably think that black holes don't exist, at least in the privacy of their homes. I guess that the second group includes a majority of the scientific community. This has nothing to do with consensus, it is about knowledge, talent, and expertise. So I would still prefer the adjective "ignorant" instead of "denier" for any person who studies gravitational physics but is unable to make this simple conclusion even in 2007. It would be foolish to demonize such people because ignorance is the primordial state of affairs.

And that's the memo.

CO2 emissions: China has surpassed U.S.

China has become the #1 producer of carbon dioxide already in 2006. Congratulations - because the CO2 emissions may be viewed as a very good measure of the industrial strength.

It shouldn't be shocking for those who knew that China's 2005 production of carbon dioxide was only 2% below the U.S. levels. Why? Well, it's because China's CO2 output grows by about 9 percent a year. It is no coincidence that the number equals the GDP growth. Together with restrictive measures in the developed world, this meant that the U.S. was already 8% below China in 2006.

Russia will cash in on 60 billion USD in 2008 for Kyoto machinations.

BBC will continue to cover climate skeptics.

Investor's Business Daily: Ban made Annan seem like a voice of reason. The daily uses Klaus' article in The Financial Times to argue that Ban is a high priest of the global warming religion. ;-) Incidentally, the title of Klaus' article, Freedom, not climate, is at risk, now has over 75 thousand Google hits and the number keeps on increasing.

Via Benny Peiser.

Carbon indulgences: price. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is 250 times smaller a problem than it was a year ago. In summer 2006, the price was minus 30 euro per ton. Yesterday, it closed at 0.12 euro per ton.

Sean Carroll: a guide for crackpots

Even Sean Carroll may be right. He has written his

alternative science checklist.

I must agree with it. However, it seems unlikely that alternative scientists will suddenly follow Sean's recipe.



For example, the first commenter, Peter Fred, ignored the article. Instead, he proposed to replace dark matter by radial spreading of infrared luminosity, following the old-fashioned crackpot algorithms. Mark Trodden joked that Sean Carroll's revolutionary theory how to proceed was being ignored by the crackpot establishment and recommended him two simple steps how to be taken more seriously. ;-)

A few weeks ago, an alternative Iranian physicist came to my office and was explaining me that Dirac's paper on magnetic monopoles was mathematically inconsistent & light bending and general relativity were impossible, too. I was trying both to explain him these particular technical points as well as to give him a general "checklist" but it was probably a failure.

These people just can't concentrate on thinking. When you start to talk about the electromagnetic potential in the magnetic monopole background, he suddenly starts to talk about Lee Smolin who criticized string theory. It is impossible to explain him that his crackpot proposals about the magnetic monopoles and Lee Smolin's crackpot proposals about quantum gravity might be analogous at some spiritual level but they are separated by 70 years and there exists no logical connection between the two: if he sees a connection, he must be doing an error.

He asked me whether he should also see Cumrun and Nima and I told him that they probably wouldn't have time for him but he can always try: former countrymates may pay some special attention to him. After 10 seconds of a discussion with Cumrun, the alternative physicist got offended and started to scream that he was much smarter than Einstein and Dirac. That was enough for Cumrun to terminate the discussion. Cumrun left the office and he has only lost 30 seconds or so! The alternative physicist returned to my office to cry on my shoulder. ;-)

Nima spent 20 minutes with him, almost comparable to myself. He tried to be nice, just like me, but he found that our alternative colleague believes that all confirmations of Einstein's theories have always been conspiracies designed to support a popular figure. :-)

The Earth today stands in imminent peril

Global warming scientists will have to learn quantum gravity by the end of July. Why?

Well, it's because we can see that every day, their predictions get more catastrophic than the previous day by an order of magnitude. Roughly 35 orders of magnitude from the present numbers, you find the Planck scale.

Let me demonstrate this trend on two recent examples. On Saturday, the new boss of the United Nations whose name is Ban even though he is unfortunately not yet banned published an op-ed in the Washington Post that argued that

Global warming has caused the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

That's great and I am sure that many people will admire Ban's new clothes except that scientific papers agree with common sense and imply that there is no link between droughts in Africa on one side and increased CO2 in the atmosphere on the other side.

However, Larry has just pointed out that everything is much more serious today than it was on Saturday. A few hours ago, The Independent has proudly announced that

The Earth today stands in imminent peril.

A team of six people led by James Hansen - a world's leading expert in scientific reticence - has chastised the IPCC alarmists that they're not sufficiently alarmist. These six "better scientists" have decided that it is now necessary to break the scientific consensus because they have "calculated" that the civilization has lasted 12,007 years and these years have been unusually stable.

OK, I added 7.

But it can't continue like that, they say. A trigger mechanism based on a subtle interplay between trace gases including carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone, flipping albedo, and melting icecaps will surely kill us in a decade or two. We immediately need to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. And so on, and so on.

The Earth is literally floating in front of our eyes as it evaporates.



Most Jehovah's Witnesses whom I have met at least admit that 1918 wasn't yet the year of the judgment day: see this table about the ultimate deadlines; yes, the current date is "imminent". Hansen et al. seem to be more difficult.

Also, you should note that any disagreement with the IPCC consensus of trillions of scientists is a deadly sin. Unless, of course, you are James Hansen who proposes much crazier scenarios than ever before.

You may ask: what journal is going to publish this hysterical and thoroughly irrational explosion of "gravest threats" equivalent to screams of a profoundly ill woman? Well, this question is unfortunately not a rhetorical one and it has an answer. The journal is called

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

Another journal controlled by profoundly alternative physicists. The 30-page-long article is called

Climate change and trace gases.

Read the half-a-page abstract. It is rather incredible. Focus on some topic. For example, consider the statement that most feedbacks are positive. Can you find evidence for this statement in the paper? What I find is their "thinking" that another naive theory can't explain some sharp features of the paleoclimate reconstructions which implies that whatever new statement they make must be correct. Cataclysmic changes thus follow. That's Hansen's "science".

If your data can be interpreted in a way that confirms your catastrophic beliefs, it's great. If your data can't do it, it's also great because it means that your previous theory was insufficient and your new theory must include some effects that are even more catastrophic than the previous effects. If a discrepancy of your old theory with the observations is visualized as a flu, Hansen's cure for flu is analogous to overriding the flu by an HIV virus that is even more powerful.

More quantitatively, Hansen's method is just like if you try to interpolate eleven points in a plane by a polynomial of tenth degree. What do you think will happen with this polynomial "y=f(x)" or "temperature=f(time)" for large values of "x" or "time"? Do you think that this algorithm proves that every function increases as a tenth power for large values of "x" or "time"? Has Hansen learned very basics of maths if he is unable to figure out that this curve-fitting is exactly what he's doing? Isn't he ready to understand that the right curve interpolating the points is not a polynomial and his original theory was completely wrong and couldn't be correctly used as a starting point, if I use my analogy?

The main problem with my analogy is that the functions that Hansen uses to interpolate the data are increasing not just polynomially but rather exponentially. ;-)

Back to quantum gravity

What does all this nonsense have to do with quantum gravity? Well, it is not hard to calculate that by next week, the climate "scientists" will predict a restoration of the electroweak symmetry caused by global warming and July will be dedicated to progress towards the Planck temperature. :-)

I wonder whether they will ultimately agree with quantum gravity researchers that the Planck temperature is the maximum temperature that is possible and July should thus be the last month of progress in this climate change "science". Basic laws of quantum gravity indeed imply that certain things such as warming can't continue indefinitely. I am afraid that this law will be too constraining for James Hansen.

Rumors about the God particle

Today, the Wired Magazine has joined the discussions about the rumors about the Higgs boson. The same text appears on ABCnews. Recall that the latest rumor talks about a 5-sigma signal around 180 GeV.



I feel that the Wired Magazine article is more reasonable than what we could have read on Slate.

The Slate article was written by an ex-student in a course of mine. No, with all my respect and compassion, I can't say that he was one of the better students and yes, I was always under immense pressure to give better grades than the students deserved. Correspondingly, the article is a typical emotional, Woitian politicization of topics that the writer doesn't understand in which the readers are frantically pushed in directions that have nothing to do with reality.

I believe that in the blogosphere and the media, the most legitimate sources of information about the Higgs signals are John Conway from the CDF collaboration and Gordon Watts who is an actual member of the D0 collaboration. Everyone who is interested in the state of the affairs should read the article below Gordon's name. You may also want to re-read John Conway's texts about the MSSM bumps at 160 GeV earlier observed by the CDF group.

Another person, Tommaso Dorigo, is not a member of the D0 collaboration where the potential signal occurred but he likes to paint himself as a very important person and he enjoys if his readers get excited about his mystifications, speculations, and propaganda. He's like a small Peter Woit which is no coincidence because he is a frequent visitor of the notorious crackpot's blog.

Clearly, very good D0 people are currently working on the hypothetical signal. It is virtually guaranteed that at the end of the Tevatron's life, many potential signals like this one are proposed and identified. If the data are processed in many different ways, it is not so shocking that one can discover some bumps that look like 3-sigma signals or 4-sigma signals and maybe even higher. In climate science, such bumps would surely be enough to propose worldwide policies. In science, however, they are not enough.

At this moment, it is not clear whether there is a scalar boson particle at 180 GeV. And if it is clear, it is only clear to a few real experts in the D0 collaboration who have just found the answer. Maybe. With a possible exception of John Conway and perhaps Gordon Watts who may also be informed, none of these people who actually know the final answer is active in the blogosphere. Everyone else who is spreading guaranteed rumors on the blogosphere - and the media - is creating pure noise. Garbage. Discard it. It's just like Peter Woit's writings.

Science doesn't work this way. It is absolutely irrelevant how many people can get excited about a blogger's posting and his one answer or another answer and how much excited they become as long as the bloggers themselves have no idea about the real answers whatsoever. You should never forget Feynman's story about the measurements of the emperor's nose and you should wait until the possible result appears on the official D0 results page.

And that's the memo.

Cat: testing string theory

Via Mike the Technobuddhist and Andy XL who proposes to treat string theory with the respect it deserves.

Amen to that.

Waldemar Matuška: 75 years

On July 2nd, Waldemar Matuška will celebrate his 75th birthday: he was born in Košice, Slovakia - however he is Czech. Congratulations!

Since the 1960s, this bearded mannish tenor has been one of the stars of the Czechoslovak pop music, country music, and folk music. Let me choose his duet with Eva Pilarová, "Oh, This Heavenly Love":

Watch a Waldemar Matuška playlist with 30 songs or so.

