Czech president: talk in Salt Lake City

... from Václav Klaus' website ...



The text mostly argues that it is difficult to accept environmentalism after communism. Yesterday, MF DNES published a new interview with the president.

Interview of Václav Klaus for MF DNES, the #1 Czech daily (9/29/2007)

Václav Klaus hasn't yet spoken on the high-level U.N. event dedicated to climate change and his speech had already ignited passions. The president was primarily accused of damaging his country's interests and critics said that he was only going to speak on behalf of himself. How did his talk in America ultimately go? What did the reactions look like? And what did he say in another speech about the reform of the U.N. and the Czech candidacy for the security council? The president answered MF DNES from New York.

Mr. President, the well-known and today even famous Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg published a new book on September 4th, "Cool It: Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming." He writes, among other things, that "the weather itself means less than the people's reactions to it." Do you agree with this sentence despite your criticism of environmentalists?

I haven't seen Mr Lomborg's new book yet. Many things he says are analogous to my assertions. Many other things are very different. On Tuesday, I gave an even longer talk about this topic in New York. When I was thinking what we, the people, should be doing in this situation, I offered this well-known sentence of the good soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hašek: "To chce klid." We tried to find a good translation and all of the translations we found were quite interesting: "Take it easy", "Calm down", "Don't panic", "Be normal". This is one of the important messages related to climate change that I wanted to be heard in the U.S.

But many people in our country keep on saying that you are just trying to provoke. That your speeches are pure ideology and that you are not using any scientific arguments.

Quite on the contrary. Many people in New York, including those in the U.N., understand very well what I say. But many of them have jumped on a bandwagon that drives them in one direction and makes them parrot sentences by others.

Does it mean that you didn't encounter a more serious criticism in America?

I became literally frustrated when I was walking through the corridors of the U.N. after the big dinner organized by the Secretary General and people from diverse countries were standing up, meeting me, and telling me: "Thank you so much for your speech."

But when you are watching what's going on from Prague or other places of Czechia, it doesn't look this way at all. Are you aware of it?

These people were explaining me that it was necessary for someone to say these things. I protested: you should say these things yourselves. The voices that I heard don't appear in the media because their sound only penetrates through the cloakrooms. However, I can't resist to ask: Doesn't anyone see that this is happening? Doesn't anyone else approach these questions rationally?

Who were the people who were praising you in New York?

For example the leader of a national delegation.

Tell me his name.

People hopefully understand that I don't have any right to reveal the name of a politician who has participated in a private conversation. But the person was explaining me that many people think the same thing as I do but they don't have the courage to say it loudly. There's nothing seriously wrong about two groups of scientists arguing with each other but the political worries, fear that one will be viewed as a renegade, it is a terribly sad and literally frustrating thing.

But the problem of global warming is discussed not only by the politicians but by the public, too. This week, BBC has published a poll. Among 22,000 people from 21 countries, 90% would welcome action to stop climate change. It seems that people are indeed worried about the current developments.

The outcome of such polls is the result of 1.5 decades of hysteria. People are constantly cheated and manipulated. Every day, they read these things in the media. The results of the polls can't be surprising.

Does it mean that you view the discussion about global warming to be completely untrustworthy and incorrect?

I have read an analysis in the August issue of the American monthly Science. If the U.S. decided to replace 10% of all of its energy by renewable sources i.e. by biofuels, the plants would have to be grown on 43% of arable land. That was one conclusion of a serious scientific calculation. I would thus encourage the organizers of polls to ask other questions, too. When you ask whether people want action against global warming, it is not shocking that everyone answers Yes. But if you asked whether sorrel or what are the names of all these plants should be grown on 43% of America, I am convinced that 99% of people would think that you have lost your mind.

This sowing has started even in Czechia.

These are side effects of this incorrectly moderated discussion whose dangers I try to emphasize all the time. One of the most ingenious economists of mankind, Frédéric Bastiat of France, wrote a beautiful essay 150 years ago. It was called "What is seen and what is not seen." Well, he points out and describes what can be seen and what can't be seen. His essay is extremely insightful and can be applied to the problem of global warming: everyone should read it. Your daily should be printing these ideas throughout the year. Sponsors would surely emerge somewhere if there are enough subjects to pay for various cosmetical products.

Has someone in New York sketched particular proposals to solve the problem?

Most presidents and prime ministers have presented speeches prepared by their ministries of environment. Speakers who were seriously thinking about the ideas and were writing their speech for one month just like I did were extremely rare. That's why the meeting was dominated by bureaucratic litanies that lacked ideas. If such a text has no author, it has no audience either. It is impossible to listen to such texts.

Der Kurier, an Austrian daily, wrote that it was indeed a sequence of dozens of very boring speeches and everyone was very lucky that there was a time restriction.

They're right. What should I add? My point is that even if one were a part of a minority, it is important for him to be heard. But such opinions should also be fairly reported.

What do you mean? Do you think that they are not reported fairly?

Even in your own paper, you have published several sentences on Tuesday that didn't discuss the key questions from the conference about the climate. For example, someone wrote that as soon as I was entering the building of the U.N., I hinted that I was entering enemies' territory. Well, I was giving no such hints. Someone also wrote that I had to wait in a long line to get my ID and they did it deliberately. Well, I was never waiting in a line. Similar reports are constantly trying to rotate diverse topics into the same undesirable direction.

On Wednesday night EDT, you gave another speech in New York during a gathering of the U.N. General Assembly. You argued that the world organization needs some reforms that would "more accurately reflect the current situation in the world rather than the situation that existed when the U.N. were founded." Did you mean that Japan, Germany, India, or Brazil should become permanent members of the security council?

For example. But I didn't mention the name of a particular country because this was not a point of my talk. But I am completely convinced that the U.N. security council in 2007 shouldn't look like the world in 1945. The world map has changed and it is inappropriate to deny it.

Did you talk with other presidents to convince them to support Czechia as a temporary member of the security council in 2008 and 2009?

I have talked to many. For example, I became befriended with Lula, the president of Brazil. He's ready to visit us. I told him that one Latin American country should be a permanent member of the security council. Surely it won't be Equador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, or Bolivia: Brazil is the most likely one. I am convinced it is. During all the meetings, I was of course advertising our membership in the security council.

Some people on the old continent argue that the EU should be represented in the security council as one entity. What do you think about it?

I don't want to provoke Britons or Germans. Moreover, I am known as a critic of political unification. Excessive, extreme, and permanent unification shouldn't take place. On the other hand, if it has already occurred, and no one should pretend that it hasn't, I would agree that the EU should appear as one entity.

This answer of yours seems surprising. It is just a hyperbole, isn't it?

In that case, the European Union should also send one team to the world championship in soccer.

No one in Europe would probably like it.

And one team could also attend the olympic games. If someone doesn't like these ideas, I would kindly ask him to think about 1,001 other things that currently take place in Europe and that occurred during the June EU summit in Brussels. Otherwise, these people would seem to have inconsistent opinions.

Before you left for America, your Czech critics were saying that your speech about global warming could threaten our candidacy for the security council. But during your speech in the General Assembly, you were expressing the opinions of the government. I would even say that your talk reflected the opinions of the previous governments, too. Did you have a feeling that your speech about global warming has shocked other politicians and reduced our chances in the U.N.?

It's just a game of some of our Mr commentators and Mr Bursík. No, I have seen nothing of the sort.

Does it mean that your discussions indicated that we could beat Croatia and become members of the security council again?

I have had dozens of meetings there. If you look at my web page http://www.klaus.cz/, you will see how such trips to the U.N. look like.

I have read it. Why are you telling me about that?

Because we - the Czech Republic - have organized a large banquet. It was interesting to see who participated at this event on Wednesday afternoon. And I don't mean just dozens of people who are the second secretaries of a delegation or something of that kind. These people came despite many competing receptions and negotiations of the General Assembly that took place at the same time. Despite these events, the Polish, Lithuanian, and Colombian president came to tell me that they supported our efforts in the U.N. I am also grateful for the friendly gesture that Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer expressed by his visit. This gesture has demonstrated his attitude to us.

Martin Bursík, the boss of the Green Party, said that you have "fortunately toned down" your speech and the expected negative consequences won't be as serious as previously feared. Did Mr Bursík know your speech in advance?

Well, be careful. These are just some wise cracks.

Does it mean that he was just bluffing in this case?

I have been playing with the speech for one month, analyzing individual words and details. But most of the text has been completed by the end of August. No essential modifications were made afterwards. I had no reasons to change it. I have no ideas to retract.

It makes it unclear how could Mr Bursík decide that you have toned down the speech.

The speech was probably different from his previous expectations. He has pre-emptively created an artificial world. At the end, he was surprised that the artificial world differed from the real one. This is a story about himself, not a story about me.

In your second speech, you argued that the U.N. must respect the opinions of its individual members regardless of their size: you advocated the equality of the countries. Is there a tendency in the U.N. that the opinions of smaller countries are being suppressed?

I would express it differently. During such a speech, you must address several topics. Your talk would otherwise be formless. Incidentally, I was one of the speakers who have respected the 15-minute limit: the talk took 13 minutes and 30 seconds. Ms secretary of the General Secretary thanked me for that. I was defending our candidacy for the security council and then I meditated about the essence of the concept of the U.N. And I was talking about the "global world government". Of course that during such occassions, one must look for a reconciliation of diverse attitudes which is the answer to your question. It was a more general debate about the problems of global leadership.

People have been saying for years that you travel all over the world and present your private opinions only despite your being a president of a country. Did you consult your second speech with the Czech government?

Of course I did. For example with the minister of foreign affairs. I have even borrowed a few little sentences constructed by his office.

So don't you expect that you are going to be criticized for the speech at home?

I insist that my talk in the U.N. General Assembly was closer to the attitude of the Czech government than any other speech of a Czech president during the recent years. Ten or fifteen years ago, you could listen to speeches that were much more distant from the position of the governments at that time.

Do I understand well that you have really noticed no complaints that you only represent your own opinions and not the government's opinions?

These statements are nonsensical and I would prefer to make no additional comments about them. Do you know what is completely fascinating?

No, I don't. What is it?

That almost everyone is making comments even before these speeches are being read. They can make comments even without reading these speeches. I would be very happy if these people were first reading my speeches, underlining ideas, adding waves, question marks, and exclamation marks into the text to indicate their agreement or disagreement. Once they do it, we could perhaps have something to talk about.

Viliam Buchert, Mladá fronta Dnes, 9/29/2007

Ozone hole theory faces lab problems

Benny Peiser has informed us about lab experiments that seem to contradict the dominant theory about ozone depletion:

Nature about Markus Rex's analysis of NASA's experiments

Because subscription is required, here is the extracted text, a technical abstract with some basic results, Noel Sheppard's reaction, and Ronald Bailey's news story.

Update: RealClimate.ORG have published a reaction by Drew Shindell whose content is, as far as I can say, zero. He only says blah blah, the experiment could be wrong, and if it is not wrong, the right value of the relevant quantity (see below) is surely as close to the old values as possible, blah blah. These are universal biased talking points that a person familiar with some scientific jargon can emit without knowing anything about the subject whatsoever. Junk.

Twenty years ago, when the ozone-saving "Montreal protocol" became a part of our lives, I didn't know much chemistry. Some of the chemistry that our 300-pound chemistry teacher wanted us to know looked suspicious. I only figured out why most of these things were right after I started to understand quantum mechanics. This sudden insight that I have vastly underestimated what the experts had known has also led me to accept the freon explanation of the growing ozone hole. I was never thinking about this problem much.



UVA in the left upper corner should be UVB.

Overview of ozone cycle

Ozone, O₃, absorbs ultraviolet radiation which is why it is important for protecting us against unhealthy UV radiation. How do you determine how much ozone you should expect in the atmosphere?

Well, let's start very simply. There are two main processes:

1. Oxygen becomes ozone
2. Ozone becomes oxygen

The relative concentration of oxygen and ozone is determined by the balance of these two categories of reactions. The first reaction occurs because of ultraviolet photons with wavelength below 240 nm that split a normal oxygen molecule O₂into two oxygen atoms O. One of them combines with another O₂to give you an ozone molecule, O₃.

The opposite reaction, recombination, doesn't need any radiation and involves an O₃ molecule that reacts with a free oxygen atom O to give you two O₂ molecules. Once you calculate the rate of these two reactions, you obtain your first guess for the concentrations.

Including the mess

That was clearly too simple. But the atmosphere is not composed out of oxygen atoms only. Moreover, the concentrations above could perhaps be expected to be rather constant and the calculations couldn't explain growing holes. So you really want to consider other compounds and their effect.

Chlorine and bromine atoms are believed to be the key elements that destroy ozone in catalytic cycles. It means that chlorine and bromine are needed at the beginning but you obtain the same atoms back in the end. They just allow the "ozone to oxygen" reaction to work. The simplest example is

• Cl + O₃ becomes ClO + O₂
• ClO + O becomes Cl + O₂

Whether the models involving these reactions are correct or not could be tested by looking at the concentrations of O, ClO, and other players but I am not really sure whether it has been done and whether there are sufficiently competent people who are doing these things.

The question is how you get chlorine and bromine atoms. Start with a freon, technically a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) that we used to have in all deodorants before we realized that they can easily be replaced by non-controversial alternatives (unlike fossil fuels). An example is CFCl₃ and the following reaction:

• CFCl₃ + UVphoton becomes CFCl₃ + Cl

It looks like we have all the necessary reactions and players to get a simple model of ozone depletion. For technical reason, the free chlorine atoms Cl (radicals) are not obtained from CFCl₃ but from dichlorine peroxide, Cl₂O₂ or "ClOOCl". But the process still requires a photon. The relevant "2 O₃ becomes 3 O₂" reaction has these components:

• ClO + ClO becomes Cl₂O₂
• Cl₂O₂ + photon becomes Cl + ClO₂
• ClO₂ becomes Cl + O₂
• 2Cl + 2O₃ becomes 2ClO + 2O₂

People apparently didn't know what was the rate of the reaction on the second line, a photolysis rate.

The guys in the past used to determine their estimate largely to get a convincing picture of ozone depletion. Well, this is curve-fitting and such estimates may often be wrong. As we have repeatedly emphasized, you shouldn't be fitting a few quantities to get a simple description of a complicated system. Quite on the contrary: you should try to separate the complicated system to components, analyze these components as independently as you can, and therefore obtain as many independent numbers from experiments as you can. You must always be ready to accept that a complex system is described by a complex set of equations and your intuition may fail.

Even though this should have been a good enough reason to make lab experiments with all these compounds, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory apparently did these experiments only recently. Their experiments were probably not trivial and required some low-temperature engineering. What is their result for the rate of photolysis of Cl₂O₂?

• It is almost ten times smaller than needed for the existing ozone hole theories.

That's a huge problem. But only Markus Rex of Potsdam was brave enough to look at the ozone depletion theory with these new data. A lot of things have obviously changed. A dramatic conclusion is that

• At least 60% of observed ozone depletion is due to an unknown mechanism.

At least all quantitative features of the models - that have been considered a part of the "scientific consensus" - suddenly become uncertain again. One modest implication is that we certainly no longer know which molecules are actually important for ozone depletion and whether most of this process is due to completely different reasons, perhaps unrelated to chlorine and bromine.

This is a cautionary tale. The possible analogy between the photolysis rate of Cl₂O₂ on one side and climate sensitivity on the other side couldn't be more obvious. The climate sensitivity may also be up to 10 times smaller than assumed in the most "pessimistic" CO₂-dominated climate-change models.

I have personally viewed the ozone depletion theory to be much more reliable than man-made global warming. It mostly dealt with some compounds, chemistry, and radiation in the stratosphere. No complexities such as different kinds of overlapping clouds etc. seemed to be relevant there. The science should have been straightforward. It wasn't.

Are we sure that these three men deserved their Nobel prize in 1995? I am no longer sure.

We should be much more cautious about the statements that the "key" process in a complex set of events has been identified. We should try to isolate the phenomena as much as we can and measure most of them in the lab whenever it is possible. And we should never think that we can determine many microscopic quantities (such as CO₂ sensitivity, cloud feedback, and many others) from one experimental number (such as the global mean temperature trend). It's simply not possible in complex systems.

And that's the memo.

LHC: triplet assemblies fixed

If you remember, a pressure test failed in March. Fermilab, the culprit, together with CERN, KEK, and Berkeley have completed repairs to all triplet assemblies today, half a year after the breakdown.

CERN press release

Pief Panofsky died

On Monday, Wolfgang "Pief" Panofsky (88), a father of SLAC, suffered from a heart attack. LA Times.

54 years ago, Edwin Hubble died. He was a great athlete when he was young. Wikipedia argues that he was not really the first one who discovered any of the things - such as the red shift of galaxies or the proportionality law to velocity. Nevertheless, his work has led to a broad acceptance of the expanding Universe.

Totalitarianism vs state climatologist in Virginia

The members of the global warming movement have offered us another piece of evidence that their thinking and behavior is not too different from the Nazis and communists.



Figure 1: Click to see a recent attack of NBC against "deniers" and Patrick Michaels in particular.

The State Climatologist of Virginia and one of the most esteemed U.S. climate scientists, Prof Patrick Michaels, was effectively stripped of his title. See The Daily Progress.

Virginia joins Delaware that fired David Legates and Oregon that fired George Taylor (WWW) in acts of blatant ideological cleansing.

Environmentalist activists complained that Michaels' opinions could be interpreted as the official climatological opinions of the state of Virginia. Well, it was my understanding that this was exactly the very purpose of the chair of the state climatologist. Who else should determine the key answers about the climate in that state? The governor, his janitor, or the state stripper? Or a public vote, Democratic primaries, or moveon.org?

But the green scum simply didn't like Michaels' conclusions. So they just fired him through a disgraceful governor, Mr Tim Kaine, and replaced him with a Philip "Jerry" Stenger. Let's now look what scientific credentials were sacrificed in the name of an ideology. Click here:

• Patrick Michael's publications
• Philip Stenger's publications

Google's Scholar finds 411 articles with Michael's name and those that he co-authored have hundreds of citations. Among 9 papers with the name of Stenger, only a few were co-authored by Stenger and all of those have Michaels on the author list, too. Nevertheless, the total citation count of Stenger seems to be 1 citation.

For purely ideological reasons, the quality of the office of the State Climatologist of Virginia was reduced by nearly three orders of magnitude. As a reader says, sharp scientists are being replaced by party officials. Much like the activists in Germany of the 1930s, these people are plain mad. They never realize that a possible decision could simply be over the edge. They are ready to do absolutely anything and everything for their silly unscientific ideology.

End of the last ice age: CO₂ innocent

One of the important observations relevant for the hypothetical role of trace gases in the atmosphere is the famous lag.

See also: The CO₂-temperature relation
How alarmists think & 800-year lag

In the second part of the weekly dose of peer-reviewed skeptical literature about the climate, we again look to Science.

Lowell Stott, Axel Timmermann, Robert Thunell: "Southern Hemisphere and Deep-Sea Warming Led Deglacial Atmospheric CO₂ Rise and Tropical Warming"

They study isotopes in sediment cores. The main result is that they can reconstruct the following chronology:

• 19,000-17,000 years ago: deep sea temperatures increased by 2 Celsius degrees or so
• 1,000 years later: CO₂ increases

Not only the CO₂ lags by 1,000 years or so but the sea surface temperatures in the tropics lag, too. The deep ocean warmed much earlier than the surface. The authors offer hints that the warm water came there from the South where the primary changes - perhaps "increasing austral spring insolation" - occurred, followed by albedo feedback.



Figure 1: Southern Hemisphere, location of sites. The color indicates the depth of the isopycnal surface (sigma_t = 27.6 kg/m3) in meters

At any rate, if their paper is right, they can rule out not only CO₂ as the cause of the deglaciation but any other mechanism that takes place at the surface or above the surface of the tropical zone (recall that the greenhouse effect should dominate 10 km above the surface in the tropics) as the driver of the deglaciation.

The authors also say a lot of politically correct stuff about the important role of CO₂ that directly contradicts their research but that has allowed them to publish these results in Science. The lead author argues that he doesn't want want people to think that CO₂doesn't drive the climate: it's just not the beginning, [the bulk,] and the end of it. ;-)

See also: USC press release
Hat tip: Marc Morano

102 years of E=mc²

Exactly 102 years ago, on September 27th, 1905, Einstein published his paper

Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?

that introduced the well-known formula, E=mc². More precisely, you can see if you click that the formula doesn't appear in this or similar form. The closest thing that you find there is this sentence:

If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c²

The form "E=mc²" of his insight is a matter of marketing but it is a good marketing. However, it is good that the people who invented this marketing trick didn't present themselves as co-authors. ;-)

Can Einstein be blamed for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Well, a little bit. Look at this provocative sentence ;-) in his article:

It is not impossible that with bodies whose energy-content is variable to a high degree (e.g. with radium salts) the theory may be successfully put to the test.

