Quote of the Day

Here is a snippet from the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a book with an endlessly fascinating take on money, debt, and markets over the long history of civilization:

Another way to look at this might be to say that the new age [1450-1971, the Age of Great Capitalist Empires] came to be increasingly uncomfortable with the political nature of money. Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just ab out everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud

I highly recommend Graeber's book for an alternative analysis of money, debt, and markets. You may not agree with his analysis, but he will help you broaden your understanding through his deep understanding of anthropology/history deeply rooted in 5,000 years of human civilization.

Brain in a Box

There is no ghost in the machine. It is turtles all the way down. Or as Julien Offray de La Mettrie put it Man a Machine:



The above needs to be tempered. Our positivist and reductionist scientific worldview makes claims that go too far for a pragmatist. From a section in Lecture 47 of Daniel N. Robinson's The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2^nd Edition:

[William] James the pluralist is not a relativist of the modern stripe. He countered the reigning positivism of his day with fallibilism. There is always more to the account than any current version can include, because there are always other experiences, other beliefs, and needs. We must conduct ourselves in such a way as to record what we take to be our highest interests, while never knowing if we have them right or have matched our interests by our actions. There is no final word.

William James was, above all, a realist: We must accept what is. Unlike the positivists, however, James took this to mean that we must accept that there is a religious element to life, because credible report points to the existence of one, as well as to a striving to perfect oneself and to needs that go beyond the individual soul or body. There are, however, things that we cannot finally know. The fallibilist doesn't deny that there is some absolute point of focus on which human interests can converge, but we are warned to be suspicious of those who come to us with final answers.

The most profound lesson of modernism is to recognize the limits of our reason, the limits to knowlege, and the ultimate fallibility or each of us. The existentialist is right in noting that we project ourselves into our future with a hope that has no foundation. In the end we all die, but we live as if we would live forever. We theorize as if there is "ultimate truth" when in fact we live in a very small corner of an inconceivably huge universe in which we don't even know how many physical dimensions exist or whether there are other "universes out there" beyond our ken.

In some deep sense we are a "brain in a box" but science has not plumbed the depths of what this means. Yes, we are "only" matter in motion. But that matter, the brain, is so infinitely more complex than a figure like de La Mettrie had not a hint of what it truly means. And just as de La Mettrie claimed more than he really knew, so today's scientists and philosophers make claims far beyond what will be ultimately revealed. The universe is far more complex and mysterious than the human mind will ever comprehend. But that doesn't mean that we don't enjoy the quest. Knowledge and truth are still the shining lights on high that we strive to attain.

Inside the Divided Brain

Here is an interesting lecture on brain asymmetry:

From Cold Fusion to Widom-Larsen

Here is a bit from an excellent post by Steven Krivit in his excellent blog NewEnergyTimes. This reviews the history of investigations and thinking about the unexpected energy production by the Fleischmann–Pons experiment to the latest thinking centred on Widom-Larsen theory. Here is the history as understood by Krivit and presented at Mitre Corp (an R&D outfit for the US government):

The first phase is 1989-1993. The initial problem is that nuclear experts had never known of any kind of nuclear energy that did not produce commensurate levels of dangerous radioactive emissions. Few people at this time were aware of weak interactions, let alone the possibility that weak interactions could lead to high reaction rates. So, for most scientists, the claimed results were inexplicable according to what they knew at the time.

Nuclear physicists couldn't conceive of a way that deuterons could penetrate or overcome the Coulomb barrier at room temperature. Some people, like Hagelstein, tried to come up with explanations for this, but they all relied on imaginary physics.

From the experimental side, the field suffered early on from "experimenter's regress," which is explained by author Harry Collins: "When the normal criterion - successful outcome - is not available, scientists disagree about which experiments are competently done."

When the field emerged in 1989, there was a lot of initial opposition. Many people in science academia responded to it unprofessionally and with outright hostility. Some of these opponents lacked the courage to consider something so radically new and potentially disruptive; some lacked imagination. On a psychological level, it threatened their fundamental understanding of physics. On a practical level, it threatened their stature and funding. It threatened to make their textbooks and coursework obsolete. There were also some other opponents who were researchers who attempted to replicate the initial claim but failed and then may have felt embarrassed and frustrated and then became angry.

The second phase is 1993-2004. During this period, the field was largely neglected by mainstream science and mainstream media. To a great degree, although the researchers would certainly have liked to receive more financial support, I think they were happy to be left alone. However, significant misinformation which occurred from the onset of the field was never corrected in the broader public awareness [during this time]. But that started changing as of [the publication of] Charles Beaudette's Excess Heat & Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed in 2000 and Steven B. Krivit and Nadine Winocur's The Rebirth of Cold Fusion in 2004. These books began to help correct some of the historical record.

