Dean's World

Brit Hume last night:

A prominent meteorologist and former NASA scientist has gone public with her questions about the global warming movement. Joanne Simpson was chief scientist for meteorology at the Earth Sciences Directorate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Institute. She has authored more than 190 studies. She contends the conventional wisdom that man-made greenhouse gasses are fueling climate change is based almost entirely upon computer models she describes as "frail."

She adds — "One distinguished scientist has shown that many aspects of climate change are regional, some of the most harmful caused by changes in human land use. No one seems to have properly factored in population growth and land use, particularly in tropical and coastal areas."

As a programmer, I'm also skeptical of any assertion based purely on computer modelling.

Can you spot the fairly obvious logical fallacy here?

Here's a hint: the passages DarkSyde amusingly claims constitute a contradiction (and a "right-wing zombie lie!" Horrors!):

All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
...
The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis.

Yes, that's right: this alleged "science blogger" can't tell the difference between a comparison of different years and a temperature trend within a single year.

The farce of the DarkSyde is indeed strong.

Also amusing is this appeal to authority:

There are thousands of scientists all over the world who spend their entire professional lives examining that data.

You would think so, but no; the lowly task of actually analyzing the data and where it comes from has often fallen to amateurs and volunteers — and what they've found isn't pretty.

UPDATE: Coldening kills six. Al Gore sought by authorities.

Uh oh. As noted here before, an unprecedented drop in temperature.

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

There's a good chance this is a one-off fluke, but given that we're also in the middle of the interruption in solar cycles there is some cause for concern here, and if the trend continues another year we should be seriously worried. Prolonged cooling would be much, much, much worse than warming. (via Glenn)

UPDATE: Rumors that Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize has been rescinded could not be confirmed. A spokesperson for Gore, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "We'll give ours back when Arafat gives his back."

Wow.

Maybe there's something to that "Dalton solar minimum" idea.

Great video from Drew Carey on how life keeps getting better for Americans. Even with all its challenges, this truly is a Platinum Age, and tomorrow will be better yet.

Drew blames the media for creating these images of doom and gloom, and he's right, but it's important to remember news is always going to skew negative. This is not because news programs want to bum everyone out, but because humans have (not surprisingly) evolved a strong information-seeking preference for bad news over good, so the news media give us what we want (else we would watch their competitors).

The survival value of such a preference for bad news for early humans in a very hostile prehistoric world is probably self-evident enough to need no explanation.

Via Glenn, this is horrifying:

The authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power.

These are precisely the same arguments that gave us Communism. 100 million dead later, some people still haven't learned.

Or, as Burke put it:

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Project Orion, re-imagined and visualized.

I'm always amazed by the fact the proposed Orion "super" spacecraft had a mass of 8 million tons. For comparison, a modern supercarrier is about 100,000 tons.

(via TalkPolywell)

UPDATE: More video on Project Orion here.

UPDATE: In the comments, CaliforniaJOSH raises an objection:

Dishman, in all fairness, you must understand that the moon has a thriving ecosystem, and any human intervention could in theory turn it into a lifeless hunck of dead rock and dust.

A case for gross scientific incompetence. With more background here. (Via Glenn.)

I think it was made obvious what The Lancet's really about for quite some time, based on the hate-based lunatic rantings of one of its editors, Dr. Richard Horton:

The world of peer reviewed publications, especially high profile ones, is increasingly dominated, it appears, by political partisanship and economic self-interest.

A Russian coldenist speaks:

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.
...
The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

Sorokhtin makes some other points, such that the CO2 concentration might affect atmospheric volatility but not temperature, and that the oft-mentioned CO2 lag in historical temperature cycles may be explained by greater CO2 emissions from warmer oceans.

I found this gray-body emissivity argument interesting as well. Is it even possible for CO2 to warm the planet?

Overall, I have to be a bit suspicious of the climate change industry. Yes, there are lots of scientists involved, but there are lots of ideologically-driven environmentalists involved too, and billions in funding are at stake. It still bothers me that James Hansen once worked on a project that ascribed global cooling to manmade pollutants; that really makes climate change activism look like a solution in search of a problem.

Guess we'll find out who's right in a few years.

Is this why humans have relatively little genetic variance compared to most species?