Stanislav Gross and his CZK 300 million

Mysterious stocks of a former prime minister

We have another puzzle for you. In this case, there exists a well-defined answer but only a few people in the world know it at this moment and they won't tell us. ;-)



Mr Stanislav Gross was born in 1969, worked as an engine-driver trainee for the Czech state railway company. He joined the social democratic party in 1989 and the Parliament in 1992. After some additional achievements, he became the prime minister in 2004. While he looked like a 16 years old boy, he was already 35 but it was still enough for him to be the youngest prime minister in Europe.

He had to resign in 2005 because he couldn't explain how he paid for his new luxurious apartment: it is something like USD 50,000 of suspicious money for a USD 200,000 apartment. Imagine how his socialist comrades had to be upset about such a huge amount, relatively to the salary of typical socialist voters. Also, their best family friend was a director of a brothel in Prague but that's not very important. While he was a prime minister, he completed a college to be a lawyer which won't be too important either.

Those USD 200,000 may look like a lot of money to the typical voters of the party that made him the prime minister except that two days ago, on Monday, the Euro weekly has revealed that Gross has bought stocks for 31 percent of a power company - Moravia Energo - whose value almost certainly exceeds USD 15,000,000. Just to be sure, I mean that Gross's stocks are worth fifteen million U.S. dollars or fifteen percent of Al Gore's assets. ;-)



Tomáš Chrenek is the majority owner of that company. Gross together with a Robert Sýkora visited Chrenek back in 1999. While Robert Sýkora was a second-league politician, it turns out that he was the owner of those 31 percent before Gross. Gross also claims that he bought the stocks from Sýkora cheaply, something like USD 1.5 million - essentially for 1 year of profits (the 2005 and 2006 profits of the whole company were 126 and 100 million, respectively). That's one order of magnitude below the conventional value (10 years of profits). Why would Sýkora sell it in this way?

If Gross had a loan, which is what he says, it would be a bad deal for him to be a minority shareholder, too. Why? Because the majority shareholder can make the dividends zero - which is what Chrenek is indeed doing - and these dividends can't be used to fund the loan. Also, Chrenek could marginalize Gross by raising the nominal value of the company, or what's the right term.

Gross's former socialist comrades want him to explain how he paid for the stocks - especially those who would never earn even 0.1% of that amount are really concerned :-) - and Gross tells them, fu-ck off, Gentlemen, I am now a private person who doesn't have to tell you anything and moreover, I must be silent to protect my business partners. Gross hints that he has borrowed the money from a financial institution that "offers this product as a standard one".

Meanwhile, all well-known Czech banks agree that he could only get a loan for 2/3 of such a large and risky transaction so he would have to own USD 5,000,000 before the transaction which still seems rather unlikely. Gross's wife says that she has nothing to do with the purchase. They only talk about their kids' hobbies rather than some irrelevant millions of dollars, she explained.

Not too surprisingly, the anti-corruption police has started an investigation. Well, the loan could be funded by a rich person or business and in that case, it seems rather likely that such a rich person or business would probably have to be pretty grateful to Gross for something. And maybe it was a gift and not a loan - so they would have to be really grateful. :-)

I kind of think that people shouldn't be required to prove how they acquired their huge assets. On the other hand, I think that when someone becomes suspiciously rich, it is very appropriate for some authorities to investigate, study money transfers, and try to deduce who funded what. If you care about my guess, I think that Gross is a typical representative of the "modern socialist" guys who always want to be very rich and who are ready to do many things to achieve their goals. Consequently, it would be a surprise for me if the transactions were clean. In fact, I also think that the ultimate explanation won't be sophisticated but rather naive.

There will be a rich subject behind it who has taken care of everything and Gross is just the lucky guy. If the ultimate answer is different, I will be immensely impressed by Gross's skills and intelligence. ;-)

Moravia Energo was created by the Třinec Steel Company, a corporation that received a CZK 2,000,000,000 subsidy from a former government where Gross was the minister of interior (while the previous Zeman administration refused to pay). Even though we have explained that Gross and Sýkora have visited Chrenek in 1999, you shouldn't overestimate this fact because there have probably been quite a few similar seemingly related big stories. The government that included Gross was also selling Unipetrol (an oil company) and Telecom (the main telecommunication company) to Telefónica O2, among other things, and rumors about corruption exist in each case. Alternatively, Miroslav Jansta, a lawyer close to social democrats, owned 23 percent of the company for some time after 2002. Today Jansta "doesn't know" whether he had bought the stocks.

What do you think?

EUX.TV on cosmoclimatology

The video, focusing on the Danish research of the cosmic-climate links, was produced by the European Space Agency (ESA) and is being shown on WWW.EUX.TV, the Europe Channel.

Note their polite formulations: our knowledge of man-made global warming wouldn't be complete [if we didn't learn the correct main reasons of the climate change that may be completely different]. ;-)

Gerd Bürger: 20th century warming was statistically insignificant

In previous weekly doses of consensus-busting climatological literature in peer-reviewed magazines, we discussed articles in Nature, Geophysical Research Letters, and many other sources. Today we look in Science magazine, volume 316 (the volume 317 is already available on-line).

Gerd Bürger argues nothing less than that the global character of the 20th century warming was not statistically significant.

Bürger: Technical comment on "The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years"

The author explains that the authors of the original article, Osborn and Briffa, didn't take proxy screening into account when they calculated the significance levels. It really means that they neglected, in their quantitative analysis of the significance, that proxies may be correlated with the existing temperatures and included among temperature-sensitive proxies by chance.

Update: Later, I realized that Steve McIntyre has already discussed Bürger's paper in June 2007 when it became available online.

Once this mistake is corrected and the probability of this kind of error included in the calculation, the significance of the 20th-century warming anomaly disappears. The 99th percentile is almost never exceeded while the 95th percentile is surpassed in the early 20th century as well as the early 11th century while the 17th century (and the year 1700 in particular) were equally anomalously cold - nothing that would support the AGW theory. Just see that there is nothing unusual about the last 70 years on this figure:



Figure 1: Difference between the fraction of records that have smoothed and normalized proxy anomalies whose absolute value is greater than zero (top), greater than one (center), greater than two (bottom), using only proxies that are significantly temperature sensitive (bold), along with the (10th, 90th), (5th, 95th), and (1st, 99th) percentile bands (thin) from 1000 random-based series exceeding the critical correlation. The area of the signal outside the (5th, 95th) percentile band is filled black.

Osborn and Briffa reply with a "nothing matters" argument that I don't understand. They say that they used a small number of records which should remove Bürger's worries about the statistical significance. I would guess that this fact would, on the contrary, strengthen the worries.

Many people, including skeptics, have been saying for years that they had no doubts about the 20th-century warming, its global character, and the assertion that it can't be understood as noise. I, for one, have always had doubts about this statement. Whether there has been anything in the 20th century that would deserve to be called global warming is pretty much an open question.

WCR predicts that the MSM won't inform their readers and spectators that the Science magazine has printed a technical paper that shows that an unusual 20th century warmth didn't exist. We won't see NBC telling us that "Expert in the Science magazine proves that there was no global warming in the 20th century." Well, that's not too ambitious a prediction by WCR.

Hat tip: World Climate Report, JunkScience.com

Amplification of opinions: ideological bubbles

Most of us think that the available facts and data don't support the climate alarm. But I want to analyze something more general right now: the amplification of opinions.

Update: Ross McKitrick has pointed out a fascinating and related 2003 economics article about persuasion bias. The authors not only argue that people are not able to properly realize that some sources of information are repetitive and fail to be independent but they also derive mathematical consequences out of their Markov chain model: it turns out that this dynamics naturally polarizes opinions into a one-dimensional (left-right) continuum even if the questions are multi-dimensional. This statement obviously boils down to the "+1" eigenvalue of any stochastic matrix, encoding a fixed point (opinion difference between main groups). If you look at the bulk of the paper, it is actually a hardcore mathematics paper with a lot of matrices and theorems. Enjoy!

Imagine that the opinions of the scientific community are representative of the actual likelihood that a certain assertion is true, according to the best methods and data that are available to the human civilization. Such an assumption may probably look more or less realistic in the case of many sciences even though you should realize that this statement has no eternal value. Eventually, the probability of any well-defined assertion goes to 0% or 100% because we learn what the correct answer is. Once we learn the right answer, the previous probability between 0% and 100% becomes falsified.

Many of us think that because of various political and economical pressures and because of group-think discussed below, this assumption is very far from being true in the case of the climate science. But let us assume, for the sake of simplicity, that it is true even in the case of climatology.

Comparing percentages

The percentage of the public that thinks that global warming is either not man-made or it is not dangerous is comparable to 40 percent or so. Among the scientific community, it may be estimated to be around 20 percent. The remaining 80 percent are not necessarily alarmists because most of the group is composed of the silent majority that dominates in such issues.

But among the speakers - politicians - at the high-level event in the United Nations on Monday, the percentage was around 0.5 percent. Czech President Václav Klaus was the real reason why the number was nonzero. It is not hard to see that 0.5 percent is much less than 20 percent or 40 percent. The participants of the climate summit are not representative of the opinions of the public and they are not representative of the opinions of the scientific community either.

Where does the discrepancy come from?

Well, politicians usually think that it is a good idea for them to represent a majority because they feel that it implies that they will enjoy a greater political support: they will be more likely to win elections and they will have a greater influence. Because the people who believe in man-made global warming (or who don't openly disagree with it) seem to be a majority both in the public as well as the scientific community right now, a "rational" politician may find it natural to modify his own opinions to be compatible with such a majority.

In the scientific community, we decided that the percentage of climate skeptics is 20%. Let's not argue about the exact number: the real point is different and we only need to agree that the percentage is much higher than 0.5%. If you trust the scientific community, you might say that the probability that the skeptical hypotheses are correct are comparable to 20%. So is it OK that this number becomes 0.5% in the United Nations?

Needless to say, I think it is very bad. If the percentage of people who happen to okay a particular conjecture happens to exceed 50%, it surely doesn't mean that the conjecture is correct. Only imbeciles could think otherwise. The brutal decrease of the number should be counted as nothing else than an example of political distortion of science.

The fact that there were many fewer than 20% skeptical speakers in the United Nations means that the institution is failing as the voice of the people of this planet. Equally importantly, it means that this international institution exerts illegitimate pressure on scientists to push their research and conclusions in a particular direction. All these things are very bad.

Can these mechanisms be fought with?

In the previous paragraphs, we mentioned that the expansion of majorities is not an exception but a result of a behavior that is, in some sense, rational. Many politicians are spineless jerks who do politics to maximize their own benefits - much like most people in many other occupations, after all. And when they evaluate expected costs and benefits, almost all of them simply conclude that it is a better idea for them to side with the majority.

Two obvious questions should be asked:

1. Is their behavior truly rational?
2. If you assume that it is truly rational, should we design policies that would prevent such an amplification of majority opinions?

Concerning the first question, I only think that their behavior is rational because of a bad atmosphere in the society and because of undemanding voters. Indeed, many people prefer politicians who agree with them right now and who defend their interests: more general moral values are secondary. Whether a politician can actually be trusted - whether he or she builds on honesty and other moral foundations - is not too important. If honesty were viewed as an important value expected from politicians, the "amplification of opinions" would obviously diminish and the percentage of skeptical politicians would be much higher i.e. much closer to the percentage in the general public or the scientific community.

I actually think that Václav Klaus is not losing any political capital in the Czech Republic by his "unpopular" opinions but I tend to agree that if you look at the whole global political scene, the answer is that an average politician loses whenever he offers "unpopular" opinions. Incidentally, unlike the global press, the Czech press dedicated a lot of room to Klaus' speech and praised it. People in the U.S. should also understand that no foreign journalist would ever criticize leader's imperfections in English especially if the leader's English is better than English of most other leaders and virtually all journalists. ;-)

The unusually rational approach of the Czech media contrasts with the scientific (!) magazine Nature that just called Klaus a "renegade". Sorry, guys from Nature, this is not scientific terminology - it's language of religious cranks. Moreover, you are using the term incorrectly because renegades are people who fell from (originally Christian) belief. Klaus has never believed similar kinds of a politically-driven pseudoscientific silliness so he can't be a renegade.

Fine. So let us accept that honesty is not a value in the present world. With this assumption in mind, we still want to ask whether the politicians' behavior is rational.

Amplification of opinions as a bubble

To answer this question, I would like to propose an analogy between the amplification of opinions i.e. group-think dynamics on one side and financial bubbles on the other side. Whenever virtually all politicians decide to agree with a majority about a question that only influences their life by the perceived agreement with others and not directly, they are participating in an ideological counterpart of a financial bubble.



Once a spineless politician concludes that a certain opinion is likely to get stronger, he may want to jump on the bandwagon. This desire to jump on the bandwagon will be getting increasingly strong because all politicians know that other politicians will be jumping on the same bandwagon because of the same reason. The result is that virtually all politicians join the bandwagon. The analogy with the bubble is hopefully manifest. In sociology, we talk about group-think.

Group-think is the most typical reason why the probability that a majority is wrong is often much higher than the percentage of the minority which is why our first assumption was incorrect anyway. ;-) Just to be sure: the probability can also be much lower but the most typical situation when it's much lower involves a minority that is intellectually insufficient to analyze the question rather than group-think.

If the analogy really works, you may want to ask whether the bubble can burst, much like the financial bubbles. The answer is, of course, affirmative. It is affirmative not only on paper: we can list a lot of examples from the history.

A virtually identical dynamics as the current global warming hysteria has appeared in many countries, societies, and communities during many eras. But let us choose Germany of the 1930s. An ever growing percentage of the public and the politicians would support the views of the NSDAP. This societal group-think is another example of the bubbles we talk about. When did this particular bubble burst? Well, people had to wait until 1945 or so for the bubble to fully burst. ;-) But it did burst, after all. Bubbles can't last forever if they're only filled with hot air.

In the case of the opinion bubbles, the finite life expectancy is even more obvious than in the case of the financial bubbles. When the percentage of the people who endorse a certain opinion approaches 100%, their position loses any advantage because most of their competitors are advocating the same opinion anyway. Because the relative benefits of such a majority position converge to zero, the original motivation to act in this way fades away. People inevitably return to other, usually more rational ways to decide what they should think and say about a certain question. In the case of climate change, that means to return from 99.5% to 80%. Meanwhile, the figure of 80% may really converge to 0% because of some objective evolution - for example when your empire faces setbacks against Stalin and the Allies or if the temperatures start to drop again, to mention a particular nightmare of the alarmists.

My main point is thus the following: even if you're a spineless, greedy politician - such as most of those we have seen in the United Nations yesterday - your group-think might only reflect your poor ability to quantify the risk. When bubbles burst, it can be pretty painful. So I discourage you from threatening scientists and encourage you to choose your opinions about climate change and related issues by a careful appraisal of the evidence that is available to you rather than by a calculation which position will bring you the highest political profit in the short term. If you act wisely or if the voters force you to act wisely, no special policies to fight against group-think in politics are needed.

And that's the memo except that I want to write a few more paragraphs about another analogy that may have come to your mind.

Amplification of opinions and proportional vs majority systems

A reader could simply point out that there were 99.5% alarmists in the United Nations because in each country, they represent a kind of majority - or at least a majority among the activists - which is why the speakers don't reflect the proportional composition of the society. This mechanism does contribute but you can't explain the data without the group-think dynamics: it is not just about a selection of speakers. For example, most prime ministers are alarmists.

But it is true that majority systems will naturally amplify the opinions of majorities, especially if the composition is something like 80:20 that we discussed above. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Above, I have mentioned that it is surely a bad thing is this political dynamics distorts the information about the likelihood of various answers as understood by the scientific community. But more generally, are majority elections worse than proportional representation?

I don't think that there exists a universal answer to this question. But one can obviously say the following thing: if there exist good rational reasons to think that the minorities are really bad or incompetent people, a system that suppresses them - majority elections - may be superior. And vice versa: if there are reasons to think that minorities bring something to a business that is unique and essential or at least equally valuable, proportional representation may be a better way to go. I don't want to discuss specific examples and where they belong because it could be too controversial and off-topic.

Mark Srednicki on non-uniqueness of vacua

I just looked at a discussion at Asymptotia.com. I think it is fair to say that the sane physicists have "won" it so that PW ended up with manifest contradictions and paragraphs written in capital letters ("not even wrong amen" repeated redundantly on 15 lines), as appropriate for the worst and most obnoxious class of ultra-repetitive trolls into which he undoubtedly belongs.

Unfortunately, it was mostly due to their brute force, a tool that is sadly important in these "public debates". For example, I can "defeat" 17 synchronized crackpots but 18 starts to be a problem. There were roughly 6 participants who understood what's going on - 2+ anonymous experts are included - and they could simply nail PW down.

There have been various attacks in both directions on that page. For example, Clifford Johnson was criticized for not being interested in string phenomenology. Well, while this comment may be legitimate, I think that he is doing interesting enough things and his being silent about a topic that he doesn't understand too well is a virtue, not a vice.

Concerning topics on that page, some room was dedicated to the tension between the proton's longevity and the anthropic principle. An anonymous commenter mentioned that this issue has been discussed in serious literature, e.g. in papers by Banks+Dine+Gorbatov (BDG) and by Susskind. This comment has upgraded PW to a regular scientist who can actually be debated. PW's ideas are of course not as refined as those by BDG and others but the idea to try to find the closest paper in serious literature that expresses similar opinions as a critic and to debate this paper could be a good strategy to improve the quality of similar discussions in the future.

It seems to me that the situation - what the anthropic principle and naturalness can say and cannot say about the proton lifetime - has been clarified, after many twists and turns. Another part of the discussion has previously confirmed that the LHC will be able to distinguish particles with different spins, in contradiction with bizarre statements by JoAnne Hewett.

But I chose to reproduce a very interesting quote by Mark Srednicki related to the landscape:

---

There is an interesting fundamental question here that goes beyond the current string paradigm. It is this: will the ultimate “theory of everything” have one and only one solution, a solution that looks like our universe? Or, will it have many, only one of which looks like our universe?

The great hope has always been that the answer will be “one and only one”. This was the hope for the physics of hadrons in the sixties, when it was widely speculated that fundamental principles (the analyticity, unitarity, and crossing symmetry of the S-matrix) would uniquely determine all properties of all hadrons.

That hope failed. We now know that hadronic physics is described by a particular quantum field theory, quantum chromodynamics, based on a particular gauge group, SU(3), with a particular set of matter fields (quarks), with a particular pattern of masses. There is nothing unique about it.

Despite Jacques’ correct observation that it was always obvious that string theory would have many solutions, there was a hope that there would be some “vacuum selection principle” that would somehow pick out one of these solutions as uniquely favored, and that this solution would match our universe.



Figure 1: Bootstrapping, a program from the late 1960s

This hope has now faded in light of new results, just as the hope for hadronic physics faded in the early seventies.

Peter Woit and others don’t want to give up this general hope. They want to abandon the most promising framework we have (the only known framework that accommodates both quantum field theory and gravity in a natural way), and strike out in search of the next “analyticity, unitarity, and crossing!”, the next set of general principles that will uniquely determine the Standard Model.

That’s fine with me (though I think the chances of success are essentially zero). But Peter also insists that everyone else should do this too.

Is revisiting a failed ideology of the sixties a good plan? Time will tell.

---

Well, as a traditional believer in a "unique" vacuum selection, I still agree with that. Even though it is true that string theory unifies its vacua into a single dynamical framework, it is still legitimate to think about the analogy between different string vacua and different quantum field theories. In the AdS/CFT context, these two categories are really isomorphic, after all.

It is historically true that people used to believe in the uniqueness of the quantum field theory describing strong interactions. It was a pure belief and we can now say that it was a wrong one because we can pretty reliably prove that gauge theories with different gauge groups and matter contents are as consistent as QCD. Consequently, general consistency criteria are not enough to pick the right theory uniquely whether you like this fact or not.

An analogous situation occurs in string theory. It seems pretty clear that there exist many vacua that don't describe our Universe. Some non-uniqueness almost certainly exists, just like in the case of field theories, and the belief that there exists a "pure thought" that picks the unique answer is just a belief - one that doesn't seem too likely right now, after the consistency of many diverse vacua has been demonstrated in detail. Open-minded people simply have to learn a lesson here. The right question has really turned into a quantitative one: how much non-uniqueness there is and how hard it is to find the right results despite this non-uniqueness.

And of course, I always agreed that this non-uniqueness of solutions that a broader set of laws admits can never be used to declare a theory less likely (or even less scientific). All this criticism has always been completely irrational: a system of ideas tells us something about science as long as it says anything about dynamics. And because the space of string vacua surely doesn't cover all theories of the Universe we could a priori imagine, it is as OK as if there were one vacuum only. The only thing that can be criticized in this context are attempts to connect the real world with the "collective" properties of the landscape by ad hoc egalitarian anthropic rules applied to the set of vacua.