The third phase starts in 2005, when Widom and Larsen came out with their theory, and has continued to the present. During this phase, the field has been experiencing bitter factionalism between two groups. One group is people who maintain their belief in "cold fusion" or, if not [in name], at least the idea of deuterons somehow overcoming the Coulomb barrier. Sometimes, they seem to have loyalty only to the name of "cold fusion." [Often, many of these proponents defend either the concept or the term "cold fusion," much like adherents to a religion defend their right to their beliefs.]

The other group of people, whom you don't hear much about, recognizes low-energy nuclear reactions as real, but they don't presume or assert that it’s a fusion mechanism.

Here is a presentation from SPAWR that gives a more technical view of developments in LENR:



Follow developments of LENR at Steven Krivits NewEnergyTimes blog.

Canadian Senate Hearing on Global Warming

Here is testimony by Ross McKitrick on global warming. You should skip to 4:40 in the video to get to the start of his testimony and it ends by 16:00. This is well worth watching:



The various presenters:

• Ross McKitrick, Department of Economics, University of Guelph


• Ian Clark, Department of Earth Science, University of Ottawa


• Jan Veizer, Department of Earth Science, University of Ottawa


• Timothy Patterson, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University

I find it amusing to see respected senior scientists in Canada giving testimony that the IPCC story of "global warming" is incomplete, misleading, and wrong. Unlike the fanatics who claim "the science is settled", these researchers make it very clear that the science is still very much open to debate and in need of serious research.

In the video at 1:24:00 a senator has laid out the extreme cases and asks the panel "what to do". Ross McKitrick very intelligently replies that under those extremes it is very hard to know what to do. But he does a very clever thing, an economic trick, to force everybody to pay attention to climate and do the right thing:

He proposes a carbon tax that will be moved up or down based on real measurements. That forces corporations and institutions and people who deal with long term planning to build in expectations to their plans. This is the "invisible hand" of economics being used to control people to do the right thing. It is very clever and it should be implemented everywhere.

I sure would like to see governments around the world adopt this kind of stabilizing, automatic economic guidance for "doing the right thing" with respect to climate change. The tax would go down if the data shows no temperature increase, and it would steeply go up if temperatures showed an alarming rate of rise. Perfect.

Gell-Mann on Languages

The great physicist Murray Gell-Mann has a hobby of studying the origins of languages.

Here is a two minute interview from March 2007 where he talks of his interest at a TED conference:



And here is an hour long talk he gave at CERN in 2011:



The study of anthropology, genetics, and language evolution are helping us to understand the spread of modern man out of Africa. Fascinating stuff.

Interesting Article on Young Love Between Autistics

Here is a bit from a very interesting NY Times article that looks at two young autistic people negotiating the strange world of love and intimacy. You need to be aware of the basics of ASD to appreciate this article:

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soul mate.

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.

...

She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.

“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”

...

Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”

In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

I love the odd connections this article brought up in me:

• The Jack Robison in the article is the son of John Elder Robison who has written a very interesting book on the autistic experience Look Me in the Eye.


• The brother of John Elder Robison is also a writer, Augusten Burroughs, who has written two books about his bizarre upbringing caused by the fact that his father was autistic and his mother suicidal. The first book was Running with Scissors which was made into a move. And the second was A Wolf at the Table which looked more deeply into his relatioship with his autistic father.


• These connections remind me of the "small world" phenomenon that was first researched by Stanley Milgram who is famous for his early 1960s experiments in authority.


• And these connections of course remind me of the famous science historian James Burke who had a very popular TV series called "Connections" and who wrote many books on the deep connections through scientific history.

The world is fascinating because it is all tied together by multiple connections. This wondrous fact makes learning so very satisfying. Not only do you get to discover the hidden connections, you find that these connections make a framework which makes learning new facts and connections so much easier.

I get utterly disgusted by religious fanatics who claim that "all knowledge" is captured in some millennia old "sacred text" that records the sketchy, ill-informed, and stuffed with magical thinking "explanation" of the world. The real world is much more fascinating. But religious bigots refuse to open their eyes and look. Very much like the famous scholastics of the Middle Ages who could interminably "debate" over how many teeth in a horse's head based on the various writing of ancient "sages" when in fact the solution lay at hand: go out on the street, open a horse's mouth, and count the teeth!

Financial Magic

Magic can work. Here is a bit from Paul Krugman on the strategy of "inflating your way to prosperity". From his NY Times blog:

One thing I often see in comments is people attributing to me, or to others, the notion that you can inflate your way to prosperity — which is presented as self-evidently absurd.

Well, if you think that it’s self-evidently absurd, you’ve been listening to the wrong people.

Nobody thinks that an economy operating somewhere near full employment can inflate its way to higher output. But under depression conditions — which is what we have now — inflation is very much a positive thing.

