Lindzen and Choi 2011: lots of improvements

I was preparing a short climate talk and I decided it was sensible to at least mildly study the newest paper by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi that will appear in Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences:

On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications (full text PDF)

I think it's a much more refreshing reading than the biased reactions at PNAS where the paper was previously submitted.

The authors have admitted several errors of their 2009 paper that were pointed out by subsequent papers and they believe that they have addressed them and the mistakes are fixed in the new 2011 paper.




The measured response of the energy fluxes at the top of the atmosphere to the changes of the sea surface temperature is still significantly larger than claimed by the IPCC and the climate sensitivity ends up being 0.7 °C. In fact, their 99-percent confidence interval is 0.5 - 1.3 °C. Imagine: they are 99 percent certain that the climate sensitivity can't exceed 1.3 °C. This is, of course, qualitatively incompatible with the IPCC whose lower bound is 2 °C.

Quite generally, I like the fact that their method uses lots of data point - a more detailed measurement of the responses to the atmospheres to many episodes of warming and cooling of the seas. This is the real source of their pretty impressive accuracy.

If the calculated sensitivity 0.7 °C were pretty much right, it would follow that one expects no warming by 2090 or so - when the CO2 will be twice the pre-industrial value - because a warming by 0.7 °C has already occurred so there's "nothing left", assuming for the sake of simplicity that all non-CO2 sources of warming average out over two centuries or so.

Feedback about the paper will be appreciated. It would be great if some TRF readers actually read the whole paper.

Will Solar Cycle 25 be annihilated?

PhysOrg.com and others are writing about a talk in New Mexico where solar physicists have hypothesized that the Solar Cycle 25 will be delayed or it won't occur at all.



The black region on the picture indicates the absence of activity near the Sun's poles. This activity should be occurring over there as a preparation for the Solar Cycle 25 expected to begin around 2020. Note that we entered Solar Cycle 24 a few years ago and a cycle lasts 11 years in average.




A missing jet stream and fading sunspots are among the other hints that the next cycle will be suppressed and we may enter a new Maunder-like minimum.



The butterfly diagram shows that the solar activity should be concentrated near the poles of the Sun at the beginning of the cycle, and then move closer to the equator.

Will it also mean a colder climate on Earth? Maybe. Well, I've been looking at those correlations and I wasn't impressed by the degree of correlation in recent years. So it's plausible that it will make some impact but I would tend to bet against a big impact.



Frozen Thames in 1677, in the middle of the Maunder minimum; the trends around 2020 would be more likely to resemble the middle of a milder Dalton minimum (1790-1830).

It seems very unlikely to me that the variable overall solar output itself is responsible for whole degrees of temperature change on the Earth; after all, it's changing at most by 0.1 percent which should correspond to a tenth of a degree only. If the solar activity makes a big difference, it's through the effects of the magnetic field on charged particles entering (or present in) the Earth's atmosphere, and or much bigger relative variations of the ultraviolet portion of the solar spectrum.

However, if you asked me whether it is reasonably likely that 2020 will be cooler than 2010 - well, my answer would surely be Yes, it is conceivable. The odds are about 50% that 2020 will be cooler than 2010. It's surely refreshing to see the media jumping on a new bandwagon - see the surprising headlines below - but I won't join them.

• Sun enters 'hibernation', cooling possible - Sydney Morning Herald, NineMSN
• What does the decline of sun spots mean for the Earth and its climate? - Alaska Dispatch
• A sun with no sun spots? What that could mean for Earth and its climate - Christian Science Monitor
• Solar forecast hints at a big chill - MSNBC blogs
• How a weather lull on the sun affects Earth - MSNBC

Lots of climate interpretations over there... Well, we will see.

See also NASA pages on Solar Cycle and SolarHam.com.

Rational thinking at Daily Kos

Anthony Watts has noticed a glimpse of a rational reasoning about the climate at one of the seemingly least likely places: one of the largest community servers dedicated to American communists and other extreme leftists, the Daily Kos. Their weatherdude has asked the community to

Stop saying everything is because of climate change. Just stop it.

The author actually realizes that there is no detectable trend in any of the extreme events and that claims that every latest unpleasant weather event is due to man-made climate change prove that the authors of these claims are dishonest fanatical biased jerks and crooks (he uses slightly different words, but the content is the same).

Among the 400+ comments, you surely find hardcore voices that "this diary is deeply troubling" but from a more general perspective, I feel that weatherdude will get away with this blasphemy against the far leftists' sacred cow. In fact, you will find many voices in the discussion that are even more skeptical than weatherdude.

Tornado CO2 propaganda

Warning: the video below is amazingly offensive.



It still got 95% of upvotes among the 1,000 votes from 50,000 viewers. An op-ed by Bill McKibben is being read and illustrated by a Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia.com.




Just imagine how hopeless psychopaths those viewers have to be to upvote this propagandistic garbage. It's just stunning.

There are tens of thousands of "types" of interesting or "extreme" or "rare" weather events that could occur at various places of the globe. If one estimates 2,000 of their types (those that are "noteworthy enough") - specified by "what's going on" and "which region of the world is affected" - it's totally obvious that roughly 2,000/100 = 20 of them will set "new records" every year simply because the record books only go back 100 years or so and statistics guarantees that new records have to be set. If you have 100 numbers, the probability that the last one is the largest one is 1/100 which is large enough to set many new records in many things every year.

What's important is that if you avoid this insane hype about every interesting weather event and look at all possible weather events statistically, there is not a glimpse of a significant trend. The number of tornadoes is not increasing. The number of hurricanes is not increasing. The same thing applies to floods, typhoons, droughts, and all other local phenomena of this kind. Those people won't ever admit that everything they have said in the previous years about entering an era without snow in winter, entering an era with Katrinas every year, and so on, and so on, have been pure, shitty, and malicious lies. They don't care. They don't want to care. They're immoral scum.

How stupid a person has to be if she is brainwashed by this totally idiotic emotional gibberish that is based on nothing else than lies and irrational fears. Not a single portion of the data justifies the alarm. Not a single of those local weather phenomena can be linked to CO2 emissions in any scientific way. CO2 may have contributed tenths of a degree to the increase of the global mean temperature - but it hasn't changed and cannot changed anything significant about the character of the local weather.

Individuals helping to promote this alarmist garbage are the enemies of the mankind, enemies of the truth, enemies of the civilization, enemies of science, enemies of progress, and enemies of the Earth. What I hate about them is that they are so hopeless. There doesn't seem to be an infinitesimal hope that these people could ever start to think rationally and honestly. What they want to do is to repeat their offensive lies frequently enough so that tons of amazingly stupid gullible people will eventually buy it, much like many Germans bought that all their problems were due to Jews - or any other equally disgusting propaganda that we know from the history textbooks.

Any discussion that fails to eliminate these nasty chronic liars and McKibbens is guaranteed to be hopeless. A sensible discussion with them is impossible. They can only be dealt with from the position of power.

Editors, reviewers, and bias

Richard Lindzen has informed me about some adventures he recently experienced while offering his new paper written together with Choi to PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While it's standard that 98% of the submissions over there get published, the people in charge of PNAS guaranteed that the likes of Gavin Schmidt would be the reviewers. With some additional not-quite-standard procedures, the Lindzen-Choi paper got rejected. So there exists some seemingly polite but inherently nasty correspondence that shows how it exactly happened.

I decided not to run a detailed story on this material because it seemed somewhat frustrating and personal to me (while not sufficiently "fiery") and I was sure that there would be people coming to the discussion - usually people who have no clue just opinions but sometimes semi-qualified people with their own interests - who would be saying "You see! Lindzen got what he deserved! That's how he should be treated. Peer review in action." and so on.

And I just didn't want Richard to be undergoing such things. Not just because of him - he can really withstand such things. But also because of others among us who find Richard's authority to be a helpful island of relative certainty, nostalgia over old-fashioned structure of the scientific community, and a beacon of hope that it will be restored in the world of climatology and other politically loaded disciplines sometime in the future - a world that is so messed up today.




Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts did run stories on the journal submission. The discussions confirmed my expectations. On Steve's blog, climatologist Andrew Dessler (together with Rattus Norvegicus which is just common rat in Latin, not the name of a big ancient thinker!) played the same role I expected. (He has publicly debated Lindzen in the past.) On Anthony's blog, this role was mainly played by an anonymous poster called KR.

When you look what was going on with the submission, you can have no doubts that Lindzen and Choi have received a "special treatment". First, it's normal for the PNAS authors to choose their reviewers. Obviously, this policy can't produce a full-fledged peer review. However, it's being used in a big majority of other submissions to PNAS.

Will Happer of Princeton was classified as incompetent while Chou was rejected because he has "recently" had a paper with Lindzen that was written 7 years ago. In particular cases, if you had more appropriate names, you could agree that those choices were problematic. However, if you know what's going on, they're just very reasonable choices.

Will Happer has written lots of papers on physical topics that are "advanced versions" of the physics needed for the greenhouse effect. He has vigorously studied the absorption and emission of infrared radiation and visible light. His most cited paper on optical pumping has over 1,000 citations which - together with lots of other influential papers - makes him an order of magnitude more successful a research than mediocre scientists such as Andrew Dessler. Happer has actually studied fluid dynamics, too.