Geneticists Lynn Jorde and Henry Harpending of the University of Utah proposed that the variation in human DNA is minute compared to that of other species. They also propose that during the Late Pleistocene, the human population was reduced to a small number of breeding pairs — no more than 10,000 and possibly as few as 1,000 — resulting in a very small residual gene pool. Various reasons for this hypothetical bottleneck have been postulated, one of those is the Toba catastrophe theory.
...
According to the Toba catastrophe theory, 70,000 to 75,000 years ago a supervolcanic event at Lake Toba... The theory was proposed in 1998 by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Within the last three to five million years, after human and other ape lineages diverged from the hominid stem-line, the human line produced a variety of species.
...
According to the Toba catastrophe theory, a massive volcanic eruption severely reduced the human population. This may have occurred around 70–75,000 years ago when the Toba caldera in Indonesia underwent an eruption of category 8 (or "mega-colossal") on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. This released energy equivalent to about one gigaton of TNT, which is three thousand times greater than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. According to Ambrose, this reduced the average global temperature by 5 degrees Celsius for several years and may have triggered an ice age.

When I read theories like this, it always brings to mind the Drake equation and the weak anthropic principle, and makes me wonder just how incredibly unlikely a chain of coincidences we rode on the path to intelligence.

Uh oh.

A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere.
….
"The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth's climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic," said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. "Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? "It seems that the answer is no."

Yeah, that’s a problem. When you're proposing massive global energy taxes to address a problem based on computer models, it's a little inconvenient when they turn out not to work.

Interestingly, the CNS version of the story has much more entertaining quotes than the ScienceDaily piece:

"This means that the greenhouse effect - while real - is not very important in producing climate change," he said. "It's a lot smaller than what the models calculate."

Singer said the reason why the models "overestimate the effectiveness of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is that the models ignore what are called negative feedbacks which occur in the atmosphere, such as clouds, which reduce the effect of the greenhouse gases."

But non-skeptics like Bracken Hendricks are skeptical, and they have irrefutable evidence for their position:

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not just a report. It's not just a random gathering of scientists. It's the largest scientific body ever assembled," he said.

Apparently many scientific studies are "just reports" produced by totally random gatherings of scientists. Good that he clarified that the IPCC report manifesto isn't one of those.

"Their most recent assessment determined that there's 90 percent certainty that global climate change is happening and that it is caused by human beings."

Of course, that also means this massive throbbing nonrandom superbrain of scientists admits there’s a 10% chance that they’re completely wrong and all this time and effort we’re putting into global warming is a gigantic waste of resources.

"We don't want to be gambling with the fate of the planet."

...said the man proposing to gamble trillions on reducing CO2 emissions that may or may not have any positive impact on climate change, based on unreliable computer models that don’t even accurately predict the past.

Who’s ultimately going to be right on the climate science? Hard to say for sure. But Hendricks’ grasp of economic principles doesn’t inspire confidence in his camp:

Hendricks countered, saying that alternative energy will be a multi-billion dollar industry and "an opportunity to revitalize our global competitiveness" through innovation and job creation.

Yeah, and if we pay little kids to break windows, then the glassmakers will have more business, and they will order more from their suppliers, and they’ll order more from their suppliers, and it will create this huge ever-expanding bubble of prosperity… what? What do you mean, broken windows fallacy?

Of course, what will actually happen is that China will chortle and build another thousand cheap CO2-spewing coal-fired power plants, and we’ll be stuck paying higher energy prices, thus further reducing our competitive advantage. But not to worry: we'll lead the world in the lucrative market for inaccurate computer models!

Short answer: no, this is just technobabble.

Less short answer: outside of sci-fi, quantum "observations" have nothing to do with whether a human brain perceives them, and humans are very unlikely to have produced any kind of particle/force interaction so novel to the universe that it creates a species of quantum wavefunction collapse that hasn't happened trillions of times before.

There's about a million fictional allusions to this idea, perhaps best exemplified by a line from an Aeon Flux episode: "Light, in the absence of eyes, illuminates nothing." It's fun idea and a great plot device, but unserious.

Here's the classic "quantum observation" experiment. Note that the results have nothing to do with whether a human happens to be standing there watching it.

Who?

Top... men.