Here’s a quick example from Eichengreen and Sachs showing changes in the gold value of currencies 1929-35 versus changes in industrial production; the devaluation of currencies against gold was closely related to the changes in their overall price level:

Click to Enlarge
Yep, countries were able to inflate their way to prosperity. And you get an immediate failing grade if you start ranting about Zimbabwe or Weimar.

If you have ever seen a magician do sleight of hand, it looks impossible. But the magic works. He does a real illusion by manipulating weaknesses in our psychology. To ignore the power of placebos or magic by being an economic "fundamentalist" is as nutty as being a religious fundamentalist. In the real world you should seize and use whatever real effects that are out there. Even if they are "magic" and depend on strange attributes of humans and their psychological make-up.

David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"

This is an excellent speculative historical review of how debt, money, slavery, coinage, and government arose. It is chock-a-block full of obscure but interesting facts. The analysis is fresh and thought-provoking. I'm not in a position to assess the scientific validity of his reconstruction of ancient societies, but it rings true to me.

If you want a new perspective on how economic forces shape us and our societies, this is a "must read" book.

Here is just a tidbit from his chapter on the Axial Age (800 BC to 600 AD):

This is the key to Seaford's argument about materialism and Greek philosophy. A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would eventually set in. It was as if there was a tension there, between the will of the community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance -- as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it -- but whose nature was a profound enigma.

Consider this word, "materialism." What does it mean to adopt a "materialist" philosophy? What is "material," anyway? Normally, we speak of "materials" when we refer to objects that we wish to make into something else. A tree is a living thing. It only becomes "wood" when we begin to think about all the other things you could carve out of it. And of course you can carve a piece of wood into almost anything. The same is true of clay, or glass, or metal. They're solid and real and tangible, but also abstractions, because they have the potential to turn into almost anything else -- or, not precisely that; one can't turn a piece of wood into a lion or an owl, but one can turn it into an image of a lion or an owl -- it can take on almost any conceivable form. So already in any materialist philosophy, we are dealing with an opposition between form and content, substance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator's mind, and the physical qualities of the materials on which it is to be stamped, built, or imposed, from which it will be brought into reality. With coins this rises to an even more abstract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one person's head, but is rather the mark of a collective agreement. The images stamped on Greek coins (Miletus' lion, Athen's owl) were typically the emblems of the city's god, but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens assured one another that not only would the coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and thus, that they could be used to acquire anything anyone wanted.

The problem is that this collective power is not unlimited. It only really applies within the city. The farther you go outside, into places dominated by violence, slavery, and war -- the sort of place where even philosophers taking a cruise might end up on the auction block -- the more it turns into a mere lump of precious metal.

The war between Spirit and Flesh, then between the nobile Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and community are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material natures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal -- all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophical traditions of the Axial Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since -- can already be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new form of money.

It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical starting place: one of the reasons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? re they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?

I heartily recommend that you read this book.

Math & Art & Science

Here's a nice video that combines humour and math with a little mythical earth history:



I especially enjoy the little bits of realism, like getting eaten by the Pythagasaurus. The problem with nerdy kids is that they don't have a healthy fear of the real world. Their math & science gives them a false sense of power and authority. The nice thing about art is that is can reintroduce these aspiring minds to the fact that math kills, like the Pythagasaurus. A little healthy fear is good for the budding scientist. And only the magic of art can help groom that fear.

Anti-Science is Alive and Well

People prefer to "believe". They don't like slow and painful study and rational thinking, calculation, experimentation, theory building aka "science". That requires 20 years of education and only really dedicated and really smart people can access the edges of science these days. That sidelines the masses and they don't like that one bit.

So people believe in magic. They believe in "spirit" and "soul" and the "power of positive thinking". They believe in "holistic medicine". They have their religions.

I worked in a high tech company and was appalled to discover that even people with PhDs in science believed in such madness as "homeopathy". These were smart people, well educated people who had worked hard to understand technology and science and yet they gave in to magical thinking.

Here's what magical thinking will "achieve". From Yahoo! News:

Five share $340,000 in holistic healer case that left woman a quadriplegic

The Canadian Press – Fri, 11 Nov, 2011

RICHMOND, B.C. - Five B.C. residents, including a woman nearly killed by arsenic poisoning and left a quadriplegic, are sharing more than $340,000 as a result of a settlement involving a self-proclaimed holistic healer.

Money from the settlement came from property seized from the defendant and sold under the B.C. government's civil forfeiture legislation.

The government says the defendant, Selena Tsui, was not charged in the case after the Crown concluded there was no substantial likelihood of conviction on any criminal charges.

The government says between 2000 and 2004, Tsui told at least a dozen people she was qualified to diagnose and treat diseases, including mental conditions, when in fact she had no formal training.