Still, Andrew Dessler finds it appropriate to call Happer "incompetent". Where did the arrogance of mediocre scientists in a fringe subfield of physics that has always been attracting the least talented students of physics - who differ from other physicists by their knowing almost nothing about physics in general, besides the narrow-minded and distorted questions about the climate - obtain so much self-confidence to talk in this way about scientists who are 10 times better scientists than the likes of Dessler?

Now, Chou (not to be confused with Choi) is surely competent when it comes to the very detailed content of the paper - energy fluxes in the atmosphere, and so on. It's clear why they didn't like it even though his "detachment" from Richard has safely exceeded those 4 years that PNAS requires.

What the editors and others wrote to Richard and how they decided could make sense in isolation. But if you try to think how other papers get in, you can have no doubts that the authors are being treated differently depending on how "convenient" the message of their paper - and their own personal message - is.

In particular, alarmist climatologists are uniformly working on the same, extremely narrow phenomenon of the CO2 greenhouse effect that is just being "perturbed" by everything else you may see in the climate. From this viewpoint, if you use the same standards as PNAS would like to use for Chou, no alarmist climatologist should be allowed to review another alarmist's paper.

Obviously, alarmists are happily reviewing papers written by other alarmists all the time. Not only that: the agreement about the "underlying questions" between them isn't presented as a clash of interests - like in the case of Chou - but rather as a striking case of the scientific consensus that makes the science settled and that should make you piss in your pants because the doomsday is coming.

How blinded one has to be if he doesn't see that double standards are being applied to the interpretation of the "broader agreement" between several climate alarmists; and the interpretation of the "broader agreement" between several climate realists? In the former case, the broader agreement is viewed as a totally positive thing; in the latter case, it's the other way around. Review process based on such distorted standards simply cannot be impartial.

What I find frustrating is that there's clearly no solution that would use the same set of climate scientists that exists today. You rearrange the capabilities between the editors and reviewers in some "ingenious" way and you will obtain the same bad results. The climatology community is clearly screwed these days. Whatever rules you will impose, it will ultimately be the case that the dishonest and deluded majority will be heard and will be able to strengthen their position further, by increasing rejections of the papers and the people who don't pay lip service to the party line.

Climate science cannot be fixed unless those roughly 90% of the people who got into it in order to promote the climate alarm will be fired. They have to be fired. There is no other way to avoid systematic ideological harassment of fair scientists in the future.

Undoubtedly, the editors of journals have some power. When I was in the Academia, I would review something like 50 papers and I rejected about 1/2 of them. In some cases, I could guess - although I was never quite certain certain - that the editor just didn't like a paper so he chose a reviewer who was likely to reject the paper. It's not surprising that people who know their work and opinions a little bit may predict whether the other person will like a given paper or not.

Of course, in the case of your humble correspondent as a reviewer, there's no problem because your humble correspondent is the 100% symbol of objectivity and impartiality - so any editor who has ever sent me a paper did the most legitimate and objective thing that he could have done. ;-)

However, there are many other potential reviewers who are not as impartial. And my experience has been enough to know that even in fields such as the climate science that really suck, the editor has the power to determine the outcome of the peer review process. So whether the editor is competent and impartial matters.

Someone may worship the peer review process but it is never perfect and it may be extremely far from perfect and even counterproductive, especially if most of the peers just suck and if the editors have too much power in cherry-picking the reviewers, while the editors sometimes suck even more so than the reviewers. ;-)

Climatology has entered a vicious cycle because the percentage of dishonest and fanatical members of the climatological community has exceeded a certain critical mass. Above this critical mass, the mechanisms guarantee that what the research is converging to is not the truth as reflected by the empirical evidence but rather the perfect partisanship and universal parroting of the Gore-style lies about a coming judgement day.

Many people don't like comparisons with the Nazis but I think that they're very important and revealing. Moreover, I think that despite a rather powerful chancellor, Aryan Physics in Nazi Germany has never become so capable of suppressing its "contrarians" as the modern Alarmist Climatology. The same is true about various distortions of natural science that communism wanted to impose.

Aryan Physics was seemingly perfectly politically correct. There were German physicists who wanted to become the "leaders" of a "clean" way of doing physics. However, the Nazi party never gave them as much support as they needed. Moreover, the other genuine physicists just couldn't give a damn.

In particular, take Werner Heisenberg, a great hero of quantum mechanics. He was unquestionably a German patriot and he peacefully supported many goals that became associated with NSDAP. These facts reflected his personality that had nothing to do with science. But of course, he wouldn't be stupid to refuse relativity just because it was discovered by a Jew and his leader didn't like the Jews!

Obviously, Werner Heisenberg - and others - continued to work with relativity and other things that were found by the Jews, as well as others. In 1937, Heisenberg got labeled a "White Jew" in the SS's weekly, The Black Corps. Nice: that was probably meant to be the biggest offense at those times. But it didn't really hurt him. Everyone still knew that he was a genuine German patriot and a top scientist at the same moment. So it was natural to assign him the task to build the German nuclear bomb - as a theorist, he fortunately failed miserably in this task. ;-)

The secret to the failure of Aryan Physics was the actual absence of important interactions between the scientific results and the politicians' goals. If relativity had been found by a physicist of the Nordic race who loved Hitler, relativity would have been totally fine for the German leaders. In some sense, the same thing holds for Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. If the Lysenkoist agriculture were invented by the capitalists, it could have been dismissed by the Soviet leaders just like proper genetics was.

However, the climate alarm is different. The very outcomes of this "science" - and not only the random historical questions about the identity of the discoverers - are important for the politicians (and other people). The more alarm there is, the more powerful and richer they will become. This correlation is greatly distorting the otherwise "color-blind" and impartial processes within the scientific community and above the critical mass, the personal, political, and ideological interests become the main driving force of the research.

That's why I would give up if I were expected to write papers interfering with sensitive questions about the climate. You're brave if you're ready to struggle with 10 times bigger obstacles than your alarmist colleagues who are not really as good as you are. But does it really have a purpose? Aren't you fighting wind mills? This mess in the climate science has been engineered from the "top", so I am kind of sure that it has to be fixed from the "top" as well.

Shoot camels to earn carbon credits

Bloomberg, dozens of other outlets and my fellow gangster in Mafia Wars :-) Darcy Nelson have informed your humble correspondent that Australia is planning to shoot a portion of its 1.2 million camels.

Whoever manages to do it will receive carbon credits. And you know, carbon credits are the most valuable thing you can get in your life - they're tickets to get 72 virgins in the heaven, among many other things.



These guys just earned their carbon credits for the vacations including flights into long-haul destinations.

Why? Because they're farting. Every year, they release 45 kg of methane in average which has the same greenhouse potential as 1 ton of CO2 which costs 18 euros or so in indulgences. So they want to kill a camel because of 18 euros. According to the IPCC figures, complete extermination of 1.2 million camels in Australia will cool the globe by 0.00001 °C (mean value).



Your humble correspondent "driving" a camel a decade ago.

The animals live for 50 years so and a typical adult killed camel may live for 20 extra years - so you "save" 360 euros in fraudulent indulgences by killing the poor animal. Meanwhile, you may have failed to notice that the animal is actually more expensive than that.




This proposal is being advocated and prepared by the people who are not just lunatics and mass killers: one of them, Mark Dreyfus, is the Australian government's parliamentary secretary for climate change so he will make sure that the Australian Parliament will discuss the proposal. In some sense, Dreyfus is Australia's most important specialized carbon tax bureaucrat.

Camels are unpopular among some Australians because much like the white humans, they were introduced to the continent in recent centuries. And they're farting, as I mentioned. However, it seems to me that camels are not the only mammals who are farting.



Click to zoom in.

On this picture - that I originally received from Peter F. - you see an average member of a family of honorary Australian citizens, Mr Philip, whose motion is optimized to streamline and increase the release of the greenhouse gases and many other gases. Mr Philip is celebrating 90th birthday these days so this is an excellent opportunity to say: Congratulations!

You see that Ms Anne (thanks, Abbas!) and Mr Charles could immediately identify the source of the carbon pollution. So could the boy, Harry, who is too young and doesn't have the carbon sequestering devices installed in his nose yet. So his reaction was a bit extreme.

Ms Elizabeth, following the rules of the royal etiquette and building upon her unquestionably extensive experience in the subject, is only trying to improve the atmosphere around her nose by a few percent by moving the nose 9 centimeters to the right and by closing her eyes which slightly reduces her need of oxygen (with the extra diverse flavors added in it).

Will Philip be the next one to be shot after the camels? Instead, wouldn't it be more appropriate for the fanatical inhuman farting alarmist jerks to shoot themselves? Instead of doing so, they're proposing to kill millions of animals and triple or quadruple gas prices.

Suing a few billion people for their homicide of the climate

Hockey Schtick has pointed out an amazing new article about "Climate Change in Court" in Nature Climate Change:

... To have a reasonable chance of keeping global temperature rise to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, the German Advisory Council on Global Change has calculated that the annual emissions budget, divided equally among the world's people, works out as 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per capita to 2050 (ref. 2). The number of people who at present produce more than this, and so could technically be in breach of their duty of care to the climate, runs to the billions - concentrated mainly in North America, Australia, and Europe, but also in China and other large developing nations. Kysar said: "No one wants to see Grandma held responsible for climate change harms because she drove to church on Sunday when she could have walked, even if her weekly devotion puts her above an annual emissions budget."