Around 1964, these two people together with Karel Gott got drunk in Carlsbad and were probably pissing on a communist delegation from a balcony on the first floor. Matuška was the only one who was punished. He couldn't perform for one year. ;-)

His songs about love and life have always had a patriotic accent in them. That's why it was so shocking when he decided to emigrate to the U.S. in 1986. The official propaganda immediately dismissed him as a traitor and his songs were banned.

Matuška explained that he just couldn't breathe in socialist Czechoslovakia anymore. The verb refers both to the lack of freedom and presence of jealousy and other things as well as to his asthma that wasn't terribly compatible with the polluted Czechoslovak air.

Matuška's life in the U.S. wasn't trivial either because he didn't speak English and it is questionable whether he speaks English today. However, he learned how to do shoppings in the supermarket without any need to speak which was great. Sometimes he sang a song for a Czech in the pub for a glass of beer, sometimes he used the fact that his wife earned millions in real estate. ;-)

Of course, after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, his songs regained the glory they deserved and Matuška sometimes performs in Czechia although he lives in Saint Leningrad, Florida - a city that is now called Saint Petersburg again. :-)

A few more well-known songs:

Tereza
Yeah, the cherries were getting ripe and mallowed
Others

Update

Sadly, Waldemar Matuška died on May 30th, 2009.

Nuclear explosion in Krkonoše

Those who watched a Czech public TV channel in the morning could have seen a nuclear explosion in the Krkonoše Mountains during an otherwise boring breakfast program that normally shows weather at different places, especially touristic targets in the mountains.

See the video (or YouTube I, II)

Who was behind it? No, it wasn't Putin. It was an artistic group called Ztohoven which means "away out of it" but it also sounds identical to the phrase "one hundred excrements". Most likely, Roman Týc was the main spiritual father. This time, they hacked a web camera. But they have already produced several practical jokes of this kind in the past, usually featuring a question mark that complains about the ability of media and commercials to manipulate people.

For example, ex-president Havel used to place a huge heartsuit at the Prague Castle. While some people thought that the Prague Castle became a whorehouse, Ztohoven hid one-half of it the heartsuit that it was changed into a question mark.

While the Czech TV wants to sue them, I tend to agree with some commenters that similar events are probably necessary to teach people how to doubt and rationally think about the news in the media.

And that's the memo.

Start Zwentendorf: nuclear power plants

Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech minister of foreign affairs, argued in an interview for Austrian press that attacks against the Czechs have become a national sport of Austria. He said that the people who protest the Czech nuclear power plant are morons and that Temelín is safer than many German nuclear power plants simply because it is newer.



Meanwhile, the Austrian "Stop Temelín" organization that has been organizing blockades of the borders has a new sister organization. It is called "Start Zwentendorf". :-) You can check that it is a sister organization by comparing its logo with the logo of the Austrian movement.

The Czech activists demand that the Austrian government protects the environment from pollutants produced by coal burning by a quick launch of the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant, 40 kilometers from the Czech border, which was terminated by 50.4 percent of the voters in a 1978 referendum. They will also be blocking the borders, using similar yellow costumes as their Austrian friends.

The treaty about the new plant should be signed in Melk, just like the treaties about Temelín, to make the place easier to memorize. Once Zwentendorf is running, the "Start Zwentendorf" movement will cease to exist and its agenda will be transferred to a new organization called "Start Zwentendorf block II". :-)

This humor is not new. A Czech anti-nuclear movement was emotionally called "Southern Bohemian Mothers": Temelín is located in Southern Bohemia. Another, pro-nuclear organization called "Southern Bohemian Daddies" was established soon afterwards. ;-)

Quantum computer inside a diamond

Mikhail Lukin's group at Harvard, supported by one Texan physicist and one German physicist, has made some progress in a new technological approach to quantum computing. The qubits are nuclear spins of carbon-13 atom inside a diamond. They are manipulated by the spin of a nearby electron controlled by LASERs. The electronic spin is a new degree of freedom that occurs inside a nitrogen vacancy - a place where one nitrogen atom replaces one carbon atom. See

ZDNET
Science
news.google.com
A PhD thesis (focus on chapters 2,3)

This technology offers a remarkably long decoherence time and a possibility of a large number of qubits that can be manipulated with in a correlated fashion. If things go really well, you will be able to buy a diamond on the picture above that can break all codes in the world by Christmas 2007 but Easter 2077 is somewhat more realistic. ;-)

Green and communist propaganda: comparison

Those readers who haven't lived in a totalitarian system may have problems to understand why the rest of us finds the structure of the environmentalist propaganda almost identical to the structure of the communist propaganda. To fix this problem, let me translate the official response to Charter 77, the pro-democracy statement penned by Václav Havel. You can compare it e.g. with DeSmogBlog's new defamatory pages against 61 of the "climate change deniers".

Rudé právo (The Red Law)
the official daily of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, January 12th, 1977: source in Czech

In their gnarly struggle against the progress, the international reaction is trying to create the illusion of a certain broad anti-communist front into which they try to drag not only open traitors but also fluctuating and disoriented individuals or groups, often covering themselves under the mask of the "Left" or "communists". They frequently try to achieve the impossible: to revive the political dead bodies, starting from those among the emigrants from socialist countries to those within the remainder of the class enemies in these countries, renegades, to various criminal and asocial elements. One of the forms of the "impressive" collaboration is the fabrication of diverse pamphlets, letters, protests, and other generic slanders that are presented as the voice of certain "opposition" individuals or tiny groups. With fanfare and in a co-ordinated fashion, these texts are being distributed throughout the capitalist world.

This description also applies to the newest pamphlet, the so-called Charter 77, that was composed by a miniscule group of bankrupted Czechoslovak reactionary burgeoisie as well as bankrupted organizers of the counter-revolution in 1968. Their work has been ordered by the world's anti-communist and Zionist headquarters and it was delivered to certain Western agencies.

This document is an anti-state, anti-socialist, anti-people, and demagogic invective that rudely and untruthfully slanders the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the revolutionary achievements of the people. Its authors accuse our society of organizing the life differently than according to their burgeois and elitist visions. These usurpers who scorn the people, its interests, and its elected representative organs try to assume the right to stand in for our people and they demand a "dialogue with the political and state authority" and they even want to play the role of a certain "mediator during potential conflicting situations". The existence of socialism in our country is only taken into account in one particular case - when they write down the name of our republic. The document is written from a cosmopolitan vantage point of the defeated reactionary burgeoisie, and it rejects socialism as a social system.

The authors of the pamphlet, seemingly living outside space and time, demagogically refer to such "important civilization values that many progressive forces in the history wanted to achieve", values such as freedoms and human rights. Yes, our socialist country has declared, in international documents as well as national laws codified, and obeys the widest selection of human rights and freedoms - for the working people, the landlords of this country. However, the inspirators of this pamphlet mean something entirely different by their words - they rave about the rights and freedoms for the remainders of the defeated burgeois reaction. What they care about are such "rights and freedoms" that would allow them to freely organize anti-state and anti-party activities, to preach anti-Sovietism, and once again, to attempt to destroy the socialist government's power.

Yesterday in the afternoon, around 70 resolutions denouncing the anti-socialist and anti-people slander called the "Charter 77" were received by the Metropolitan Committee of the Communist Party in Prague during a few hours. Many more letters keep on arriving. The workers of Prague's companies that are active in construction, machine industry, and other fields; physicians; the employees of municipal executive councils; teachers; associations of artists, and many more sharply reject the lies filling up the pamphlet.

Right after the morning workshift, the workers of dozens of companies have gathered for short meetings during which they have written down their clear attitude to the Charter. They have sent their work to the Central Committee as well as the Prague Metropolitan Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Let me now try to identify some basic common features of the propagandistic algorithms of both ideologies; it won't be too hard:

• They try to convey the message that the opposition doesn't exist
• If the opposition exists, it is composed of unsuccessful or dead bodies who have been defeated decades ago
• The members of the opposition are painted as being controlled by others, usually by demonized sources of power, with hints of corruption; a connection - even indirect connection - with these ultimate "sources of evil" is presented as a complete proof of wrongness
  
• Opposition gets badges that are meant to be derogatory - capitalist, Zionist, deniers, renegades, contrarians, reactionary, burgeoisie, oil-funded etc.
• Opposition is presented as being against all the people - and all the people should agree and do agree with that; statements that everyone agrees and everyone keeps on supporting the official position are repeated all the time
• The opposition members are criticized for their very existence and for the tiniest deviations from the official ideology, to assure everyone else that one simply can't join them if he wants to survive
• Opposition is claimed to misinterpret words and facts even though it is pretty obvious that it is the official party who is doing that
• The opposing individuals are deconstructed one by one by carefully crafted ad hominem attacks
• The propaganda openly states that a debate or a dialogue itself is unacceptable and no details of the opponents' opinions are ever analyzed
• Whenever it's possible, the opponents must be fired or otherwise harassed; a penetrating analysis of skeptics' personal lives and attempts to find anything questionable - even if it is completely unrelated to the dispute - is a standard tool of the propaganda
  

The real risk of this posting is that those who are imposing the environmentalist consensus will learn something from their predecessors who were much more experienced back in 1977 than most environmentalists are today...

Carbon debits

A remotely related, entertaining story. There exists a new company whose website is at carboncreditkillers.com that sells carbon debits. Their purpose is to save the Earth from carbon credits. So far they only cut trees for your money - to offset the impact of every single carbon credit that is sold in the world - and sell T-shirts but I hope that as the company grows bigger, they will add some new activities. For example, they could deliver additional toilet paper to Sheryl Crow or drive children on fast motorbikes around the city (or in the helicopters) to have some CO2-producing fun. At any rate, The Reference Frame applauds a very good idea to fight against a fashionable lunacy.

Extra frequently visited climate-related articles on The Reference Frame

• Lord Monckton & warming hysteria
• Dr Naomi Oreskes & her invented consensus on global warming
• Temp drove CO2 concentrations, not the other way around
• IQ2 US duel: sceptics defeat alarmists
• Correlations of the Sunspots and cosmic rays - and temperature
• 2006: a losing year for little chickens
• 2006: coldest average temp since 2001

Global warming arrives to Sweden

June is the right time for snow in Sweden. Via ClimateAudit.

As highs go, Thursday was a record low in Virginia. Also, Kentucky's and Oklahoma's yields have been reduced by an April freeze.

Disclaimer: this particular weather event implies neither that the whole Earth is cooling down nor that the Earth is warming up. Neither senator James Inhofe nor Michael Crichton or your humble correspondent claim so.

However, the Prairies will be shown to expect a devastation by the climate change in the future that is more catastrophic than ever anticipated. How much catastrophic? About 250,000 catastrophic. What You See Is What You Get.