As expected, Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, along with the entire UN Intergivernmental Panel on Climate Change. Reportedly, Gore will donate his half of the $1.5 million prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

Of course, as Christopher Hitchens also noted a few weeks ago, this event puts the question of whether Gore will run for President into renewed focus.

and, in case my own preferences aren't obvious, RUN, AL, RUN!

That's one of the questions this book (via Glenn) asks — and their answer probably isn't something Robert Spencer would like any more than Muslims, or that the Christian religious Right would approve of.

The authors, who are evolutionary psychologists, assert that the correlation is actually the result of just two lines in the Koran — the one permitting polygamy and the one promising 72 virgins — while the rest is just a product of how our evolved psychology reacts to the situation of polygamy.

The authors find evidence that polygamy (at least, the many women for one man version) causes young men to be far more violent in all societies in which it occurs. Why? Because it forces so many men to be total reproductive losers by ensuring the high-status men monopolize the available wives (as opposed to monogamous societies, where there is generally one woman available for every man), beacuse the resulting competition is so violent, and because successful reproduction reduces men's tendency to be violent.

Interestingly, there is considerable evidence polygamy is man's natural state, and societies probably devised monogamy as a means to reduce violent competition.

The authors make the point that a man with even one real-world wife is unlikely to trade her for 72 in the afterlife, but in a situation where no women are available, it starts to sound a lot better. This makes sense to me. Guys, think about having 72 hot virgins — really think about it (you know what I mean). If you had little prospect of finding a real woman, that fantasy might quickly become obsession.

But are they right? I don't know for sure, but it seems persuasive. Anyways, it's a fun read, since evolutionary psychology is all about sex. Some of their conclusions seem overstated, but they draw a lot of sensible conclusions about why humans behave the way they do, based on who we are descended from (successful reproducers) and who we are not descended from (reproductive losers).

Computer programmers and engineers of other complex systems are very familiar with the concept of a "cascading failure," which is when a failure in one place causes a surprising failure somewhere else, which in turn causes a whole host of failures in a bunch of other places at once.

It's a ubiquitous phenomenon, really. You see the same thing when a small crack in a dam eventually results in collapse of the whole system.

A few years ago the Esmay household found itself in the middle of the Northeast Blackout of 2003 that took down most of the electrical grid in large parts of the United States and Canada. We remember it very well: we were days without power in the middle of a hot summer, and it was all caused, according to reports, because ultimately, a single generating plant in Eastland, Ohio went down, which happened because the company that owned it failed to trim trees properly in their area over a short period of time. The result was over 100 power plants shut down, about 10 million Canadians without power, and about 1 out of 7 Americans without power--for days.

It's long been my contention that the peer-reviewed funding system run by the U.S. Federal government and many international agencies has suffered from this problem in numerous areas, most especially because of failure to admit the possibility of this problem ever occurring. Thus when someone questions current scientific consensus on any of a wide variety of subjects, they are portrayed as believing in "conspiracies" or of "attacking science" or "attacking medical professionals" or "denialism" any of a host of other counterproductive defensive reactions.

Take, for example, a recent book by Gary Taubes, a correspondent for Sciencem Magazine magazine (one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals on Earth). Taubes has recently published a book: Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. Taubes is not the first to rise up and say that most of what we've been told about dietary fat causing heart disease, obesity, and cancer is bunk, but he's maybe one of the most prestigious so far. I fully expect him to be thoroughly attacked, but I am also pretty damned sure he's correct. Lowering the amount of fat in your diet is very unlikely, in most people, to reduce risk of obesity, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Trans-fats, maybe. But regular natural fats? Not very likely at all.

By the way, I've been saying this for more than a decade, even back when I had my blog-before-blogs and published hand-html-coded articles on my personal web site that I've preserved from those days. See The World's Biggest Fad Diet (which I have it on good authority thoroughly pi**ed off Dean Ornish and his sycophantic vegan-worshipping supporters, by the way), and also The Low Fat, Low Cholesterol Diet Is Ineffective, which I got permission ten years ago personally from Dr. Laura Corr to publish on the web, and I've kept online ever since.

Fat is good for you. You need it to be healthy. And yes, saturated fats like you get in things like butter and bacon and cheese are needed in a healthy diet. After decades of study, no one has ever shown that a reduced fat, or reduced (natural, not trans-) saturated fat diet reduces heart disease or overall mortality. Indeed, while there is some minor evidence that it might be peripherally helpful, there's also some evidence that such diets are actually harmful.