These days, these breathtaking kooks are publishing their "theories" under the "Nature" trademark. Well, so far, I live in a country in which it is the duty of the laws of Nature, and not ours, to be responsible for the climate.

By the way, you could think that the sequence of words "to have a reasonable chance of keeping global temperature rise" below 2 degrees is sufficiently contrived that it had to appear, in this form, in Nature Climate Change for the first time. Well, you could be wrong. A 2007 Greenpeace document contains the very same sequence. This is clearly a mode of thinking (more precisely, of lack of thinking) that has spread like a virus among the green people.

RSS AMSU: all cooling and warming trends through May 2011

There is still a lot of confusion and misinformation concerning the question whether there has been a cooling trend or a warming trend between some moment XY and the most recent months.

To lift the confusion, I (and Wolfram Mathematica 7.0.1) have calculated 3500 linear regressions and the result is offered to you in this truly tall PDF file:

RSS AMSU trends in °C per century

The file above allows you to pick any month between January 1979 and April 2011 as the starting month. The last month is May 2011. The table offers you all trends - calculated accurately - expressed in Celsius degrees per century. The line for May 2011 contains the actual most recent temperature anomalies.




In the table, you find not only the trends of the global temperature but also the trends of the regional temperatures observed by RSS AMSU, a satellite team. Apologies that I picked RSS - Roy Spencer et al. are doing a great job but I just want to avoid possible accusations that I have picked the skeptics and the most cooling dataset etc.

Let me just select two lines among the nearly 400 lines that the table offers you. The warming or cooling trends between January 1979 and May 2011 have been

• +1.43 °C / century: globally
• +1.32 °C / century: tropics
• +2.23 °C / century: North extratropics
• +0.69 °C / century: South extratropics
• +3.40 °C / century: Arctic
• -0.19 °C / century: Antarctica
• +1.63 °C / century: contin. USA
• +1.90 °C / century: North Hemisphere
• +0.93 °C / century: South Hemisphere

You see it's been mostly warming in the 31+-year period. However, let's write the same numbers with January 2001 - the beginning of the new century - as the initial month. Note that we're not trying to include the El Nino year 1998: instead, we just pick the most natural beginning of the centtury. It's been more than 10 years and the linear regression in this period gives us:

• -0.40 °C / century: globally
• -1.16 °C / century: tropics
• +0.22 °C / century: North extratropics
• -0.19 °C / century: South extratropics
• +3.83 °C / century: Arctic
• -1.27 °C / century: Antarctica
• -4.84 °C / century: contin. USA
• -0.23 °C / century: North Hemisphere
• -0.58 °C / century: South Hemisphere

These are decidedly different numbers! The globe has been slightly cooling since January 2001 although the trend has been less than half a degree per century. The tropics saw more than one degree of cooling per century. The Arctic has seen a significant continued warming by four degrees per century, the Antarctica experienced a cooling by a degree per century.

The biggest figure (when it comes to the absolute value) that you may see anywhere in the tables above is the trend since 2001 in the United States of America. The U.S. has been cooling by nearly 5 Celsius degrees per century since 2001. The global trend stays negative if you pick any month of 2001, 2002, or 2003 (except for December 2003) as the initial month. Quite generally, negative and positive trends are pretty much equally represented in the recent part of the table.

Obviously, you can't or you shouldn't extrapolate any of the figures. The shorter periods we investigate, the bigger trends we typically obtain. For example, the global cooling trend since May 2010 has been cooling by sixty degrees Celsius. ;-) But even when you look at the 31+-year trends, they show a huge variability. The "same" portions of the Northern and Southern Hemisphere display very different warming or cooling trends which imply that the (inevitable) changes are not "global" in any nontrivial sense.

Code:

midTroposphere = False; (* True/False *)

whereString = If[midTroposphere, "TMT", "TLT"];
a = Import[
"http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_\
AMSU_Channel_" <> whereString <>
"_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_3.txt", "Table"]; Length[a]

labels = {"year", "month", "-70/ +82.5", "-20/ +20.0", "+20.0/ +82.5", "-70/ -20.0", "+60.0/ +82.5", "-70/ -60.0", "Cont. USA",
"0.0/ +82.5", "-70/ 0.0"}

b = a[[4 ;;]]; bwith = Prepend[b, labels]; Grid[bwith, Frame -> All]

(* Linear trends in bwith *)

LMfit[v_] :=
LinearModelFit[Transpose[{Table[i, {i, 1, Length[v]}], v}], x, x];

howmanyrows = Length[bwith] - 1
btrendsPREP = Table[
Round[1200 * D[Normal[LMfit[bwith[[m ;; howmanyrows + 1, column]]]], x], 0.01] , {m, 2, howmanyrows}, {column, 3, 11}];
btrends = bwith;
btrends[[2 ;; howmanyrows, 3 ;; 11]] = btrendsPREP;

Grid[btrends, Frame -> All]

EU: forest density doubled since 1945

Daily Mail posted an article about the natural reforestation of the world:

Forget deforestation: The world's woodland is getting denser and change could help combat climate change

According to a study by Aapo Rautiainen, Pekka Kauppi, and others from University of Helsinski and the New York Rockefeller University, the forest density has started to grow in Western Europe after the war and it doubled between 1945 and now. A little later, this process has also spread to North America and, even more recently, to East Asia and perhaps South America.




There are quite many lessons to learn here. First, humans have become capable to significantly engineer the character of their environment because much of the increase of the European forest density was man-made.

Second, there is a clear spontaneous component of the growth, too. Nature just likes the improved environment - which includes higher levels of CO2 - and it benefits from it.

Third, things such as the forest growth are much more important for the character of our environment than a few degrees of temperature change in one direction or the other. Even if you care about the temperature and you want a lower one (which is unlikely), a forest typically reduces the average temperatures inside by 2 degrees Celsius or so.

If we managed to increase CO2 from 391 ppm today to something like 1500 ppm (which is unfortunately unlikely), it may be estimated that the biomass growth per unit area would approximately double for all plants - relatively to today. This could feed a much higher number of people and do many other good things. But one must be careful: the CO2 only stays in the atmosphere for a few centuries so the natural contributions to the quality of agriculture could start to deteriorate and billions (or tens of billions?) of people could be suddenly starving if people didn't manage to compensate the loss of CO2.

At any rate, it's obvious that in the long run, and maybe even in the medium run, people should think about the ways how to make and keep the CO2 in the atmosphere elevated - as high as possible. This is a real long-term survival goal that researchers should investigate. The virtues of a higher CO2 are completely indisputable.

The previous paragraph may sound nearly funny given the constant brainwashing by the media about the need to reduce CO2 emissions. But it's not quite funny. Imagine, just for the sake of it, that we stop emitting all CO2 today. The CO2 concentration will then be decreasing by roughly 2 ppm every year. From 390 ppm today, we would get to 300 ppm in 50+ years or so (the rate of decrease will drop when we're closer to 280 ppm). However, such a drop of CO2 by 30% or so will reduce the amount of plant food we may grow by 15% or so (a square root relationship) which could mean that if no big increases in the efficiency of agriculture (or the area of arable land) are made, 15% of the population - one billion people - may starve to death, to reduce the population by 15% as well and to restore the balance. I assure you that the relatively abrupt reduction of food supply by 15% would be orders of magnitude more serious a problem than a few degrees of warming or cooling or whatever is fashionable among the people who are unable to think.

By the way, one trivial realization: it's known that plants of the known species stop growing when the CO2 concentration drops below 150 ppm or so. I was always intrigued that it was so close to the 180 ppm minimum concentration during the ice ages. Where did the coincidence come from?

But of course, it is not a coincidence! And many of you have probably always realized that it is not. The explanation is "anthropic": the plant species that couldn't survive an occasional dip below 180 ppm have gone extinct. On the other hand, because the concentration has never dropped below 150 ppm for extended periods of time in recent millions of years (and probably since the birth of our planet), the species that can tolerate as low concentrations as 150+ ppm were allowed to survive.

Finally, it's just sad that the propagandistic garbage about the "fight against climate change" is being added even to articles that are about much more important topics that have nothing to do with "climate change" per se.

AGW: brainwashed Australian politicians eager to start a diplomatic cold war with Czechia

Czech president Václav Klaus will celebrate his 70th birthday in two weeks. If you need some contacts to the Prague Castle where he works, for example because you wanted to send a gift, here they are.

(The photograph is genuine, not edited. Klaus wanted to provide the people with some data to decide whether he and Santa Claus are the same person.)

Our leader, a well-known climate skeptic, has previously recommended Australian prime minister Julia Gillard to listen to the true climate change experts who live in her country, e.g. Bob Carter in particular.

The Australian and Monsters and Critics have already figured out what her reaction will be. Dear Australian readers, your prime minister won't meet our president after he completes his 16,000-kilometer flight! Her obsession with the global warming hoax is so intense that she is going to put the Australian-Czech relationships at risk.