One of her clients, identified only as E.L., began taking a concoction she believed contained mushrooms and herbs, but had extreme arsenic levels, and she suffered respiratory and renal failure, cardiac arrest and paralysis.

She was taken to hospital, put on life support and given a five per cent chance of survival, but her life was eventually saved.

The real world is complicated. It isn't a simple morality story. It isn't something that "a good heart" and a "strong will" can conquer. It requires hard work, sophisticated technology, advanced math, and a long education in a specialist area of science. But people love quacks with no training yet who have an "aura" about them, or can "channel spirits", or have a commanding presence and claim a direct line to "God".

Right now, Europe and the United States are in the hands of quacks. Serious economists know that austerity budgets only prolong a depression. A Keynesian approach is needed. But Obama and the European leaders would rather call in the witch doctor to shake bones over the economy and prattle some debt reduction "confidence building" mumbo jumbo rather than rely on the math, the models, and the sophisticated economic theories (the ones prior to the Chicago school and "freshwater" economists turned into lunatics and ran economics off the rails).

It is tragic living in a world where some plague is raging and the scientists and the doctors have the technology to manipulate DNA to create a vaccine to cure it, but the "authorities" (political, religious, civic, etc.) all cry out for "prayer" and "abstinence" and "a submission to God's will" or some "alternative medicine" rather than to science to cure the plague.

We live in a dark time. Carl Sagan wrote a book in 1995 before he died in which he worried about this modern anti-science trend. The book was called The Demon-Haunted World. We live in that magical thinking, irrational, and anti-science world. Millions die every year because of this stupidity. That is what people who want "quick solutions" have created by preferring magical thinking to the difficult path of rationalism and science. Tragic.

Heresy and Global Warming

Here is a bit from a talk by Matt Ridley at the RSA:

Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.

Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.

I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.

I was not always such a “lukewarmer”. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick*. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.

Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion*. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.

This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before.

For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.

It was warmer in the Middle ages* and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.

Stalagmites*, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time.

Sea level* is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating.

Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century.

There has been no significant warming in Antarctica*, with the exception of the peninsula.

Methane* has largely stopped increasing.

Tropical storm* intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years.

Your probability* of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s.

Malaria* has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.

And so on. I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

It is well worth your time reading the whole talk. There is a fine line between pseudoscience and science, and as Ridley points out, many outstanding scientists have simultaneously been on both sides at the same time on different issues.

The problem with fanatics is that they willing change the goal posts and reinterpret everything as support for their viewpoint. Here is Ridley on climate "sensitivity":

Nor is there even any theoretical support for a dangerous future. The central issue is “sensitivity”: the amount of warming that you can expect from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consensus – at first. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Here’s* how the IPCC put it in its latest report.

“In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating…the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C.” Paragraph 8.6.2.3.

Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks, mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is good consensus about the 1.2 C, there is absolutely no consensus about the net positive feedback, as the IPCC also admits. Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt.

So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false.

The sensitivity of the climate could be a harmless 1.2C, half of which has already been experienced, or it could be less if feedbacks are negative or it could be more if feedbacks are positive. What does the empirical evidence say? Since 1960 we have had roughly one-third of a doubling, so we must have had almost half of the greenhouse warming expected from a doubling – that’s elementary arithmetic, given that the curve is agreed to be logarithmic. Yet if you believe the surface thermometers* (the red and green lines), we have had about 0.6C of warming in that time, at the rate of less than 0.13C per decade – somewhat less if you believe the satellite thermometers (the blue and purple lines).

So we are on track for 1.2C*. We are on the blue line, not the red line*.

Remember Jim Hansen of NASA told us in 1988 to expect 2-4 degrees in 25 years. We are experiencing about one-tenth of that.

We are below even the zero-emission path expected by the IPCC in 1990*.

To be skeptical of the IPCC claims is to be ostracized as a fanatic, somebody tenaciously holding to a disproved view since "the science is settled". But I fully expect to see the IPCC and the "global warming" crowd defrocked and disgraced before my life is over. In the interim, I expect to be pilloried for my unwillingness to be "reasonable" and "accept the facts". As Ridley points out, it is very, very hard to debunk and defeat pseudoscience.

Journalists are fond of saying that the IPCC report is based solely on the peer-reviewed literature. Rajendra Pachauri himself made that claim in 2008, saying*:

“we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don't settle for anything less than that.”

That’s a voodoo claim. The glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that*: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”

Truth will win out. But as Ridley notes:

Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.

And this isn't just a quibble of science versus pseudoscience. It is real dollars and cents:

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

...

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.