D0 discovers "cascade b"

If someone is interested in dirty corners of heavy quark physics, she may want to know that D0-brains at the Tevatron have discovered the "cascade b" particle whose mass is 5.77 GeV, dominated by the bottom-quark.



It is the first baryon that contains quarks of all three generations, namely "dsb". Note that all of them are lower quarks, making the net charge "-1". While the evidence so far has been largely indirect (from LEP), D0-brains have found it as a 5.5 sigma bump via its decay

$\Xi_b^- \to J/ \psi + \Xi^-.$

In other words, the probability that it is background equals 0.033 ppm. Yes, the left hand side is the new particle. See

Preprint
Space Daily

In the preprint, there is a funny typo in the list of authors. Can you find it?

Gia Dvali: 100 quintillion new particle species

Gia Dvali argues that if you have "N" stable particle species that are conserved because of "N" $Z_2$ symmetries or something similar, they can't be heavier than

$ M \leq M_{Planck} / N^{1/2} $

This statement is supported by

• a perturbative naturalness argument: having a smaller Planck mass than dictated by the inequality above would be a form of fine-tuning
• black hole physics: black holes with all the discrete charges must remember them which requires them to be heavier than the bound above

Gia Dvali uses his insight to offer a truly radical solution to the hierarchy problem.

Disclaimer: I discourage all crackpots who routinely read "Not Even Wrong" and who have visited this weblog unintentionally to stop reading because the large numbers below could make them really sick.



Gia argues that if there are $10^{32}$ copies of the Standard Model particle species - which would include $10^{32}$ electron squirrel species -, then the gap between the weak scale and the Planck scale becomes natural because of his N-scaling. ;-) Recall that $10^{30}$ is called a quintillion in the U.K. but nonillion in the U.S.

Gia urges the readers to study the relation between his statements and the weak gravity conjecture. What I find perhaps even more interesting is that Dvali's inequality may be understood as a lower bound on the amount of discrete symmetry in a theory of quantum gravity. If the argument is refined, it could also be used to explain why pure AdS3 gravity has to have the monster group symmetry.

Oh, sorry, it's actually an upper bound on the amount of discrete symmetry. But surely it must be saturated in some sense. ;-)

Dvali also argues that any charge that leads to no long-range force must only be conserved modulo

$ N \leq (M_{Planck} / m)^2 $

where $m$ is the mass of the unit charge. That should explain, in our non-Abelian monster setup, why the elements of the monster group have order up to 71 only. As you can see, I don't really believe that there are quintillions of sub-Planckian particle species in the real world but the conceptual, swampland implications of Gia's insights could turn out to be important.

Gr-qc papers on Friday

Let us look at the new gr-qc papers tonight:

Diaz-Polo and Fernandez-Borja solve a well-defined mathematical problem how to extract the precise dependence of entropy on the horizon area of a black hole in loop quantum gravity. Physics-wise, the paper is of course incorrect because the calculation of areas and entropies in loop quantum gravity is known to be physically absurd. Nevertheless, it is a well-defined and potentially interesting mathematical problem.

The spectrum of areas in LQG is semi-discrete but it is not quite equally spaced because the contributions to the areas are of the form $[j(j+1)]^{\frac 12}$ for $j$ being an integer or a half-integer. The resulting dependence of the entropy on the area is something in between a linear function and a stair-like function. The authors study the impact of this semi-discrete spectrum on the Hawking radiation.

Alekseev and Belinski ask whether two charged black holes can be in equilibrium. In Newtonian physics, the answer would be Yes: you just cancel gravity against a repulsive electric force. In general relativity, the answer is also Yes in the case of extremal black holes. That's why BPS objects of the same kind can co-exist more peacefully than Hamas and Fatah.

The authors claim that for non-extremal black holes, the answer is No. The answer would also be No for two naked singularities (super-extremal holes) but it can be Yes for a mixed pair. They get it by a complex analysis of solutions. I don't quite understand what's non-trivial about their result: if the two black holes have the same Q/M ratio, the no-force condition clearly means that they are both extremal. If they have different Q/M ratios, the no-force condition clearly means that one of them must be sub-extremal and the other must be super-extremal, am I wrong? The Q/M ratios must move in the opposite directions, I think.



Hogan proposes a very interesting refinement of the idea that a non-commutative geometry is behind holography in quantum gravity. Take two space-like separated events 1,2 (if I understand well) whose proper distance is $L_{12}$. He argues that the relative separation in two transverse directions $x,y$ satisfies

$[x,y] = -i l_{P} L_{12}$

which implies a new uncertainty principle

$\Delta x \Delta y \geq l_{P} L_{12} / 2.$

Note that the uncertainty grows as you keep on separating the events. The paper is at a comparable level of concreteness as Lenny's or Raphael's holographic papers. It also talks about LIGO and holographic noise implied by this paradigm and I think people should read it.

Brevik, Elizalde, Gorbunova, Timoškin promote a combination of FRW equations with a specific fluid with a certain non-linear equation of state as a useful model for various transitions in cosmology as well as quintessence. They want to explain the CMB anisotropy by considering viscosity in their fluid.

Larena and Perez determine what kind of FRW-like equations of classical general relativity with additional scalars are solvable. The answer depends on rationality of certain exponents while other relevant exponents may be written in terms of square roots.

Nacir and Mazzitelli arguably study Einstein's equations with a scalar field source in the quantum gravity regime. The action for the scalar field contains arbitrarily high derivatives but it also depends on an observer velocity given by a D-vector $u_\mu$ that picks a privileged reference frame. That implies that the dispersion relations also depend on infinitely many coefficients.

While I don't find such general Lorentz-breaking theories well motivated, that's not my worst problem with the paper. What's worse is that they only want to write Einstein's equations for expectation values of the stress energy tensor only but at the same moment, they want to be careful about the renormalization of the stress energy tensor operators. I don't understand the logic and motivation of this approximation.

Gaza Strip is becoming Hamastan

The real dream of the most progressive and politically correct segment of the Palestinian nation hasn't been a Palestinian state. Instead, it has always been Hamastan, an Islamist country fighting against Israel and all forms of freedom.



The picture above shows representatives of the Green Party of Palestine, also known as Hamas, that also has an official website.

We criticized disengagement as a strategic mistake that would cripple the security of Israel in the medium term. Disengagement was organized professionally and many Israeli citizens surely liked that they would get rid of some problems tightly connected with a part of their country.

However, it should have been clear that such a partial surrender would energize the most radical Arabs in Palestine - a nation that is manifestly unable to establish its own civilized country at this moment - and it would provide them with an opportunity to gain full control over the situation. People who understand politics had to know these things for a long time.

For example, Benjamin Netanyahu decried the effective creation of Hamastan already in January 2006, when the Green Party won the elections. Unfortunately, the Bush administration is currently in shock and awe. The Abbas loss is a major surprise and blow to their policy. Well, that probably means that they don't understand politics and psychology too well.

Hamas has now started some kind of civil war - well, in Gaza strip it has already pretty much ended - and it is removing Fatah from many strategic places in Gaza strip, see news.google.com. You can see how Hamas has "executed" all Fatah officials in their security headquarters. These former officials are now officially referred to as vandals from suspicious dens: joy overwhelms, they say. Hamas has not only killed dozens of people but they have even kidnapped Mickey Mouse, forcing him to brainwash children about the Islamic domination over the world. Fatah's troops are numerous but they are lacking the kind of zealotry that drives the Hamas warriors.

Recall that the very name Hamas means "zeal". Paradoxically, zealotry was originally a movement in first century judaism. ;-)



In the West Bank, the larger territory in the Northeast that continues to be partially controlled by Israel, Fatah still shows signs of self-confidence and control over the situation but I am afraid that this is a temporary state of affairs, especially because terrorists can freely arrive to the region from the effectively infinite Arab thermal bath around. The West Bank is referred to as Judea and Samaria by many Israeli.

Samaria covers most of the ancient Kingdom of Israel and it is the Northern portion of the West Bank while Judea largely coincides with the ancient Kingdom of Judah and it is the Southern piece of the West Bank.

I think it is very clear where the situation is going to develop. Hamas wins and starts to create Hamastan, an Islamic totalitarian country whose open goal is to destroy Israel. It will take some time for responsible people in the world to realize that there is a problem over there. This delay will make the re-occupation of Hamastan less peaceful and more painful.

The Reference Frame urges all people who have something to do with these decisions to realize that they have made a mistake and try to correct the mistake before it's too late.

Update 1: Palestine Liberation Organization recommended Abbas to sack the government, declare a state of emergency, outlaw Hamas, and organize early elections. Still a hope that there are people with IQ above 80 over there.

Update 2: He did so. But I am not sure whether his acts are still relevant.

Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard, dies

Back in 1960, well before the second wave of feminism, girls could not only burn a \$500 banknote but they also understood heat conduction. Don Herbert (89) died.

Kilimanjaro ice cap melting: warming not the culprit

Philip Mote (scientist) & Georg Kaser (climber) explain diverse factors that influence the dynamics of the Kilimanjaro glacier in American Scientist. Thanks to Robert Schwartz.



As policies start to be discussed, the carbon divide moves away from the ideological boundary between Democrats and Republicans to the boundary of interests between states that produce fuels and coal and those who don't.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are more coal-friendly and oil-friendly than e.g. John McCain. Obama's idea to transmute coal to liquids has the advantage or disadvantage that it produces twice as much CO2 than traditional petroleum fuels. Do you think that Obama's green friends call it an advantage?

India won't accept the role of a second class global citizen who has a smaller right to emit CO2 per capita.

Ross McKitrick proposes to introduce his T3 tax, a fee for CO2 emissions whose size would be dynamically determined by John Christy and Roy Spencer and their UAH measurements of the troposphere temperature (and by their competitors, RSS). The faster it warms, the more taxes you pay.

That would be great for CO2 emitting stocks, especially if the tax could go negative which has roughly 50% probability. If you hypothetically imagine that the warming would accelerate, the T3 tax would be much more strict a regulator. I think that the economist's proposal is the second fairest and most meaningful solution of the disputes whether the tax should exist in the first place - after having no policy.



In the Financial Times, Czech president asks whether global warming is truth or propaganda. What is at risk, the climate or freedom? Click the picture above - see the URL, ft.com/klaus ;-). You can also ask the expert. The text is nicely written except for the comment that the temperature increased by 0.6 "per cent". ;-) Of course, he meant per cent of the difference between the boiling point and freezing point of water.