(But calculate how many pounds of CO2 will be emitted by the aircraft - and no results!)




And she is not the only one in the land of kangaroos. Even though, with all due respect, Australia probably doesn't have any politician of Klaus' caliber, they will obey what the group think requires. And when it comes to questions such as the hypothetical global warming threat, the group think is controlling much of the Australian nation. Gold Coast Mail have reported that global warming skeptics are an endangered species in Australia, perhaps more so than the polar bears (in Australia). ;-)

Unlike polar bears, the global warming skeptics won't make the Australian politically correct activists abandon their wealth and jobs in order to save the species a from extinction: after all, it's just a human species so why should they care? Humans are just a waste so their species may go extinct, right? Only brave Australian citizens may openly admit the obvious - that they would like to meet Klaus themselves.

The article in the Australian above has also quoted your humble correspondent's translation of a noted statement by Klaus (from a 2007 interview) in which he explains why politicians are afraid to say what they really think about the global warming: it's because the whip of political correctness strangles their voices. Well, some of them have already become genuine global warming proponents because the whip of political correctness has stopped the inflow of fresh blood into their brains.

Andrew Bolt explains why he thinks that Gillard is terrified by the idea that she would meet Klaus.

Things are very different in Czechia where only 28 percent of the population think that global warming is a problem worth talking about. While President Klaus is special - and deviates from the average - in many respects, usually in the direction that may be interpreted as "up" :-), basic attitudes such as the global warming skepticism are actually echoed by the bulk of our society.

But should one admit that people have different opinions that should be confronted before the direction of the society and the conditions of the citizens' co-existence is re-adjusted? I think that Klaus himself would never create tension with another problem-free country just because he disagrees with their leader about something. After all, if it were the case, he would probably never meet (almost) any foreign politician. ;-) But of course, Klaus enjoys meetings with Obama and many others who can't exactly be classified as Klaus' natural ideological soulmates. Because almost all of my countrymates think that he is doing a great job in these "formal" parts of his job, but also because of other reasons, his approval rate remains high.

What the Australian politicians are doing is wrong, wrong, and wrong, and it constitutes some indirect evidence that Australia is gradually ceasing to be a free democratic society. It is a society where politicians and citizens are expected to pay lip service to any myth that becomes fashionable at a given moment, otherwise they face troubles that makes their lives measurably constrained and they are being threatened with extinction. In this sense, I think that the unpopular comparison with Germany of the mid 1930s is completely legitimate and important. Climate non-conformist recalls some other brutal stories about "how they don't really like us".

The speech codes are being imposed publicly. In anonymous polls, things are less obvious. For example, 3/4 of the Australians realize that Gillard's carbon tax would reduce their living standards. However, a slight majority thinks that the Australian carbon tax would have some impact on the environment. Well, about a few millidegrees of cooling per century - while it's unclear whether it's a good or bad thing even in Australia.

Interview: Is climate change caused by solar inertial motion?

The questions were asked by Mr Vítězslav Kremlík M.A., a historian and a blogger at klimaskeptik.cz; see original URL

An interview with Ing. Ivanka Charvátová, CSc. from the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague). The story of one politically incorrect scientific discovery.

(Translation of the original Czech interview published at Osel.cz in May 2011 - link - also by V. Kremlík)



Motion of the barycenter of solar system relative to the Sun.

Your field of study in the Geophysical Institute is solar inertial motion (SIM). Could you explain what it is?

It is a movement of the Sun around the barycentre (centre of gravity) of our solar system. This motion is due to the varying position of the planets, especially the giant planets.

Already Sir Isaac Newton in his PRINCIPIA (1687) intuitively came to the following conclusion: “… since that centre of gravity (centre of mass of the solar system) is continually at rest, the Sun, according to the various positions of the planets, must continually move every day, but will never recede far from that centre.” This effect is not insignificant. The Sun moves across an area the size of 4.3 solar radiuses, i.e. 0.02 AU or 3.106 km. As a coincidence, the average solar speed is around 50 km/hr. Just like the speed of a car driving downtown. The first study about SIM was written by P.D. Jose in year 1965.

You are the author of quite a breakthrough in this field of study. What is it?

First I studied the SIM periodicity and in 1987 I came to survey the geometry of this motion. I discovered the solar motion can be classified into two elementary types. Motion along a trefoil-like trajectory governed by the Jupiter-Saturn order. And another motion type which is chaotic. This gave us a precise homogeneous basis, upon which it became possible to study the solar-terrestrial and climatic variability. You may find it comforting that no matter how the Sun wiggles, every 179 years it comes back to a regular trefoil path. It is important to note, that the periods of chaotic motion coincide with the long-term minima in solar activity such as the Wolf Minimum (1270-1350), Spörer Minimum (~1430-1520), Maunder Minimum (~1620-1710) or Dalton Minimum (~1790-1840). During the trefoil periods the ST-phenomena are stable – the sunspot cycles are 10 years long, volcanic activity is muted and in the middle of the trefoil period there is a temperature maximum down here on Earth.




Later I discovered also a 2402 year long cycle of solar motion. After the lapse of this period the Sun always enters a segment, when for almost 370 years it moves continuously along the trefoil trajectory. This is when the natural conditions are stable, there is a long-term thermal maximum. The latest symmetry of the motion trefoils was around 25 AD. The NASA scientists called this 2402 yr cycle as “Charvatova Cycle”. The prospective solar motion can be calculated in advance (celestial mechanics), which gave us brand new solar-predictive capabilities. So far our predictions exploit the observation that the same solar motion trajectory tends to generate similar phenomena. (I was the only one in the whole world who got the 23rd sunspot cycle prediction right). The physical mechanism is not known yet.



Figure 1: The trajectory of the Sun centre divided into two basic motion types: trefoil trajectory according to JS-ordering (top) and disordered (chaotic) (bottom). The Sun returns to a trefoil trajectory, which always lasts for 50 years, once every 179 years. The chaotic segments correspond to long-term minima of solar activity (see above). The dark yellow circles in the top images represent the Sun.

What made you study solar motion?

In the 1980s the director of our institute was academic Václav Bucha. At some conference abroad he met the renowned American geologist and climatologist Rhodes W. Fairbridge, who was currently studying solar motion along with J.H. Shirley from JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), NASA, Pasadena. Mr. Bucha could smell important topics miles away, so we decided to research this too.

Did the world notice your discovery?

Even before my major discovery came, Prof R.W.Fairbridge contacted me after I published an article about SIM periodicity in Paris. It was published under my former name Jakubcová. He and J.H.Shirley published an article in Solar Physics at the very same time. R.W.Fairbridge wrote me a very friendly letter of praise. There was a communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia in that time, so any post coming from the Capitalist West was inspected by censorship. Surely you can imagine what a fuss there was about this letter. Not only it had NASA on the envelope, but on top of that Prof Fairbridge mentioned in the letter, that he knew Prague because he had been here in 1968 during the Prague Spring at some Geology Conference. And he mentioned to have seen the “eastern visitors”, the tanks of the occupants invading Czechoslovakia. He and Jim Shirley were so excited at my trefoils that when they edited the Encyclopaedia of Planetary Sciences in the early 1990s they invited me to write the main article on “Solar Motion” there. I was the only author from the whole Eastern Block in that very Encyclopaedia. And I was the most cited one.

Did you two meet in person?

No, we did not. But we maintained very lively correspondence. He used to send me articles that were not available in my country. He also invited me to write an article to the Proceedings published on the occasion of his 80th birthday anniversary (published in the Journal of Coastal Research.)

Another well known researcher who studied solar motion is Theodor Landscheidt. Do you know each other?

We do not and I believe he is not alive any more. We agree that in the first half of the 21st century the solar activity might be lower and even the temperatures might go down. But he does not cite me and I cite only one of his studies.

Apparently there are lots of scientists who explain climate change by other factors, not merely by CO2. However in the Czech Republic, where you live, most people know only one climate sceptic. Your president Václav Klaus.

Oh my. I would rather not comment on that. I only browsed through his book “Blue Planet in Green Chains” in the bookshop.

There are many climate sceptics in the world, they have their organisations, especially at the American or Canadian universities. Many professors of theirs have contacted me. For instance Prof. O. Manuel, the former chief researcher of the Apollo project. They even published a book “Slying the Sky Dragon“, where they document the scandals of the climate change research and thus also the uncertainties in the temperature measurements of the last 40 years or so.

The UN climate panel (IPCC), which is so harshly criticised by your president Klaus, has had lots of scandals lately. Have you heard about Climategate?

Of course. The director of CRU (Climatic Research Unit) P.D. Jones had to step down.

What does the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4 2007) say about solar motion?

Nothing at all. They are allergic to SIM. Their whole research fails to consider the solar-terrestrial phenomena (solar, geomagnetic, volcanic activity etc.) and they take into account only temperatures since 1860. However in Europe we have a number of continuous instrumental temperature data sets dating back to mid 18th century. The Jesuits started the measurements. With my colleague we processed these data and we showed their relation to solar motion and published an article on it in the Climatic Change journal, Stanford University. In mid 18th century the temperature was as high as in 1940 (both in the middle of a trefoil). But was there any industry, air pollution? No. They even fail to take into account the climate reconstructions (temperatures, proxy data) derived from tree-ring width 18O or 10Be isotopes in ice cores etc., though they are already available for periods deep in the past and are of good quality at least for the Holocene period.