Yet watch the fury that comes pouring out of some people when you say that. I've experienced it firsthand, and it's almost frightening to behold.

You tell people this and they tell you you want to kill people, particularly old people or those with heart disease. They'll tell you you're attacking the medical profession. Doctors and nurses. Heroic researchers. Science itself. And of course, you must believe in "conspiracy theories." Cascading failure. It's not that hard to understand. It only requires admitting that there may be a problem and instituting needed reform in how we fund scientific research.

That's what this guy, Nasif Nahle Sabag, is arguing:

For example, the real radiative equilibrium temperature of Earth is 300.15 K (27 °C), and we want to know the anomaly caused by carbon dioxide, which concentration in the atmosphere was 381 ppmv. If the standard concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 280 ppmv (another subjective number because the real one was fixed by scientific associations and boards, and its value is 350 ppmv), the anomaly in the temperature of the lower troposphere (the layer of air just above the ground and in contact with the surface with not more than one meter thick) caused by CO2 (Partial Pressure from 381 ppmv [CcdL] = 0.00034 atm-m) under a total atmospheric pressure of 1 atm is:

[Equations at link]

Thus, the anomaly of the lower troposphere temperature caused by the increase of CO2, on June 15, 2007 at 18:05 hrs. (UT) was 0.02 K, which is equal to 0.02 °C.

Seems to hang together fairly well. Anyone care to try to shoot holes in this?

Sabag appears to believe increases in solar radiation are more likely to be responsible, and argues that case in this thread, citing data that do appear to show solar irradiance has been rising both in the past 400 years and the past 50, though (as pointed out in the thread) the correlation to temperature is lagging (ironically, lagging correlation is of course the same argument warming skeptics have made against the long-term CO2/temperature correlations), and he gives some interesting formulas for surface warming based on irradiation.

We should be skeptical, but in both directions: with the recent revelations that James Hansen is not only receiving six-figure payments from Soros but actually once worked to bolster claims the same problem (air pollution from fossil fuels) would bring about a "catastrophic" Ice Age, the whole climate change industry starts to look like a bit like a cause in search of a convenient crisis.

A flurry of poorly-written news briefs, replete with claims of time travel made possible and proof of parallel universes, have been spawned by the announcement by Oxford scientists that a mathematical model of the Many Worlds Interpretation is more robust than thought. Predictably, perhaps the best explanation of what MWI means comes from a Slashdot commenter:

The remaining issue in a theory of quantum + decoherence is that the classical states have the right probabilities, but there is still nothing to explain why we observe a particular classical state (photon measured spin-up instead of spin-down). However the (ad-hoc) postulate of wavefunction collapse, no longer being necessary to explain how the probabilities arise, can in fact be entirely removed if we allow that the global superposition never collapses.

Thus, a local observer (e.g. an instrument or a human) perceives a single outcome only because they are a participant in this "global superposition" (the superposition of the entire universe). The wavefunction of the universe as a whole evolves deterministically.

It's odd to think of the Universe we experience as a superposition, but that does seem to be the implication of our current understanding of quantum mechanics.

Scientific consensus on global warming? Or not? Denialists apparently abound:

Sept. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares.
...
Other researchers found evidence that 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate

As I've said before, the weakest argument of warmenists is their catastrophic predictions. The notion of dramatic sea level rise is one of the most egregious scaremongering tactics (I'm looking at you Al Gore).

I thought the fact the Romans produced wine in Britain was interesting, too. Read the whole thing.

Had a visit with my family physician today. Best doctor I ever had. And I mean that without reservation: she's the best doc ever ever. She really listens, she's respectful, she cares, and she's not a wimp. She really knows her sh*t, she can disagree with me but respect my disagreement, and she really cares. God I love her.

She's also maybe ten years my senior. And I caught her today in a "senior moment." We were sitting there after the office visit and she was talking to her staff, and she said, "OK so check me on this, tomorrow is July 31, right?"

I immediately said, "Uh, no."

"OK, tomorrow is September 1?"

"Uh, no?"

Now, see, a really stupid person would say "wow, this doctor is totally addled and can't find up from down." But the intelligent person says, "This is my very intelligent doc, who just made a fencepost error."