Communist secret police spied on Klaus

Václav Klaus, the second president of the Czech Republic, used to think that he was a member of the gray zone - a person who doesn't support the communist regime in any way and who never joins their structures but who nevertheless peacefully co-exists with the regime, unlike Václav Havel, his predecessor.



But can you really peacefully co-exist with the communist regime if you're organizing enthusiastic seminars about Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Adam Smith? Are they happy if you're planning to create a "Czechoslovak model of economy" using these ideas? It turns out that the answer is "not quite". :-)

Newly found documents of StB, the Czechoslovak communist secret police, show that Klaus and his wife have been carefully watched for 2 years. All of his correspondence and telephone calls were monitored and his office was checked during a night of September 1984: the Orwellian year is not quite a coincidence. ;-)

These events were called "Akce Kluk" which means something like "Operation Boy". StB has figured out that Klaus spreads non-Marxist, right-wing ideas. One of the informers has made the following entertaining testimony for the secret police:

• Concerning the person Klaus, our Source said that his behavior makes it clear that he feels like an unrecognized genius. He doesn't hide that whoever disagrees with his visions and ideas is simply an "unable moron".

Well, it took a couple of years for Klaus to be recognized, after all. And people similar to the informer above - unable morons who are always looking for ways to hurt others - are still living almost everywhere around us. They no longer have a fully official place for their games - StB - but the left-wing blogosphere is unfortunately even more effective in some respects.

And that's the memo.

Britain: secondary school physics replaced by stupidity

Wellington Grey, a teacher of physics, wants his subject back. According to a new curriculum, teenagers are learning something very different than the quantitative and precise science that physics used to be. The new subject has four main parts:

1. The Vague
2. The Stupid
3. The Political
4. The Non-Scientific

In the vague segment of the new "physics", teachers are only instructed to "discuss advantages and disadvantages of everything" but it is not specified what kind of advantages and disadvantages they mean. Suddenly, an exam question asks why blacks have a lower risk of skin cancer from getting a suntan. It is very unlikely that according to the vague prescriptions, the teacher would teach the kids what they need to answer this question.

In the stupid part of the exam, we see many questions like the following:

• Why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals?

You can check whether you would pass the exam. The correct answer is

• Can be processed by computer / ipod.

It is important that it is an ipod and not a Zune, for example :-), and that you spell it with a lowercase "p". How many people got the right answer?

Another exam question contains a page from newspapers that says "children under the age of nine shouldn't use cell phones". The question is: "Below which age it is recommended for children not to use cell phones?" :-) No, it is not a reading comprehension question from a primary school English lesson. It is a "physics" question at the secondary school.

In the political part of "physics", teenagers are asked zillions of political questions such as "Why must we develop renewable energy sources?" It's obvious that these questions have no place in physics exams.

Moreover, children are led to constantly find holes in scientific experiments but they never learn how to guarantee and figure out that an experiment is reliable or at least as reliable as possible. It's been already demonstrated that this kind of education transforms scientifically minded individuals to those who say: "It's not possible to know anything, so why bother?" Distrust of scientific evidence combined with debates where style and presentation is what matters will lead society astray, Grey argues.

The non-scientific portion of the new "physics" exam confirms that children are only taught how to read newspapers, not science itself. I personally find the last question of the January exam extraordinarily silly. Here it is:

Electricity can also be generated using renewable energy sources. Look at this information from a newspaper report.

• The energy from burning bio-fuels, such as woodchip and straw, can be used to generate electricity.
• Plants for bio-fuels use up carbon dioxide as they grow.
• Farmers get grants to grow plants for bio-fuels.
• Electricity generated from bio-fuels can be sold at a higher price than electricity generated from burning fossil fuels.
• Growing plants for bio-fuels offers new opportunities for rural communities.

Suggest why, apart from the declining reserves of fossil fuels, power companies should use more bio-fuels and less fossil fuels to generate electricity.

What is the correct answer? You must answer: adds no net CO2 to the environment, increases profit of power companies, gives chance to grow a new kind of crop, more jobs.

The answer is not in the specifications and can't be deduced from the material given them to study. More importantly, physics wasn't a superficial subject about profits of power companies or jobs in a rural community. Wellington Grey discourages people from becoming a physics teacher unless they want to watch their favorite subject dismantled.

Grey suggests that because rigors of physics have been torn down and replaced with impotent science media studies, he may also want to quit.

The children are led to trust the newspapers and not solid knowledge or the scientific method which is very unfortunate because most journalists these days have already been miseducated in a similar way. Tony Blair has just figured out that journalists are "feral beasts". Breathtakingly stupid and aggressive articles in the newspapers about global warming or uncritical celebrations of crackpots in physics, attacking serious science, are just two among many manifestations of this phenomenon.

Civitas

Civitas, The Institute for the Study of Civil Society, has published a booklet that also says that the British state school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference. The traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.

Media studies

They explain that all subjects have been affected. In literature, great poets are omitted while third class poets are included according to a political key. Civitas also confirm Grey's statement that the new subject "scientific literacy" is not really about chemistry, physics, and biology but rather about media studies. The children are expected to discuss AGW, GM crops, and whether scientists should be trusted. I have no idea how they can decide whether scientists should be trusted if the children learn no science.

Belief in science, languages, fractions

It's been shown by three studies that the children exposed to this "education" are less likely to trust science or do it. Others talk about a "terrifying absence of proper science". Languages are not taught properly either. Fractions in mathematics are divided to tiny segments in many years and the only thing children remember from the previous segments is that they didn't understand fractions.

History without dates

The new history has no chronology and dates. Children jump from Vikings to Victorians and they don't have to learn about any specific event. British history is particularly affected because its shining moments are not viewed as politically correct.

New geography

Geography becomes a tool to brainwash children about global citizenship, with environmentalism as its main idea. Instead of knowledge and tools to decide for themselves, children are being filled with a new kind of environmental moral codex that the whole world must share.

To stop this scary deterioration, Civitas recommends to

• depoliticize education: politicians shouldn't view education as a place to make political statements
• restore the status of knowledge & expose the destructiveness of anti-elitist education
• accept the ability of children to engage with knowledge and give them a challenging educational environment

Looking at the specifications

When I look at this official document, it seems even worse than I expected. On pages 21-22 out of 85, the content of biology, chemistry, and physics is described. "Biology" has 8 parts:

• how humans respond to changes; staying healthy; abusing drugs; avoiding infectious diseases; where species live; genetical engineering; extinction; man's impact on environment.

You can see that all of them are the kind of soft topics found in the newspapers, usually related to the environmentalist ideology, but there is no real science in it. By real biology at this level, I mean evolution of life, classification of plants and animals, structure of cells, elementary processes of life, transport of energy in the body, basics of genetics, and a few others.

"Chemistry" is perhaps even worse:

• how we use rocks to build; metals from rocks; fuels from oil; ethanol from oil; using oil; changes of Earth's atmosphere

Whoops. By science here, I would mean elements of the periodic table, oxidation numbers, inorganic and organic compounds, basic chemical processes, biochemistry. What is sketched above is some ludicrous parody - find six stupid newspaper articles that could be argued to have something remotely in common with chemistry. You end up with oil everywhere.

"Physics" has seven parts and it is almost exclusively about energy production and health, economic & environmental impact of technology:

• heat transfer; efficient use of energy; electrical devices are useful; how to generate electricity; hazard and use of EM waves; risk and use of radioactivity; origins of Universe

Compare with real physics: mechanics of particles, astronomy, fluid mechanics, forces, gases, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, circuits, voltage, mechanisms inside basic engines and gadgets, sketches of modern physics - quantum physics and relativity. The list above has almost nothing to do with what I mean by physics. It's a stupid list created by vicious imbeciles who want to create many more small imbeciles by osmosis.

And that's the memo.

Is cosmology behind the second law?

Previous articles about the same topic:

Boltzmann's brains
Predicting the past

A newer article that will be written in the future:

Myths about the arrow of time

Sean Carroll gave a talk in Santa Cruz promoting the idea that cosmology is the cause of the second law of thermodynamics. I happen to fully agree with one of the commentators who happens to be more senior than UCSC graduate students:

Finally, the magnitude of the entropy of the universe as a function of time is a very interesting problem for cosmology, but to suggest that a law of physics depends on it is sheer nonsense. Carroll’s statement that the second law owes its existence to cosmology is one of the [dumbest] remarks I heard in any of our physics colloquia, apart from [Rosenblum & Kuttner]’s earlier remarks about consciousness in quantum mechanics. I am astounded that physicists in the audience always listen politely to such nonsense. Afterwards, I had dinner with some graduate students who readily understood my objections, but Carroll remained adamant.

Why do I agree? Well, indeed, it is interesting to study what entropy is doing during the cosmological evolution. But the second law of thermodynamics is a local law that applies to any macroscopic process even if it takes a very short time in any small but macroscopic region of space. The law shows its muscles instantly. The slow cosmological evolution has virtually no detectable influence on such local processes.

The second law of thermodynamics trivially implies that the initial state of the Universe in the past had to have a smaller entropy than its current value. But it is incorrect to revert this implication. A low entropy at the beginning is not a sufficient assumption to fully replace the second law of thermodynamics in the context of all physical questions.

In physics, we usually ask the question what is the probability of different outcomes at time "T" given some initial conditions at an earlier time "t". It is important to realize that the initial time "t" is almost never the Big Bang. While we could argue that the entropy at time "t" is probably smaller than the entropy at time "T" because of a low entropy at the very beginning of the Universe, this observation is not sufficient to guarantee that we only define the initial conditions at "t" and predict the outcomes at time "T", not the other way around.

This logical arrow of time has to be inserted into quantum mechanics by hand. It is a key part of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. It doesn't contradict other, dynamical laws of physics - on the contrary, it peacefully co-exists - and it implies that the thermodynamical arrow of time has inevitably the same direction as the logical arrow of time used by the interpretation of quantum mechanics. The dynamical laws are time-reversal symmetric but the interpretation of quantum mechanics is not. But one can't derive these conclusions just from "cosmology".

In some sense, I agree with the UCSC physicist that the error in Carroll's reasoning is analogous to the errors encountered by the authors who propose links between quantum mechanics and consciousness. For example, Roger Penrose has blamed the collapse of the wavefunction in the brain on the gravitational force, or something along these lines. But the gravitational force between small particles is negligible while the features of quantum mechanics such as the time evolution of the wavefunction or the localization of the particle after the measurement is an extremely accurate, reliable fact about Nature.

It simply follows that gravity can't be responsible for that because of its immense weakness. Analogously, cosmological evolution can't influence the validity of any robust, local laws of physics such as the second law of thermodynamics today. And saying that the cosmological evolution in the past is the primary culprit either violates locality or it contradicts other dynamical laws of physics.