But how do they explain why every 180 years there is a long-term temperature maximum? How do they explain the significant temperature maximum around 1000 AD, when even Greenland was settled? How do they explain the long-term minima?


They don’t. They pretend it did not happen.

Explaining climate change by other factors, not only by greenhouse gases, it is almost a heresy in our times. Were you aware of this when you discovered the trefoils of yours?

In 1987 when I realised there are trefoils in the solar motion (note: there are trefoil symbols in the gothic cathedrals too), I shivered. I realised immediately, that it is connected with almost everything, that nobody was going to do the work unless I do and that I would have to face unbelievable enmities. I raised my hands to the sky and I almost cried: “Why me?!” On top of that, it was exactly 300 years after Sir Isaac Newton, in his PRINCIPIA, formulated his intuitive conclusion about solar motion.

You are from a Christian family. Did you face any persecution under the communist regime?

My maiden name is Kryšpínová. The brother of my grandfather, a school headmaster, was a famous constructor of steam locomotives and he even became a director of the ČKD company. Unfortunately, we lived in the same house as the family of powerful communist bureaucrats. The mother of Vasil Mohorita was an influential Communist Party secretary in Prague 7. When I was finishing my elementary school, she rang a bell in our place and she yelled at me that a relative of the bourgeoisie ČKD director would never be allowed to study at any secondary school! Times changed, today my uncle Vojta is in the textbooks of the Transport Faculty of the Prague Technical University (ČVUT) as a constructor of world fame. He even has a street named after him, he has his stamps etc.

How did you solve it?

My uncle Vojta advised my parents to send me to the other grandparents to Jilemnice, at the foot of the Krkonoše Mountains. My grandfather was an engraver who printed cloths, almost worker class, so we though this might be acceptable to the communists. It worked, I even had the support of the grammar school headmaster in advance. It was a fine school. It had great teachers, including some scientists who were expelled there from universities for political reasons. This school was established as early as in 1909 when my country was part of the Austrian Empire and it was one of the few secondary schools where lectures were in the Czech language. Many Czech artists studied there such as the song writer Jiří Šlitr, actor Stanislav Zindulka, photograph Zdenko Fejfar or the director Karel Palouš. It is unbelievable, that now some madman wants to close this great school. Only Hitler was so insolent to do that. There are protests, demonstrations, so far in vain.

Yet the communist regime let you study at a university

I went to ČVUT (Czech Technical College), the Faculty of Civil Engineering, since my father was a civil engineer. The communists did not censor technical fields so much. I did not enjoy the first grades much, meliorations, road construction, surveyor work, but in the higher grades we could specialise – higher maths, (early) computers, cartography and others. I chose astronomy. In the building of the old Technical College at Karlovo Square, the magnificent Prof. Emil Buchar chaired the “Institute for Astronomy and Elementary Geophysics”. He always took only a couple of students. I was the first woman among them. This autumn it is the 110th anniversary of his birth.

You work at the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. How did you get here?

The end of my studies was coming soon, when suddenly one day, late at night, the telephone rang. Prof Buchar called that the next day I was to go to the Geophysical Institute at 9 AM for an interview. He informed me he had already registered me. So I went there and I passed. I have been working here ever since.

Aren’t you sorry that after 20 years SIM is still not in the elementary school textbooks? That climate changes are still explained only by CO2, as if climate was influenced by no other factors whatsoever?

Publishing of my (our) articles has always been a bad dream. Some editors rejected our article without review, saying their readers would surely not be interested. Another editor told me, that they would not allow having anything about SIM published in their magazine! I even received a “peer review” consisting of a single sentence: “All articles about solar motion should be banned!” In spite of all these enmities, we succeeded to have articles about SIM and ST-relationship published in renowned world journals with high impact factor (e.g. New Astronomy (Harvard University, IF 2.2), Surveys in Geophysics (IF 3.1) or Climatic Change (Stanford University, IF 4.)

And my results are in the prestigious textbook of physics for American universities – “Fundamentals of Physics“.

What welcome did solar motion research get among the scientists in your country?

The enlightened ones, and they are many, support it and help me a lot. The others use this topic for target practice. I was sorry to hear dr. Grygar, Czech astronomer and member of the Czech branch of CSI, compares SIM to some astrology. I wonder when he will grow tired of doing that. And our climatologists? I represent our institute in the Czech National Climate Programme. These people “research” only greenhouse effect vs temperatures. I call them “heaters”. Sometimes I feel like a lone Hussite warrior – myself against all. They deny the existence of solar influence on climate let alone the influence of the whole solar system. Most of them refuse to talk to me, most of them even do not say hello, when we meet. Even now when many world journals publish articles about the influence of the Sun on climate. Probably this requires more time. Many discoveries had to wait, some very long. I do not waste my time fighting windmills. God will sort it out when the right time comes.

And what about the Czech media? What is their attitude to solar motion? Has there been any documentaries on TV about this?

Some two years ago people from the ČT2 television channel came to me and we filmed a half an hour interview for some TV magazine. I was sceptical. Will you really broadcast it? Sure, it’s already in the TV Guide. And then, some 2 hours before the broadcast, some powerful person called them and banned the broadcast.

My only media “presentation” was when I was invited to an entertainment TV contest on the PRIMA TV channel (The “Guess Who I Am” programme). It was fun and I used the opportunity to sneak a short description of the trefoils and solar motion into my speech.

But your work is known and cited abroad

It is. I am very cited in both Americas, Canada, I am cited by the Germans, Italians, Australians, Scandinavians, recently even by the Chinese. I am cited even in other fields of study, for instance in the journals Nuclear Physics, Neutron Repulsion Journal ... In 2009 as part of the European Geophysical Union congress there was a Great Panel on Sun and Climate. I had an invited talk there. And I had another invited talk at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Brazil 2010.

I hear you are cited also by the scientists who study exoplanets? How is it related?

Yes, I am cited by the Germans, the astronomers from the Heidelberg University. I suggested that we might expect barycentric motion in the stars, which manifest variable irradiance. Which means such stars probably have planets. I wrote this for CTS (Centre of Theoretical Studies) in year 1995, when no exoplanet was known yet. Now we know over 400 of them.



Figure 2 No, these are not jewel designs. These are four examples of barycentric path of stars with exoplanets (from Perryman and Schulze-Hartung, Astronomy& Astrophysics 525, A65, 2011).

Is there any message you would like to send to the readers?

When you fight for a good cause, you must never give up. I am from a family of keen followers of the Scouting traditions. My father was a founding member of the 5th Group of Water Scouts in my country. As a Boy Scout he had the honour to welcome our first president, the founder of the first independent Czechoslovak Republic, when T.G. Masaryk was returning from emigration. Thanks to his resilience my father succeeded with many things in spite of the communists. And I have a personal example too. To keep sane during the communist era I privately translated the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. My translations could be published only after the end of the communist regime, on the 100th anniversary of her birth (Modrý večer, ODEON, 1990, translated by Ivanka Jakubcová). Ms Anna had a difficult life. In the Stalinist era she was persecuted, she could not publish her poetry for decades, her son was imprisoned in Gulag for almost 20 years. But look now - her poetry is read by the whole world.

Interviewed by
Mgr. Vítězslav Kremlík, the founder of the Czech Climate Skeptic website www.klimaskeptik.cz

(The Czech text was authorised by ICH)

Profile:

born 3. 12. 1941 in Jilemnice, Czechoslovakia

education: ČVUT, Faculty of Civil Engineering, subject: geodetic astronomy and geophysics               

doctorate: CSc. 1991

current position: Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences since 1963 (Institute website - link)

List of publications
(note: some of the publications are downloadable from Klimaskeptik.cz - link)

Bucha, V., Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M. 1985 Resonance frequencies in the Sun’s motion, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 29, 107-111.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986a The planetary system and solar-terrestrial phenomena, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 224-235.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986b Is there any relation between the Sun´s motion and global seismic activity? Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 148-152.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M.: 1987 Correlation between solar motion, earthquakes and other geophysical phenomena, Annales Geophysicae, B, 135-142.

Charvátová-Jakubcová, I., Křivský, L. and Střeštík, J., 1988 The periodicity of aurorae in the years 1001-1900, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 32, 70-77.

Charvátová, I., 1988 The solar motion and the variability of solar activity, Adv. Space Res., 8, 7, 147-150.

Charvátová, I. 1989 On the relation between solar motion and the long term variability of solar activity, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 33, 230-241.

Charvátová, I., 1990a The relations between solar motion and solar variability, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 56-59.

Charvátová, I., 1990b On the relation between solar motion and solar activity in the years 1730-1780 and 1910-60, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 200-204.

Charvátová, I., 1995a Solar-terrestrial and climatic variability during the last several millennia in relation to solar inertial motion, J. Coastal Res., 17, 343-354.

Charvátová, I., 1995b Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-04, March 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1995c Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-08, 2nd Edition, November 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1997a Solar-terrestrial and climatic phenomena in relation to solar inertial motion, Surveys in Geophys., 18, 131-146.