My personal bête noire is the willingness of these global warming fanatics to condemn the bottom 3 billion to a pauperized future by calling for a halt to economic growth in order to stop what, to me at least, was a phantom problem. These fanatics want to return to the "golden age" of the early 1800s before the growth of fossil fuel. They want to go back to the glorious days of trailing behind horse or ox to plow a field. They days when families huddled in an unheated cottage in the dark because light and fuel were expensive.

There is a bad historical precedent for the current struggle of science vs pseudoscience:

Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.

“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw*, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.

Or remember Trofim Lysenko*, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.

The irony of course is that much of the green movement began as heretical dissent. Greenpeace went from demanding that the orthodox view of genetically modified crops be challenged, and that the Royal Society was not to be trusted, to demanding that heresy on climate change be ignored and the Royal Society could not be wrong.

Talking of Greenpeace, did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia.

By contrast scientists and most mainstream journalists risk their careers if they take a skeptical line, so dogmatic is the consensus view. It is left to the blogosphere to keep the flame of heresy alive and do the investigative reporting the media has forgotten how to do. In America*, Anthony Watts who crowd-sourced the errors in the siting of thermometers and runs wattsupwiththat.com;

In Canada*, Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who bit by bit exposed the shocking story of the hockey stick and runs climateaudit.org.

Here in Britain,* Andrew Montford, who dissected the shenanigans behind the climategate whitewash enquiries and runs bishop-hill.net.

In Australia*, Joanne Nova, the former television science presenter who has pieced together the enormous sums of money that go to support vested interests in alarm, and runs joannenova.com.au.

The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics.

As "Deep Throat" in the Watergate scandal advised: "Follow the money."

Go read the full Matt Ridley talk.

Jeffrey Kluger's "The Sibling Effect"

This book is an interesting mix of science reporting and autobiography. His topic is birth order and the effects that siblings have on each other. He uses is own quite interesting family to spice up the story with personal details. I found that fascinating.

The book will acquaint you with the major results on the biological and sociological effects of siblings on each other. It looks at genetics, sex, gender, birth order, and a bit of cultural history. It nicely mixes this up with a survey that runs through Kluger's life but nicely separates out issues chapter by chapter.

Here is a bit where Kluger is being grandly philosophical:

I may have been lucky in the siblings I got, and all six of us may have been lucky in the way we were able to parlay the challenges we faced into greater closeness and loyalty, as opposed to greater distance. But if there's anything my research and my own history have taught me, it's that in the overwhelming share of cases, our relationships with our siblings -- whether easy and loving or fraught and factious -- deserve all the care, tending, and watering we can give them. Nature, after all, plays for keeps. Any human life will have more than its share of pains and grief -- and it will end in death no matter what. And yet the life of anyone with a sibling begins with a sidekick and traveling companion who can be with you the entire way. Wasting that relationship is folly of the first order. It's true when we're kids, it's true when we're adults, and it's surely true when we're aging and alone. To the extent that this book has a mission, it's to argue for the sibling ideal -- and for better understanding and preserving those bonds.

I would recommend this as a fun and educational read for everyone.

I've previously reviewed his book Simplexity which was a much more serious review of science. This book doesn't put the demands on you for any real interest in science. You can read this book as a light "biography" with some interesting scientific bits thrown in. It is very entertaining, not in a purely "ha ha" way, but as an insightful look into relationships and family dynamics that I find engrossing. The book will lead you to some "aha!" moments.

The Essence of Being Human

Researcher Robert Sapolsky has nailed it. We are dopamine junkies...



Those of us who are flops in life can't handle time delay of more than a day or week. But as Sapolsky points out, the typical successful middle class dopamine junkie can hold out for the reward of "getting into the best nursing home". The truly long distance and heroic dopamine junkies are the ones who can delay gratification into the hereafter, waiting for the reward that Saint Peter offers them.

Who says that reductive science can't take the measure of man? This talk is an excellent example of reducing a human to a single neurochemical.

If you are dopamine-driven and still haven't had enough Sapolsky, click here, here, here. And repeat that for 100,000 times!

Nothing is Obvious

I love the complexity of the natural world. It is utterly amazing to me that scientists ever decoded anything. I remember as a kid "deciding" that I would be a great chemist. But I had no chemicals, so I mixed things that were around me. Mostly I got mud. No brilliant insights, no atomic theory of matter, no complexity about valence electrons. The real world is very complex and very opaque. It takes lots of hard thinking, experimentation, and clever theorizing to make any sense of anything.

Here's a simple example of how counter-intuitive the world is:

The orbit of the Earth’s around the sun is slightly eccentric. The closest point is called the perihelion. On January 4th the Earth is just 147,098,291 km away from the sun. Aphelion occurs July 4th when the Earth is 152,098,233 km away from the sun, a difference of +3.3%. Naturally the power of the sun falls away with distance. Its radiation is 7% weaker in July than in January. Strangely, near surface air temperature for the Earth as a whole is 3.3°C warmer in July than in January. Yes, the surface is warmest when the Earth is furthest from the sun!