More generally, Carroll's thesis contradicts very basic facts about the relationships between laws of physics. In physics, the short-distance laws are fundamental and the long-distance effective laws are their consequence. The second law of thermodynamics is a law that applies to very small systems, and it thus can't be a consequence of some properties of the Universe at the cosmological scale. The relations between short and long distances may be modified by various kinds of UV/IR mixings in string theory but you only expect those to be relevant when you study physics at the Planck scale, not Carnot engines.

Concerning the sociological portion of the UCSC statement, I also agree. It is just weird whenever physicists silently and politely listen to some complete crap even though their often complex work guarantees that they should be able to spot the errors within picoseconds.

This extreme politeness may have been a good thing sometime in the past. But in the current world controlled by all kinds of media campaigns, it is dangerous. Whenever you don't criticize a nonsensical talk or book about physics, you make it much more likely that tomorrow, this nonsense will be proudly spread to thousands if not millions of other people who are just not able to spot the errors. You should think twice before you decide to be polite.

And that's the memo.

Safari for Windows

Now you can freely download Apple Safari 3 for Windows XP or Vista. The authors claim that it is twice as fast as Internet Explorer and 1.5 times faster than Firefox. The program offers popup blocker, tabs, SnapBack (accurate bookmarks), private browsing (history is not saved anywhere).

If you have downloaded it, let us know what you think.

Ancient Rome as it looked liked in AD 320 when the population was 1 million people is re-born in the digital form. You may look how advanced the civilization was before it was destroyed by the politically correct barbarians.

Dirty snow behind 20% of warming

According to an American team of climate modelers and their peer-reviewed article in Journal of Geophysical Research, about 0.1-0.15 Celsius degrees of warming in the last two centuries is due to

• dirty snow (news.google.com)

which is up to 19% of the "global" warming. The effect is strongest in the Arctic. They argue that 0.5C out of 1.6C warming in the Arctic (one third) should be attributed to dirty snow i.e. snow polluted by even small amounts of black carbon: 80% of this black carbon comes from human activity. In the Arctic region itself, dirty snow would thus have the same impact as the enhanced greenhouse effect (click the picture below).



I can't check the numbers but you can see how "settled" this science is. Within a few days, 20% of the warming is attributed to a previously unknown effect even though this effect intuitively seems much more important than e.g. the greenhouse effect. According to these and other current "official" numbers, dirty snow has contributed more to the warming than e.g. enhanced greenhouse effect from the whole global transportation or than enhanced greenhouse effect from the whole global energy production. Be sure that dirty snow is not the last contribution that is going to be found.



Puppets made out of dirty snow

The U.S. scientists also act as activists and urge Canada to lead the cleanup efforts and to be careful with the Northern Passage.

Related

Alexander Cockburn has another powerful critical analysis of the climate change orthodoxy from a left-wing perspective in The Nation and Counterpunch. For example, he writes:

The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism by the weight of the global emergency.

Postmodernism 2007

Sean Carroll has decided to compete with the postmodernism generator. In his essay remembering Richard Rorty, an eclectic philosopher who just passed away, Carroll proposes some kind of unification of science and postmodernism. His ambitious unification project is somewhat analogous to Brian Josephson's Mind-Matter Unification Project.

In Sean's utopia, scientists should accept the wisdom of postmodernism saying that the truth can't be found, it is socially constructed, and our language is always inappropriate. On the other hand, postmodernists would also pay their price because they would have to accept the existence of Nature. That's what I call a great and balanced compromise, especially for the postmodernists. ;-)

Richard Rorty has argued that every person should try to be an ironist. How can you become an ironist? The original explanation isn't terribly comprehensible but as far as I understand, an ironist must be

• female
• confused
• postmodernist
• dissatisfied with her situation
• thinking that all other cultures and languages are better than hers.

It's very nice but not too much. ;-) If a sane physicist arrived at this idea, she would probably instinctively use her garbage bin. However, philosophers haven't yet invented this gadget. Moreover, ironism is not the only notion that Rorty has invented.

He has also invented the concept of a final vocabulary. A final vocabulary is defined as something that upsets an ironist's stomach. Why does it happen to her? It's because a final vocabulary is a set of "communicative beliefs" whose "contingency is mostly ignored by the bearer". This fancy language reminds me of the essay that Feynman decided to crack during an interdisciplinary conference:

"The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels."

Do you know what it means? "People read." Recall that the essay continued: "Sometimes people read, sometimes they listen to radio."

If I understand the definitions well, then the terms "ironist" and "final vocabulary" themselves belong to the final vocabulary. More precisely, they belong to the garbage bin of confused, incoherent ideas.

More generally, I always wondered how it happens that a particular person who invents this kind of verbal nonsense becomes famous even though millions of village philosophers are doing pretty much the same thing.

My conjectured answer is that the success in philosophy is a social construct - it is a result of the person's charm, his or her good luck, and his or her ability to appear at the right places in the right times. Pomo philosophers realize that this is how results are created in their field. But they haven't yet realized that this fact demonstrates a huge problem with their discipline, not a virtue, and that there can exist other disciplines that are based on merit.

And that's the memo.

Lidice atrocity: 65 years later

Exactly 65 years ago, the village called Lidice in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (five miles from the Prague Airport) was completely destroyed. Nazis retaliated for the assassination of the protector, Reinhard Heydrich, and murdered all 192 men, deported the rest of the population, demolished all houses, and cut all the trees. Heydrich's funeral took place one day earlier. See a German video.



Children of Lidice, a memorial. The sculptor, Ms Marie Chytilová-Kučerová, was also the author of the most well-known Czechoslovak one-crown coin

The massacre occurred during the most optimistic times of the Third Reich. They thought that the last pieces of self-confidence of Czechs would be undermined. The village was expected to disappear from the maps forever - much like another village, Ležáky, two weeks later. Unlike other atrocities, the destruction of Lidice was openly publicized by the German propaganda machine.

Instead, they have demonstrated to most of the world that Nazism was a great evil that had to be liquidated. Most people started to realize that any kind of appeasement was unacceptable. Czechs also started to understand that the centuries-long coexistence with the Germans on the Czech territory would have to stop after Germany is defeated.

Nowadays, Lidice live again and several more towns in the world were named in the same way. A few months ago, a controversial "game", Total Burnout, was released by the director of the Lidice Memorial and it successfully reminded the world about the tragic event in 1942.

Bush ends his visit of Europe as a hero

People in the streets scream "Bushie, Bushie" and celebrate the leader of the free world. The U.S. is extremely popular in the country and Bush enjoys a 99% approval rate or so. Postage stamps with the Statue of Liberty and with George W. Bush himself are issued.

A street in front of the national Parliament is renamed to Bush Street. Citizens reach out and embrace Bush, grab at his arms, shoulders, and head, mussing his hair. The lawmakers say: "Please occupy us."



Is it a fairy-tale? No, this is how George W. Bush was treated in the last country of his European trip. See NPR.

Now, I don't say that the Albanian opinions are identical to mine but they're undoubtedly much closer to mine than the attitudes of the obnoxious, anti-Bush, anti-capitalist, anti-American sourballs that seem to be everywhere in the rich countries.

Even though they are poor, I feel somewhat jealous because they still believe in the ideals of freedom. They surely don't have to think about the fact that freedom is also freedom for the politically correct and other freedom-haters.



The people in Albania also use cutting-edge technology, e.g. the laptop above, to worship George Bush.

The only "minor" problem with my happiness above is that it is excessively transparent why Albania loves America so much: it is because of the uncritical military and diplomatic help that the Albanian nation has been receiving from a Western, U.S.-led coalition against its Serbian neighbors. Treating the Albanian-Serbian situation in such a black-and-white fashion is simply pathetic.

Václav Klaus: three questions for G8 politicians

Seemingly courageous and certainly likable (for those who don't think about the consequences) was the "decision" of top politicians of G8 to reduce emissions of the so-called greenhouse gases by 50% in comparison with the current rates before the year 2050. It is necessary to ask them the following three simple questions:

1. The first question is: why did they make this "decision"? What is the evidence that has convinced them to propose such a far-reaching intervention to human lives and to the functioning of the whole human society, rich countries as well as very poor countries? Convincing scientific evidence that a massive global warming occurs or that human activity and primarily greenhouse gas emissions are behind the observed moderate warming do not exist. I am afraid that those eight presidents or prime ministers of the most developed countries of the world know this fact very well. That's why I ask: why this gesture?


2. The second question is: do these eight politicians know methods and ways how to achieve their goal? Do they know a different way than a radical de-industrialization of the whole world and than preventing billions of people from participating on positive effects of long-term economic growth, effects that have brought such an improvement of lives for the people in developed countries? Are these politicians able to compare costs and benefits of interventions that they are proposing or at least anticipating? Do they appreciate elementary causal relationships that are being stressed by rationally thinking opponents of the warming hysteria on a daily basis?




3. The third question is: do these politicians - whose limited mandate should inevitably lead them to a short-term perspective - have the right to mess up with lives of billions of even those people who will live half a century after these politicians' mandate ends? Are human beings - politicians or someone else - able to decide rationally about anything in 2050 except for their own lives? Are the events of 2050 equally "major" and important as events of 2007 for the people who live today? Shouldn't a politician discount the future as dramatically as every "normal", rationally thinking person does? Isn't any goal and every goal that reaches 50 years into the future a mere gesture that doesn't cost anything which is why politicians can make it so easily? Isn't it a mere politically correct, cynical game with the public?
   

These were my three questions that I would be asking to eight politicians in Heiligendamm, Germany. The primary sad fact is that these politicians have demonstrated an enormous historical pessimism. They showed that they don't believe in positive results of unregulated creative spontaneity of the human society and instead, they primarily believe in the duty to plan and organize the society from above. They are being forced into this mode of thinking by the "green" movement which - unlike the climate - has become a real threat of the contemporary era.

Let me make one thing clear: I can imagine that in 2050, the global emissions of greenhouse gases will be equal to one half of their present rates. But it will only happen if Man will be able to protect his natural creativity and if he gets enough room to act freely, to react to new phenomena, and to invent new things. Simply if he will be allowed to do what he did in the last several millenia.

And that's the memo.

Václav Klaus, Czech president, June 9th, 2007, "Mladá fronta Dnes" daily

Synthetic life forms

Craig Venter, a big shot in genetics who led the private team to sequence the human genome, has finally applied for a new patent which is nothing less than

• Synthetic life

Mycoplasma genitalium (*) has 482 genes - probably the minimal number which is why it may become the H-bomb of biology, as explained by Mohammed AlQuraishi - and 101 of them may be removed so that it can still reproduce itself.