Charvátová, I., 1997b Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Chapman & Hall, New York, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2006 Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Springer, Berlin, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2000 Can origin of the 2400-year cycle of solar activity be caused by solar inertial motion?, Annales Geophysicae, 18, 399-405.

Charvátová, I., 2000 The cycle of 2402 years in solar motion and its response in proxy records, Geolines, 11, 12-14.

Charvátová, I., 2007 The prominent 1.6-year periodicity in solar motion due to the inner planets, Annales Geophysicae, 25, 1-6.

Charvátová, I., 2009 Long-trm predictive assessments of solar and geomagnetic activities made on the basis of the close similarity between the solar inertial motions in the intervals 1840-1905 and 1980-2045, New Astronomy 14, 25-30, doi: 10.1016/j.newast.2008.04.005.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1991 Solar variability as a manifestation of the Sun’s motion, J. Atmos.Terr. Phys., 53, 1019-1025.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1995 Long-term changes of the surface air temperature in relation to solar inertial motion, Climatic Change, 29, 333-352.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2004 Periodicities between 6 and 16 years in surface air temperature in possible relation to solar inertial motion, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 66, 219-227

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2007 Relations between the solar inertial motion, solar activity and geomagnetic index aa since the year 1844, Adv. Space Res., 40, 7, 1026-1031, doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2007.05.086.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2000 Is the solar activity cycle synchronized with the solar inertial motion?, Int. J. Bifurcation and Chaos, 10, 2519-2526.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Seehafer, N., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2007 The solar activity cycle is weakly synchronized with the solar inertial motion, Physics Letters A, 365, 421-428, doi: 10.1016/j.physleta.2007.01.039.

Charvátová, I., Klokočník, J., Kolmaš, J. and Kostelecký, J., 2011 Chinese tombs oriented by a compass: evidence from paleomagnetic changes versus the age of tombs, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 55, 159-174.

Italian seismologists on trial as killers because they have no crystal ball

I have added some estimates of the frequency of quakes of different magnitudes and cost-and-benefits analysis of evacuation at the end

Another example of the insane witch hunts that are gradually returning our world back to Salem 1692.



Vitalik sent me a link to a stunning article at the Fox News server,

Italian Seismologists Charged With Manslaughter for Not Predicting 2009 Quake; Google News

Six earthquake scientists and an official have been charged - it's not just being talked about, it has happened - for manslaughter, a softer version of (mass) murder. They may spend up to twelve years in prison. Why? Because they didn't predict a 6.3 magnitude earthquake in L'Aquila that killed 308 people on April 6th 2009, including 2 Czechs. When did it happen? Now, in the 21st century. Where did it happen? In Italy, a country that is amazingly still a member of the European Union rather than a freshly separated province of Zimbabwe.




Where does the immense stupidity come from? Most things of this sort can't be predicted. At least, none of the major earthquakes has ever been successfully predicted as of 2011. If this were possible, lots of human lives would have been saved in the past. Why would someone believe otherwise? Where does the idea that similar rare events can be predicted come from?

Well, there's an answer to the last question. It comes from the media where other lunatics - mostly global warming alarmists these days - claim to be able to predict all kinds of wonderful things 100 years in advance.

Inside the Earth, things are constantly moving, in systematic as well as chaotic directions. Sometimes a piece of rock crosses a threshold, a tipping point, and in some of those cases, the resulting changes may make a bigger piece of rock cross another tipping point. And a big earthquake may quickly result in a very small percentage of such cases. In Italy itself, shaking similar to the L'Aquila aftershocks appears 100 times every day.

But to predict whether this sequence of events will lead to very large earthquake, you would need to know the detailed position of every grain of sand - and it could still fail to be enough. It's just like the question whether a 1-sigma bump in a scientific graph is going to grow to a 5-sigma bump. No one can know by looking at the bump itself. These bumps are everywhere and they look nearly identical. One may only interpret what happened a posteriori.

I personally think that the predictions of earthquakes that are larger than those that have just occurred at nearby places, days in advance, will always be impossible. There have been various preprints arguing that one could have seen signals of the Japanese earthquake for days but the papers don't actually show what the litmus tests are and were doing when there are no earthquakes. I don't think it's a good science. But even if this methodology could be developed to predict the quakes, we're not there yet.

Note that in a similar business, last year, people were predicting an imminent eruption of Katla volcano in Iceland. I was saying it was unlikely and the specific larger events are almost never "ignited" by smaller ones in such a straightforward way. As always, I was right, they were wrong. Even if Katla erupted now, it couldn't really be said to be the result of the E-ugly-name volcano eruption last year. There's another volcano erupting which would be more likely a "starter" of Katla if Katla decided to act now.

Quakes are a chaotic process. Even quantum randomness may influence the timing of big earthquakes. The only thing you can predict is that after a large earthquake takes place, it's likely that there will be various smaller "echoes" across the region whose locations may be predicted with a limited accuracy, using a probabilistic language. But getting bigger events out of the smaller ones always depends on chance.

There were dozens of aftershocks but only one foreshock, a 4.1 magnitude earthquake 1 week earlier. Earthquakes of the 4.1 magnitude are not even recorded on the USGS maps. Only a supertiny portion of 4.1 earthquakes may be "predictors" of a coming magnitude 6.3+ earthquake. It was just sensible for the seismologists to stop the panic because if every 4.1 earthquake led to an evacuation of a town for weeks, several percent of the mankind would be constant refugees.

If someone suggests that the seismologists should have recommended the evacuation of the town with 80,000 people for weeks because of the 4.1 foreshock (plus some much smaller trembling), just consider how crazy it would be. Exactly a week ago, there was a 4.8 magnitude earthquake 30 miles from Chania, Crete, which also has 80,000 people or so, and similar cities. (You may check hundreds of other examples of earthquakes predicting a doom just in the recent month.) Would you really say that because of that - a possible sign of a coming big earthquake - the local seismologists in Crete, when asked, should have recommended the evacuation of those cities for weeks? Hundreds of thousands of refugees? Have you lost your mind? 99.99... percent of such smaller earthquakes are not foreshocks of much bigger ones.

What the seismologists recommended not only fails to be a crime: it was the right thing for them to do given the information they had and the current state of their discipline. A Czech seismologist, Mr Jan Zedník, nicely says that reliable warnings before big earthquakes are only possible in Hollywood movies in which a blonde female seismologist calls the mayor sufficiently many times so that they finally evacuate Los Angeles. ;-) This is spot on. Billions of people fail to distinguish the movies (and equally fictitious predictions of climate-change-related catastrophes in the media) from the reality. And billions of people began to worship their governments, being certain that the governments should protect them even against the laws of physics.

Now, just try to evaluate how many complete idiots have to exist in the whole hierarchy of the "dignified luminaries" in Italy. The general prosecutor of that country probably has to be a complete imbecile because it had to go through him and the same has to be true for a whole pyramid of his subordinates, all of their secretaries, and many others who had to have some tools to stop this insanity.

Meanwhile, if you live in a country where morons such as these Italian lawyers or global warming alarmists prevail, the only relatively safe way how not to spend your life in prison or at stake is to say that all conceivable kinds of catastrophes, all earthquakes, volcano eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, floods, collisions with other planets etc. will occur at every place of the Earth at every second in the future. Almost no one will harass you for talking rubbish and many people will applaud you. That's the only way how you may "become" innocent. Otherwise, together with the fellow seismologists and industrialists who use fossil fuels, you will be charged of manslaughter for causing all these events and killing the people!

You're a witch! Burn you!

Sorry, I got carried away by the mass hysteria myself. It's everywhere. ;-) I am sure that the Italian judges will be inspired by the video above and they will weigh the seismologists. If they weigh as much as a duck, they must be made of wood, and therefore they are witches.

Frequency of quakes and foreshocks

About 40 percent of L'Aquila-like, larger earthquakes have foreshocks. But can you evacuate the nearby towns every time you experience trembling? For weeks or months or years?



The Gutenberg-Richter law says that the frequency gets reduced ten-fold every time you increase the magnitude of the quake by 1 degree. So the frequency of magnitude 6+ earthquakes is about 100-times lower than that of the magnitude 4+ earthquakes.

Moreover, they're not "quite" correlated. At most 40% of the larger magnitude 6+ earthquakes have magnitude 4+ foreshocks - and probably many fewer because among the 40%, the foreshocks included may be much weaker, too. Also, foreshocks at various delays - time scales - are included as well, making the predictive usefulness of foreshocks even lower. Moreover, the later quakes don't necessarily have to occur on the same place, so our predicted odds that the quake could occur at the bad place will be overestimates.

It follows that the probability is less than 0.5% (and probably much, much less) that an ongoing magnitude 4+ earthquake is a sign of a coming magnitude 6+ earthquake beneath the same town. And probably much smaller. Now, think sensibly: would you evacuate the town of 80,000 which would be needed to systematically try to save almost all lives?

Note that some greatest earthquakes such as the 1950 Medog earthquake display no foreshock activity at all. The foreshocks are simply a very poor litmus test to predict larger earthquakes.