But from an epistemological vantage point, a large set of vacua is just another reincarnation of a large set of possible theories of the Universe - including theories involving microscopic aliens who play different kinds of board games - and the total number of such theories has always been exponentially large. Nevertheless, we have reduced the set significantly, organized it, and understood many things about it.

A hockey stick graph: indulgences

The goal of the fight against climate change is to make the climate stable i.e. to achieve a flat Earth's climate.

However, it seems that the market tools needed for such a goal are rather unstable. The price chart looks like a hockey stick graph that would make Michael Mann extremely jealous:



The graph above is the newest graph of the price of the European 2007 carbon indulgences. Click it to get to their website. Two days ago, one ton was 5 eurocents. Yesterday it was 7 eurocents. Today it is 60 eurocents, a 750% increase in one day or 1100% increase in two days. I don't know what happened but I assure you that I unfortunately didn't own any indulgences.

Still, the current price of 60 eurocents is below the price of 30 euros during the holocene climate optimum of April 2006. ;-) Between March 2006 and last Sunday, the temperature increased roughly by 0.01 Kelvin degrees, from 287.66 K to 287.67 K, while the price of indulgences dropped by 99.9% or so. I wonder which of these two fluctuations or changes will have a more dramatic impact on the economy once indulgences become a key entity in the corporate budgets. Just to be sure: this was a rhetorical question.

Looking at these bizarre and meaningless wiggles, it might be better for the carbon regulators to peg the indulgences to the dollar i.e. to make the price fixed. You could emit CO2 for a fixed fine and you could get a fixed gift for saving them. That's essentially carbon tax which is a bad thing but probably a more sane one than this "market".

Mašín brothers: heroes or monsters?

There are two Czech people who have made rather extraordinary things between 1951 and 1953.



Unlike other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia was a mostly peaceful country without much armed resistance during the Nazi occupation as well as during communism.

But there have been two brothers who don't fit this description, namely Ctirad Mašín and Josef Mašín (pronounce: "machine"). Their acts continue to divide the Czech society. Were they heroes or villains?

Wikipedia about Mašíns

Their father was a prominent member of the underground resistance during the Nazi occupation. And even his two young sons were given medals from President Beneš.

However, communism started in 1948. The brothers listened to the Western radio stations and believed, together with a group of others, that America was planning to wipe out communism. The U.S. saviors were not coming and the resistance against the political correctness of the early 1950s was getting tough. Eventually, their group decided to leave the communist country.

It wasn't quite trivial. So they had to do two raids to grab some weapons for their future adventures, terminating one cop per raid, and to obtain CSK 850,000 (a lot of money): the life of a wage clerk turned out to be redundant in this case. Meanwhile, they were planning to explode a train with uranium and maybe the private jet - sorry, I mean private train - of President Gottwald, the little Czech Stalin. Eventually they were ready to get to the West through West Berlin because the wall didn't yet exist. They made a logistical mistake in East Germany and 20,000 German communist cops were trying to get them.

The two brothers were thus facing a pretty large number of armed commies. Nevertheless, the brothers have won, shooting three German cops directly (that puts the total direct casualties of their trip to six) and encouraging other German cops to shoot at least three more policemen in friendly fire. ;-) The German forces were completely humiliated so the German officials at least realized, a posteriori, that the number 20,000 above could have actually been just 5,000 ;-) while the Czechoslovak TV shot a movie about the popular fictitious communist secret cop, "Major Zeman", who was actually able to catch the brothers on the screen!

The reality was quite different. Eventually, the brothers got to the U.S., served in the U.S. army, and did other things. The other members of the group who were caught were executed, of course, much like many people who knew the brothers in Czechoslovakia. Their decisions were surely not risk-free.

Because these two Gentlemen born in 1930 and 1932, respectively, are still alive, the main question is: should they be given medals for their heroic resistance against a brutal totalitarian regime as fans, including the current prime minister, propose? Or should the Mašíns be treated as Godless killing machines whose murders have been barely forgiven which is what roughly 50+ percent of Czechs think?

The story is tough and morally ambiguous. What is your answer?

Hořava and Keeler on non-supersymmetric heterotic M-theory

It happens quite frequently that I consider the first paper on the hep-th archive to be the most interesting one. I guess that it's only possible because the community is sensible.

Hořava and Keeler - whom you may remember as the discoverers of non-critical M-theory - discuss the supersymmetry-breaking heterotic M-theory by Hořava and Fabinger and especially its perturbative description. It involves a heterotic string with a single E8 group. If you like E8 representation theory and complicated orbifolds of free fermion theories, you should like the paper.

Also, interesting and clarifying analogies with the work of Swanson and Hellerman emerge. Logarithmic CFTs - whose OPEs are allowed to have logarithmic singularity structures - turn out to be relevant for tachyon condensation.

Live from the United Nations

Live broadcast removed

Most of the speakers had nothing to say so they were emitting the same verbal fog as nearly everyone else.

The only exception I noticed was the Czech President. Download his talk in the IVR format playable by RealPlayer 11. In the 6.99 MB file (9 minutes), Václav Klaus starts to talk in 30 seconds. See also the transcript.

I have watched about 20 speakers and it's just a complete catastrophe. If someone suggested that Czechia is going to leave the United Nations, I would almost definitely agree. It's an organization full of bureaucrats who look like concerned careerist members of Komsomol. All of them are ready to say an arbitrary amount of lies, none of them is willing to think with his or her brain, and their statements reflect neither science nor the opinions of the people of the Earth.

While the percentage of skeptics among scientists as well as the population is of order 10-50 percent, there is exactly one leader of a U.N. member country that has the courage to offer his skeptical viewpoint. I think that this proves that most politicans in the current world are spineless jerks.

It seems that Klaus is a brave man. After having heard dozens of these puppets saying that no one is allowed to disagree and everyone has to consider stupid girls from Greenpeace to be the main constituency of the international organization - and literally tons of similar ideological and alarmist garbage - it is non-trivial that he gave the talk that he has prepared.

The Cuban minister who speaks now is very characteristic, too. Climate change is caused by consumerist capitalist countries and Fidel Castro has discovered this fact. What he says is otherwise identical - this Cuban viewpoint is the pure essence of the global warming movement. I think that the Cuban minister's comment is fair: it really seems that nearly the whole world has bought the ideology of Fidel Castro. That unfortunately includes even China.

Lawrence Summers vs moral hazard fundamentalists

Prof Lawrence Summers responds to some questions and issues that we raised in a previous article about the credit crisis. One of my main points was crisply summarized by Gene:

Right on, Lubos! Ultimately the markets will decide the value of residences, stocks, bonds, loans, paper clips and everything else. Any attempt by governments to regulate prices will always have negative consequences. Unless the people who make the inadequately-secured loans (or buy them later) and those who buy overpriced houses suffer the consequences of their "irrational exuberance", to quote Greenspan, the markets will not be self-correcting and the excesses will worsen.

It is only humane for the rest of us, through our taxes, to provide a safety net for those who cannot fend for themselves but it is totally destructive to try and protect people from their own greed and stupidity.

Speculative bubbles in tulips, houses, and dot.com stocks have been taking place forever because they are an inevitable result of human emotion. It has been said forever but, when something seems too good to be true, it always is.

Yet we continue today with farm price supports, which encourage overproduction and lead to the need for further price supports.

The housing market will shake itself out in time and the process will begin all over again but quite a few people will have learned what they should not do in the future. That's capitalism.

I completely agree with these words of Gene's. It turns out that Prof Summers disagrees. While Prof Summers is not sufficiently left-wing to be allowed in the dining halls of the University of California, he is still a liberal economist in the U.S. sense, after all. ;-)

The column in the Financial Times

He sketches some history. Gene and your humble correspondent refer to something that is called "moral hazard" and in Summers' terminology, we are proud to be "moral hazard fundamentalists". The terminology was first used in the insurance industry but "moral hazard" is now used more widely for the expected negative consequences of people's expectations that "there will be future bail-outs". The moral hazard is about the future negative consequences of people's not being fully responsible for their acts today. In different contexts, various words are used instead of "bail-out" but the mechanism is always analogous.

The first paragraph by Prof Summers that criticizes our attitude says:

Moral hazard fundamentalists misunderstand the insurance analogy, fail to recognise the special features of public actions to maintain confidence in the financial sector, and conflate what are in fact quite different policy issues. As a consequence, their proposed policies, if followed, would reduce the efficiency of the financial sector in normal times, exacerbate financial crises and increase economic instability. They are wrong in three crucial respects.

Well, as you can see, these are just statements, not arguments. I think that Gene and I understand the insurance analogy very well and recognize the special features of all actions that exist. We carefully distinguish different issues whenever they are different and use the same rules for situations that are analogous. Consequently, our proposed policies are the optimal ones to increase the efficiency of the financial sector at all time scales, starting from the short time scales where interventions are universally counter-productive and ending with longer time-scales where the negative consequences of moral hazard are seen. Fine. ;-)

So what are the three mistakes we're making? Well, Prof Summers claims that the free markets and our opinions have the following three types of imperfection:

1. People and institutions will under-insure if there is "contagion" as fires can spread from one house to the next because they don't feel obliged to insure others; also, he argues that according to our logic, fire departments shouldn't exist because people may smoke in bed
2. Prof Summers claims that we don't appreciate that not only insolvent, but also solvent institutions can fail during havoc because creditors may rush to withdraw their assets, and this fact justifies special policies that increase confidence
3. It is argued that in contrast with the insurance analogies, the taxpayers don't have to pay anything except for one lunch for the "bail-outs" in the financial markets; the LTCM case is used as an example

As you can guess, I don't think that either of the points above is correct.

1. Spreading fires and contagion

So let us discuss the points one by one. The first point mentioned fires.

Should we abolish fire departments because people smoke in bed? Frankly speaking, I completely misunderstand this argument, to put it very mildly. Smoking in bed is one of many reasons of fires. Fire departments exist because the damages they prevent are higher than the costs. It is a matter of historical coincidences that fire departments are rarely viewed as commercial subjects. All of them could be private, for-profit companies, too. In fact, the first fire departments in most Western countries were indeed established by insurance companies, just like you would expect.

We are talking about damages caused by fires and every fire has a reason. Smoking in bed is just one possible reason and there is nothing special about it. The only difference between fires started by sleeping smokers and fires started by a heat wave or anything else is that the smoker may be held accountable for his acts and forced to pay.

Fine. I just don't get this argument which seems to be a classical strawman. We've never said that fire departments should be abolished because of sleeping smokers and it clearly doesn't follow from any of our principles.

Let's turn to a more serious issue: spreading fires. It is claimed that if you own a condominium, you will tend to under-insure it because otherwise, you would feel that you are paying for others if the fires spread. I don't get this point either. In reality, every single owner should compute costs and benefits of his insurance. He only insures himself, not his neighbors. Why should he exactly under-insure? More generally, when a Harvard economist or a government official can figure out what is the "right" level of insurance, why it shouldn't be found by owners who depend on these questions after decades or centuries of trials and errors?

The costs are the insurance fees. The benefits include the average amount of money (according to the probability of fires) expected to be paid by the insurer in the case of fires - which is clearly smaller than the insurance fees by the variable that is known as the insurer's profit ;-) - plus all the indirect damages that are avoided by being paid in the case of a fire. The latter quantity depends on the client's subjective psychological relation to risk and it is what finally decides whether he will insure himself or not.

This computation is pretty much independent of the question whether other condominiums will burn at the same moment. What difference is that supposed to make? If you have 100 apartments that are likely to share the same fate, the total insurance fees are about 100 times higher, just like the total damages caused by a big fire: the whole system is pretty much extensive.

From the viewpoint of the individual owners, contagion doesn't have any special consequences because it is just another possible reason of fires, just like a smoker in your bed or a heat wave. Contagion only makes a difference for the insurance companies because these insurance companies must be ready to pay money to a large number of people at the same moment. If they are not ready to survive realistic scenarios that might occur, they should insure themselves with bigger insurers. At the top of this hierarchy, you may find the governments or global financial institutions that normally only "insure" the largest insurers.

Every intervention of the government that tries to influence the lower stairs in the hierarchy is counter-productive.

Incidentally, because the fires are likely to influence all owners of apartments in a building, it is reasonable for them to co-ordinate their behavior in the case of fire. Such a co-ordination - something that may lead them to create collective funds etc. from below - may make many things cheaper for them. But whether or not they decide to act collectively, it is very clear that contagion cannot qualitatively change the main conclusion that the owners should behave rationally and they should be trained to behave rationally.

Scales

As you could see, the question of scale plays a role here. Individual investors and companies must certainly be ready to withstand various fluctuations that can occur once in 15 years if you want me to quote a particular number. If an investor were allowed to assume that "there is always a housing boom" and the government would pay all losses in the case of a downturn that appears once in 15 years, that would be a huge problem. Why? People would be just borrowing money like crazy and buying houses even more frantically than what they were doing during the last housing boom. Only the risk of a downturn protects the markets from an infinite escalation of similar processes. In the case of investments that are analogous to real estate, no one is allowed to say that a housing downturn is an exception.

If a government declares a housing downturn or another downturn to be an exception in which new policies take over, it encourages even crazier bubbles in the future.

Concerning the financial scales, once again, a company must be thinking about possible losses that are comparable to its assets. In some industries, the ratio is smaller, in other sectors, the ratio is higher. But the general rule is clear. Any profit or loss that is much smaller than their net worth is optimally dealt with by free markets. Losses that are comparable to their net worth should be individually insured against - using a "larger" insurance company than yours - while higher losses inside the system justify the government intervention.

2. Solvent institutions may fail, too

I think that the phrase "a solvent institution that has just failed" is really an oxymoron. As long as financial institutions are solvent, they can't really fail. It seems to me that the separation to "solvent" and "insolvent" is actually meant to be a separation to "innocent" and "guilty". I don't quite understand the algorithm to divide the institutions in this way. If a financial institution depends on a certain kind of investors or consumers who are likely to rush away in some conceivable scenarios, it is simply just another kind of risk that the institution - a small one or a large one, it doesn't matter - should be able to identify and properly quantify.

When a financial institution says that it couldn't have been ready for a certain event because such an event shouldn't have happened, the reality simply falsifies such a statement as soon as the event takes place. Even though we may feel that some of the companies could have been less lucky than others, it is still true that every individual failed company could use the magic words to justify the problems and that these words are pretty much irrelevant.

Why? The reality is simpler than that. Whenever something like that occurs, it shows that the institution was incorrectly quantifying the risk which is a fault of the institution. The more frequent or predictable such special events are, the more able to deal with these events financial institutions should be. As they continue to learn, they should be ready for ever more complex and unlikely situations.

3. Taxpayers don't pay anything & LTCM

Let me start with the actual lessons of the LTCM hedge fund. It was founded in 1994 and for nearly 4 years, the annualized returns exceeded 40 percent or so. In 1998, a few months after one of its self-confident bosses won the economics Nobel prize, the fund collapsed.

What should we learn here? First of all, annualized returns above 40 percent are completely insane. Of course that it is possible to do such a thing in principle but the risk is immense. With these returns, the expected lifetime of the fund before it completely collapses is shorter than 5 years. I think that this conclusion may result from a fuzzy theoretical calculation but more importantly, this conclusion is supported by observational data.

Bosses of such hedge funds may think that they are extremely smart so that 40 percent annualized returns are legitimate. Except that this statement is a demonstrable nonsense. No economist in the world is so smart. Even if he were smart on paper, such an exploding fund can't work for 10 years or longer simply because reality cannot be so predictable. The human society is so complex and chaotic that there will surely be events that aren't predicted by any economics Nobel prize winners.

So I think that the people who had these insane 40 percent returns were just getting money that they didn't deserve. And when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a bail-out of USD 3.625 billion in 1998, it was a textbook horror example of moral hazard. If you allow me to simplify what happened, the people behind LTCM were earning money that exceeded the actual risk they were willing to take by a huge factor. The main trick was that they knew that a full collapse of their fund would be such a big deal that other financial institutions would help them out of the trouble.

Because they were using the information about this future bail-out that no one else really knew, you might view the example of LTCM as a case of insider trading which is the main moral flaw of this whole case. What's really wrong is that the bail-out wasn't agreed upon in any contract but the LTCM bosses were still effectively relying on it. Whenever this occurs, something unfair is going on. Similar bail-outs should always be described in a contract. If too many of them appear ad hoc, the system depends on subjective decisions and corruption which is always wrong.

There are legitimate relationships between risk and returns but these relationships were violated and the net outcome is that LTCM has stolen USD 3.625 billion from other financial institutions. The main lesson is that companies such as LTCM are dishonest, they effectively steal money from the rest of the financial system. They shouldn't exist. Every new bail-out makes the existence of new funds that violate the sane relationships between risk and returns more likely. And every bail-out makes the financial system less efficient because it reduces the correlation between work and genuine achievements that are helpful for someone else on one side and profit on the other side.

Let's discuss the taxpayers. I don't think that it really matters whether you can identify these USD 3.625 billion as taxpayers' money. This amount was distributed among some of the big universal financial players in such a way that you can pretty much call them taxpayers' money. The financial institutions that collected the amount were hurt. The people behind these companies were also hurt and whether or not we call them "taxpayers" or not is just a matter of populist rhetoric.

Of course that the CEOs of big financial institutions don't really care if their company loses USD 300 million because they're rich puppets anyway and if others also lose, they're not even criticized for it. But that's another example of moral hazard.

Saying that the bosses of LTCM only needed to pay for one lunch to get out of the trouble sounds like a story from a mafia movie. If someone steals a relatively small amount, he is often punished. But if he gets USD 3.625 for one lunch he pays, he is often doing fine. This is a very bad situation, both from a moral as well as economical viewpoint.

Final questions

At the end of his column, Prof Summers asks the following questions. If the answers to all of them are affirmative, governments should act (according to him):

1. First, are there substantial contagion effects?
2. Second, is the problem a liquidity problem where a contribution to stability can be provided with high probability or does it involve problems of solvency?
3. Third, is it reasonable to expect that the action in question will not impose costs on taxpayers?

Concerning the first question, I think that he is on the right track. The justification of a government action increases with the degree of contagion. But the rule to determine the threshold is incorrect. Government's action is not justified when contagion is just "significant". Government's action is only justified if the magnitude of the contagion exceeds the size of the private financial players such as the largest insurance companies or if the probability of an unlikely event is very low and corresponds to events that occur less often than once in a lifetime.

Concerning the second question, it doesn't address the issue of moral hazard at all. Of course that all these interventions are made to solve some problems with solvency and/or to strengthen stability but it doesn't mean that they're wise acts.

Concerning the third question, let me start with a minor point that I have already mentioned. I don't like the special role of "taxpayers". Government's acts should be fair according to some moral standards and they shouldn't selectively help someone because he is a taxpayer. Almost everyone is a taxpayer anyway. Does the government have the right to nationalize corporations and distribute them to taxpayers' hands just like it did in communist Czechoslovakia of 1948, just because it helps many taxpayers? I don't think so. Governments shouldn't steal money from institutions even if such an act influences a relatively small number of taxpayers. Governments should guarantee justice and real justice never gives majorities or "many taxpayers" a universal edge.

But my key point related to the third question is a different one. While it is true that the government should compare costs and benefits of its possible acts, one must be extremely careful when these costs and benefits are calculated. I feel that what Prof Summers advocates are some very short-term benefits such as the stability of financial markets in September 2007. I think that it is exactly this short-term analysis that must be completely left to the individuals and companies: it is exactly where the invisible hand of the free market is supposed to show its visible muscles.

The governments should, on the contrary, think about the longer timescales. As soon as you think about the long run, moral hazard becomes a very important issue because you start to realize that every new bail-out justified by short-term stability will lead to many examples of wrong behavior in the future. That's why moral hazard is an important consideration that makes interventions of the government - except for those that protect the "big picture" - illegitimate.

And that's the memo.

The mole and the coal becomes politically incorrect

Zdeněk Miler, a Czechoslovak cartoonist, started to produce these cute mole cartoons in 1956, long before your humble correspondent was born, and they were entertaining generations of babies. If there ever were a peaceful cartoon for small kids, this is one. The communist reality in Czechoslovakia couldn't change anything about it.

However, times are changing. A Youtube user called "hollermommy" wrote:

This is pure coal company propganda. Coal Kills and it is killing our planet. Coal is not extracted nicely. The coal industry is blowing up mountains to mine coal and the smoke from burnign coal is causing global warming. This is hidden evil.

Poor babies who live today. Instead of cute cartoons that have also taught them basic things about the world and how it works, they are going to be exposed to fear, ignorance, guilt, and environmentalist politically correct garbage.