The resulting minimal, 381-gene organism, Motlplasma Minimalium, can be extended to create specialized microorganisms that can either eat carbon dioxide, create biofuels, compute spinfoam amplitudes, or write rants against string theory.



Environmental organizations are angry. Venter's activities really look like those described in Michael Crichton's latest novel, Next. Did you know that NEXTgencode has sued Crichton and Wally Gilbert's BioGen? ;-) Click at "ads" on their website and choose, for example, Perma Puppies.

Space Shuttle Atlantis: smooth

A few minutes ago, Atlantis successfully reached the orbit. It will arrive to the International Space Station.



The launch wasn't interrupted by any of the diverse believers who would like to transform NASA into a tool to worship their religious systems - neither Islamists nor global warmers. Congratulations. ;-)

May 2007 was 0.35 C cooler than January 2007

UAH data show that May 2007 was 0.35 Celsius degrees cooler than January 2007. This temperature difference equals to the hypothetical global warming trend predicted for two or three decades. Nature is nevertheless able to make such a change within four months. Have you noticed that the Earth was 0.35 C cooler than in January? I have not. Moreover, I can show you that you couldn't have either. May 2007 was also cooler than September 1980 and many other months when you were much younger.



The picture above doesn't describe the current state but the state of Earth in a few thousand years. We are approaching the end of an interglacial. Click to see more comments on ice ages.

The Northern Hemisphere reveals an even more impressive recent cooling trend. May 2007 was 0.47 Celsius degrees cooler than February 2007; it was the coolest month since the beginning of 2005. Also, May 2007 was 0.84 Celsius degrees cooler than April 1998. The same magnitude of warming as the cooling that occurred on the Northern Hemisphere within 3 months is predicted for the future period of 30-50 years. Analogously, the cooling since April 1998 equals the predicted artificial warming for most of the 21st century and some people, including many people who don't yet live in asylum, are ready to sacrifice trillions of dollars (from the pockets of other people, of course) to avoid this "catastrophic" hypothetical prediction. The world is just mad, isn't it?

RSS data make the picture even more complete although they only talk about latitudes between -70 (South) and +82.5 (North). May 2007 was the coolest month after July 2004. The most drastic cooling between April 2007 and May 2007 appeared between latitudes +60 and +82.5 (the Northern polar areas), namely by 1.91 degrees Celsius in one month! You should note that one month is enough to cool the Arctic region by two Celsius degrees - the same temperature change that is routinely presented as a catastrophe even if it takes one century!

Your humble correspondent doesn't trust the surface data too much. But according to GISS, May 2007 was 0.37 Celsius below January 2007.

Bill Gates: commencement speech

Bill Gates has finally completed a Harvard degree. Congratulations! In his commencement speech that has been positively received by all people whom I have talked to, he spoke about his Radcliffe experience and the fight against poverty and inequity.



The worst bug of the speech is that at the beginning, he greets presidents Bok, Rudenstine, and Faust, but omits Summers even though he has been talking to him for a long time hours before his speech.

Lee Smolin vs Thibault Damour

Le Monde informs about another battle in the neverending War on Crackpotism.

Thibault Damour faced no one else than Lee Smolin. Le Monde first summarizes how string theory solves the schizophrenia of the 20th century physics and talks about unification and dimensions.

Lee Smolin urges everyone to study any alternatives, whether they're garbage or just junk, and dares to talk about "tragic consequences" for "suicidal young physicists" who would like to work on these alternatives. (Similarity of his language with global warming is not a coincidence.)

All readers who understand anything about reality know that the situation is just the opposite than what Smolin says - namely bad consequences are more likely to meet those who publicly disagree with politically correct fashionable crackpots like himself. But "catastrophic" language and victimism is exactly the weapon used by those who already have about 500 times higher influence than they would deserve. (Similarity with crying feminists who already control the Ivy League is not a coincidence either.)

Damour has argued that not even Smolin can be so limited that he would actually believe the naive Popperian dogmas. Well, I am afraid that Smolin is much more stupid than Damour can even imagine. Accepting statements of philosophers as dogmas, blowing them out of proportion, applying them behind the range of their validity regardless of physical arguments, and using them to organize witch hunts is something that Lee Smolin is very good at.

Damour has also sketched the unprecedented conceptual richness of string theory as well as some experimental tests of string theory and its features by the LHC and other experiments. Damour also mentioned his work about the runaway dilaton that would generate a fifth force that would violate the equivalence principle. If the scenario in this paper were confirmed, it would prove their particular low-energy model that at some level naturally fits into string theory. I think that the runaway dilaton is unlikely but it could be experimentally proved if it is right and it would violate the usual consequences of the equivalence principle.

Predictably, the black crackpot has no idea about any of the actual papers so he thinks and even writes that Damour's statement contradicts my statement that all known semi-realistic F-theory and other major flux vacua exactly obey the equivalence principle. Everyone who has any clue about these things knows very well that there is no contradiction here simply because Damour talks about some very different scenarios.

I think that they're unlikely and as far as I know, he can't construct fully realistic backgrounds containing well-known particle physics (and if you ask me, it will never be possible in Damour's picture), but he is of course right that these models could be in principle experimentally proven, making the case for string theory and his particular structure of scalar fields strong. His models are 10 times more concrete a theory of future physics than anything in DSR or LQG and 50,000 times more than anything that Peter Woit has ever written down.

The usual models referred to as the landscape however don't have a runaway dilaton that would fit Damour's models. That's what I mean by the equivalence principle to be a general prediction of the whole landscape.

I just can't understand why some people read this breathtaking moron from Manhattan even after several years - when it must be so clear to absolutely everyone that he has no idea whatosoever about the topics he is writing about and everything he writes about anything that depends on physics, at least indirectly, is 100% junk. The people who read him must actually enjoy when a vitriolic simpleton constantly annoys and lies about other, much more sensible people. They must also enjoy when a wild dog attacks a human and eats her. They must suffer from some kind of deviation.

Concerning the other statement, I don't know whether Damour knows a construction to get some bizarre DSR-like dispersion relations from string theory. Maybe he knows something I know, maybe knows something I don't know, maybe he is wrong. But I can't judge what he says before I actually see a quantitative description of what he means and what's his evidence. Needless to say, crackpots can always judge anything, centuries before they understand the very basics. That's one of the millions of advantages of being a crackpot.

And that's the memo.

Clifford Johnson and Big Brother

I was kind of stunned when I read what Clifford Johnson thinks about the ways how the society should work. His comments in the article

• Griffin apologizes
  

summarize the scary, Orwellian proportions of the influence of political correctness and certain idiotic ideologies on the functioning of diverse institutions in the current world.

First, he celebrates that moderate coward Griffin was forced to make some kind of apology for expressing his mind - and for raising opinions that are obviously both true as well as important. More importantly, Clifford also reveals what kind of logic hides behind his approach. It is a logic taken directly from George Orwell's famous novel. See:

• ... I think that when you are the head of a huge organization with a budget that size, and essentially in control (symbolically or otherwise) of the fortunes of very many research programs and the scientists concerned... it is important to watch what you say about what you are doing with the resources, why you are doing what you are doing, and so forth. And it is important to watch what such people are saying, since it can be early warnings of what’s actually going on behind the scenes as opposed to what they might wish you to believe is going on.
• ... The blame lies firmly in the most obvious place... the head of NASA said stupid, ill-informed, and downright strange things. He was called on it, and that is the way it should be. He even had the decency to apologize (kind of). That is good too.

Wow. Clifford even believes that the media insufficiently "inform" the public about the "threats of global warming"! That proves the multiverse theory because Clifford must clearly live in a different Universe than your humble correspondent.

Well, I agree that responsible people influence the world both by their acts as well as their words which is why they should think twice and that people naturally watch them but I completely disagree with Clifford's suggestions how the "right" words and "right" acts should be chosen. I also disagree with Clifford's opinion that idiots should determine what the most educated elite thinks about scientific questions and that they should be harassing those who don't share their opinions.

Michael Griffin is the boss of NASA and it is him who should be deciding which projects are important and which projects are unimportant. It is him who should decide how the existing knowledge about the climate should influence the work of NASA - everything that Griffin is responsible for. It is his job to decide what the leader of NASA thinks about climate change. That's why he was chosen to do the job, and this is what he is really paid for. He has all credentials he needs for the job, including seven academic degrees, and he has been chosen with all of his degrees, plans, and opinions. He has even been praised by the far left-wing activist organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, for his objective, apolitical leadership:

• “Recently a Bush appointee to the position of Public Information Officer attempted to muzzle Jim Hansen, Director of GISS . . . the NASA Administrator made it clear that such political meddling would not be tolerated. This was excellent leadership at the top and set the tone for any lower echelons that may not otherwise have been this strong. Michael Griffin is a great improvement over his recent precedents.”
  

That was of course before Griffin said a truth that was not convenient for UCS and other servants of Big Brother, a person whose identity will be explained below.

If the work of an official - work based on his or her own decisions - leads to successes, he or she is more likely to be re-elected or promoted, and vice versa.

Clifford assumes that it should never work like that. Whoever is the boss, the actual person who determines what is "right" and what is "wrong", what should be said and what should be done, is someone completely different, namely Big Brother. It should always be the same person who decides about all important questions. Who is Big Brother? Well, he probably doesn't exist as a single concrete person. Instead, he is a ghost who is diluted in the confused spirits of thousands of radical left-wing activists.

Clifford might think that Michael Griffin is wrong or stupid because he realizes that the "fight against climate change" is idiocy. For analogous but much more rational reasons, I think that Clifford Johnson is stupid if he thinks that the "fight against climate change" is a meaningful project. But Clifford thinks that there is a profound asymmetry in this disagreement. His opinions and his rules are the holy ones - because they agree with Big Brother - and every leader has the duty to obey them.

In a properly functioning world, every person and every leader has the right to make errors. Moreover, it remains very questionable what decisions are actually errors and what decisions are correct. Unlike Clifford, I think that by becoming a boss, a human being shouldn't lose his or her basic human rights.

Of course, I have learned that the reality is different. Since the beginning of my latest job, I've constantly been intimidated by piles of radical left-wing scum into thinking what they wanted me to think and acting in ways they wanted me to act. Feminist girls who should normally be spanked for hours for their bad behavior were trying to dictate me what I think about the role of groups in science and how should I grade students; crackpots like Naomi Oreskes wanted to dictate me what I should think about global warming; crackpots like Woit and Smolin were finally trying to determine what others including me think about quantum gravity. This whole machinery was secretly tolerated or even supported by some of the people in the hierarchy of power. The rules are such that exactly when you get to some position, it is the imbeciles who decide what you should do and think. Don't be surprised that I ended up hating most of these people.