Take a sensible quantification. First of all, you must quantify the human lives whether it looks bad or not. Take one million euros per life which is a lot. So the earthquake ultimately killed 300 people which is 300 million euros in damages. However, the probability that this would occur was only 0.5%. So the expectation value of the damages from the dead people is just 1.5 million euros.

On the other hand, you have the expenses needed to evacuate the town. In order for the evacuation to be a good investment, you would need the evacuation of 1 person - among 80,000 - to cost just 1,500,000 euros divided by 80,000 = 19 euros. I guarantee to you that the actual evacuation is going to be much more expensive than 19 euros. If you want to store the people for a month - before the threat goes away - in a different place, they will have to pay hundreds of dollars for some "rent" or its equivalent, or count the corresponding reduction of the living standards. You should really subtract their salaries as well because they will probably not work. That's already thousands of euros per person.

So at least by an order of magnitude, and probably two orders of magnitude or more, it would be a lossy investment to evacuate the town. You would have to say that a human life is 10 million euros. And it's just crazy. Almost no life insurance can get that high. People ultimately die - and they may also die from the shortage of money (that's the case of millions in the third world) which is why it is simply wrong to say that the missing money can never match the loss of human lives. Putting the price of a human life to an infinite value is incompatible with a rational policymaking.

Note that the argument above doesn't change if you imagine that the seismologists would only advise "voluntary" evacuation to a subset of the people. For these people, the expectation value of the expenses would still exceed the expectation value of the risk of their life converted to the money.

If someone wants to put his life to 100 million euros and use a very different cost-and-benefits analysis than what is above, he has to do it privately because the officials are working with the population statistically, as an average. If he's waiting for someone else to escape even though he's scared of the slightest risk of a quake, well, then I would say that it shows that his intelligence is probably low enough for the claim that his life is worth 100 million euros, anyway. The price could be closer to 5 euros for the beer his parents drank before they made him.

If you really hate converting human lives to the money, I can actually offer you an argument that avoids it altogether and the conclusion is still the same. Evacuation is not safe, either. When New Orleans was evacuated, dozens of people died in the Dome and other centers for the refugees. That's more than 1 percent of Katrina's casualties.

So the evacuation would statistically save just 0.5% (chance of larger quake) times 300 = 1.5 people, but it would kill 1% (percentage of casualties due to evacuation) times 300 = 3 people in average because of the problems with the evacuation. So regardless of the expenses, the evacuation would actually kill more people than the large quake if both things are computed as proper expectation values.

The actual merits of the evacuation are even worse. In reality, the same trembling was observed in that region at least since December. So you would need to evacuate the people for half a year if not permanently. That could be equivalent to building 50,000 euro worth of new housing for each average inhabitant of L'Aquila. Compare this with the expected loss due to the possible larger earthquake which was 19 euros.

All this reasoning may look too cruel and cold-blooded but if you use pure emotions, you simply can't decide whether people such as the Italian seismologist gave a good advice according to their best knowledge at that time. They did.

Does ethics require us to believe in tornado witches?

When I was a kid, something like a 10-year-old one, I didn't have the feeling that the contemporary human society is obsessed with irrationalities.

This experience of course depended on the environment; I guess that people such as my grandfather and the teachers at school were rational people which was why I made the implicit extrapolation that the mankind approaches similar issues in similar ways.



Examination of a witch

I have never really understood the psychology of the medieval zealots who would burn people at stake just because those people realized that the Earth wasn't a center of the Solar System or the Universe, for that matter. Where did such extraordinarily obsessed idiots come from, I was asking? Something like that is clearly impossible today, isn't it?

Of course, there were many other crazy stories that I used to view as a part of the history that could never return. When we visited the Salem Witch Museum 8 years ago or so, I learned some details about the Salem witch trials. As recently as in 1692-1693, the people were burning or hanging or beheading girls because a witness claimed that they saw ghosts around them or because dogs fed urine reacted in one way or another. Families just blamed bad crops, illness of the family, or a death of a child on a local outcast. That was enough for the mass hysteria to "ethically" punish the unlucky girl.




Why did they find it so important to attribute these obviously scientifically impossible features to pretty ordinary girls? Why did the people think that the worth of human beings becomes unacceptably low if we start to believe that the Sun is more central among the nearby celestial bodies than the Earth? I thought that this stupidity was unprecedented and would never repeat itself.

Of course, I learned that I was as wrong as I could be. People are essentially as stupid - and obsessed with completely crazy beliefs - today as they were in Massachusetts of the 1690s.

A huge percentage of people, including some people who are very close to me for various reasons, will start to curse you as soon as you suggest that ghosts and spiritism are nonsense or that the motion of glasses on the table, as well as the motion of all other material objects we have ever seen, agrees with the laws of physics. When you say such a thing, they make you sure that you are attacking an essential part of their soul and human dignity - because the bulk of their knowledge and perception of human dignity is built out of superstitions and lies. The bulk of their brain is composed of rubbish.

It's kind of normal for the normal people to have crazy beliefs and it mostly doesn't affect the functioning of the society. For centuries, sensible people were more likely to occupy more influential positions which is why the society could really make some progress despite the irrational beliefs of something that could be a majority of the world population. However, in recent years, much of this craziness started to be institutionalized in the very institutions that used to be associated with the scientific and rational evaluation of the evidence - such as universities.

In Italy, 6 seismologists and 1 official are on trial as killers - yes, they are already charged - because they didn't have the crystal ball needed to predict the 2009 Earthquake in L'Aquila in advance. But this article is about another story.

Anthony Watts has pointed out that the Penn State University - yes, the headquarters of the loop quantum gravity silliness and the hockey stick graph silliness, among other things - employs a completely unhinged man as an "associate professor of environmental ethics, science, and law". The description of the discipline is quite crazy by itself. But the article he wrote about the tornadoes is just extraordinary:

Why Ethics Requires Acknowledging Links Between Tornadoes and Climate Change Despite Scientific Uncertainty

Quite a title. And not only the title. I have mentioned the witch trials because Mr Brown's text is virtually isomorphic to Joseph Glanvill's 1668 essay, Against Modern Sadducism, which said that it was unethical not to believe in witches and apparition and which ideologically helped to execute those 26 folks in Salem.

(Sadducism was believed by some Jews 2,000 years ago who rejected afterlife, rewards and penalties after you die, fate, resurrection, and the evil committed by God - quite a mixture, a mostly sensible one, but Glanvill clearly uses "modern sadducism" as a synonym of "rationality" which is what he really hated.)

The page above about the tornadoes contains a remarkable number of 76 copies of the root "ethic", 28 of which are found in the proper part of the article. It's being repeated that even though we are not "certain" that tornadoes are caused by CO2, it is unethical not to "acknowledge" that the relationship exists. Wow.

What I find unethical is to say untrue things even if one knows that they're untrue - that's what Mr Donald Brown has explicitly confessed to be doing and the people who are doing so are called "liars". Mr Brown is not just a liar; he is a liar who is stealing lots of U.S. dollars from the U.S. taxpayer by saying these things that, as he knows, are lies.

The evidence is overwhelming that the Penn State University should be stripped of the status of a university and only regain this privilege once it starts from scratch and proves that the breathtaking intellectual weeds similar to Mr Brown have been safely removed from the institution in a way so that they can never return again. Just for fun, let me look at all the sentences in his article that contain the word "ethic*".

This post argues that ethics requires acknowledging the links between tornadoes and climate change despite scientific uncertainties about increased frequency and intensity of tornadoes in a warming world.

The main insane thesis of the title is repeated about dozens of times in the article. The scientific integrity, a key part of ethics of a scientist, requires to present the links between pairs of phenomena that agree with the scientific evidence. In the case of the tornado-CO2 link, the evidence in favor of the relationship is virtually non-existent, and the small glimpses of evidence suggest that these two things are negatively correlated, not positively.

This post, however, looks at links between tornado intensity and frequency and climate change and what ethics requires when discussing these links.

His post actually doesn't look at any links between those things at all. After all, the author doesn't know any science so he couldn't have achieved this goal. He just states the usual religious insanities of the type "climate change is always caused by CO2, it's 'real', and it's causing all the bad things in the world, Amen". Everyone who is genuinely incapable to demonstrate that such proclamations are preposterous religious dogmas possesses a physiologically defective brain.

IV. The Ethical Obligation To Discuss Tornado/Climate Change Links Despite Scientific Uncertainty.

Note that after several sections, there is a section number four whose headline is completely isomorphic to the headline of the whole text. This "recursion" doesn't look strange to mentally limited individuals of Mr Brown's caliber because they believe that this bizarre proposition has such a special status that if you repeat it at the top of your article, in a section, in its subsection, and at infinitely many other "levels", you will still look sane. Well, it turns out you can't.

To fully understand this it is helpful to understand why climate change is essentially an ethical problem.

More precisely, it is a problem invented, fabricated, and aggressively promoted by ideologically driven irrational zealots and their companion who believe that they can make profit out of this movement. But it's true that the "climate change problem" has nothing to do with science.

Climate change is an ethical problem because: (a) Some people in some parts of the world are putting others at risk,

That's a type of influence that people - and all other objects in the Universe - have been doing with each other since the Big Bang. The only problem is that the contribution of man-made climate change to this type of interactions between the people is zero for all practical purposes.