See also: the propaganda by car industry (2 parts)

Václav Klaus in the United Nations

Between 10:58 and 11:03 EDT, the Czech president was speaking about the global warming hysteria in the U.N. on Monday (9/24/2007), see transcript and I. adaptation and live stream on this blog

The 9-minute video containing mostly Klaus' speech is available in RealPlayer's IVR format or ordinary RealVideo

The DailyKos that has previously declared, together with the Huffington Post, that Václav Klaus is the best politician in the world if you allow me to simplify a little bit, also has a different kind of posters.



No, I don't mean Lenin himself.

A. Siegel, a Kossack, now argues that the U.S. Congress should condemn the ad showing Klaus and Gore. The author has found eight main arguments:

• a kindergarten drawing of the Earth, with "RIP" on it
• the observation that Klaus is a greater skeptic than Dick Cheney
• Klaus disagrees with a future Nobel prize winner Al Gore so he must be wrong
• the statement that global warming is not "a crisis", but "the crisis"
• a proof of global warming involving swimming suits
• well-known sentences containing the words "ExxonMobil" and "funding"
• a videoclip of "Don't worry be happy"
• the future of the Czech Republic in the U.N.

Well, that's a convincing package, indeed. Perhaps, the Democrat Congress should be advised by DailyKos to nuke the Prague Castle to help the Czech Republic become a member of the U.N. security council. ;-)

Well, Siegel's posting is surely silly enough to be entertaining. But let me discuss one particular topic that the author mentioned - the reactions of other Czech politicians.

Siegel writes that the Czech government disagrees with Klaus's views. That is, to put it mildly, a misleading description of reality. The Czech government has never made a joint statement about related issues. The prime minister thinks that his government should better "look into the problem" before "the socialists benefit out of it".

The environment minister who is the Green Party chairman (the leader of a junior party in the coalition) has a duty to behave in a green way. So he has politely recommended Klaus to talk about bike paths and the public transportation in Prague instead. :-) According to Mr Bursík, if Klaus talks about something else, Czechia would lose the votes of the island countries that were going to be flooded by global warming. ;-) Klaus answered to him equally politely.



Jiří Paroubek, the chairman of the social democratic opposition (on the left side of the picture), wrote another letter to Klaus, claiming that Klaus has to represent views like those of Paroubek. Klaus replied that he was invited as Klaus and he can and he will offer his own views. Klaus thanked Paroubek for his participation in the public debate that should continue even though, hopefully, Paroubek's future contributions will be more material and rational than the present ones. ;-) For example, Paroubek's separation of companies into "good ones" that consume energy and "bad ones" that produce energy is indeed childish, isn't it?

Concerning the speculations that the talk may hurt the membership of Czechia in the U.N. security council, I suspect that the ministry of foreign affairs led by Karel Schwarzenberg is the most relevant body to have an opinion here. It has determined that the speech won't impair Czechia's ambitions. Schwarzenberg agrees that Klaus should talk in harmony with his opinions.

While many Czechs in various polls say that they believe that global warming could be man-made and maybe even dangerous, there doesn't exist any aggressive movement in the Czech Republic that would promote this opinion as an important one; this statement implies that the environment movements such as "Rainbow" are neither too aggressive nor relevant.

The most relevant reason is that it is impossible to earn big bucks from this opinion in Czechia. It will probably continue to be impossible in the future because Czechs are very skeptical about this kind of fads. They wouldn't be paying big money to speakers such as Gore for repeating some obnoxious clichés about climate change.

Also, I think that it is ludicrous to expect that "island countries" would be irritated by the talk. Quite on the contrary: the people in these countries are those who actually understand what's happening with the sea level, who know that it is increasing by 3 millimeters per year or less, and that this simply won't be any problem in any foreseeable future. It is mostly the people who live far away from the sea who are ready to believe fairy-tales that this is going to be a problem.

Summer Nights over

This is a 1995 Slovak edition by MC Erik and Barbara Haščáková, the same musicians who have also answered whether you can stop climate change. After Summers come Falls...

Edward Witten: a wise video

This is the last part (5/5) of Stephen Hawking's Universe. Besides Witten, you will see Hawking, Coleman, and experimental cosmologists. Some things have changed but not that much.

Gravitationalist has submitted 132 physics-related videos in total.

Climate Feedback becomes ideologically clean

RealClimate.ORG has informed all of their believers about great news: "Climate Feedback [Nature's climate blog] seems to have gotten back on track!" :-) Michael Mann can now happily endorse it which is the second best thing after a Nobel prize!

Commercial: Václav Klaus speaks in the U.N. on Monday!

Michael Mann was kind of nervous at the beginning because one of the first articles on Climate Feedback described the decay of the hockey stick, even though McIntyre and McKitrick were not mentioned, and there were several other articles that could have been viewed as sane ones.

But things are great for RealClimate.ORG right now. Climate Feedback has been overrun by hardcore believers and the three newest articles teach us that

1. Syun-Ichi Akasofu in the Wall Street Journal is crazy because there is a complete consensus, Michael Mann's hockey stick is perfect, and so on
2. Clarity is emerging in temperature-hurricane links even though this article seems to be the converse of clarity; Climate Feedback attacks a paper that shows that the landfalling hurricanes haven't increased which probably means that no hurricanes have increased and people just overlooked 3 hurricanes on the ocean in the past; Climate Feedback parrots Michael Mann's assertion that it surely can't be true because there are "good reasons" why the percentage of landfalling hurricanes is changed by global warming (the best reason is that this weird legend helps climate-religious people in their belief)
3. Polar bears disappear even though the total number of polar bears jumped from 5,000 in the 1950s to 20-25,000 today and Mitch Taylor has just showed us that a particular "threatened" (according to the U.N.) population in Canada is rapidly expanding

The author of the articles 1,2 is Kevin Trenberth whom the ClimateAudit readers remember because of some of his bizarre and pretty clearly untrue accusations. All three articles above are great but only 1,2 explicitly cite the holy genius of Michael Mann. It just happens that Michael Mann considers 1,2 to be the only two recent excellent entries. ;-)

Sorry but this guy simply suffers from the Messiah complex.

At any rate, congratulations to RealClimate.ORG. They must feel just like devoted Christians who have just burned a witch. And congratulations to all of their fans who can again worship the perfect shape of the hockey stick, the disappearing polar bears, and the unstoppably strengthening hurricanes. ;-)

Amen.

Disinviting Larry Summers: a mirror for the far left

Lawrence Summers was invited to speak at University of California about competitiveness of the UC. He's quite an eloquent, engaging, and thoughtful speaker who has a lot of things to say and I am sure that many people wanted to hear him. Many other people would become happy after they would hear him. A third group would feel irritated but they would appreciate that they have learned a lot a few years later. And of course another group wouldn't ever find Summers' talk useful. That's how it always works.



However, a Maureen Stanton has decided that it shouldn't happen. She collected about 350 signatures of fellow Feminazis - the University of California is clearly an infinite heat bath of this stuff or, using the words of Santa Cruz Sentinel, a self-appointed cabal of leftist elitists - under a letter saying that Summers is a symbol of sexism whose visit is inappropriate.

What did the Regents do? Well, this question is really equivalent to the following one: is the Academia more influenced by top scholars, economists, and policymakers such as Lawrence Summers, or by hysterical far-left activists? As you know very well, this question is a rhetorical one. The answer is that the Academia - and University of California in particular - is controlled by a self-invited far-left thought police.

Everyone either agrees with them, or is so scared of them that he or she effectively agrees with them, or is eliminated. The result? Lawrence Summers was instantly disinvited. How does Regents chair Richard Blum justify his highly controversial disinvitation? "It is not an issue I want to deal with. There are many more important things to deal with." Well, your somewhat arrogant proclamation doesn't seem to be correct, Mr Blum. It is actually one of the most important things that UC administrators mustn't buckle to ideology because it would be at odds with everything a college should stand for.

Let us first discuss how the real world actually works and then we will have a look how it works under the control of a far-left political movement.

During a January 2005 conference about women in science that was overrun by politically correct pseudoscientists, Lawrence Summers very carefully suggested that the participants could perhaps think about the actual likely reasons behind the male-female cognitive differences that keep on surviving, despite 40 years (two generations) of aggressive affirmative action. Biological differences and different roles of men and women in families are among the first issues that must be considered.

It's a well-known story that the reaction of the politically correct "establishment" was explosive. Summers and all people who agree with him were ostracized, Summers was forced to resign one year later, and he was eventually replaced by a scholar who is not really comparable to Summers, to put it very mildly. As John Leo says, after Summers comes the Fall.

Is Maureen Stanton right? I personally find it alarming that a person as ignorant or blinded as Maureen Stanton has ever received a PhD from biology. I don't believe that anyone can understand what's really going on in biology if he or she can't figure out that millions of years of evolution have left different fingerprints on different groups of people (such as two sexes), or that hormones influence both anatomy as well as physiology of the brain. To make things worse, she is an "evolutionary biologist".

How can she be an evolutionary biologist if she doesn't get the simple fact that millions of years of evolution of humans - and tens of millions of years of evolution of mammals - have optimized men and women for different kinds of tasks? When one or two creationists who have made it through the university system end up with similar anti-evolution opinions because of their religious reasons, everyone is upset. When feminists end up with analogous unscientific opinions because of their feminist ideology, we're supposed not only to tolerate them but even promote their misunderstanding to the status of the only allowed "truth".

I think that granting her a PhD in 1980 was already an example of political correctness in action. But it was just a minor example. Political correctness and affirmative action have filled the Academia with thousands of people who shouldn't be there and who are starting to use their loud voices and immoral techniques to destroy basic principles of scholarship.

Many people often say that it doesn't hurt when extra people are admitted somewhere. It actually hurts a lot: the terror against people like Lawrence Summers - and be sure that his case is one of the more peaceful examples - is a part of the price for giving the likes of Maureen Stanton their PhD degrees and not only PhD degrees.

Freedom of expression

Let's not discuss biology because it is very clear that the people who prefer their egalitarian dogmas over very elementary facts about biology will continue to disagree. Instead, let us analyze the incident from the viewpoint of freedom of expression and a fair scholarly exchange of information.

There's no doubt that the decision of the Regents is shameful. Even if you disagreed that the biologically-driven cognitive differences between groups are a fact, it is certainly an opinion shared by dozens of percent of population and a similar percentage of scientists who can also back it up by quite some evidence. It is not acceptable for a university to be suppressing one kind of ideas in similar cases. Papers, talks, authors, and speakers must be judged and chosen according to their coherence, evidence, content, and other quality aspects instead of ideological colors.

In churches, political parties, and environmental movements, you can use an ideological key. And indeed, it is used all the time. But the standards of the Academia have been much more universal and fair at least for 7 centuries. What is happening right now is a brutal suppression of the basic values of scholarship and rational discourse in general, a decline of the Academia.

In the Academia, the sane, non-leftist people have effectively been exterminated. So let us talk about the leftists instead. Are they happy about the disinvitation? Well, there is no consensus about it but you will see that this fact is not such a good sign as you might a priori think.

For example, Bitch PhD writes an incoherent text about the topic whose only comprehensible component is the intriguing title: "Larry Summers: zombie or pirate?" In the comments, she explains that the right answer is probably "dick". She disagrees with some people who have criticized the disinvitation - such as Prof Eric Rauchway whom she considers a respectable "right-on feminist dude" - but her explanation makes no sense. So let's summarize: the most well-known female leftist Academic blogger in the U.S. - and I hope that she is going to be flattered by my posting - informs us in her latest work that Larry Summers is a dick. And she probably doesn't mean Dick Feynman even though Dick Feynman was a "sexist pig", too. ;-) This observation shouldn't be unexpected for those who know something about the feminist garbage that has filled the U.S. universities. Most feminists have similar qualities as this Dr Prostitute, at least when it comes close to any topic that is supposed to be covered by their favorite ideology.

Sean Carroll, another well-known far-left blogger, argues that the disinvitation was a mistake. But you shouldn't get too happy about his conclusion. If you read Carroll's explanation, you will see that the main thing he cares about is "the bad image it projects": conservatives may "beat the drum of leftist intolerance". Is it OK to conclude that according to Sean Carroll, if there were no conservatives who talk about these things, the "bad image problem" would go away and the leftists would be happily filtering all speakers, including former members of Democratic administrations, on an ideological basis?

Well, I happen to know that the answer is Yes. They have always done it whenever they were allowed to do so and I was "lucky" to live in one country where they did it for 41 years. This is an innate feature of all leftists. Leftist ideology is inherently totalitarian in character and it can't be otherwise. It's the very purpose of their ideology to control the whole society and to "optimize" it against the will, interests, opinions, and even scientific results of individuals and in contradiction to the values of a free society. Whenever the percentage of the true leftists gets above 15% or so, the society or organization is in big trouble because there is a "tipping point" or a "phase transition" above which the leftists are destined to take over the whole society or the whole organization.

I wonder how many more Stalins we will have to see before most people start to realize that the leftists are far greater a threat for the society than, for example, hungry grizzly bears or climate change. ;-)

And that's the memo.

P.S. If you worry about the freedom of speech, there are also good news. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be unanimously and enthusiastically welcome as a speaker at Columbia University; see this interview that Mahmoud considered to be non-interview. ;-) Peter Woit may show us a new map - gift from the president - without Israel that is not even wrong. Donald Rumsfeld's new job faces protests at Stanford but he still has an infinitesimal chance, despite 2500 signatures of haters. Erwin Chemerinsky may be re-elected as the dean because those who protested were not leftists but just some ordinary lawyers.

Nonrenormalizability of GR

A reader has asked me what I thought about two preprints, namely

• hep-th/0012069
• hep-th/0410117

that are "beginning to understand that quantized Einstein's theory of gravity renormalizable using Wilsonian techniques". Well, that's surely an interesting statement because every student who has attended at least 10 lectures of Quantum Field Theory II of a good course knows how to prove that it is not renormalizable. ;-)

So what is going on? Let's discuss both science and sociology.

Science

These papers and dozens of other papers that are found in the references are doing some sort of semiclassical treatment of general relativity. In the context of the renormalization group, they study the running of Newton's constant but throw away all other couplings of general relativity.

If you do so, you get some equations that have some solutions. In their particular formalism, they typically reveal an ultraviolet fixed point. But whatever the conclusion is, the conclusion can't be generalized to the full, untruncated theory of gravity. The truncated theory is not unitary i.e. it is not consistent. Also, it is not in the same universality class with the full theory.

How does the running work? In general relativity, it has been known for decades that the one-loop diagrams would keep it renormalizable. So various quantum corrections to Newton's force can be calculated at this precision - meaning terms proportional to the first power of Planck's constant.

It has also been known for nearly three decades that the two-loop diagrams are divergent and require us to add new kinds of counterterms that differ from the Einstein-Hilbert action. That proves that general relativity is not renormalizable. As we go to higher loops, the situation gets worse. Many more new terms are generated and the degree of divergence increases, too.

Can we just forget about all coefficients of these terms except for Newton's constant? The answer is that we can only forget them approximately and such an approximation will only be meaningful at energies much lower than the Planck energy. At energies comparable to the Planck energy, the higher-derivative terms are equally important as the Einstein-Hilbert term. You can even say that at energies above the Planck energy, the higher-derivative terms are actually more important than the Einstein-Hilbert term.

The existence of an ultraviolet fixed point - something that would almost uniquely determine what the theory is supposed to look like at extremely short distances - really depends on what happens at very high energies, namely energies above the Planck energy. It is very clear that if you throw away the higher-derivative terms, you are throwing away the most important thing that decides about the answer. What you get with this truncation is physically irrelevant: it has nothing to do with properties of quantum gravity.

Sociology

I understand that in the eyes of a layman, most papers on the arXiv look the same. Some text with some equations, similar keywords, and so on. Can a layperson figure out that these papers probably don't include a proof of an unusual statement that Einstein's equations are renormalizable? I think that he can.

Assume that the number of people who actively study questions sufficiently related to quantum gravity and its nonrenormalizability is 2000. Now, let's be very critical and skeptical about the intellectual qualities of the science community. Assume that only 20% of this set, about 400 people, are evaluating the evidence and new papers really independently while the remaining 1600 tend to copy big opinions from others. (The active core would be much smaller than 20% in some other fields and higher in yet another group.)

In this arrangement, will the most famous physicists remain ignorant about a paper that has proven an important result that falsifies some lore?

Well, most of these 400 people look at the abstracts of preprints pretty much every day. So about 400 people who should know the stuff and who are thinking independently have looked at the papers above. By discussing them with others, the message about the new papers would spread to others. The papers are pretty simple so surely at least 200 people would understand the nontrivial essence of the proof. Because it would be a completely new approach to quantum gravity, 50 of them would start to think about related issues or write papers about this topic. That would surely include some well-known names.

Note that as you can see, I certainly don't claim that if there were a new key result in science, there would be an instant consensus of 2000 people that it is correct. Only pseudosciences can act in this way. But if you think about the events, you might agree that something comparable to 50 independent qualified physicists would start to be really interested in the topic. Let's estimate that about 20 of them would be considered to be "good physicists" by one of the leaders. How likely to do you think that these leaders would "miss" the new development?

Well, I think it is extremely unlikely.

What I want to say is that it is almost impossible to collectively miss an important paper. In other sciences, the places where papers are published are more chaotic and the percentage of independently thinking researchers may be smaller. But as long as these differences are "finite", my qualitative conclusions will hold.

The only realistic reasons why important papers like that could be missed is that almost all the people would have some unscientific or irrational reasons to reject a certain kind of results. Well, it may be true in other fields, especially if a certain kind of results means smaller funding. But it is hard to imagine that an important result is missed.

If you want to believe these papers make sense, it also means that you must believe that the community of 10 not-too-well-known physicists who work on these papers are systematically smarter than the people who are considered leaders of theoretical physics and who have made a lot of discoveries in closely related topics. I would find such a conjecture extremely unreasonable.

Of course if you are a postmodernist who believes that physics is a social construct and a random person who writes papers about "renormalizable GR" is intrinsically equally qualified as e.g. Edward Witten, you may end up with very different conclusions. But in that case, I think that you're not sane.

And that's the memo.

Children left behind a green bus

Jeff Warren describes a characteristic story about environmentalism from St. Helena, Napa Valley, California.

Commercial: Michelle Malkin interviews James Inhofe (global warming)

The school in St. Helena, a California Distinguished School, was going to become a "federal failure" according to the No Child Left Behind Act because the law requires too many excellent kids in English which is hard in the environment with many Mexicans. The English grades were lousy. So what did Napa Unified School District do? They bought a green school bus for USD 249,000. If you don't know, it's a bus with a button that switches from diesel fuel to waste vegetable oil.



It is a pretty smart method to teach kids English, isn't it? It is a decision that a Terminator would make if he had no film director. :-) Unfortunately, the school became a federal failure despite the bus. ;-) If it happened in Africa, we would surely all agree that the green bus was a barbarian act. Politically incorrect readers could even suggest that the school district should have hired 10 part-time English tutors for a year instead.

Jeff Warren correctly explains that these environmentalist sleights-of-hand don't have much of an impact on environment but they have a different role: people of a certain mentality use them to achieve a false sense of accomplishment, an unjustified feeling of superiority, and a real control over others.

Hat tip: Willie Soon

Hansen, Schneider: catastrophic new ice age by 2021

U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming

Washington Post and Science magazine

The world could be as little as 15 or 25 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. Dr. S. I. Rasool of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Columbia University used a computer program by his colleague, Prof. James Hansen, that studied clouds above Venus.

By 2021, fossil-fuel dust injected by man into the atmosphere could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees, resulting in a buildup of new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas.



Video 1: This is what would happen in Florida. Around Shanghai, home to 40 million people. The area around Calcutta in India, 60 million.

If sustained over several years, five to ten, or so, Mr. Rasool estimated, such a temperature decrease (about 3.5 Kelvin degrees) could be sufficient to trigger an ice age, as calculated in their article in the Science magazine written together with Stephen Schneider.

"Mr. Rasool is a first-rate atmospheric physicist whose findings are consistent with estimates I and others have made," Gordon MacDonald, a top government scientist told us.

Hat tip: The Washington Times, News Busters
Source: The Washington Post (also appeared in Science)
See also: new ice age in Time magazine

Sorry if you think that the news from 1971 are no longer hot but I found them rather cool. ;-)

If you feel too cold, yorick and ABC News have a warm update for you. The same James Hansen now argues that the year 2045 will be warmer than any moment in the last one million years. This remarkable prediction is based on Hansen's latest scientific paper that is formatted as a small footnote for one page of Michael Crichton's famous book, "State of Fear". Hansen chose to be a Michael Crichton's assistant, although not too important one. ;-)



Hansen spends eight paragraphs arguing with "State of Fear" and claiming that he was not wrong in his 1988 Congress testimony. Click the picture above by Willie E to see more details. The upper curve is the scenario A warming that assumes a continued growth of CO2 concentrations, just like what happened. The blue line are the HADCRUT3 observations that are even colder than Hansen's scenario C that assumed that CO2 concentrations would stop rising after 2000 and numerous volcano eruptions would contribute to the cooling.