If you think you're above a fencepost error, you're an idiot.

And you know how I know she is one of the best family physicians ever? When she asked that question, I said, "Do you know what year it is? Do you know who is the President of the United States? Can you follow my finger?" as I waved it in front of her face.

See, now, you think I was being sarcastic and snotty. But this is the moment in which I knew I loved her:

She busted out laughing and said, "Hahahaa, you got me!"

That, my friend, is a family physician you want forever.

I wouldn't just trust my life with this woman. I'd trust my wife and children with this woman. Not that she's perfect (she ain't, no one is) but she knows her calling.

This doesn't include Japan or France, but is still pretty powerful evidence our healthcare system is the best in the world.



This data says the oft-publicized plight of the uninsured is not dragging U.S. cancer survivability down even to European levels -- and cancer is expensive to treat. So either the insured are getting incredibly good care, so good it outweighs the alleged 50 million uninsured who would supposedly die from lack of treatment if they got cancer, or the uninsured are in fact getting treated.

It's not just that U.S. hospitals treat everyone who shows up needing care, or that states have their own systems of funding medical care for the poor; there are also all kinds of medical charities, formal and informal, a product of American-style capitalism's enormous private wealth. These are not hard to come by; in a rural area where I lived in for a while, there was a family or ne'er-do-wells notorious for fundraising almost every year for supposedly desperately-needed kidneys or livers.

It seems very unlikely a significant enough number of U.S. citizens are involuntarily going without medical care in the U.S. to the extent that the toll exceeds, per-capita, the excess deaths of citizens being forced to wait for medical care or given substandard care in socialized systems.

M Simon at Power and Control has the scoop, as usual. There is apparently confirmation from Dr. Bussard that the Navy is going to pick up his original contract and re-fund his efforts to produce a WB-7 demo model — and if the results are as expected, a full-scale power plant (approx $100-$200M), which is more than we'd dared hope. Confirmation and further details should follow shortly.

Tom Ligon says Bussard credits the grassroots campaign among bloggers, so thanks to everyone who followed this.

So now the race with Tri-Alpha to a working net-power IEC fusion machine (and perhaps a new era for humanity) begins. Should be a very exciting next few years.

I found this story of an embattled sex researcher fascinating. I honestly take no opinion on his theories, except to note that I've been saying for, oh, at least 10 or 15 years now that gay people who insist that homosexuality is genetic were going to face certain arguments that they didn't like sooner or later, and that this sort of argument was long-term damaging to the community.

I also note that it's just sort of assumed in the story in passing that people who associate with this researcher are afraid they'll lose their ability to get research grants. Which goes with something I've raised so many times, which is the complete charade that is our "anonymous peer review funding" system to dole out taxpayer funds in an opaque, croney-filled system. More people should be upset about it since it's so obviously a flawed and irresponsible way of spending public funds.

*Update*: The Wikipedia entry is indeed interesting.

When you're working to advance science, the appropriate response when someone finds an error in your data or calculations is contrition (best expressed by an openness to further scrutiny and re-evaluation), and perhaps gratitude that truth has been served. James Hansen, on the other hand... well, read for yourself:

The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important.

The real deal is this: the ‘royalty’ controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains’ disinformation campaigns.

Court jesters serve as a distraction, a distraction from usufruct. Usufruct is the matter that the captains wish to deny, the matter that they do not want their children to know about. They realize that if there is no ‘gorilla’, then usufruct is not an important issue for them. So, with the help of jesters, they deny the existence of the gorilla. There is no danger of melting the Arctic, of destabilizing the West Antarctic ice sheet, of increasing hydrologic extremes, more droughts and stronger forest fires on one hand and heavier downpours and floods on the other, threats to the fresh water supplies of huge numbers of people in different parts of the globe. “Whew! It is lucky that, as our jesters show, these are just imaginary concerns. We captains of industry can continue with business-as-usual, we do not need to face the tough problem of how to maintain profits without destroying our legacy in our children’s eyes.”

Hardly the model of dispassionate reason and logic; this is as polemic as anything written by Ann Coulter. I mean, really, calling your critics "jesters?"

I didn't know much about Hansen before this incident, but this does not inspire confidence in his work.