(b) The harms to those at risk could be catastrophic,

Except that we know that it will not be catastrophic, and it's highly questionable whether it will be measurable amid the contributions of other drivers - that may be confusingly classified as "noise" - at all.

and (c) Most of the victims of climate change can do little to avoid harm,

People in Micronesia, if the sea level are raised by less than 42 micrometers by a Czech power plant in Prunéřov as predicted by the IPCC, can move by a few micrometers away from the sea. They can do a lot. Even if there were any significant changes, such as 5 degrees of warming in the next 100 or 200 years, it would be pretty much trivial to avoid their consequences. It would be many orders of magnitude easier than to continue a civilized life without the currently essential pre-requisites such as the fossil fuels.

they must rely on a sense of justice will motivate those who are putting others at risk to reduce their climate changing causing behavior.

They do not have to rely on anything outside their world, and they shouldn't rely on anything outside their world. They shouldn't be taught to rely on things outside their world, either.

For this reason, since we now know that it is scientifically plausible that tornado frequency and intensity will increase as the world warms and climate change is already affecting timing, location, and intensity of tornadoes that will form, it is not ethically acceptable to assert there is no link because such a claim implies that there is no scientifically valid basis for concern or risk.

It is an ethical duty for every scientist to loudly and clearly say that there is no link between the CO2 and the tornadoes because all the available scientific evidence shows that there is no link and it is an ethical duty for any scientist to use and say things that are dictated by the actual scientific evidence.

There always remains a nonzero probability that something will profoundly change about the science in the future but this is true about any question about the real world and a scientist should never mix the evidence obtained from the past data, which is what science builds its conclusions upon, with unjustified speculations and/or wishful thinking about the future, which is the type of considerations associated with unscientific modes of thinking.

To understand why this it is ethically problematic to deny evidence. it is necessary to review the ethics of dangerous behavior.

Since the renaissance, people began to understand that it's always ethically problematic to say lies and that the truth really can't hurt, at least not hurt the mankind in the long run. It's been understood that the truth is often different than the first hunch or the dogmas inherited from the ancestors. Apparently, not everyone has understood those things.

The criteria of acceptability must be understood as an ethical rather than a scientific question.

That's fine except that science may often say that some people's ethical criteria are just insane. If someone finds it ethically unacceptable for people to realize that the Earth isn't the center of the Solar System or that the people promoting the tornado-CO2 links are unhinged loons, it is his personal ethical preference but this fact can't prevent a rational person from using the scientific evidence to determine that any person with such ethical preferences is a lunatic.

For instance, although science may conclude that a certain increased exposure to solar radiation may increase the risk of skin cancer by one new cancer in every hundred people, science cannot say whether this additional risk is acceptable because science describes facts and cannot generate prescriptive guidance by itself.

That's why science can't directly "dictate" that people should be "protecting the atmosphere", reducing CO2 emissions, avoid certain scientific insights about the tornadoes, or anything else of the sort. However, it's still true that a rational society and rational individuals will look at science when it makes its own decisions. They will affect them. In the particular case of the CO2 emissions, a rational society will allow the CO2 emissions to be anything they want to be because any regulation of CO2 means a reduction of the people's well-being.

The scientific understanding of the nature of the threat, of course, is not irrelevant to the ethical question of whether the risk is ethically acceptable, but science alone cannot tell society what it should do about various threats.

Right. That's why it shouldn't be doing so. That's why the IPCC or any other would-be scientific body should never try to do politics.

In environmental controversies such as global warming where there is legitimate concern, important ethical questions arise when scientific uncertainty prevents unambiguous predictions of human health and environmental consequences.

There is no legitimate concern when it comes to "global warming". All this concern has always been created by propagandistic tricks and fraudulent pseudoscientific babbling and attempted would-be "ethical" intimidation similar to this very article by Mr Brown, so it is thoroughly illegitimate.

By the way, the very fact that the uncertainties were not significantly reduced despite USD 100 billion invested into the climate research in the recent decades strongly suggests, if not proves, that the reason is that the correct answers are actually not in the vicinity of the predetermined answers.

The distance X between the predetermined answers - especially the answer "there is a climate threat" - and the correct answers is very large and its being large is essential for tons of parasites such as Mr Brown to continue to be parasites, so this distance can't be reduced by this community. Whenever the widely believed answers are close to the correct ones, USD 100 billion is enough to reduce the uncertainty X by a significant factor. It is easy to converge closer to the result and reduce X to X/2, and so on.

It's not possible in the "science" of a "global warming threat" because this "science" is qualitatively invalid, not just inaccurate. The incorrect qualitative conclusion about a "climate threat" is the very reason why those people are doing what they're doing so they're incapable (well, unwilling) to abandon this incorrect prejudice regardless of the amount of evidence. That's why they can't converge to the accurate answers.

This is so because decision-makers or those engaged in risky behavior cannot duck ethical questions such as how conservative "should" scientific assumptions be in the face of uncertainty or who "should" bear the burden of proof about harm.

There's still a rational approach to such decisions - one based on the costs-and-benefits analysis - that the rational decision makers will be close to while the irrational ones will be far from it.

This is an ethical question. And so from the standpoint of ethics, potential risks are relevant to what should be done.

Clearly, Mr Brown is using the word "ethics" as any kind of a pseudo-argument that should have the capacity to override any rational argument. However, "ethics" is not the same thing as "irrationality".

For this reason, environmental decisions in the face of scientific uncertainty must be understood to raise a mixture of ethical and scientific questions.

They have always been. However, in this mixture, one should still try to use good ethics and good science. Mr Brown's main point is that it should be a mixture of ethics of medieval bigots combined with junk science of corrupt ideologues that can always ignore the actual empirical evidence because of reasons that are described by fancy words but that are always nothing else than the desire of the fraudsters to continue with their fraud.

That only proven facts should count about dangerous behavior can be shown to be ethically problematic by looking at how societies often deal with other kinds of unsafe behavior.

If one is uncertain about the impacts, he will be more careful about these acts - and encourage others to be more careful. However, a modern society can't ban all new activities just because they haven't been tested for a long enough time. All of life - and especially life in the scientific and technological era - is about trying things that are new. One only prohibits things once there is a solid evidence that these things have some wrong consequences - because one may derive it from established science or because they have been tried (or very similar things have been tried) and there have been significantly bad consequences.

In other words, when the burden of proof should shift to those proposing to do something dangerous or how much proof should satisfy the burden of proof are ethical questions that need to take into consideration many different factors.

Well, the people proposing something dangerous are surely the people who dare to suggest that we should regulate our CO2 emissions. This idea is a threat for the well-being of billions of people - and their pets, among many other things. Mr Brown's idea is different than what he says: what he wants is to shift the burden of proof to those whom he doesn't like because they're not the same kind of unhinged and unstable kibitzers as he is.

Because these are ethical questions, they cannot be answered by an algorithm or a "value-neutral" scientific calculation.

In practice, rational economic questions about the right decisions may be answered in this way, as I mentioned. At any rate, even if we were using less well-defined algorithms than the science and the costs-and-benefits analysis, Mr Brown hasn't offered any evidence that these other algorithms would yield the answer he proposes. He has just repeated that he wants the ethical outcome to be XY but he has presented no evidence and no link with conventional definition of ethics whatsoever, except for the evidence that was relying on junk science as well so it can't be viewed as an ethical dimension of the problem.

As long as anyone is asking the question of whether there is a link between climate change and tornado damage because they want to know whether there is reason to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it is therefore ethically problematic to say there is no link.

In other words, the ends justify the means, Mr Brown says.

An honest scientist has to give and will give the same answer to a given well-defined question regardless of the reason for which the people who have asked want to know the answer. Otherwise the scientist is not a real scientist but an unethical liar and opportunist.

There is no tornado-CO2 link whether you ask because or X or because of Y. Or because of anything else.

However, it is also ethically required to acknowledge that increased tornado damage and frequency are not yet proven. However, if this said, it is also ethically important to acknowledge that increased damage from other kinds of storms is virtually certain as the planet warms.

Whether storms increase on a warmer planet is a scientific question, not an ethical question, so a medieval moron preaching about a perverse form of ethics has nothing to say about these matters. The answer of science is that a warming planet would see a faster warming near the poles, because of the stronger feedbacks, which would reduce the pole-equatorial temperature difference and the related gradients that dictate the strength of storms as well as the magnitude of weather oscillations of many other kinds related to rare and extreme events.

While there's no available measured evidence of a change of the frequency and intensity of storms and extreme events at this moment, science shows that if there is a correlation, it says that a warmer planet will see less extreme weather.

Furthermore, it is ethically important to acknowledge that tornadoes will appear in places that they would not likely occur in the absence of global warming even if tornado frequency and intensity decrease because a changing climate is already affecting tornado propagation.

Again, it's a lie - warming, even if it were occurring, wouldn't make some qualitatively impossible things suddenly possible - so it is unethical to say such things and it is even more unethical to agree with being paid a salary for spreading these lies.

You should be ashamed, Mr Brown. You should be ashamed, Penn State University, for harboring this stunningly dishonest crook. You should be ashamed, the people of Pennsylvania, for being unable to get rid of this big piece of immoral dirt that exists within your state.

And that's the memo.