In a normal world, something completely different should happen when someone becomes a boss. By becoming a boss, the person should gain a certain influence and a certain responsibility to decide according to his or her best judgment instead of the pressure by a vitriolic, loud, and distasteful political movement and rules that are not written anywhere but every good friend of Big Brother has memorized them.

I personally think that promoters of theories of "global warming" shouldn't be a part of NASA which has actually been created as a space agency, not a service organization for a political activist movement. And a wise, courageous, and responsible boss of this institution should fire most of these crackpots. The pressure by a certain political movement is such that this decision is virtually impossible. But Clifford wants much more than to prevent the chief of NASA to fire certain people: he wants all leaders to obey the commands of the politically correct party, the vaguely defined party of Big Brother. This logic contradicts absolutely everything about freedom, democracy, as well as a functioning distribution of responsibilities among different jobs.

Clifford and his soulmates may have different colors of their ideology but their methods and ideas about power are identical to the methods and ideas of major 20th century totalitarian ideologies. These PC people are extremely dangerous and I assure everyone else that unless we gain some confidence to urgently deal with this dangerous stuff, the outcomes will be analogous to the outcomes in Germany of the 1930s or Russia of the 1950s. You can see that already today, it is someone different than the elected officials and bosses who are actually in charge of the situation.

And that's the memo.

Bill Clinton is 99.9 percent the same as Rush Limbaugh

Bill Clinton's annual class day speech at Harvard was mostly about the fact that 99.9 percent of the genome sequence is shared by all humans.

Clinton is so impressed by this number that when he found Rush Limbaugh in the same New York restaurant, he almost ruined Limbaugh's dessert by telling him that the two Gentlemen were 99.9 percent identical, too. Finally, he only shaked his hand and said "Hi". That was a good choice because otherwise, Limbaugh could think that Clinton had accused him of havind done 99.9 percent of Bill's things in the Oval Office, among other things.

Clinton believes that this high number means that everyone should emphasize what we share and not what divides us - and that everyone should fight not only poverty, disease, and terrorism but also climate change. It certainly looks like a 75 percent nice conclusion but I don't quite see how it follows from the number. We should also note that we share 96 percent of the genome sequence with chimps. More importantly, Clinton's recommendation is not a real recipe to reduce conflicts. The ex-president probably doesn't realize that attempts to force all people to like the same list of things and personalities as Bill Clinton does is a source of conflicts by itself.

Clinton's speech was followed by two orations. I guess that Clinton always likes the orations.

Microsoft Surface & surface computing

A year ago, everyone would think that the ultimate übergadget in the future would look like a cell phone.

But you might ask: why is it exactly this particular invention of Alexander Graham Bell that should swallow all other useful electronic gadgets? Why is it a telephone? Why it's not a hair-dryer, a washing machine, a lamp, a tricycle, the New York Times, or a coffee table?

It turns out that the right answer actually is a coffee table! You can transform and move your windows with your hands across your intelligent coffee table. The most creative readers could suggest that there could also be intelligent walls with such active windows. Indeed, that's possible, too. The technology is called

• Surface Computing
• Microsoft Surface

What's important is that there is no longer just one cursor on the screen. The whole coffee table is controlled by multi-touch signals. The top-secret project called Milan is only known to Bill Gates, a Czech businessman at the Bahamas, PopularMechanics.COM, the readers of The Reference Frame, and to UIUC where they already have a three-dimensional virtual cave.

Thanks to Viktor Kožený.

Off-topic: Michael Griffin told his colleagues that he regretted that he had expressed his opinions about global warming. That's the closest approximation to an apology that the bigots can get, so they present it as an apology in the media. Some of them may start to sleep again, trying to convince themselves that his interview was just a sequence of typos and misunderstandings! :-) When Griffin was leaving the conference room, he said that "it's revolving anyway", at least a legend has it.

Elizabeth Okazaki & Stanford

A story about

• Elizabeth Okazaki

is both serious, touching, and entertaining. She has lived in Stanford's Varian Hall for about four years. In order to cover her plan to get free housing plus some food, she was dreaming about writing papers with Leonard Susskind and about dating Lukasz Fidkowski. But other physicists work on the theory that she only wanted to marry a future physics professor to become a housewife of a person who knows how to fix washing machines.

Well, unfortunately, Lukasz wasn't attracted enough for the plans to become true and Okazaki is no longer allowed to enter the campus. Meanwhile, Scott Aaronson argues that people like Okazaki should be hired to become social glue of the scientific community.

Landscape 2007

A notorious critic of physics wrote the following:

There seems to be a peculiar trend going on in the particle theory community. Just about all theorists I talk to, correspond with, argue with on blogs, etc. claim to be quite unhappy with the Landscape, and insist that most of their colleagues share this view. On the other hand, all evidence is that Landscape research is becoming increasingly influential at the highest levels of the string theory community.

A long list of talks about the landscape and hints that some people find it important follows.



Well, indeed, most high-energy theorists dislike the anthropic principle. A poll at a previous Strings conference revealed that about 80% of the folks oppose notion that the anthropic selection will be an essential feature of the right solution to the vacuum selection problem. There is obviously no consensus and the majority dislikes the anthropic setup.

But what is equally important to realize is that the landscape is, at present, the only concrete solution to the vacuum selection problem that can be combined with the cutting edge understanding of particle physics as well as gravity into a coherent whole that has also the ability to produce the right value of the cosmological constant problem. Whoever denies the statement of the previous sentence because of some preconceptions is a bigot and a denier. ;-)

The absence of a concrete alternative is why there can't obviously be too many serious papers that would approach these important questions - and the vacuum selection problem is even more important today than it was in the past - from a different perspective than the anthropic one. Such a perspective is simply not yet available. This fact makes it unsurprising that the relative representation of the anthropic principle in literature and at the conferences and summer schools keeps on growing.

Is the actual probability that the anthropic principle is correct increasing, too? Or is the effect in the previous paragraph just an irrational artifact of sociology?

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this question. How does it really work? Those who think that the right answer to the vacuum selection problem is not anthropic - like myself - spend a part of their time by thinking about conceivable alternatives, for example attempts to refine the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction within string theory. We believe in the assumption that it was only due to a lack of imagination that people have only found the anthropic answer so far; more creative people will find a better solution in the future. However, no one has so far found such a concrete enough alternative which makes our belief system somewhat vague.

The assumption that the situation will change in the future is a nice assumption but it can't be a dogma as long as we're scientifically inclined people. I think that it is pretty clear that the more unsuccessful man-hours the community has invested to the search for quantitative but non-anthropic laws controlling the vacuum selection problem, the less likely it is that such a better solution exists. If you have been searching for a cup in your bedroom for three days, you should start to consider the possibility that the cup is actually not there.

I don't know how quickly the perceived probability that another solution - which may even be a non-stringy solution, if you want to be even more speculative - exists is decreasing or should be decreasing. But it is decreasing anyway. While I believe that the probability is still very high (the probability of a non-anthropic, but of course stringy solution), it would be foolish to think that the probability of a completely different theory that no one has been able to write down for decades can be kept constant. The only question is a quantitative one: how quickly it goes down.

On the other hand, the anthropic approach is continuing to perform all kinds of analyses. People like me don't believe that a huge majority of these things will be relevant for the ultimate understanding of the vacuum selection problem. People like me think that some of the ideas used in the anthropic research are even irrational and wrong and that no material progress in increasing the explanatory power of the theory takes place. But despite these facts, there is also an increasing amount of knowledge based on the anthropic thinking that is scientifically legitimate and logical. At least, the people find correct solutions to some mathematically well-defined problems even though these problems may be proven to be physically irrelevant in the future.

Right now we can't prove that the anthropic framework is wrong in all of its forms: the difficulty with proving that it's wrong is one of the main reasons why we hate it so much. :-) There is a very small chance that something could go very wrong with the vague anthropic framework which makes the survival of the anthropic framework unimpressive as a consistency check. Nevertheless, I think that the scientific approach obviously dictates that the people who believe the anthropic principle - and be sure that people like Raphael Bousso and others who give talks about it do believe it and expectations of a universal consensus are silly - have the unquestionable right to continue to do what they're doing while others will continue to believe that this whole direction will be replaced by something much more satisfactory in the future. This majority will wait for a better alternative - hopefully not just passively wait.

If I summarize this situation, it may be frustrating but there is simply nothing so terribly peculiar about it. The anthropic answer is disappointing but more concrete which is why it is rather straightforward to find problems in this setup and write papers about it. The hypothetical non-anthropic alternative is surely more attractive but it is mostly ill-defined at present. This asymmetry implies that the number of anthropic papers exceeds the number of non-anthropic papers even though most people believe that physics is ultimately not anthropic. There's nothing wrong with this asymmetry as long as the anthropic papers correctly admit that they still don't have any proof - and they do admit it. They may find a proof in the future but I find it unlikely.

There is no law that would say that the distribution of papers or talks should copy the opinions of scientists about the underlying questions. It would be a silly law: in reality, the number of papers and talks reflects not only the beliefs but also the actual ability of a given framework to be concretely or even quantitatively analyzed. And in science (as opposed to theology), the results of the papers can actually influence the beliefs.

In junk sciences, the number of papers about a given topic is also determined by the potential of this topic to scare the society and secure funding and by the political opinions of the scientists but I don't think that in the case of the high-energy questions, the society cares in one way or another and I don't think that politics is correlated too much with physics which is why the distribution of papers is determined almost exclusively by objective factors. But the a priori beliefs of scientists are not the only objective factor. In fact, it is not exactly one of the most objective factors here!

But if you're an opponent of the anthropic principle, don't forget: no one can guarantee that the anthropic principle will be replaced by something else. There have been many people in the past who had various reasons to dislike various theories - for example evolution, probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, or string theory - and who were simply waiting for the theory to die. They have always been using big words to attack the theories they disliked. But these three theories, among hundreds of other examples, simply haven't died and they almost certainly never will. But concerning the anthropic landscape as an explanation of the low-energy parameters of Nature, we just don't know for sure.

The vacuum selection problem is an important problem and many people from both sides of the anthropic divide feel that this is the right moment when we should try to solve it. No one can promise that a solution will be found in 5, 15, or 50 years. And we're not confident about any solution today. The anthropic people are in advantage because they have a bad but very concrete framework to address all these issues. The anti-anthropic people are in disadvantage but the last thing they should do is to invent idiotic sociological conspiracy theories a la Woit or Smolin. Only fresh ideas and actual working theories and explanations can make science more exciting, powerful, true, and predictive - and their case stronger.