I find it funny that the "global warming" crowd is convinced there is a very tight relationship between CO2 and air temperatures. They think CO2 can drive up temperatures. Actually the evidence is mostly the other way around: warmer climate releases more CO2. But don't let such facts cloud the mind of an ideologue!

Climatologists have long wondered why a 1°C increase in temperature at the sea surface relates to as much as a 3° increase in temperature of the upper troposphere. They call this phenomenon ‘amplification’ as if the temperature of the upper troposphere in some way depended on the temperature at the surface and there was a transistor circuit between the two. Hey guys, its the other way round. Turn the telescope round. The presence of a long wave absorber namely ozone, is responsible for this phenomenon. The warming of the upper troposphere results in cloud loss and then, after a little time lag, the surface temperature increases.

In the mid and high zone, cloud is present as highly reflective interlacing micro-crystals of ice that we describe as cirrus and stratus. When the air warms these crystals sublimate. Ice cloud is the dominant cloud of the subtropical region. In IPCC climate science high altitude ice cloud is supposed to warm the surface by enhancing back radiation. But when radiation from the atmosphere increases in winter relative humidity falls. This radiation it is not bounced back by the cloud, the cloud disappears and lets the sun shine through. The surface temperature response is due to the disappearance of the cloud, not back radiation. Oops.

...

The $164,000 question is what is causing cloud cover to rise and fall on decadal and centennial time scales.

The answer to both questions lies in the activity of the coupled circulation of the stratosphere and the troposphere at the poles that feeds ozone into the troposphere. The upper troposphere warms or cools depending upon the feed rate of ozone. The feed rate changes over time.

The ozone content and temperature of the upper stratosphere depends in the first instance upon the activity of the night jet at the poles that introduces NOx from the mesosphere. Less NOx means more ozone. The activity of the night jet depends upon surface pressure and the concentration of NOx in the jet depends upon solar activity. In Antarctica, surface pressure has been falling for sixty years indicating a continuous increase in the ozone feed into the troposphere, the second major influence upon the ozone content of the polar stratosphere.

In that the coupled circulation of the stratosphere and the troposphere over Antarctica changes surface pressure at 60-70° south it changes the strength of the westerly winds in the southern hemisphere, cloud cover and surface temperature on all time scales. Stratospheric ozone is wasted above and below the stratosphere, processes referred to as ‘unknown dynamical influences’ in the more respectable polar ozone studies.

These phenomena are the very essence of the Southern Annular Mode, arguably the fundamental mode of global climate variation on all time scales.

One thing is plain. High altitude ice cloud in the southern hemisphere is plainly a reflector of solar radiation. It does not promote warming (positive feedback). It promotes cooling (negative feedback). It’s presence depends upon the flux in ozone in the upper troposphere as governed by processes in the stratosphere. So the UNIPCC climate models are 180° out of whack.

The above snippets are from an article by Erl Happ, a wine maker:

I am a winemaker and grape-grower with a strong interest in climate. I was interested enough to try and discover the common thermal characteristics that are seen in great vineyard locations and did a lot of work with hourly temperature data from around the world. Climate sets the limit on what can be achieved in the vineyard. I became interested in climate change when I noticed the growing season temperature falling in our part of the world, the south west of Western Australia. That set me on a quest to work out why. Soon, it became apparent that parts of the Southern Hemisphere like Antarctica and Southern Chile had been cooling for fifty years or more. My experience in analyzing temperature dynamics for vine sites and working out just how much heat these plants need to bring their fruit to maturity gave me a focus on sourcing data and figuring out what has been happening on a regional scale, both at the surface and in the upper atmosphere. I think there is room for a subject called historical climatology. We can learn a lot just by looking at what has happened over long periods of time. Good data sets are readily available on the net. All one needs is a little curiosity, a facility with spreadsheets and a lot of determination.

Erl Happ's real "job" is wine...

2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

Saul Perlmutter was one of the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Here he is trying to explain his research:



Pondering the cosmos is mind boggling. It is hard to appreciate that what we understand as "matter" is only 4% of what is out there. That "dark energy" is 73% of the "stuff" of the universe and "dark matter" is 23%. We are in the 4% "minority" of our universe.

Perlmutter gets into the more exotic speculations at 08:00 into the video when he touches on the extra dimensions of string theory. If these speculations bear out, then our 4% will shrink to negligible. The stuff "out there" in the dimensions hidden from us will be so much more that what we know.

Yes... the universe is a very, very strange place.