Peru: first toxic chondrite meteorite

On Saturday afternoon, a meteorite fell in Puno, Peru. It was a chondrite meteorite i.e. one whose composition hasn't changed by melting or differentiation from the early days of the Solar System. People started to touch the glowing rock, believing that it had a monetary value, and began to be sick. Surprisingly, this contact caused them dermal injuries, dizziness, nauseous, or vomitting. So far about 600 people, including some cops, have been influenced. The chief suspected gases are sulphur, sulphur dioxide, chlorine, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide.


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Health officials later determined that the most likely reason of the illnesses were not chemicals but rather scientific consensus, also known as collective psychosis. Jose Ishitsuka, an astronomer, found a piece of magnetized iron on the spot.

Via Benny Peiser.

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Paul Steinhardt and religious fervor

The media and especially blogs continue to be literally overwhelmed by incredibly stupid proclamations of remarkably ill-informed people about theoretical physics.

Backreaction.blogspot.com keeps on promoting the blue crackpot book as an important work - mostly because its author is asking similar elementary undergraduate questions as Sabine does and is also desperately waiting for someone to tell him the wrong answers he wants to hear.

Posters at Asymptotia.com except for Clifford, Moshe, Mark, and an anonymous coward who happens to know every recent paper about particle phenomenology flood Clifford's blog with tons of pure garbage. Samantha whom we know as a fanatical feminist writes that she has just revolutionized science and superseded string theory but unfortunately she must go out for a bit so she can't discuss her ideas right now. ;-)

Carl Brannen writes a few wrong identities involving zeta functions and argues that this is why string theory is wrong. Peter Woit wants to look smart so he says that Carl Brannen is too stupid and he (P.W.) would erase his comment if it appeared on N.E.W. - only "intelligent" comments saying "it is not even wrong" are allowed there.

Clifford is repeatedly recommended to read crackpot books because it is apparently needed to discuss string theory. Well, it is only needed to discuss string theory with complete idiots such as the readers of N.E.W. Clifford is very nice to P.W. - the kind of "oh, Peter, you're so cute, do you need new diapers?" Believe me, you won't get rid of the aggressive and dishonest crackpot in this way, Clifford.

But let me get to the main source of silliness here.

An Edge Symposium was dedicated to Einstein but this giant is no longer a source of passions. That's why Brian Greene, Walter Isaacson, and Paul Steinhardt started to talk about string theory. Brian Greene says good things in a very polite way - you can see that Brian who is surely no warrior is being influenced or intimidated by the environment.

The main aggressor in the debate is Paul Steinhardt. While he offers some speculations that might be right - for example that Einstein would probably love string theory as another step in geometrization of physics - he also says so many breathtakingly dumb and bitter things about inflation and string theory that Not Even Woit would be ashamed of them. Saying that inflation is becoming a failure exactly during the decade when it begins to be confirmed experimentally is just way too much for the author of such a sentence to be taken seriously. Steinhardt may be trying to kill the Nobel prize for inflation that could otherwise be distributed in three weeks from now.

But his comments about inflation are nothing in comparison with the following assertion:

But what angers people is even the idea that you might accept that possibility — that the ultimate theory has this googol of possibilities for the laws of physics? That should not be accepted.

Wow. Just the possibility angers them. ;-)

Many multiverse people have always emphasized the Copernican principle - that the Universe is big and we live at a random place. There are many other places and many other galaxies even though we can't observe their stars individually. These multiverse people were often presenting the current situation as analogous to the era when heliocentrism had to fight against the religious and Aristotelian prejudices.

Every serious participant of these discussions has always realized that this comparison doesn't prove anything - it is just a story that makes a certain scenario plausible. These stories should be counted as propaganda, not science. Those of us who think that the anthropic reasoning won't be crucial in the final picture prefer other analogies. But all of us realize that this question is not settled which is why different approaches must be allowed.

But I was always feeling doubtful not only about the science behind the analogy. I didn't believe the sociology either, especially the implicit message that some opponents of the anthropic reasoning would be using similar arguments as the Catholic Church was using in the 16th century. In fact, I used to think that even the old catholic opinions have been idealized and demonized so that the heroic struggle of science against religion looks more impressive.

Well, I was apparently wrong. What Steinhardt said now, in the 21st century, is completely identical to the idealized picture of religious fervor that was trying to kill the scientific revolution during its infancy. I am really amazed because Steinhardt's approach is so flagrantly incompatible with basic principles of the scientific method that Steinhardt, and not the Catholic Church, should be used as the ultimate bad example in textbooks for children.

Looking at Steinhardt's incredible statement

First of all, whether "people" are "angered" must be absolutely irrelevant for science as long it remains a science. All serious theoretical physicists surely think that, for example, all fans of Peter Woits are imbeciles and the fans' "anger" really can't change the scientific facts or opinions and shouldn't change them. If scientists were routinely intimidated by laymen's anger, they couldn't get too far. Our civilization has a lot of experience with what happens if the "anger" of masses is allowed to manipulate with opinions of individuals.

Surely, millions of simple-minded and brainwashed members of the Catholic Church were "angered" in the 16th century when they heard that the Earth - I mean the main celestial body that was created by no one else than God during the first day - was actually not in the center of the Cosmos. The Earth was the only body where people could have walked, they didn't feel that it was shaking, and the Universe looked identical in all directions. These and other facts, including the Bible, were surely proving that the Earth must be at the center and nothing else can ever be accepted, right? Indeed, it wasn't accepted and some heretics were executed.

It might be largely because of the predominantly atheist environment in which I was grown up but I have always considered such "anti-heretical" sentiments, indicating that someone is afraid to even think about a possibility, to be childish. People can believe wrong theories and most of them do - and it may be unpleasant if ill-informed people start to control your life (which usually happens if there are many of them around). But I simply can't understand how someone can feel threatened by a few people who work on their theories or how he can be scared of thinking about a possibility with his or her own brain.

Well, this is called bigotry. Those who can't accept that underlying equations have many solutions or that biology is surely behind some of the male-female cognitive differences are examples of it. They not only want to refuse these facts themselves but they also want to force the rest of the world - 100% if possible - to believe the same myths as they do. The taboos seem necessary for their life. They are dreaming about a "scientific consensus".

According to state-of-the-art theoretical physics, there are infinitely many stabilized backgrounds of quantum gravity that share basic features - such as the existence of gravity and the postulates of quantum mechanics - but whose physics differs in detail. I think that every good theoretical physicist knows that the previous sentence is most likely a fact. You don't need any fancy KKLT-like vacua: the AdS5 x S5 SU(N) backgrounds are enough to prove the main thesis. Whether a vacuum is a semi-realistic one is a matter of definition anyway: how much it has to be realistic to be called semi-realistic? The existence of many possible types of physics is not a new thing - there have been many quantum field theories, too.

What's new is that string theory is a complete theory so it unifies all these possibilities into one picture where all possible environments are connected in one way or another.

People disagree how they should interpret the wrong vacua, how cosmology makes or doesn't make some of them relevant, and how science should proceed. But the existence of many choices is simply not such a controversial result. It is a result of very solid calculations that can be checked in thousands of ways. It is not really possible to do theoretical physics correctly while denying this basic fact. Even if the fact were controversial, you can't ban it unless you want to join the worst tyrants in the history.

Paul Steinhardt pretends that he can rule out the very existence of many solutions:

That [many solutions] should be regarded as an out and out failure requiring some saving idea. The fact is that, everywhere we look in the universe, we see only one set of laws. Also, the universe is smooth and uniform, smoother and more uniform than we need for humans to existence.

I can't believe that he believes that these words are a proof that there are no other vacua. When the observational data are rationally evaluated, the correct conclusion is that we don't know how many other "pockets" the Universe has or how many stationary points the underlying equations admit. Saying that the observations imply that the answer is one is a result of a completely sloppy, unscientific thinking.

Every important development in science has made the world "larger" in some proper sense. Each of them has allowed us to predict (and see) some new objects or phenomena that were thought to be impossible. The Copernican revolution has increased our ideas about the size of the Cosmos. Later, billions of new galaxies outside the Milky Way were added to the picture.

Relativity predicted some "obviously impossible" phenomena that appear at high speeds. Quantum mechanics predicted hundreds of new "obviously impossible" phenomena at short distances. Dirac's equation has predicted antiparticles, the electroweak theory has predicted W and Z bosons and the Higgs, other field theories have predicted new particles and interactions at higher energies than what could be previously observed. Hawking has figured out that radiation can get out of black holes, after all, and so on and on and on.

Steinhardt's "argument" could have been used - and indeed, was often used - in every single case to stop the progress. I think that good contemporary physicists are much more able to properly evaluate what we know and what we don't know than their ancient predecessors. With relativity, we learned physics at arbitrarily high speeds but still didn't know what was happening at atomic distances. That was answered by quantum mechanics. You could continue. Today, we know how physics in the visible Universe works up to some distance scales or energy scales. Clearly, what happens at higher energies than those we have seen remains somewhat mysterious, much like physics outside the observable Universe if there is one.

An honest scientist must agree that we don't know certain things.

Saying that these limitations of our current theories don't exist is dumb. It is equally dumb to say that the general picture of the multiverse is incompatible with some basic observations. It is fully compatible. Steinhardt's hatred against the "googol" of Universes is nothing else than the well-known 16th century catholic bigotry against everything that questions the uniqueness of God and the special character of His creation. I thought that we have grown up a little bit during the last 500 years. Only some of us have.

Inflation - another thing that Steinhardt dislikes - explains why the visible Universe is so uniform, smooth, and flat. But it doesn't imply that there can't be anything else besides this smooth patch. The multiverse cosmologies are compatible with all basic features of the Universe that we observe.

String theory is a theory of everything

You can see how Brian is being intimidated into "retracting" that string theory is our only candidate for a complete theory of everything. They don't fully succeed but the pressure of ill-informed people, if I have to avoid the term idiots, is just becoming scary. Does someone really want to ban physicists from saying that a set of equations has XY solutions and it is the only set of equations with certain properties? Do all people with IQ above 140 have to become heretics because of some angered simpletons?

Is Leonard Susskind supposed to apologize for his heresy - his belief that the multiverse is the final picture? Should I be ashamed that I wrote a paper with him (more precisely he agreed to put the name there)? ;-) I am not ashamed at all!

By saying that string theory is a theory of everything, we mean something very particular, something that has been repeatedly explained even to the public, and something that is almost certainly true. And it is the following: if you assume that string theory is a correct next step in finding the rules that govern all elementary particles and their interactions, it is the final step. Why?

Simply because string theory, unlike all previous theories in physics, admits no continuous deformation and it has therefore no continuous adjustable parameters. It cannot be an approximation of a more accurate theory because the theory doesn't break down under any circumstances and every attempt to deform its rules turns out to be either a journey along its moduli space that already exists, or it turns out to be inconsistent.

Why? Perturbative string theory must be formulated in terms of a worldsheet conformal field theory, for consistency. The space of conformal field theories is by definition the same thing as the configuration space of massless scalars. Every conformal field theory that exists is a background of perturbative string theory and every theory that violates the rules is inconsistent as a background of perturbative string theory. The only other modulus is the dilaton that determines the strength of the stringy interactions. Similar arguments may be made in other descriptions that don't rely on the weak coupling.

Eventually, there are portions of the "landscape" with exactly flat directions - massless moduli - that are unlikely to be relevant for phenomenology because of their "fifth forces". And then there are portions of the landscape where the stationary points are discrete, isolated minima. By analyzing such a minimum properly, one can derive the spectrum of particles (and other objects) as well as the strength of all kinds of interactions in between them. These things directly or indirectly determine everything that happens in the real world which is why the theory is a theory of everything unless it is completely wrong which seems extremely unlikely.

And that's the memo.

Stephen Schwartz vs scientific consensus

Michael Hansen has pointed out that the "scientific consensus" people around RealClimate.ORG have expanded their criticism of the paper we have discussed previously:

Stephen Schwartz and low climate sensitivity

For your convenience, here is the PDF file with Schwartz's paper.

See also a comment by UC at ClimateAudit

Recall that the main quantitative question about man-made climate change is usually phrased in terms of climate sensitivity: if you increase the CO2 concentration from the pre-industrial value of 280 ppm to 560 ppm expected before 2100, how much does the temperature increase because of the CO2-related changes?

The correct answer is probably around 1 Celsius degree - which means 0.4 additional degrees expected during the 21st century - but you need much more for a catastrophe so the IPCC magicians try to get 3 or 5 or even more degrees by some black magic. These results are almost certainly nonsensical. At the same moment, 3-5 degrees would still not be enough for a catastrophe but that's not what we want to discuss here.

Why is the sensitivity around 1 Celsius degree?

Well, there are two simple and relatively reliable ways to see that the climate sensitivity should be around 1 Celsius degree and can't be much greater:

1. the calculation of the absorption by CO2 molecules, ignoring all feedbacks, leads to sensitivity around 1 Celsius degree. The feedbacks are likely to be small or negative because the climate with strong positive feedbacks would otherwise be an unstable system spoiled by exponentially growing perturbations
2. according to the greenhouse calculus, the last 107 years have already made up about 70% of the effect of the doubling (because the effect of new CO2 molecules is slowing down), and we have seen that it has lead to 0.7 Celsius degrees of warming. That means that the full doubling is expected to generate about 1 Celsius degree of warming.

Everything else is unnecessary and shaky maths and bias. Climate sensitivity can't really be much greater than 1 Celsius degree. In the article mentioned above, Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven obtained 1.1 Celsius degrees, claiming that the standard deviation is about 0.5 Celsius degrees. That's fully compatible with the solid results above but his method was different. He represented the climate as a machine with some noise that tries to reach the equilibrium much like soup that cools down in the kitchen.

In his setup, the sensitivity is obtained as the ratio of two quantities: the time constant - a time after which the deviation of temperature from the idealized equilibrium decreases 2.718 times - and the effective heat capacity. The time constant was obtained from high-frequency statistics of the measured temperature autocorrelation. According to Schwartz, it is between 4 and 6 years. This quantity is the main source of controversy.

Annan et al.

James Annan wrote a vacuous rant against Schwartz's paper on his - Annan's - blog, claiming things that one could say even without knowing anything whatsoever about the particular paper (which is probably the case of Annan anyway). Everything that Schwartz writes is unreliable, all the numbers are ambiguous, and his method is surely biased in the "right" direction so that the truth must certainly be much more catastrophic than he can even imagine.

Annan picked three more hardcore alarmists and they have converted Annan's blog rant into another format that looks like a scientific article. At the same time, Michael Hansen has informed us about a related attack on Schwartz's work by a blogger called Tamino. It is kind of fascinating how often these "professionals" on RealClimate.ORG rely on random bloggers or astrophysicists even when the basic quantity of global warming - the climate sensitivity - becomes the question of the day. Here are the two attacks:

Tamino's attack
Foster, Annan, Schmidt, Mann's attack

I will refer to them as Tamino and Foster et al., respectively. They share the same scientific meme copied from Annan's blog but there are some specific differences. Let's look at the two texts.

Tamino

Tamino is a textbook example of an ill-informed environmentalist activist. In his text, he uses the word "denialist" five times. More entertainingly, he or she argues that Sen James Inhofe shouldn't celebrate Schwartz's paper because Schwartz is not a denialist. This fact apparently means, according to Tamino, that Schwartz himself doesn't take his own paper seriously but instead thinks that only calculations that end up with a consensus with Al Gore can be trusted. Some modest and careful quotes from Schwartz's paper are used by Tamino to argue that Schwartz surely thinks that the right result must be 3 times higher than what Schwartz has obtained. ;-)

Some of the scientifically sounding statements by Tamino are identical to those in Foster et al. - all of them were copied from Annan's blog anyway - so without a loss of generality, let us look at the attack by Foster.

Foster et al.

First, a minor detail. You can see that they're probably not the most experienced statisticians in the field by a review of their typos. At the bottom of page 4, they use the term "autogressive". That's a typical typo of people who call themselves "progressive" because they tend to think that the root is just "gressive". I wonder why they think that the acronym is AR1 if it doesn't stand for "autoregressive". ;-)

Back to their scientific claims. They argue that

1. Schwartz needs to assume that the climate is a combination of a linear trend plus first-order Markov process, which is unrealistic, especially because of the presence of many time scales
2. Schwartz's method to extract the time constant gives too low time constants (and thus low sensitivity) because of a "bias" that exists even if the previous assumption in (1) were right.

It is not hard to see that they have first decided what the conclusions of their "paper" should be and then they added the fog in the bulk. Schwartz's result is inconvenient so all of his methods must be attacked. And Schwartz's value is too low so one must selectively invent arguments that could raise the value. The bias of Foster et al. is so obvious that I think that a scientifically inclined person would have to be completely blind not to see it.

Why is Schwartz's approach sensible

The difference between Schwartz on one side and Foster et al. on the other side is analogous to the difference between science and a new kind of science represented by Stephen Wolfram. What is this difference all about?

In science, we are always trying to understand a system by decomposing it into components. For each component, we try to find the best possible observation that allows us to study the component separately from others. Once we know how the components work, we study their interactions and complex systems containing these components. Particle physics is extreme in this reductionist approach because elementary particles are the components we are keen on. Anyway, reductionism is the right strategy not to confuse different possible causes of observed phenomena and to get as detailed information about the system as possible.

In the new kind of science, the approach is the opposite one: much like Gaia, it is holistic. For example, Stephen Wolfram writes a program for a cellular automaton. If you look at the result of this program, it visually looks like the skin of a tiger. That implies that your computer model has to describe genetics and biology, Wolfram argues. In the very same way, the proponents of the existing climate models claim that their naive oversimplified computer games describe the climate of the Earth because one resulting graph for the global mean temperature looks roughly like the observed one: an increasing line with a wiggle. ;-) Whether or not any of the details of their computer program describes reality becomes secondary: these questions are never tested in isolation.

Back to science. Schwartz's model, of course, can't be used to describe everything about the climate. Indeed, there are many diverse time scales that are relevant for the climate. This fact is actually one of my favorite observations that is usually neglected by the consensus advocates. The climate naturally changes at the decadal scale, centennial scale, sub-millenium scale, ice ages take tens of thousands of years, and there are additional phenomena at much longer time scales, too. Proponents of the man-made climate change theory tend to assume that there only exist interannual variations and the climate is otherwise stationary so any temporary trend is bound to be created by SUVs.

Fine. Now they agree that the climate is pretty complex - because they need to attack an inconvenient paper. Their admission of the complexity is progress anyway.

But if a system is complex, it doesn't mean that it is impossible to say anything about any of its components separately. If we design the right measurement, we can do so. For example, a physician can find the "bare" weight of a fat woman in a heavy fur coat in winter. It is brutal but he can do it: he asks her to get naked.

Analogously, Schwartz looks at the character of the autocorrelations extracted at very short time scales - much shorter than 5 years or so. This allows him to figure out that there is a force in the climate that tries to bring the temperature closer to the equilibrium whose time constant is approximately 5 years.

This result, 5 years, is extracted from the data in several ways. The method is controllable enough so that Schwartz can determine the error of 1 year, too. The statements by Foster et al. that the time constant could also be 30 years instead of 5 years is technically correct: it's possible that the result is 30 years, it is just very unlikely. The distribution is not Gaussian but the values far away from the central value are still very unlikely. These high values of the time constant are less likely but they are more interesting for the IPCC. Guess which adjective is more important for the IPCC: do they prefer more accurate & likely & central values or the more interesting ones at the tail?

Removing the slow signals

Are there other time scales that drive the climate to the equilibrium with a different speed? Yes, but only the slower ones. There are surely parts of the Earth whose inertia is much larger and that are able to store heat for 20 years or 1,000 years or longer. But these slower effects won't influence the very-short-time-scale behavior entering Schwartz's analysis. If you study chaotic motion of a bee, it won't be influenced too much by waves under your ferry because these waves are just too slow.

At timescales much shorter than 20 years or 1,000 years, the waves (or exponential damping) whose timescale is 20 years or 1,000 years look like a linear trend. That's exactly what Schwartz needs for his high-frequency calculations to be legitimate and that's why the criticism of Foster et al. that the non-noise component is assumed to be "linear" is irrelevant.

Now, the slower components of the climate will surely make the model that only contains the fastest component incorrect for all low-frequency questions. But that's not a problem for Schwartz's method because Schwartz wisely extracts the high-frequency information and all his calculation is based on this information.

Foster et al. either don't understand this approach based on the decoupling of scales or they pretend that they don't understand it. The main result doesn't care which answer is the correct one: their paper is a lame attack on an approach to climate sensitivity that is more scientific and much more controllable than the approach favored by most people in the IPCC - random games with overly complicated models where different effects are not separately understood. And it also leads to a much more realistic value for the climate sensitivity - a feature that really drives Foster et al. up the wall.