And that's the memo.

Bush liked the dumplings

"Vojáci, nazdár," greeted Bush the soldiers in very good Czech.

During his speech / full, Bush said that Russia under Vladimir which is how he proudly calls Putin was derailed from democratic reform tracks and that Russia has nothing to be afraid of. Countries like Czechia no longer have to choose who is their friend because both America and Russia may be friends, he said. Bush encouraged China to open its politics as much as it opened its economy.

The Czech defense minister gave him her new CD, "Good Morning Mr Radar, we couldn't wait", a parody of a 1961 song celebrating Gagarin. :-) I can't almost hear her singing in it. She is much more quiet than Jan Vyčítal.

There's a lot of criticism of this new song because the lyrics is too simple (it was completed in 10 minutes) and because it is a propaganda song backwards (the Gagarin song wasn't propaganda but rather an authentic expression of global excitement but there have been a lot of propaganda songs in the socialist bloc, of course). The only difference between propaganda and propaganda upside-down is that propaganda is wrong & ordered and rewarded by a powerful political clique while propaganda upside-down is correct & not ordered by anyone and its authors become a general target of virtually everyone else.

Lunch (photos). Bush was chewing a chewing gum for hours. When he saw some faces that looked surprised, he probably swallowed the chewing gum :-) because no one noticed that he would throw it away. The appetizer was a cheese roll with a honey-cognac sauce. Bush's eyes started to shine when he saw the duck with Czech dumplings and cabbage and he liked the lunch prepared by 30 cooks. Bush tried to smile at everyone and speak to everyone. For example, he praised the green tie of the environment minister, Martin Bursík, the chief of the Green Party. Well, this is somewhat characteristic about Bush's recent positions. :-/

In the afternoon's talk, freedom was Bush's most favorite word. Its attractivity is the most powerful weapon against terrorism. Freedom was given to us by the Creator, Bush said, and it is the only arrangement that leads to justice and human rights. The event "Thank you America" was attended by few hundred people. The anti-American rallies were comparable although they were much more heavily promoted in the media.



CNN reported that Bush has met its counterpart, the prime minister Klaus Topolánek. The photograph above suggests that Klaus Topolánek are two people, not one. Click the photograph to get 94 more.

Angelina Jolie decided to adopt a Czech boy.

Heterotic landscape: gauge coupling unification statistics

Raby and Wingerter have performed an interesting poll of heterotic orbifold vacua. 12% of their vacua have $\sin^2 \theta_W = \frac 38$ while none of them exceeds this value. $\frac 38$ is an upper bound! Among those that saturate the bound, 89% embed the hypercharge within an SU(5) group and can thus be interpreted as SU(5) GUT models.

I personally don't think that vacua that belong to a certain minority are excluded. On the other hand, if there were a plausible argument - supported by some experimental data - that some numbers always satisfy some inequality, like that $\frac 38$ is the maximum value of $\sin^2 \theta_W$, then it could be viewed as an insight.

Helmut Schmidt on global warming

Around 1981, my uncle who has lived in Australia since 1969 visited Europe. He invited me and my mother to West Germany. The communists didn't allow me to go but my mother did go. She brought some luxurious stuff as well as a booklet called "This is how we live in the Federal Republic of Germany."

It explained how rich and free the Germans were. And the social-democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt was featured in the booklet, too. In 1980 I was a red kid and no one could have said anything wrong about the Soviet Union. At least this is how my grandfather used to remember me. Around 1981, I became a pro-capitalist person and it stuck. ;-)

Nevertheless, Schmidt was replaced by Helmut Kohl in 1982 and I didn't hear about him for 25 years. However, now the 88-year old Gentleman made an interesting interview (part 1, part 2) for Der Bild. I don't speak German but because the interview is interesting, let me translate it anyway. ;-)

The G8 summit is just a theater

Dear Mr Chancellor, Germany hosts the G8 summit in Heiligendamm (Holy Dam) in East Germany. If you imagine that you are again a young man who attends a rally 70 years ago, what would you demand from the world leaders?

70 years ago, I was a young person who was against the Nazis. I wouldn't stand at the fence and demonstrate. But if I had been demonstrating against them, the Nazis would have put me into jail.

What do you think about the anti-G8 demonstration?

Not much. No 18-year-old person can know how the world works. Our law says that the federal presidents must be at least 40 years old. It is a reasonable regulation. Only exceptions may sensibly judge the world's economy if they are younger than 40 years. However, even young people are capable to participate in peaceful rallies. That's not so difficult: even small babies know how to cry!

Together with the French president Giscard D' Estaing, it was you who organized the world economic summit in 1975. Was it a success story?

It's fair to say that the two of us have essentially invented the summit. It wasn't easy to convince the Britons and Americans that ours was a good idea.

The purpose of the summit didn't use to be in large resolutions. However, later it became a summit of 10,000 foreign bureaucrats each of which wants to contribute and each of which wants to discuss with others indefinitely.

Instead, we wanted the most important top-tier politicians to meet each other in person, ask questions and answer them, in the smallest possible circles. And indeed, it was a good enough setup to terminate the global inflation that was getting started.

Is it different these days?

Today, the whole event is just a theater for the media! I've heard that only from America, we will host 1000 visitors. That will stimulate Chinese and Russian media. Needless to say, personal contacts become virtually impossible - a problem that Ms Merkel as the hostess can hardly solve.

If you were writing down the three most important problems for the G8 countries, what would they be?

The first big question is why is it just G eight? Where are the Chinese, the Indians, the oil-exporting countries, and the third world? You have to understand that you can no longer control the world economy from the West, without China and India. This era is gone! And you cannot do things without the oil exporters who determine the oil and gas prices.

How should the world economy be controlled?

At present, the most serious threat is no longer high inflation or skyrocketing oil prices. The economy has been booming for an unprecedented long period of time and it involves all continents. It will continue for some time - two years and maybe three years if we are lucky.

The biggest problem I see is the unbalanced position of the three key global currencies, the dollar, the euro, and the Chinese yuan.

China and Japan run a surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars each year while the U.S. have the same deficits. That's a completely sick trend that we should fix.

As I said, this issue won't stop the booming economy in two or three years but in the long run, it will surely be a threat for the global economy.

It's the first time when the protection of the climate stands at the top of the G8 agenda. Is the situation as dramatic as the IPCC climate panel warns us?

This whole climate panel has invented itself and no one has asked for it. It is a severe exaggeration to call IPCC a council that should issue recommendations. The whole debate is hysterical and overheated, especially by the media. There has been climate change since the beginning of the Earth.

For hundreds of thousands of years we have seen ice ages and interglacials.

For example, people find tusks in Germany and prove that elephants once lived in this country during interglacials. Or in my garden in Hamburg's Langenhorn which is 15 meters above the sea level, I can find mussels that indicate that the ocean used to reach to Langenhorn and maybe even further.

Meanwhile, the reason behind these climate changes have been inadequately researched for the time being. And there is no reason to think that the climate change should suddenly stop. But to get upset about it and to believe that mankind could stop this climate change by making a resolution in Heilligendamm is pure hysteria, it is a nonsense!

Is it possible to be influencing the climate without further use of nuclear energy?

The short answer at this moment is No. But I can't predict what people will say in 30 years.

The technological progress has accelerated tremendously and it will continue to do so. Recall that there were only 50 years between the first airplane and the first airplane with a bomb that destroyed a whole city.

When we discuss the shortage of energy, the rising population is a key issue. When my dad was a schoolboy in Hamburg-Barmbek, the world's population was 1.6 billion. Now it is over 6.6 billion and around 2050 it will be approximately 9 billion. All of them will need bread to be baked, all kinds of meals to be cooked, and cars to be driven and heated up in winter.

Great thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder for adjusting and confirming the translation.

Some additional influential climate articles on this weblog

• Viscount Christopher Monckton & climate fearmongers
• Naomi Oreskes & non-existent consensus on climate change
• Temp determined CO2, CH4 concentration, not the other way around
• IQ2 New York debate: skeptics beat alarmists
• Correlations of our star and cosmic rays & warming trends
• 2006: a weak year for climate hysteria
• 2006: coolest average temperature since 2001

Frostbite stops another woman

Even women who are not fanatical global warming evangelists can find the weather near the North Pole tougher than expected.

Rosie Stancer had to cancel her attempt to become the first solo woman on North Pole because of frostbite, zero visibility, and other problems.

At any rate, these people are brave and strong - including the pair of global warming zealots we discussed previously.

LHC: multi-month delay

It's because the LHC is in the tunnel of LEP which stands for a Lot of Extra Problems. ;-)

Marijuana creates holes in lungs

Some friends of mine have been saying that marijuana is very healthy, unlike cigarettes. I was always skeptical about these statements.

What they meant is that it doesn't cause lung cancer. In fact, marijuana can slow down the growth of tumors and you should recommend it if your friends have cancer. But cancer is surprisingly not the only disease in the world.

BBC reports that young people who are strong marijuana smokers have lungs similar to old tobacco smokers. Emphysema may be caused by marijuana. Holes in your lungs are getting bigger as the lungs lose their elasticity.

Your humble correspondent realizes that many readers are left-wing, anti-string-theory fighters. So they probably smoke marijuana and this is my modest attempt to help them.

Bush in Prague: rockets not radars

The missile defense system will be one of the main topics of George W. Bush's visit of Czechia that starts tonight. What do Czechs think about it?

According to polls, a majority (around 60+ percent) opposes the radar base. But it's not necessarily the sensible part of the Czech population. The demonstrations against the base are usually organized by communists, Islamists, and "peaceful feminists" (which is fortunately not a numerous group). One of the rallies had to be moved to a less prestigious place. Thanks God.

On the other hand, the icon on the left belongs to the movement called "We don't want radars, we want rockets!". I sympathize with the movement. Reuters has released a report called "Prague has Cold War edge before Bush visit". They compare the current plans with a long history of powers occupying Czechia in the past and ask whether the citizens think that it's the same thing today.



The picture above shows Fidel Castro who has become one of the Czech advocates of the U.S. umbrella. The pro-American demonstration took place at the Prague Castle.

The Czech prime minister will assure Bush that Czechia is an ally but one that can't be directly controlled by a superpower. He will make it clear that the U.S. will have to pay the expenses connected with the radar otherwise the project is dead.



Ms Vlasta Parkanová, the Czech minister of defense, is a former jazz singer. She had a great idea to compensate the negative campaign against the radar organized by various kinds of commies. She asked Mr Jan Vyčítal, a