Death & Physics

I enjoy Jenifer Ouillette's Cocktail Physics blog. Here is a bit out of piece she has written on Robert Wilson:

... nobody forgot that the work they were doing at Los Alamos was both vital to national defense, and highly dangerous due to the radioactive substances involved. Wilson recalled his own brush with death while assisting a physicist in the Critical Assemblies Group with another experiment to determine when criticality was reached as one stacked a series of enriched uranium hydride cubes. He was surprised, and a bit dismayed, to find that the group didn't rely on the usual elaborate safety devices commonly used at cyclotron facilities at the time. Instead, the physicist arrived with a simple set-up involving a wooden table, a single neutron counter to monitor criticality, and a whole bunch of cubes of enriched uranium hydride.

Wilson watched, rapt, as the physicist started stacking uranium cubes, and then noticed with alarm that the neutron counter wasn't, well, counting. Upon inspection, he discovered that the voltage supply was burnt out. When the counter was turned back on, it lit up immediately, to Wilson's horror. "A few more cubes and the stack would have exceeded criticality and could well have become lethal," he recalled. Furious, Wilson chewed out the physicist, his division leader, and even raged about it to Oppenheimer himself, but he had to leave for Trinity the very next day, so he let the incident drop. Had he stayed and pursued the matter, Wilson believed, "I might have saved the lives of two people. To this day, the incident is on my conscience."

Those two people were Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. and Louis Slotin, both of whom died of radiation sickness after accidents that occurred while conducting critical experiments with a plutonium core -- known as "tickling the dragon."

More on Louis Slotin from Wikipedia:

On May 21, 1946, with seven other colleagues watching, Slotin performed an experiment that involved the creation of one of the first steps of a fission reaction by placing two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around a plutonium core. The experiment used the same 6.2-kilogram (13.7 lb) plutonium core that had irradiated Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., later called the "Demon core" for its role in the two accidents. Slotin grasped the upper beryllium hemisphere with his left hand through a thumb hole at the top while he maintained the separation of the half-spheres using the blade of a screwdriver with his right hand, having removed the shims normally used. Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol.

At 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a "prompt critical" reaction and a burst of hard radiation. At the time, the scientists in the room observed the "blue glow" of air ionization and felt a "heat wave". In addition, Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand. Slotin instinctively jerked his left hand upward, lifting the upper beryllium hemisphere and dropping it to the floor, ending the reaction. However, he had already been exposed to a lethal dose (around 2100 rems, or 21 Sv) of neutron and gamma radiation. Slotin's radiation dose was about four times the lethal dose, equivalent to the amount that he would have been exposed to by being 1500 m (4800 ft) away from the detonation of an atomic bomb.

As soon as Slotin left the building, he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation. Slotin's colleagues rushed him to the hospital, but irreversible damage had already been done. His parents were informed of their son's inevitable death and a number of volunteers donated blood for transfusions, but the efforts proved futile. Louis Slotin died nine days later on May 30, in the presence of his parents. He was buried in Winnipeg on June 2, 1946.

At first, the incident was classified and not made known even within the laboratory; Robert Oppenheimer and other colleagues later reported severe emotional distress at having to carry on with normal work and social activities while they secretly knew that their colleague lay dying.

The core involved was subject to a number of experiments shortly after the end of the war and was used in the ABLE detonation, during the Crossroads series of nuclear weapon testing. Slotin's experiment was set to be the last conducted before the core's detonation and was intended to be the final demonstration of its ability to go critical.

The accident ended all hands-on critical assembly work at Los Alamos. Future criticality testing of fissile cores was done with special remotely controlled machines, such as the "Godiva" series, with the operator located a safe distance away in case of accidents.

One of the jobs I had was software safety for the detrous manipulator being built for the Space Station. It was hard to get the engineers to think hard about "what could go wrong". We are all optimists by nature. We love to extrapolate the upside. It is really hard, however, to think about failure modes, the "what if" when things go wrong. It helps if you've had previous experience to guide you. But the problem with new technology is that it is "new". We all love to see the wonderful new possibilities of the new, but few like to muck around with the grim downside. Worse, when people do consider what can go wrong, they tend to overshoot and come up with real gloom-and-doom scenarios (e.g. gray goo or the singularity) rather than the more mundane cascade of of unlikely faults that have hidden connections that lead you into a major disaster.

The Art & Science of Placebo

I love this little video. It is both a joy to watch and informative...



I want to get one of those "placebo buttons". I want a monster one. Something a foot or two across that it takes both hands to push. And I want it to have a satisfyingly strong spring behind it so that I have to give it a really good push to get the full placebo "effect".

Oh... and for me, geek that I am... this is probably the most effective placebo for dealing with a down day...



For those seeking "technical details", click here.

Peak Oil

For the doomsday crowd that follows regular predictions of gloom-and-doom, the "peak oil" story has been a good one.