And that's the memo.

Zeta-function regularization

A typical example of a mathematical fact that the anti-talents in theoretical physics can't ever swallow are the identities that appear in various regularizations: we will mainly talk about the zeta-function regularization applied to the sum of positive integers.

First, let's ask: How much is

S = 1+ 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... ?

Everyone who knows some maths will tell you that if you multiply geometric series by "(1-q)", you obtain one. In this case, if you multiply "S" by "(1-1/2)", all terms cancel in pairs except for "1" that is left. "S" must thus be "2" because "2" times "1/2" equals one. Now, how much is

S = 1 + 10 + 100 + 1000 + ...?

Well, most people will tell you that it is infinity, it makes no sense, it diverges, it is not even wrong, and so forth. Fair enough, at least in the context of mathematics. Some creative kids will tell you that the sum is "...11111" whatever it is.

But imagine that you obtain this sum as a result of a legitimate scientific calculation that is supposed to be relevant for natural phenomena - this situation occurs every day when you're a physicist. Moreover, you are told that the experimenters have measured a finite answer - which is what they usually do.

In other words, what will you do if the sum above appears in the context of physics whose goal is to predict finite results of experiments rather than to philosophize about the relations of infinities and God, to brainwash stupid laymen by the thesis that science is not even wrong, as an infamous crackpot likes to do, or to sketch meaningless infinite sequences of ASCII-characters? You simply have to get a finite, real result.

What will a scientist do? Well, he will realize that if you multiply the sum above by "(1-10) = -9" and use the distributive law, all terms except "1" will cancel in this case, too. That means that "S" must be equal to "-1/9". What I am saying here is that a physicist will be ready to use the formula "1/(1-q)" for divergent sums, too.

Theoretical physics - because it is a natural science - has a different set of wisdoms what to do with seemingly meaningless expressions than conventional mathematics has. Sums and integrals in physics mean something else than a prescription for a mechanical algorithm. Instead, they encode "natural" sums and integrals that are supposed to be evaluated by Nature. And She always likes to return a meaningful finite answer. From Her viewpoint, the people who will rant about divergences, infinities, and not even wrong things are just looking at the sum too naively, without using some necessary powerful tools.

When a physicist writes an integral, she usually doesn't care whether you use the Lebesgue integral or the Riemann integral. For a physicist, these two and other definitions of an integral are just man-made caricatures to calculate some expressions in practice and to give them a rigorous meaning in a particular system of conventions.

That's not exactly what a physicist means by the integral. A physicist always means nothing else than Nature's integral that coincides with the Riemann and Lebesgue integral in most well-behaved situations. But whenever there is something unusual about the integral, we must leave it up to Nature - not Riemann or Lebesgue - to decide what is the right thing to do with the integral. And we must learn the answer from Her, rather than Riemann or Lebesgue. And indeed, Her answer is often different and brings some additional flavor and rules to calculate. This fact about theoretical physics is virtually impenetrable for most laymen and even for most mathematicians.

Sum of integers

The geometric series was a simple example. There exists a more important example in physics,

S = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ...

This sum appears at many places of perturbative string theory. For example, it determines the mass of the tachyon or the critical dimensions of string theory. The well-known result is

S = -1/12

That's already enough for many physics anti-talents to argue that string theory is not even wrong and it surely can't be tested, and so forth. However, what I haven't told you so far is that the same sum also appears in the calculation of the Casimir effect that has, in fact, been experimentally measured. The measurement - an experiment - confirms that ths sum is equal to "-1/12". Fine, so let's avoid further general clichés and accept the fact that the people who say that theoretical physics is not even wrong are just a waste of time and their writing is spam - one that can't even cure their readers' impotence.

You might still be left with some uncertainty about the result. We will be asking three general questions:

1. How can the result be derived?
2. What's the difference between correct derivations and wrong derivations?
3. What is the actual relationship between the "finite" and "infinite" answers? Is there a contradiction?

Derivations of the correct result

Concerning the first question, the answer is that there are actually many correct ways to derive the right result. There are also many incorrect ways to derive a wrong result but we don't need to discuss these because a generic creative but uninformed reader is surely able to design one of those. ;-)

For example, a creative, convincing, but still wrong thing is to say that "1+2+3+..." is equal to "(1+1+1+...)^2" - just draw dots in an infinite quadrant. The main problem with the result for the sum of integers obtained in this way, namely "(+1/4)", is that it is wrong.

One correct way to proceed is to generalize the sum to a more general expression, the Riemann zeta function

zeta(s) = 1^{-s} + 2^{-s} + 3^{-s} + ...

The original sum is "S=zeta(-1)" as you can easily see. What's funny is that the formula for "zeta(s)" is perfectly convergent if the real part of "s" is greater than "1". The resulting sum is a meromorphic (analytical) function of the complex variable "s" and there exists a canonical method to extend such a function to general complex values of "s". In the case of the zeta function, the result is unique and "zeta(-1)" happens to be "-1/12".

Another method adds a regulator. Compute a more general sum

S' = 1 + 2 e + 3 e^2 +4 e^3 + ...

where "e" is a number that is equal to "exp(-epsilon)" where "epsilon" is very small. For "epsilon=0", you reproduce the original sum "S". For a finite positive "epsilon", however, the sum converges. When you sum it up and expand in powers of epsilon, you obtain

S' = 1/epsilon^2 - 1/12 + o(1).

The first divergent term can be and must be removed by an addition of a "local counterterm". That's a technical term for the fact that it can be handwaved away by very rigorous arguments. I say "handwaved" because only experts are capable to understand how these arguments work and decide whether they're correct. Believe me or not.

Although the leading term is divergent, its "natural" value is actually zero because it can be and must be consistently removed with certain well-defined rules of "consistent removals". If you care, the total quantity that must be zero is the vacuum energy density and it must be zero because we require that the full theory is scale-invariant. The value of "o(1)" for "epsilon=0" is zero even outside the realm of natural sciences so what is left is "-1/12".

There are many other methods but the simplest one goes back to Euler. It's so simple that this blog article will give you the full derivation. You first relate "S" to a similar quantity

T = 1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + 5 - ...

that has alternating signs. First of all, this sum can be calculated using Taylor expansions because

(1+x)^{-2} = 1 - 2x + 3x^2 - 4x^3 + ...

Substitute "x=+1" (exactly on the edge of the disk of convergence) and you get the previous sum as well as its result, "T=+1/4". Now, when you know "T", it is easy to get "S" because

T = 1+2+3+... - 2 x (2+4+6+...) =
... = 1+2+3+... (1 - 4) = -3S

The equation "T=-3S" is solved by "S=-1/12". Fine. There are also wrong methods to get wrong results, usually involving some "forbidden" transfers of values from one term to another. People who have neither good physics intuition nor the experimental results will easily end up with a wrong calculation. So let us ask the second question:

How do we distinguish wrong methods from correct methods?

Well, the correct methods always lead to the correct result, namely "S=-1/12" that can be experimentally tested. Is there a purely theoretical way to decide, one that could be used for experimentally inaccessible sums and integrals? Yes, there is. In the context of the removing the "1/epsilon^2" term, everything is about a regulator that will generate finite results and whose infinite part can be subtracted by a local counterterm. When you do things right, it is guaranteed that you will never end up with a wrong result - and whether you will end up with the right result depends on your skills and patience.

The zeta-function regularization has a different feature than "locality of counterterms" that makes it special: it preserves the conformal symmetry and the modular invariance. A generic method in which you "redistribute" parts of the terms would violate this symmetry. The zeta-function approach is analogous to dimensional regularization: instead of a general complex dimensionality, we work with a general number of derivatives in the expression for the worldsheet energy, if you care.

The sum of positive integers happens to have a unique finite result - one of the signs that the underlying theory (string theory) has no adjustable parameters. In particle physics, we often deal with integrals whose result is calculable but depends on a finite number of parameters extracted from experiments - such as the fine-structure constant. The reason why the sum of positive integers is so unique is that we have dealt with a free theory in this case and the only local counterterm that we were adding was the vacuum energy density.

At any rate, I want to assure you that physicists know the correct rules that allow them to identify an illegimate step in a wrong calculation - or to demonstrate that a correct calculation is legitimate. As a theoretical physicist gets mature, these methods become a part of her skills. They are not contained in general lectures of mathematics for mathematicians because what we need here is mathematics for physicists that simply follows different rules in these "exceptional" cases.

However, they are rules that are still very well-defined and accurate. And incidentally, they are confirmed experimentally. Theoretical physicists are able to do similar steps very quickly and automatically while the anti-talents are not even able to understand that they're missing some knowledge that is necessary to do advanced physics calculations. Once again: please, try to understand that these things are necessary for physics and they follow clear rules even though these rules are not taught in the colleges or lower levels of education.

Relationships between the mathematicians' and physicists' understanding of such sums

We are getting to the final question: is there any contradiction between the mathematician's "infinite" answer and the physicist's "finite" answer? No, there is none: the two occupations really mean somewhat different things by the "sum" whenever the sum diverges. The difference is analogous to the difference between the Riemann integrals and Nature's integrals that we described previously.

But that's not the main thing I want to say in this section. What I want to say is that physicists in general and string theorists in particular are natural scientists whose main focus is the ultimate finite prediction of the results of experiments. There are usually many ways to obtain the correct finite result and the particular procedure that leads to the correct result is, strictly speaking, not a part of physics even though a physicist must of course learn or find at least one correct way to get where he wants to be. ;-)

This separation differs from the approach of mathematicians who are not able to divide things to "physical" and "unphysical" because all of their reasoning is supposed to be disconnected from any perceptions: all of their reasoning should be "unphysical". The mathematicians' convention to describe their situation would probably be the opposite one, i.e. to say that all results of calculations as well as all intermediate results are "physical". ;-)

What's important is that there is no division of pure mathematical results to physical or unphysical ones because all results in pure mathematics are either correct or wrong and none of them can be measured.

That's why mathematicians, much like the laymen, have a lot of problems to understand why physicists can use many different methods to obtain the ultimate results and why the intermediate results seem so ambiguous. They would be asking: so is the analytical continuation and/or the removal of the "1/epsilon^2" divergent term a part of the result? A mathematician may be stuck with this question but a physicist doesn't care. This question is simply not a physical one. There are different procedures to find the correct result but it is only the final result that is in principle measurable. Only such an answer may be viewed as the physicist's answer. Everything else may depend on conventions and it often does.

The fact that different regularizations lead to the same final results is a priori non-trivial but can be mathematically demonstrated to be inevitably true by the tools of the renormalization group.

The sum of integers can be computed in many ways that superficially look very different but their answers coincide. That shows that there is something very robust beneath all of these correct calculations: something inherently physical that all of them agree upon. A similar conclusion holds for results calculated in dual or equivalent descriptions of string theory. The final predictions of experimentally measurable quantities are identical even though the calculations look very different.

The oldest example of such a non-trivial equivalence were the identical predictions of quantum mechanics calculated from Heisenberg's matrix calculus vs those from Schrödinger's wave mechanics. The equivalence was soon proved by Dirac.

In the case of string dualities, we don't have a unified framework analogous to the renormalization group or Dirac's brackets that would allow us to prove all dualities at the same moment. In various descriptions, some dualities may be proven (e.g. in Matrix theory) but others can't. This fact is what we mean by saying that we don't have a background-independent description of string theory or, as we often misleadingly say, "we don't know what string theory is". This statement doesn't mean that we don't know something about physics of string theory in a particular situation but rather that we don't know what principle, if any, unifies all allowed situations in string theory. Such a principle would have to be independent of any particular computational technique in string theory or its Lagrangian definition.

Despite this absence of a simple and universal proof, the following fact is important. Every time we have several very different ways to obtain the same accurate and quantitative result, it always counts as a highly non-trivial consistency check that indicates that we haven't made a mistake and that the calculation was more than a mechanical masturbation. Even though physics anti-talents may think that it is bad that none of the calculations is "more canonical" than all others, theoretical physicists know very well that it is always a virtue, not a disadvantage, to have many procedures that lead to the same physical predictions.

As we approach ever deeper theories, from ordinary quantum mechanics to quantum field theory to string theory, the number of seemingly inequivalent ways to obtain the same physical results gets increasingly diverse. That's one of the reasons why we think that we have a more complete understanding of both physics as well as of the network of mathematical ideas that are relevant for physics.

And that's the memo.

France: prepare for war in Iran

Just like today, I used to have mixed opinions about the Iraq war back in 2003 when it was getting started. Despite a lot of uncertainty, there existed beliefs that I found manifestly wrong.

For example, some hawks (and even some peaceful liberals) assumed that all people in Iraq actually hated Saddam Hussein and would welcome the U.S. troops as liberators. This belief looked completely ridiculous to me. Saddam Hussein received nearly 100% in the latest polls in which he participated. Such a high number is a result of his power but on the other hand, it is incompatible with the reality being close to 0%. You can't get more than 99% in the elections if you have less than 10%-15% of the population supporting you.

While in Czechoslovakia the percentage of "decided" supporters of the communist party would be in this 10%-15% interval, it was clear to me that the percentage would be much higher in Iraq and it would continue to grow in the case of an attack. The war in Iraq couldn't have been easy. It was always a war against a non-negligible part of a rather large nation.

But the anti-war people have always had even more bizarre beliefs.

One of the frequent comments would be that the trans-Atlantic relations would be destroyed forever. Four years ago, I would hear this comment hundreds of times. Why is it silly? Because it is based on the assumption that all citizens of Europe are unified in pacifism and that this ideology would moreover control Europe forever.

The reality is that there are dovish as well as hawkish voices in Europe, just like there are both of these voices in America. The numbers may differ but the fact about disagreements remains a fact. Moreover, it is not at all guaranteed that the dovish voices would control Europe forever. Only people who share beliefs with the believers in the "1000-year empires" and "Soviet Unions forever" may boast silly opinions about eternal military policies of Europe. In democratic countries, the typical lifetime of these attitudes is 4 years, namely the timescale separating two elections.



France used to be one of the main civilized opponents of the Iraq war but it is no longer the case. In fact, the new France is arguably ahead of the U.S. in its hawkish attitude to problematic regimes of the Middle East, especially Iran. Bernard Kouchner, the French (socialist!) minister of foreign affairs (previously healthcare minister) who also co-founded the peace-Nobel-prize-winning organization Doctors Without Borders told the world that is was necessary to prepare for war with Iran in the case of nuclear complications.

His attitude, much like the current French dominant attitude, is of course to try to save peace, negotiate, and impose sanctions on Iran that may go beyond the collective sanctions agreed upon in the U.N. and the EU.

The words about the war are strong but obviously relevant. The guy is blunt but he clearly reflects opinions that other French politicians are thinking about more privately. I would personally not start a war in Iran based on some vague signals or rumors about their military nuclear program. In my opinion, one should postpone similar "big" decisions for a hypothetical future situation that looks much more urgent. But I agree that it would be irresponsible if democratic politicians whose job description included the Middle East were assuming that a war with Iran is physically impossible and if the military leaders were not ready for a relatively swift action if needed.

Nicolas Sarkozy also knows (and has said) that Iran might be attacked if it doesn't curb its nuclear program but he predicts that the outcome would be a disaster. And I am afraid he is right. However, one must carefully compare the disasters that result from action with those that result from inaction. It is not trivial mathematics.

Iran accused Paris of moving closer to Washington. The Reference Frame praises Paris for the very same thing.

Václav Havel on global warming

Václav Havel about climate change: The planet is not at risk. We are.

It sounds almost like Václav Klaus, doesn't it? ;-) However, before you make your conclusions, you should read his text in the International Herald Tribune.

Sorry for this irrelevant link. Many people confuse Klaus and Havel and Google search for Havel's opinions on global warming so I wanted to have the #1 hit. ;-)

If I understand him well, Havel argues that we shouldn't try to learn how much the human activity influences the climate or whether some policies are useful or not. Only materialistic technocrats such as Klaus quantify and think all the time which is wrong. Instead, we should assume that the discount rate has the opposite sign than the economists think and we should just make crazy things, assuring ourselves that they are wise. If we don't act, the planet will survive but mankind is going to either be exterminated or its last 2 millions of years of evolution will be undone. :-)

Commercial: If you want to receive USD 720,000 from George Soros, ask James Hansen how to do it...

If you're one of the Havel searchers mentioned above, you should be told that even though the former Czech president is an exceptional man, what you really want to read are not these insanities but rather the opinions of the current Czech president, Václav Klaus, who remains the most trustworthy Czech politician.

Faust vows black Harvard

The following story shows that life at Harvard for those sane people who consider affirmative action to be a wrong thing is becoming life-threatening and I feel very happy and safe to be thousands of miles away.

The Crimson reports...

The new president has intentionally organized a meeting to promote affirmative action and allowed people like J. Lorand Matory to prominently spread their hatred and rants about "Summers' era being a period of frustration".

See also comments by Powerlineblog

All professors who have ever told me anything about Mr Matory agree that he is an unusually unpleasant person. But none of them would ever say this fact in the public. Mr Matory was also one of the main guys who have masterminded various shameful anti-Summers resolutions. When I informed this blog's readers about a 2005 FAS faculty meeting, the guy decided to silence me personally.

So he has contacted the whole Harvard hierarchy above me, much like numerous other nasty, mostly leftist people did during my last three years. The physics department chair was ordered to act, too. Now, you should realize that the physics department chair was a complete puppet who has no character and who has always been playing both sides, secretly helping the side that would help him personally. So guess what happened after he calmly calculated the odds. I was eventually forced to apologize to the voodoo expert, Mr Latory. I am not sure what was the justification of my apology but it had to be done anyway.

Let me just assure everyone who has ever seen this apology that it was a fake document written down under brutal pressure and they should disregard this apology.

This experience - together with the FAS anti-free-speech resolution itself - was completely stunning for me and I was down for weeks, canceled all plans to extend my visas, and prepared my resignation letter which was ready to be sent as soon as Summers would resign (which only happened one year later).



Video 1: Martin Madej (Slovakia): Canibals. (Music by Peter Nagy.) It was great to find this fun video a year ago to restore some human dignity and self-confidence. Lyrics: Canibals came to our city. They wanted to pick our babes. And the answer is: No, forget it, no. ... Our babes are ours to eat... :-)

In my opinion, apologists for dictators such as Mr Babangida should really be dealt with by the U.S. troops and not by academic officials. Because I am an extremely tolerant person, I can imagine living at the same institution where some people have these weird political preferences as long as it is guaranteed that they co-exist peacefully.

But if you imagine that this kind of "intellectual" movement becomes able to dictate you what you should say and what you shouldn't say, and maybe even what you should think and what you shouldn't think, it just becomes a complete nightmare. It's a huge problem. I've lived in a similar system for years but at least the people who were deciding about the "right" opinions were somewhat more decent than Mr Matory. The Czechoslovak communists were communists but they were still building on certain European traditions rather than some radical approaches from Nigeria. Also, they were listening to Karel Gott rather than racist rappers.

Incidentally, Matory wrote a new anti-Israel rant three days ago. I wonder whether he realizes that the existence of Israel is a part of the current international legal setup and its threatening is thus effectively a declaration of war. However, anti-Semitism is alive and well in many corners of the Academia and the likes of Mr Matory get all support they dream about.

Mrs Faust must have known very well that her event would help Mr Matory to propagate his lies and hatred and Mrs Faust just becomes a failing official. Incidentally, Larry R. has pointed out that the former Harvard president Summers was disinvited from a dinner at University of California, see the story about New McCarthyism at the UC. The disinvitation followed 300 protest signatures. With 300 people who have these opinions, they could establish a new organization to compete with the organization of OBL.

Normal distributions

Now, should the number of blacks in similar instutions increase? I certainly don't think that it should be anyone's goal. Increasing the percentage of particular groups has become a fairly new, postmodern obsession. When schools like Harvard were the ultimate places of intellectual authority, no such rules existed. And incidentally, the number of blacks was very small.

Fine. If everyone is finally allowed to do anything, how many blacks do you expect to find among the employees of top universities?

In the general population, 12% of the U.S. citizens are black. But of course, if you start to select particular subgroups of people, the percentages change.

According to the "fundamental law of sociology", the mean black IQ is 1.1 standard deviations below the mean white IQ - about 16 IQ points. Moreover, the black distribution is narrower: its width is about 0.88 of the white width. The average white IQ is about 103 while the average black IQ is about 87. The white standard deviation is about 15, the black standard deviation is about 13.5.

Now imagine that you only pick people who are 2 white standard deviations or more above the white average e.g. at 133 or higher. According to the standard numerology of the normal distribution, there are about 2.2% of whites whose IQ is 2 SD above the average or more. But 133 is more than 3 black SD's above the black average, and less than 0.1% of the blacks are found in this interval. So the particular condition of IQ above 133 increases the black/white ratio by a factor of more than 20.