As has been noted before, if Hansen really cares about global warming as much as he claims, he needs to release all the GISS data and algorithms for public scrutiny. Someone reverse-engineered GISS' work to find this error, which as a programmer I can tell you is a very troubling harbinger, as it means it was fairly obvious. Maybe the rest of the GISS data is perfect, but sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Again, if global warming really matters to Hansen, he should be doing everything possible to ensure the integrity of the data and calculations his apocalyptic rhetoric is based on; that's the scientific method to dispel doubt, not calling your critics names when they find flaws in your work. As Glenn says, we'll believe this is a crisis when the people claiming it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.

in. your. face!

The Germans confused group velocity for velocity.

In the wake of the news that German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light, Glenn asks "Does quantum tunneling really violate special relativity?" I think the answer is yes. QM and relativity just don't get along very well.

There's an esoteric effect in relativity that demonstrates the problem with FTL information transfer. In Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene notes that according to relativity, a person ten billion light-years away can move centuries into your past or future simply by walking toward you or away from you, because the effect accumulates over distance. This isn't a problem for relativity, where nothing travels faster than light and no information can pass between the two that might violate causality. But enter quantum nonlocality, and now you have a problem. Your 10B-LY-distant friend could travel into your future by walking toward you, get some stock/lottery picks from your grandkids instantly via a nonlocality effect, walk away from you and give them to your grandparents.

I think eventually we will find relativity's treatment of time must be lacking in some respects, or that Warren Buffet has been doing this for years.

UPDATE: Okay, I found the passage I referenced above from Fabric of the Cosmos. It's on pages 134-139, and it says more or less exactly what I remembered: an observer at rest relative to us, 10 billion LY away, can travel into our past and future by walking towards and away from us. Brian gives the example of a Presidential election rather than stock picks, but it's the same concept. This means that if you can communicate with him instantaneously, as the Germans claim to have in their experiment, you can learn about your future and violate causality.

I don't believe causality can be violated, so as I said above I think this means relativity must be incomplete.

Since it seems to be Global Warming Day here at DW, I'll join the party and chime in as well.

There are essentially three assertions that warmenists need to prove to make the case that huge amounts of money need to be spent to prevent global warming (it's important to keep in mind that in the scientific method the bar for heretics/denialists is much lower; the null hypothesis does not bear the burden of proof).

1. Global temperatures are rising.

2. This global temperature rise is caused primarily by human activity.

3. Global warming will have profoundly negative consequences in a meaningful time frame (say, 100 years).

Even with the recent GISS embarassment and weak underlying data, the first is almost certainly true. The second is believed to be true by most scientists, though there are vocal dissenters who point to solar irradiance, other natural variability, and warmer periods in the Earth's past prior to homo sapiens' industrialization. The third assertion is the one that really doesn't prove out very well: sea levels are not expected to rise enough to seriously affect humanity (and recent ice core samples from Greenland indicate catastrophic flooding is even less likely than previously thought), and other putative negative consequences are offset by probable positive consequences (generally speaking, in human history warming has been overwhelmingly beneficial, allowing longer growing seasons, better hunting/foraging, less need for heating fuel, reduced misery, and more biodiversity).

The third assertion is also the focus of an increasing number of claims based on little or no scientific evidence, from the notion that global warming has created a plague of feral cats to the idea earthquakes and tsunamis or increased hurricane frequency are caused by climate change. This kind of alarmism distorts the debate and tends to discredit even the valid scientific arguments by assocation; warmenists need to be more careful in this regard and police their own if they want climate change to be taken seriously.

Finally, it has to be kept in mind that there exists both a large economic incentive and an ideological imperative for warmenists to prove their case, which should make any independent oberver wary of their claims. Money and politics rarely make for good science.

I am a skeptic.

For people who truly understand, a "skeptic" does not say "I think X is not true." A skeptic says, "I am not convinced about X, and I have some tough questions." Which, to me, has always been where science truly starts.

I'm often astonished how some people, especially some with college degrees in science, can't distinguish the difference.

Many of my friends and teachers who have been working scientists have told me a certain dirty fact: there are an awful lot of "scientists" who are nothing but bureaucrats and self-serving suckups and administrative button-counters and bottle-washers-- just like every other honest and admirable profession in the world.