The typical "picture of doom" is something like this from Wikipedia:

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That picture is pretty convincing. We are on the slide to perdition. Only a bleak and hopeless future awaits us...

But wait a second. Here is a more recent graph from an article in the Houston Chronicle:

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The article goes on to report a "new peak" in production:

North America appears headed for an oil renaissance, with crude production expected to hit an all-time high by 2016, given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week.

U.S. oil production in areas including West Texas' Permian Basin, South Texas' Eagle Ford shale, and North Dakota's Bakken shale will record a rise of a little over 2 million barrels per day from 2010 to 2016, according to data compiled by Bentek Energy, a Colorado firm that tracks energy infrastructure and production projects.

Canadian crude production is expected to grow by 971,000 barrels per day during the same period, with much of the oil headed for the U.S.

Combined, the U.S. and Canadian oil output will top 11.5 million barrels per day, which is even more than their combined peak in 1972.

Goldman Sachs has estimated the U.S. could move from being the No. 3 oil producer behind Saudi Arabia and Russia to the No. 1 spot by 2017.

It's a reversal of the steady downward production trend that started after 1971, when U.S. oil production peaked around 9.5 million barrels per day.

I know this is a shock and disappointment to the end-of-days crowd. But this is an old story. If you followed the Club of Rome with its best seller in the early 1970s, the book "Limits to Growth" you've seen this tale before. It is so convincing. The end is nigh! Repent!

But human ingenuity keeps foiling that tale of gloom and despair. It is so seductive to believe that there is no hope and we must give up our sinful "modern ways" and go back to our pastoral past when we were disease ravaged and lived an average of 34 years. But those pesky scientists and technologists keep ruining out return to a "golden age" by creating new techniques or helping us conserve or producing a new substitute. This story is older than civilization. But the siren call of "repent! the end is nigh!" keeps winning because it appeals to our dark side that expects us to be punished for "having it too good".

The Club of Rome pessimists are still in business and no doubt still selling their siren song of "the end is nigh!". But you are better off reading "The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon. Unlike the Club of Rome, Simon has been right more than wrong. But unlike the Club of Rome, Simon is ignored by the press. It is so much easier to sell papers with the story of doom-and-gloom. Nobody wants to hear that we will "muddle through" or that we can count on "human ingenuity". We want morality plays. We want punishment for sinful ways, the excesses of the past. Nobody wants dull fact, reasoned judgement, and a scientific attitude. It doesn't sell.

Global Warming Eyed by a Climatological Maverick

Roger Pielke Sr. would reject the label "maverick". He is a climatologist who accepts "climate change" but rebels at the IPCC "global warming" story as being too simplistic.

Here's a presentation he gave while visiting the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada on September 29, 2011. In amongst his slides are these two which, from my perspective, summarize his message:






From the local Waterloo press, TheRecord.com, here is an article written by Brent Davis summarizing Roger Pielke Sr.'s message:

When it comes to the issue of climate change, one leading researcher believes too much attention is being paid to carbon dioxide.

And that focus — touted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among others — means that other important factors aren’t being given the consideration they deserve, said Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado Boulder.

“It’s blinding us to other possibilities,” Pielke told an audience at the University of Waterloo on Thursday night, as he delivered the 2011 TD Walter Bean Lecture in the Environment. “Carbon dioxide shouldn’t be the paramount, overarching variable.”

Now, Pielke is the first to admit that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is a concern. But he says the issue of climate change goes far beyond global warming, and that the negative human impact on climate goes far beyond carbon dioxide.

Land use and changes to land cover, aerosols and nitrogen deposition are key causal factors, or “human climate forcings,” as well, Pielke said.

“The human influence on climate is everywhere.”

Given the complexity of the climate system, global warming isn’t the sole concern. In fact, Pielke argues that various data sets, including upper-ocean heating, don’t show any global warming for the past seven years or so.

And it’s debatable whether extreme weather events are on the rise, he said. Tornado damage in the United States, as a percentage of gross domestic product, is on the way down, and the coastline isn’t being hit any more frequently in the past hundred years by major hurricanes.

Pielke wants to see a different model used for the climate change issue, one that takes global warming and carbon dioxide into account, but recognizes that there are other significant human influences.

He’d like to see key resources such as water, food, energy, human health and ecosystem function used as the basis of an assessment of vulnerability that takes into account the influence of things like population growth, policy and institutional changes and climate variability.

The problems we face in terms of climate are multi-dimensional, Pielke said. All too often, current approaches are a “gross oversimplification of reality,” he said.

And here is an interview of Roger Pielke Sr. on the local Waterloo radio. If you listen you might be surprised at this scientist who is demonized by some as a "climate skeptic". He doesn't fit the simplistic picture that most people have of "the debate" over climate change.