This means that assuming this condition, you shouldn't expect 12% of blacks but rather 0.5% of blacks in the departments that are affected by the particular IQ condition we have considered. In natural sciences, about 1.2% of tenured or tenure-track professors are black. That means that the proportion of blacks is twice as high then what you would expect from the cut of IQ around 133.

In other groups, you will find black proportion to be different, for example 5.8% among the non-teaching staff. In special black departments - departments that shouldn't really exist at a good university because they have virtually no academic goals because their real purpose is to promote anti-white racism - the percentage will be closer to 100%. If you look at various numbers, it is at least questionable whether the proportion of blacks is lower or higher than what you would expect in an unbiased society. And I think it is already much higher.

Having more blacks than what would be appropriate is no good news for anyone - certainly not for themselves because their colleagues realize that many of their black friends are around because of different things than scholarly results in the past of expected academic results in the future. I've known several decent black wise men who agree that it is a wrong policy to artificially increase the percentage of various groups. There are, of course, black people who disagree - usually the less wise ones.

Let me emphasize that the cold calculations above don't depend on the question whether the IQ differences between races are biological or social in character. Whatever the origin is, it is impossible to change this fact about the statistical distributions. Whether you like it or not, you can't invent too many very smart or skillful people in groups where they statistically don't exist.

But these calculations are huge taboos in the Ivy League and elsewhere and the "ideal" proportion of one group or another is actually not determined by rational calculations that takes social science as well as science into account but it is rather dictated by voodoo experts such as Mr Latory.

It may sound sad but that's the memo.

Northwest Passage becomes navigable

Yesterday, pictures of the European Space Agency showed that the Northwest Passage became navigable for the first time in modern history: all ice along the path is new ice. Again, would it be a good thing or a bad thing if this thing continued every year?

Incidentally, the Northeast passage "above" Russia remains partially blocked.

Explorers: some history

Europeans were dreaming about a more direct path to the Orient since the 15th century. John Cabot started with the research in 1497. Numerous brave men tried the passage and some of them became trapped in sea ice, e.g. Englishman Octavius in 1762. The Franklin expedition got ice-locked in 1846, too. Robert McClure tried to go through the passage from the West, starting in 1850. His crew got stuck in ice and they had to wait for three years. Fortunately, someone helped them. An even more lucky coincidence was that the saviors came from the East so the surviving McClure folks became the first people who have circumnavigated the Americas.

Explorer John Rae chose a much more amateurish approach, combining smaller ships with some Inuit techniques, and he succeeded. In 1854, he could happily present the bad news about the Franklin expedition to the British fans. In 1906, Roald Amundsen became the first guy who has made it through the passage purely through the sea. Shallow waters he has encountered make his route commercially unpractical.

Time magazine informed that the Northwest Passage was navigable in 1937.

Summary: benefits

Imagine it will be possible to use this passage soon. Do you think that, regardless of the causes of these changes, the sane Canadians who are not controlled by extreme ideologies will think it is bad news to be getting millions of extra dollars every day from dozens of ships that will save millions of gallons of fuel because the typical route from Europe to Asia will be 9,300 km shorter than one through the Panama Canal? Is it bad news for the big ships to have a choice where to go? If the cargo is food, is it better to go through the tropics or the polar regions?

Let's just understand some extra numbers. Almost 40 vessels use the Panama Canal every day. Each of them spends 9 hours in the canal, carries about 20,000 tons of cargo, consumes thousands of gallons of fuel per hour (please add more accurate figures), and pays over USD 50,000 for using the canal in average. Don't you think that the capacity may be getting saturated? Yes, it may. The current capacity exceeds the designed one by a factor of 3.5 and it is getting too high. What responsible politicians in Canada and elsewhere should primarily be doing is to resolve territorial and legal issues concerning these places that may become pretty relevant soon, instead of working on idiotic global policies that are pretended to prevent the climate at every point of the Earth from changing which is impossible as every sane person knows.

27,500 workers died during various attempts before the Panama Canal, one of the most extensive engineering projects in the history of human civilization, was completed. Now we can have a better alternative for free, without killing a single person. Should we cry, or should we be wisely and happily thinking how to use this Nature's gift? Stephen Harper, do you still have some responsibility and common sense left or are you already controlled by the environmentalist fanatics? What about offering 1/3 of the commercial profit from the passage to the U.N. in exchange for your full territorial rights over there?

Illinois, Iowa: record cold temperature

It's kind of cold in Czechia - right now we have 4 Celsius degrees in Pilsen. What about some other places?

Yesterday, the capital of Illinois recorded 39 Fahrenheit, breaking the previous cold record of 40 Fahrenheit set in 1985. It was the earliest sub-40 temperature since 1890.

Iowa saw frezing temperatures locally. That was also enough to set records. Ohio and Minnesota officials issued a freeze warning, too. Frost was also seen in northern Wisconsin and upper Michigan.

Unlike a heat wave, these events are not associated with a climate trend. Only warm weather contributes to the climate. Why? It's affirmative action. Warming was discriminated against in the 1970s when a new ice age was just beginning so it must be compensated now.

Ice-hockey in Pilsen

Last night, we went to see an ice-hockey match, the first one in the new season. In my case, it was an experience I haven't tried for many years. Our team, HC Lasselsberger Pilsen, beat HC Vítkovice Steel 5:4 after individual shots or whatever is the right English term for penalty shootout. ;-)

You can't expect me to know these things. On Thursday, British media informed about a speedway rider, a teenager from Pilsen who learned perfect English by shaking his brain in a car crash - a miracle that is supposed to exist under the name of xenoglossy. Do you believe it? ;-) Wikipedia explains that xenoglossy is related to reincarnation :-) but how could I mock this thing if a fellow Pilsner guy could do it?

What may be more impressive than the Pilsner players are the Pilsner fans. There have been 6,191 people there and many of them were screaming like mad. The most active part of the audience gathers on our, Eastern side of the stadium.



There were about 2,500 people in the extended loudest part of the hardcore Pilsner melting pot - a body of fans that may be the most active body of sports fans in the world. It is a group of people equipped with standardized slogans, anthems, banners, and apparel. I am also a city patriot but these people are amazing. Everytime the Vítkovice player (guests) do something good, the Pilsner fans whistle like mad.

It just happens that every decision of the referee that helps the local team is great and every decision of the referee that helps the guests is bad. More importantly, there is a complete consensus about these matters in the melting pot. They are the very best 2,500 people you may find in the whole city who have the skills to be ice-hockey fans.

You may also find some fans from Ostrava who sit inside or near the melting pot and who may have a different opinion but they must be pretty silent, for their own security.

Even though I haven't seen ice-hockey in real life for some time, it seemed to me that those 2,500 people on the Eastern side of the ice-hockey stadium reminded me of someone. They behave in the same way, evaluate the same events that all of us see in the same "objective fashion", and completely agree with each other. Where have I seen these people?

Finally, I realized what was the right answer: it's the IPCC, the world's "top" 2,500 climate scientists! :-)

They scream "Škoda Plzeň" or "Pilsner ceramics", paying no attention that the team has belonged to Lasselsberger for several years. They have no tolerance for heretics or deniers that the Pilsner team is the best one and it must surely win the extraleague (last season, they were the second team from the end of the table).

Needless to say, there also exists a harder core inside the hardcore - the summarymakers. One summarymakers was especially loud - you hear insights such as that the referee is an idiot at 120 decibels. I was told that the guy is always there. It must be James Hansen's relative. ;-)

Potatoes from Greenland

BBC informs about a quarrel concerning the price of potatoes grown in Greenland. See also Spiegel in 2006 (pictures).



Regardless of the causes of the recent warming, one may wonder whether people are happy about it or not. Do you want to be able to grow more potatoes in Greenland or no potatoes?

Potatoes vs cultural traditions

The environmentalists argue that Greenland is called Greenland because there should be nothing else than ice over there. Ice is green, much like our blue planet, and it creates sheets that are known as land. Also, they argue that being able to grow potatoes in Greenland means to lose its cultural identity. The most important part of Greenland's cultural identity is the fact that you can't grow anything there.

All concerned green parties in the world are explaining us that all green things are dangerous. Their examples include green potatoes, the green background of this blog, and greenhouse gases but if they had a mirror, they could find a better example.

A Greenland's brainy son, Professor Minik Rosing, argues that this cultural tradition - the country's inability to grow anything - is priceless and can't be compensated by any economical benefits. The priceless character of the cold weather in Greenland is a likely reason why Professor Rosing chose to live in Copenhagen. ;-) But with his convincing attitude and genuine care about the environment, he could have moved to Nashville, too.

Independence

Ms Aleqa Hammond, Greenland's minister of finance and foreign affairs, apparently has somewhat different opinions. She thinks that glimpses of agriculture could be good, after all, and they could eventually make Greenland independent of Denmark. I wonder whom the 57,000 people who still live in Greenland agree with. My guess is that it is not their lost son, Prof Rosing of Copenhagen.



Figure 1: Ferdinand Egede, a grandson of a hunter and a son of a livestock farmer. What do you think that he thinks about a possible further warming? Would it be good or bad?

Do you think that Denmark loves to pay USD 600 million a year to Greenland (USD 100 per capita or USD 10,000 per capita on the recipient side) or it would prefer to stop these subsidies? If you remember that you like 21 Celsius degrees in the living room and the global & annual average is 15 Celsius degrees, do you think that most of the world would prefer cooling or warming? How much do you think is 21 - 15? Is it more than 0.6 Celsius degrees?

Commercial: On Sunday, the New York Times will explain that not Michael Moore or Al Gore but rather Jane Fonda causes global warming. How is it possible? Hint: U235. Hat tip: Marc Morano

The farmers in Antarctica will have to wait little bit longer and the Antarctic national cultural heritage thus seems pretty safe so far. ;-) Even the people in Greenland should be cautious before they become too optimistic about the trend: according to Vinther et al. (2006), the warmest decades in Greenland were the 1930s and 1940s, after all.

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk: 70 years later

Figure 1: a part of the information board describing Masaryk near the Masaryk monument in Washington, D.C.

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia (born 1850, in office 1918-1935) died 70 years ago, on 9/14/1937. When he did, happy years were slowly ending. His successor, Edvard Beneš, was arguably a great politician. But he was lacking some of Masaryk's charisma and he was just very unlucky. While Masaryk lived in the happy world where the U.S. was the main external superpower, Beneš's task was to lead a nation influenced by Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other side.

Masaryk was a very good sociologist and philosopher. As a statesman, he was able to play all roles that used to be expected from the emperor. At the same time, he was a firm defender of freedom and democracy. Masaryk was always able to advocate unpopular opinions - for example the opinion that the old Czech manuscripts were fake (he was right, of course!) but that has never eliminated his natural authority.

There are many things to be said about Masaryk but let me choose one topic: the communist caricature of him. When I was a kid in a socialist country, Masaryk, the first leader of a capitalist Czechoslovakia, wasn't of course quite presented as a devil. He was presented as another stair in the staircase to progress, the staircase that is supposed to culminate with communism. I am convinced that they realized that no communist president could match or surpass Masaryk. But they still enjoyed to contaminate Masaryk's name by various stories.

For example, roughly five different teachers were supposed to tell us that "Masaryk was shooting the hungry people" - a reference to an irrelevant demonstration of a mob that had to be suppressed by police. But this kind of propaganda didn't really work in our case because about 1/2 of these teachers were anti-communist and they have presented a much more realistic picture of this story.

I want to repeat that Masaryk was an eminent person but a part of his success was due to the favorable external circumstances. It was just possible for him to establish and lead a free country that was singing all the time and that was happy. It could be much harder for him in the present world filled with leftist and Islamic hatred, idiocy, and hypocrisy.

And that's the memo.

See also:

Klaus about Masaryk
Czechoslovakia founded 88 years ago
(also about his American wife)

Oil price: USD 80

In August 2005, the oil price was around USD 60 and the gasoline was sold for USD 2. We predicted a USD 3 gasoline - something that happened quickly - and a USD 80 oil price.

In slow comments, Wolfgang said:

• I am not so sure about oil hitting 80, but what do I know?

Well, I agree with you, Wolfgang. You don't know that much but unlike others, you at least realize these limitations of human imagination. ;-) Yesterday, the oil price exceeded USD 80 for the first time. More seriously, Osama bin Laden was threatening us with USD 100 oil price in one of his previous speeches.

Should we be scared?



Figure 1: Black gold: how the world floats on oil (click)

I think that bin Laden and many other leftists vastly exaggerate the impact of some price variations. Nine years ago or so, the price was below USD 10: see this graph. Now it is more than 8 times higher and the civilization hasn't collapsed. Even though oil is important for our lives, a 700% price increase is not such a big deal. The markets and people can simply deal with such changes.

The oil price is arguably decided irrationally by some Arab chaps but what is important is that this price effectively becomes one of a small number of external parameters and capitalism adjusts all other prices and other quantities almost ideally for any value of external parameters. According to theory as well as experience, any crippling of the markets' invisible hand is far more devastating than a change of an external parameter.

Leftists want stable prices of everything and now they also want a stable climate. They may also want an ideal oil price - but is it USD 15 as in 2002 or USD 80 which is the case now? Their motivations are irrational but the obvious way to promote their goals is to paint any change as a tragedy: fear is their best ally. But the changes that can happen are about 10 times smaller than what would be needed for a tragedy.

For example, any centennial temperature change that is smaller than 10 Celsius degrees or so would be small enough to be treated perturbatively. It would make some subjects happier and some subjects less happy. Because the second group can make some preparations for adaptation, the positive impact will exceed the negative impact. The reality will be much closer to 1 Celsius degree.

We often hear that the Earth is a fragile physical object. In a debate with climate realists, "concerned scientist" Brenda Ekwurzel even said that the Earth is more fragile than a human being! I think that many people realize that such proclamations have nothing whatsoever to do with reality and only paranoic hypochondriacs would be ready to believe these silly things.

Even a single human being is a pretty robust animal but the whole ecosystem of the Earth is way more robust than its individual components because all components may be effectively replaced. Ladies and Gentleman, the real shocker arrives right now. This text is actually not about economics - it is about the anthropic principle! ;-)

The proponents of the anthropic principle believe that very many quantities have to be accurately adjusted for life to be possible. But we already know enough to falsify this hypothesis. Only a small number of parameters must be within a certain interval. For any collection of values, life can emerge and adapt to the environment.

Every process in reality has its characteristic timescale and it prefers a stability over this timescale. But it is important for the processes at all time scales to change because evolution of anything would otherwise become impossible.

People shouldn't be afraid of arbitrarily small changes and those who spread this fear of change must be properly identified as dishonest people or lunatics.

And that's the memo.

Bad physicists and populism

Musings from a French programmer convinced me to write another essay about the interactions of scientists and laymen.

The programmer's ideas are based on several basic myths about the very meaning of science in general and theoretical physics in particular:

1. The goal of science is to wait for a "new Einstein" or a savior
2. The job of scientists is to search for a "new Einstein" or a savior
3. It is possible to divide scientists to Einsteins and non-Einsteins
4. The main tool of science is to search for random sentences written by random people, waiting for one sentence that will revolutionize science
5. It is comparably likely for an outsider to find such a holy grail of physics as it is for an esteemed scientist; more generally, intelligence doesn't matter when it comes to cracking the secrets of the Universe
6. Peer review is always a bad thing
7. Societal pressures help scientists or science to make a scientific revolution; it is possible to social-engineer a new revolution in science
8. Interpretation of quantum mechanics is an unsolved problem that waits for a savior
9. More generally, what physicists are waiting for has something to do with Lee Smolin's proclamations in books and newspapers
10. Laymen have a good idea what scientists think, what principles they find reliable, and why they do so

The further a person is from the actual physics research, the more likely he or she is going to believe these myths. The more a person knows about science, the more ridiculous these myths sound to her. However, some bad physicists have a vested interest for these myths to spread.

Let's discuss these points one by one.

The goal of science is to wait for a "new Einstein" or a savior

The actual goal of science is to explain an ever greater set of natural phenomena ever more accurately, using increasingly coherent, robust, and meaningful theories. The particular insights that were solved by Albert Einstein can be viewed as random coincidences of the history of science. It is a complete accident that Albert Einstein has solved exactly the things that he has solved. There is no objective measure that would define the "current counterparts" of relativity and whose solution would make one a "new Einstein".

The job of scientists is to search for a "new Einstein" or a savior

More importantly, scientists are solving very different problems today and it is impossible to construct any isomorphism with the era of Einstein. And one more key thing has to be said: institutionalized science couldn't work at all if all of its members were trying to make the "revolution" only and no one would care about anything less than a revolution. In reality, of course, people work on more well-defined, more predictable tasks. Such an arrangement is completely necessary. It is analogous to the insurance industry: most of its resources and calculations are connected with relatively predictable events while the worst tragedies such as a collision with an asteroid play a secondary role.

Another important point is that scientists are supposed to make progress themselves rather than to wait for a mail from an outsider that will solve the problems for them. ;-)

It is possible to divide scientists to Einsteins and non-Einsteins

Some of these laymen - including Lee Smolin - have a completely religious attitude to Albert Einstein's name. Well, I find this attitude irrational. Einstein's story is captivating, he was unquestionably one of the most original physicists of all time, and his life differs from the lives of most of the other physicists in certain ways.

On the other hand, I don't think that Albert Einstein was the smartest physicist of all time and I don't think he was qualitatively different from other great physicists of the 20th century. What does it mean if we say that von Neumann, Max Planck, Richard Feynman, or Werner Heisenberg were no Einsteins? Equally importantly, there have been many aspects according to which Albert Einstein can be considered the ultimate mainstream physicist of his era.

He was very conservative, he considered the results and established principles of the contemporary physics to be extremely important and valuable, he knew them, he used them in his work more intensely than others, he considered his discoveries to be a minor update of the previous ideas, and he considered mathematical beauty to be the main feature that allows wise guys like himself to make progress. Also, 90+ percent of his papers were correct and most of them were even important.

In other words, Einstein was the exact mirror image of the people who like to use Einstein's name for populist purposes, e.g. Lee Smolin. Smolin dislikes established results of science, he doesn't understand them, he hates mathematics and the concept of mathematical beauty, and 90+ percent of his papers are pure junk. Still, he likes when people call him a "new Einstein". What an irony.

Is there a new Einstein alive? I don't know what this question is supposed to mean. With some definitions, Edward Witten would count as a new Einstein. With other definitions, another Einstein would be an oxymoron. With a third definition, you could pick a different new Einstein such as your humble correspondent. At any rate, "is there a new Einstein" is not a question that serious scientists would ask - except as a topic for poetry or jokes - because they know it is ill-defined and irrelevant. Only laymen who don't understand the difference between science and religion are obsessed with similar questions.

The main tool of science is to search for random sentences written by random people, waiting for one sentence that will revolutionize science

The French programmer tells us that he is sending his physics theories not only to Lee Smolin - who doesn't respond - but also to lots of other physicists including many Nobel prize winners - who usually don't respond either. Everyone privately uses the word "crackpot" for these people but when a journalist puts such people against you as peers, you're in trouble and it becomes a taboo to say that they are crackpots.

Are scientists supposed to be searching through similar mail for valuable ideas? I don't think so.

What the crackpots usually misunderstand is that good science is not supposed to generate a short slogan. It is supposed to produce a coherent theory of something. A coherent theory is composed of at least 2 pages - but more typically 10-200 pages - of text where sentences and formulae fit together. It is next to impossible to write a meaningful scientific paper "by chance". On the contrary, it takes a few seconds to see that a mail from a crackpot is not a meaningful scientific paper and it can therefore be ignored.

The French guy tells us that the "savior" doesn't have to have EDU in his e-mail address and the famous physicists should read all his mail.

Well, of course that a future science star doesn't have to have EDU in her e-mail address (even though it is more likely that "she" or more likely "he" will). But I am afraid that the EDU is not the real reason why the French guy's mail was ignored.

What about if I try to give you a new idea, Mr French guy? Why don't you try to consider the possibility that your mail is actually junk because it reveals some basic ignorance of yours that the recipients of your mail are able to spot within a few seconds? What if the actual message of these stories is that you should learn a great deal before you dare to talk to people who are just five levels above you? It is an inconvenient theory for your pride, isn't it? There are thousands of pompous pools and self-confident cranks like you and it has become nearly dangerous to suggest that they are not real scientists.

Most people in science ignore this correspondence. I have almost certainly been the only person who has replied to virtually all of them in my whole life but I assure you, it is almost always a waste of time. These people often have huge basic problems with scientific thinking. They are constrained by dozens of wrong dogmas that simply prevent them from understanding extremely trivial things - things that an intelligent person must be able to get within a few minutes.