(Repeat: Just like every other honest and admirable profession in the world.)

On global warming, my position has been the same for years:

1) It is undeniable that there is Climate Change.
2) It is virtually 100% certain that human beings are contributing to Climate Change.
3) It appears highly likely that there is a general warming trend in the world at the moment.
4) CO2 levels have clearly been increasing globally for decades.

So, given that I agree to all of that, what exactly am I "doubting" or "denying" or expressing "heresy" or whatever on? I await a succinct answer upon that.

In the meantime, what is not clear to me, and has not been clear to me for some time is:

1) The increase in CO2 levels is the primary cause of whatever warming trend we've seen recently. How sure are you? It's okay if you have some doubt. But how high is that doubt? 10%? 20%? 30%? What's your confidence interval?

2) Regardless of how certain you are, a separate question: is this truly the most important ecological question we face as a species and as a planet? Should this truly be our #1 priority, ecologically and in terms of our nation, our race, our species, or our planet?

I've been saying most of this pretty consistently for quite some years now. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that (aside from maybe a sarcastic or flip comment now and then) that I haven't changed my view on that in a decade.

For the record, I have read Al Gore's Earth in the Balance cover-to-cover, including all footnotes, and checked many of his references. Have you?

I've also read Rarchel Carson's Silent Spring, by the way. Have you read it, Mr. Self-righteous Liberal or Ms. All-Knowing Conservative? I even have the special edition where Al Gore wrote his own introduction to it somewhere in my library. I remember being as unimpressed with it as I was with Al Gore's incredibly self-serving, messianic political campaign movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which he quite transparently hoped would transport him to the Presidency in 2008 and still hopes will make him a viable candidate in 2012. (Which is just fine by the way, but let's not kid ourselves that this man is in any way smarter or more noble than, say, George Bush or Bill Clinton, because he isn't. Although he's still a way more honest and intelligent pseudo-documentarian propagandist than, say, a hatemonger like Michael Moore).

Indeed, for some time now I've been saying that if Al Gore and their supporters would just drop their destructive opposition to nuclear power, I would be willing to compromise and support some of their other proposals which I found dubious. All they have to do is stop demonizing nuclear power, which is the most environmentally friendly, greenhouse-gas-free form of power generation ever invented by humanity. Unfortunately, Al Gore still publicly refuses to do so.

And by the way, my own personal financial or personal stake in the nuclear power industry? 0.0%. It's just the most environmentally friendly and economically viable form of power generation humanity has ever created, and I still feel betrayed by "environmentalists" who demonize it.

Anyway, since you can't make this simple politics-free concession, Al & Co, I'm not on your side, and will instead continue to do my best to (A) educate people on why we appear to have been snookered by the ridiculous luddites who oppose nuclear power, and (B) continue to point out why everyday people should be skeptical of global warming scaremongers, especially those scaremongers who clearly derive their entire incomes and personal prestige from spreading that scaremongering.

And by the way, to you scientists who do this research? For pay? As part of your full-time jobs? From money that comes from taxpayers like me? You don't get to whine like wounded puppies when someone says, "uh, so, that money we gave you, did you do something valid with it? Or are you just rationalizing?"

As for me: "Denier?" "Heretic?" "Doubter?" Hey, pick whatever convenient label helps you ignore the substantive arguments raised here (and elsewhere, not just by me but by many others).

*Update*: By the way, as I've said many times before, I pretty much consider it a given that anyone reduced to using the word "denier" or "denialist" or "conspiracy" or claiming that only money drives skepticism automatically proves themselves intellectual lightweights not worthy of answering.

Weird but apparently true — and bad timing for some. When we called global warming "anthropogenic," I don't think we meant it was caused by programmers.

Of ccourse, this mostly just means the problem isn't as bad as thought; it doesn't affect the global averages by more than a few percent. But it does raise troubling questions about the accuracy of the underlying data, especially since people like James Hansen, who heads GISS, have a huge financial and career interest in having the numbers trend upward. A conflict of interest coupled with a lack of transparency is a recipe for abuse.

I hadn't realized the GISS temperature data underlying so many GW models was based on secret computer code and undisclosed correction methods. If they're serious about global warming as anything more than a vehicle for funding, they need to release all of this for public scrutiny. Now.