These people are never able to focus on the real essence of their ideas and to rationally decide whether it is correct or not. They don't want to listen to things that could disagree with their dogmas. They prefer to live in a fog and to invent verbal pseudoarguments that "confirm" their wrong dogmas. It takes roughly 10 times more time to explain them a simple thing than what it takes to teach the same thing to average students. They never feel that they are wasting your time.

The French guy complains that not even Lee Smolin wants to talk to him about the French theories - despite Lee's proclamations that he is searching for a new Einstein. Lee Smolin must realize that the relationship between him and the French guy is completely analogous to the relationship between leading physicists and Smolin. But he thinks that leading physicists are obliged to listen to him even though he is not obliged to listen to his French colleague. The French guy asks:

• How would I know that I am a crackpot, if nobody tells me?

He also writes: "At the same time, I am painfully aware that, from a technical standpoint, I am sorely lacking, and have no hope to understand more than one word out of five in a physics discussion with Ed Witten. So I don't need to be reminded of that. Does that necessarily invalidate my idea? I don't think so."

I think that the answer is effectively Yes. I say "effectively" because as a matter of principle, it is surely possible that someone finds an answer to a difficult question without knowing any maths that is assumed to be needed. It is unlikely but conceivable. But because of some infinitesimal probabilities of such miracles, people like the French guy simply can't expect to be treated as peers of Edward Witten. They can't expect leading theorists to dedicate hours to their insane theories. And I am not exaggerating: this guy really thinks that he is a peer of Edward Witten as his following paragraph reveals:

"If Ed Witten came to me saying 'I have this great idea for a new piece of software', it is quite likely that the idea might be good even if he probably doesn't know crap about C++ template metaprogramming, compiler implementation for coroutines, or Itanium speculative loads (which are the kind of technical topics I do need to master in my work)."

I have no idea whether we should expect Edward Witten to revolutionize programming, but if you let me guess, I think that Witten's revolution would be exactly based on his detailed new knowledge of C++ template metaprogramming, compiler implementation of coroutines, Itanium speculative loads, and similar issues. The revolution would follow after he would learn these things and put them together in an entirely new way. Don't expect Edward Witten to generate vague slogans. In Witten's case it is obvious but even more generally, I think that this is how similar revolutions could occur.

So even if you imagine that the analogy between physics and programming is a good analogy, the correct answer confirms that the French guy's ideas about making breakthroughs is a naive one. However, there is of course another important subtlety here: the analogy is simply not a good one because the situation is not symmetric.

The French guy is not a mirror image of Edward Witten even though he tries to create this impression - and hopes that everyone will be polite not to tell him that this analogy is absurd. Sorry but I find it very important to say that the analogy is absurd. Even if pure intelligence were the only thing that mattered here, he is roughly 25 points below Witten. The high-energy theoretical physics community is more than 1000 times more selective than the programming community. If someone uses completely crazy assumptions in his analyses, it is not shocking that he ends up with ludicrous conclusions.

Is it comparably likely for an outsider to find such a holy grail of physics as it is for an esteemed scientist?

Finally, I want to return to the question whether one can make a breakthrough without knowing the necessary maths. Once again, the effective answer is No. The outsider doesn't have to know the words and terminology but he needs to know whatever content that is necessary. Even the knowledge of an outsider must be effectively isomorphic to the key portion of the knowledge of the experts. Otherwise his contributions are impossible.

There is no universal rule but on the other hand, there is a lot of demonstrable patterns that make certain people much more likely to make a certain kind of progress. Even among the outsiders, there are people who are much more likely to contribute. What will actually happen will often differ from these statistical expectations but if there is way too much stuff to listen, a scientist must obviously make some selection and the selection should be a qualified one.

I think that all sane people realize that physicists aren't waiting and can't be waiting for some opinions of a random person among six billion people. The problem with some people is that they're unable to figure out that they're essentially average people. They have irrational reasons to think that their opinions are important. Of course that there can be an outsider who can make progress. But such an outsider will typically be able to find a common language with an insider and convince the rest.

It is much more likely for an insider to make progress. But even if you're an outsider who finds something that is very important, it is still easier for you to find an insider who will understand your breakthrough. If the people who support you are other complete outsiders who have never made anything that requires similar skills that are expected from someone who solves your problem, you can be pretty much certain that you are just another crackpot.

The idea that masses of laymen are routinely making revolutions in science is completely absurd and as far as I know, there is not a single example of this kind in the history of science. The authors of the revolutions, either insiders or outsiders, always had to make an intellectual step that was difficult for normal scientists and even more difficult for average people. The previous statement is not a controversial one; it is rather a mathematical assertion that can be trivially proven. If such a difficult step were not needed, someone else could have done it much earlier and the result would not be viewed as a revolution.

Is peer review always a bad thing?

The French guy offers us a typical example of an irrational argument that he uses to fool himself into thinking that he is just like Einstein:

• Einstein apparently did not lack peer review either. That makes two of us, then.

Well, Einstein has had problems with particular reviewers. Because we talk about Einstein, it was much more likely that the reviewers were worse physicists than he was. ;-) But every physicist can have a good experience with some reviewers and bad experience with others. In average, one of the two sides is correct if there is any disagreement and it is not always the same side. ;-)

But what I find important in this context is that peer review is just a sociological setup that tries to increase the average quality of articles or keep it above a certain threshold. It is not perfect but it was necessary for journals that need to protect their good name and that need to save paper to survive. Peer review has played a similar role as the natural selection. All working arrangements that don't have any peer review have something effectively equivalent instead.

But even if the French guy had similar opinions about peer review as Einstein had, this fact is absolutely irrelevant for judging the French guy's physics. I claim that the French guy thinks that he is closer to Einstein because of some of these similarities - even if he doesn't state this assumption explicitly. No, he is not. Good science is not about opinions about peer review.

The French guy thinks that it is impossible for an author to defend a good idea because of peer review. This opinion just shows that the French guy doesn't have a slightest idea how the reviewing process actually looks like.

Societal pressures help scientists or science to make a scientific revolution; it is possible to social-engineer a new revolution in science

This myth is popular with some postmodern philosophers of science but there are many people who buy this nonsense. I am always amazed when I learn that many people who should be rightwingers believe it but they apparently do. To my frustration, this list includes many climate skeptics. My theory is that they buy this nonsense because they place themselves into the position of an unjustly discriminated person who is waiting for a help from above.

OK, let me describe the idealized science. In idealized science, you find ideally honest, intelligent, and productive scientists who ideally listen to others. They choose the best ideas in the most efficient way they can, according to the most rational arguments one can imagine. They are not constrained by any taboos or social limitations and develop the ideas in the most spectacular and speedy way. :-)

Fine. Idealized science doesn't exist. ;-) We can't have idealized science but we can say what arrangements make science better and what arrangements make science worse. First, if you flood science with people who are just not as talented or productive or honest, you will make science worse. Second, if you define any social criteria or taboos that constrain scientists in such a way that certain rational conclusions are discouraged or prohibited, you will always make science less honest, less scientific, and thus less efficient, to say the least.

Any social-engineering framework for institutionalized science is always designed to help a particular group of scientists. This statement is true not only in science. Is such a framework helpful? Well, if a new policy helps a better group of scientists instead of a worse group of scientists, the society benefits - and vice versa. It is very likely that the scientific community itself knows what people are good and what people are bad and their opinions are more likely to coincide with reality than the opinions of random laymen manipulated by the media or other means or the opinions of bureaucrats.

But of course, the attitudes of the experts don't have to be true. One can have fields or subfields that are temporarily filled with intellectually weak or dishonest people. But even if this is the case, I think it is important to let the intelligent and honest people influence the situation more than the dumb and dishonest people.

One more fact is important here. If you design policies that systematically restrict what scientists are allowed to think, you are devastating science. If a biologist is not allowed to think (to know) that creationism is junk or if a theoretical physicist is not allowed to think (to know) that loop quantum gravity is junk, it is simply a huge problem. And be sure that those who know what's going on have these opinions.

The social-engineering projects have different "philosophies" behind them - philosophies that are often contradictory. Sometimes they try to increase the influence of a "majority" - e.g. in "consensus science" that is crippling climate science these days - and sometimes they try to increase the influence of a "minority" - e.g. to promote crackpots in theoretical physics. These explanations are completely contradictory. Nevertheless, they are often promoted by the very same people.

Needless to say, the basic goal is identical in both cases - to help a particular group of scientists by using political arguments that are irrational from a scientific viewpoint. If the "favorite" group is a majority, they use the former argument, if it is a minority, they use the latter argument. Such an influence is a bad thing in both cases and all cases. Such an influence always moves us away from the idealized science. Such an influence always increases the power of dirty politics relatively to rational thoughts. The people who promote any of these policies are jerks.

Free scientists who are allowed to think whatever they can about science - and who are allowed to ignore whomever they consider stupid or irrelevant - are not always 100% efficient but in the long run, the arrangement based on free scientists who decide about the equilibrium of the market of ideas are surely the best arrangement to find the correct answers that one can get. Every science that has been influenced by political arguments involving "consensus" or, on the contrary, "diversity" is more likely to have deteriorated. Idealized science never uses these arguments, only political movements do. These pseudoarguments always decrease the signal-to-noise ratio.

Interpretation of quantum mechanics is an unsolved problem that waits for a savior

This is a somewhat technical myth but it shows that the people who don't follow the current picture of the world as painted by science not only offer wrong answers but they are often asking wrong questions, too. For virtually all practical purposes, the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics has been known since the late 1920s. By mid 1980s, all remaining details - such as decoherence - that are relevant for a unified understanding of all physical systems were clarified.

The only "known" open interpretational questions about quantum mechanics appear in the context of quantum gravity.

What the people who dream about "solving" this "problem" actually want is to make quantum mechanics go away and return to a pre-quantum picture of the world. Every single one of them wants it. But that will never happen. The leading quantum physicists in the late 1920s already knew it would never happen but during the last 80 years, a lot of theorems and much more specific insights have been collected that make it clear that it won't ever happen.

The fact that Einstein didn't understand the inevitability of quantum mechanics in the last 30 years of his life showed that he was no God but also had human limitations. The fact that some people are not able to understand these facts about quantum mechanics even 50+ years after Einstein's death shows something very different - namely that they're stupid bigots.

More generally, what physicists are waiting for has something to do with Lee Smolin's proclamations in books and newspapers

Again, the more you know about physics, the more you know that the statement above is ridiculous. Good graduate students may be influenced by the media and the caricatures of physics offered by them. They may believe these things in the first year of their graduate school. But if they're good, they will realize that something is wrong with these "ideas" during the second year.

If they can't show themselves that Lee Smolin's "popular physics" is based on wrong science and irrational arguments by the third year, they are just bad physicists themselves. It is not a disaster if one or two such physicists get a PhD in a decade. But flooding the scientific community with these severely limited people is dangerous.

Laymen have a good idea what scientists think, what principles they find reliable, and why they do so

Unfortunately, it is not the case. Laymen typically not only misunderstand what are the correct answers to technical questions. They also fail to get a correct sociological picture of science - what questions are important, how difficult it is to work on one problem or another, who is believed or respected and why, what is "normal" to say in different contexts, and so on.

This failure of laymen to get a realistic picture of science is not just a fault of the media and science communication: it is largely a fault of the laymen themselves who often prefer colorful conspiracy theories about the interactions of people over the actual technical content of science. The truth found by science is OK but it is arguably too boring for too many people. Myths are sometimes better even if they are entirely untrue.

And that's the memo.

Aurora: new LaTeX for MS Office

Aurora

is a new competitor for TeX4PPT and TeXpoint. It's much more professional but it is not for free except for a one-month trial.

If you prefer knit clothing over latex, there are five relevant blogs:

string theory blog 1
string theory blog 2
string theory blog 3
string theory blog 4
string theory blog 5

All of them have one special relationship to strings besides knitting. The first one is a physics grad student, the second one is a violinist, the third one studies astrology, and the fourth one knits her own Ferrari, and the fifth one has two Witten's dogs.

Vacuum bombs: Russia ahead of the U.S.

Thermobaric weapons - also called the vacuum bombs - are parachute-delivered. The explosion has two steps. In the first step, a huge cloud of fuel is spread over the enemy's territory. In the second step, the cloud is ignited.

The U.S. have had the mothers of all bombs (MOAB = Massive Ordnance Air Blast) - the M-theoretical bombs - for some time. They were used e.g. in Afghanistan. However, the Russian bomb that was tested yesterday, the father of all bombs - the F-theoretical bomb - is four times as powerful and creates twice as high temperatures. Its impact is comparable to a small nuclear bomb.

I don't know whether feminists will like it but the father bomb is stronger than the mother bomb, after all. ;-)

The Russian general in the video also explains that their new bomb is absolutely environmentally friendly and creates no pollution. It is also fully compatible with all international treaties. Because the bomb also whitens your teeth and is carbon-neutral (once you include the negative corrections from the destroyed enemies' fuel consumption), it can be safely used at any place of the Earth. ;-)

They seem rather excited about it! A missile defense system against their papa bombs could be helpful, too.

Simon McBurney: The Magic of Maths

This Is London describes an "extraordinary, beautiful piece of theater" about Hardy and Ramanujan. In the play, Ramanujan triumphs posthumously: their discoveries become a tiny part of Martin Schnabl's solution to cubic string field theory. ;-)

Colbert report with Bjørn Lomborg

I disagree with some of Lomborg's statements but it's fun anyway. He promoted his new book Cool It and argues that there are better investments than to fight climate change. You can see that it is hard for Colbert to play his role - at some moments, he has a temptation to try to debunk Lomborg's assertions - but he resists so that the video is still funny and pleasant.



Lomborg together with John Tierney of the New York Times made a trip to a café under the Brooklyn bridge. The amazing discovery that Tierney made is that the shocking 1-foot sea level rise in the last century hasn't destroyed Manhattan! Who could have thought? Tierney was so surprised that the impact of a 1-foot sea level rise on Manhattan wasn't as catastrophic as the movies suggest that he had to write a long article about it in the New York Times. ;-)

Thanks God and John Tierney that he wrote it. I still view the New York Times as the leading U.S. source of printed news, despite its left-wing bias.

Inflating vacua may be rare

Hertzberg, Tegmark, Kachru, Shelton, Ozcan wrote a review of stringy cosmology for cosmologists. They argue that moduli in the simplest string models can't be used to satisfy the slow-roll condition. The condition for inflation to be possible could thus be highly constraining. Tegmark thinks that type IIA vacua are the fittest ones.

See also Nude Socialist.

The 9/11 flip

Clifford Johnson at asymptotia.com asks what is the origin of the term "9/11 flip" in theoretical physics - a concept that is much older than the 9/11 attacks. He writes down the correct answer but he also adds a lot of incorrect speculations and misinterpretations, together with David who has made a comment.

Let me clarify the situation

The fact is that the 9/11 flip was only found in the context of Matrix theory and it couldn't have been found earlier as I will explain. That's why the paper by Dijkgraaf, Verlinde, and Verlinde (DVV) from March 1997 is the first paper that uses the term "9/11 flip" while my earlier paper from January 1997 where matrix string theory was actually discovered - even though some slow physicists such as Clifford Johnson haven't yet noticed ;-) - was the first paper where the technique, as opposed to the term, was used.



Figure 1: children's version of screwing strings, as named by your humble correspondent, currently known as matrix strings

I chose to compactify the "X1" coordinate as opposed to DVV's "X9" which is why what I used was actually "the 1-11 flip in screwing string theory" rather than "9-11 flip in matrix string theory". ;-) Note that the 9/11 flip was discovered more than four years before the 9/11 attacks.

Why I am so certain that you won't find anything about the 9/11 flip before our papers, mine and DVV? Well, it's because the method itself couldn't be used earlier - i.e. before the Christmas Eve 1996 when I realized these things in Pilsen. The 9/11 flip is inherently linked to the discrete light cone quantization. It is very important that the circle "X-" or "X10" (or "X11") plays a very different role in the construction of the light-cone-quantized theory than "X9" (or "X1" using my conventions) does.

On the other hand, in all pre-matrix-theory papers such as the paper by Hull and Townsend on U-dualities (a paper mentioned by David as a potential candidate), all circular coordinates always play the same role. The permutation of "X9" and "X11" is thus a trivial "Z2" subgroup of the U-duality group (a large diffeomorphism, in fact) that doesn't deserve any special discussion and that is completely manifest in all pre-matrix-theory pictures or M-theory. Everything changes in Matrix theory which is why you need Matrix theory to talk about the 9/11 flip.

David from asymptotia.com seems confused (is it David Gross?), too.

Discrete light-cone quantization

In order to explain what the term means in Matrix theory, we must first explain how you derive the model. Fine.

Return to 1996. Take M-theory in 11 dimensions. It is very mysterious as the name "M" suggests. But you want to write down a complete and well-defined Hamiltonian for this theory anyway. Can you do it? You bet. Follow Seiberg and Sen and compactify the light-like coordinate "X- = X0 + X10" on a circle so large that the identification becomes physically inconsequential (14 billion light years, if you wish). Because light-like compactifications may be subtle, deform the identification rule so that the identified points are space-like separated although the separation is "almost" null in the coordinate space.

Nevertheless, it is space-like anyway so you may apply the Lorentz symmetry of M-theory to change this almost null separation to a standard and very short space-like separation (the proper length of an almost null separation is very small). That makes it clear that physics of M-theory in 11 dimensions is equivalent to some limiting physics of M-theory compactified on a very short circle. The latter is known to be nothing else than type IIA string theory. The amount of momentum in the "X-" direction is translated to the number N of D0-branes in the resulting type IIA string theory - and this number must be sent to infinity if you want to describe a finite-momentum sector (with "P+ = N/R" kept fixed) in decompactified M-theory.

If you look at the limits that you need to get the original theory, you will see that the corresponding limiting physics in the type IIA string theory that is equivalent to M-theory in 11 dimensions is nothing else than the matrix quantum mechanics of massless open string modes ending on D0-branes, i.e. the BFSS matrix model: it is the dimensional reduction of the maximally supersymmetric U(N) gauge theory to 0+1 dimensions.

Note that the circle "X-" or "X10" (or "X11") must always be compactified and it is highly boosted in order to be able to find a matrix description of anything at all.

By the procedure above, we derived the exact Hamiltonian for M-theory - the whole superselection sector of the string-theoretical Hilbert space that approaches flat 11-dimensional spacetime at infinity. Can we find the exact Hamiltonian e.g. for type IIA string theory itself? Yes, we can. But we need to compactify one more circle besides "X-". It must be one of the nine normal transverse directions - I chose "X1" and DVV chose "X9". One must carefully distinguish the transverse "X1" or "X9" direction from the "systemic" almost-null direction "X-" or "X10" (or "X11"). There are two different type IIA string theories that you may "see" inside the compactified M-theory. The relation between them is as miraculous as the ability to use Matrix theory to study M-theory in general and jumping in between these two mental images is referred to as the 9/11 flip.

It sounds simple once we know how it works but it wasn't quite trivial to understand what's going on. The 9/11 flip was, for example, the main obstacle that prevented Edward Witten to understand matrix string theory for some time. ;-)

Challenge

If you don't believe me, feel free to find a paper before DVV that uses the term "9/11 flip" or a paper before mine that uses the relation between two different type IIA string theories inside the same M-theory to achieve anything non-trivial. I predict that you will fail.

And that's the memo.

Antarctic sea ice at record high

Urbana-Champaign, Illinois - Satellites began to measure the Earth's cryosphere in 1979. Because of a warm summer, the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area has reached new historic lows in 2007. Around August 28th, the new minimum of 2.99 million squared kilometers of sea ice easily surpassed the previous record of 4.01 million squared kilometers set in 2005. These numbers available at the web page of Dr William Chapman and his team at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were widely publicized.



Some analysts have speculated that the new record could be evidence of global warming. But is it? Even though it may sound very complicated, it turns out that the Earth is round. At the global scale, there is not one polar region but, in fact, two. There is also sea ice on the Southern Hemisphere. It turns out that the Antarctic sea ice area reached 16.2 million squared kilometers in 2007 - a new absolute record high since the measurements started in 1979: see this graph.

During the year, the Southern Hemisphere sea ice area fluctuates between 2 and 16 million squared kilometers or so while the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area fluctuates approximately between 3 and 14 million squared kilometers. The climate models predict warming in Antarctica and they are increasingly inconsistent with the observations.

The South pole winter is now about 0.6 Celsius cooler than in 1957.

Via Marc Morano.

Sidney Coleman's notes: TeX edition

Bryan Chen has LaTeXed a significant portion of Coleman's notes on Quantum Field Theory:

Bryan Chen's directory

The files are sorted anti-chronologically and you may want to see the PDF files only. At the very bottom, you find the original scanned notes in the files whose names are starting with Coleman.

If you happen to extend Bryan's work, it could be a good idea to follow his LaTeX conventions and templates and inform him or me about your final work.