UPDATE: This is even worse than I thought. There's been a volunteer project to check out the network of temperature monitoring stations, to determine how reliable their measurements are. When problems like nearby air conditioner exhaust and lightbulbs next to thermometers were found, the response from the National Climatic Data Center was... to hide information about the stations locations so no one could check them. They later relented, but cancelled a project to validate the network.

This is so not how science is done.

I just got off the phone with Dr. Miklos down under. For some stupid reason, after over 2 years of correspondence, I'd somehow assumed he was Spaniard by descent, but it turns out he's a Hungarian. Silly me.

Still, he's semi-retired, and paid as a genetics consultant. He has no book to sell, no treatment plan to offer, no patent to sell, and no profit motive. I already knew all of that except the Hungarian part. I've always loved Hungarians since I met my first Hungarian, whose name was Atilla Nanay. I told George that if he was named Atilla Gabor rather that George Gabor, everybody would be afraid of him. He laughed heartily and said "Atilla Genghis would be even better, eh?"

George's list of peer-reviewed publications is longer than your right arm, stretching over the last 30 years. Just go ahead and check if you don't believe it. He's just in a position right now where he owes no allegiance to anyone, financially or otherwise. Indeed, as his recent email stated:

I am semi-retired, financially independent and enjoying a lifestyle that allows me to think, interact with whomsoever I wish, travel internationally and write without any pressures from academia, government or the corporate world.

I set up Secure Genetics nearly 10 years ago as a private consulting company so that I could think about data in my retirement and draw upon the expertise of people whose clinical and scientific expertise I valued.

It transpired that a number of firms, large and small, wished to, and continue to, use my insights into various problems with which they are faced, precisely because I have no axe to grind. I just evaluate data; scientific, clinical, statistical and corporate.

Secure Genetics has never applied for any grants, government or private, nor does it intend to do so. It is not a front for, nor does it endorse, any particular technologies, imaging or otherwise.

The article:

When one looks at the completed Miklos-Baird article and it's references, the only reference to an imaging technology for human cancer is reference 98 which is to Magnetic Resonance Imaging of lymph nodes of patients from the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School. I do not know any of the people involved. This is the type of imaging technology which the article highlights for metastatic cancer.

As far as BioTraces is concerned, it's a company whose technology I have been aware of for over a decade. It is a radioactive technology and cannot be used in cancer patients for in vivo imaging because of the properties of the multi photon detection characteristics. A look at the picture will reveal an image of a 2 dimensional format which any scientist or clinician would recognize. My current intellectual interests are in evaluating 2D protein gel data in the adult stem cell field in terms of cutting edge technologies. The Biotraces radioactive methodology is particularly suitable for this, hence the picture.

I have not received any payments from Biotraces, nor do I consult for them, nor do I help them apply for grants. I interact with them as I do with all my affiliates when I need advice in areas in which I am deficient.

The data I have evaluated for recent international clients have involved the diverse areas of renal dialysis; chemical fractionation technologies for immunoglobulins; single nucleotide polymorphisms potentially predisposing to myocardial infarction, stroke and atherosclerosis and finally, trade mark disputes involving pesticides.

I became interested in the cancer area as one that was a complete mess in terms of therapies that seemed to be doing little for patients and so I have slowly evaluated it over the last 5 years as a personal intellectual challenge, in combination with my friend Dr Phillip Baird who is both a physician and a pathologist of decades standing.

If the cynics wish to fly over to the northern beaches of Sydney to enjoy the idyllic surroundings and genuinely discuss cutting edge scientific and clinical aspects of cancer that may be of therapeutic benefit to patients, or any other of the diverse areas in which I have an interest, then they are most welcome to do so. Attached is a picture from my home office. They would then realize that the last thing one would wish to do is to bother interacting with granting agencies, private or governmental, or setting up imaging companies. Life's too short for that.

After talking to George, I made a single invitation: he and Dr. Baird should review all the comments left so far on Dean's World on this particular series, and respond on the front page to any comments they find particularly interesting or worthy of challenge. For example, commenter Elizabeth Reid left a couple of comments regarding a couple of their citations that deserve an answer. I am otherwise proud to have presented this series, and to have presented a simple question to American (and non-American) taxpayers and medical consumers:

Are we getting our money's worth out of what we've spent these last 30+ years?