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.

Tsunami: swimming houses and cars live

If you want to have an idea about the amount of time you have when tsunami arrives, look at this 5-minute video of tsunami attacking in Minami-Sanriku.



Warning: the video gets tough.

Not much is happening in the first two minutes or so - except for some dust above the distant beaches - even though the cameraman seems nervous from the beginning. You will understand why.




But the actual scary events eventually begin. I found it impressive how the houses remained compact yet swimming - they turned into boats. Nature is very powerful and cruel. Such events sometimes occur and they're more far-reaching than 0.008 °C of warming or cooling per year.

Thanks to Gene

Why is the Earth so fat?

Loop quantum gravity crackpots can be smelled from miles away

The Earth resembles an oblate spheroid - an ellipsoid that is flattened towards a disk-like shape: the points on the equator are further from the center of the planet than the poles - by about 20 kilometers.



Just for the sake of completeness, the other ellipsoid would be a "prolate spheroid" that resembles a long stick.

Needless to say, the Earth is oblate because it is spinning around its axis. Mark Eichelaub has seemingly made a very sensible - and "nearly correct" - calculation of the "height difference" between the poles and the equator.




The sea level should have a constant gravitational potential. He assumed that this constant arises from a variable term "h.g" where "h" is the height as a function of the latitude - a deviation from the spherical shape - and from another latitude-dependent term, the centrifugal potential "-omega^2.R^2.sin(theta)^2/2".

By demanding that their sum is constant, he obtained the equator-pole height difference (Earth's equatorial bulge) as

h = (omega.R.sin theta)^2 / 2g = 11 kilometers

which is about 1/2 of the actual bulge, close to 21 kilometers. Now, this looks like a cool discrepancy: the sea level (its difference between the pole and the equator) is 10 kilometers higher or lower than it should be!

Now, when I saw this question at the Physics Stack Exchange, two answers were already posted. One of them didn't get to 10% of the calculation by Mark - it just "suggested" that some deviations could depend on the cosine of the latitude, and proposed to do a calculation "for the equator only" which is a completely nonsensical comment. All the problems in this task are three-dimensional and depend on a comparison of the equator and the poles. So I downvoted the answer.

There was one more answer that was longer but even worse. After saying many irrelevant things about phase transitions, it essentially said that Mark's calculation of the equatorial bulge would produce the observed result of 21 kilometers if it were done with the parameters a few billion years ago. And the Earth just froze, so that the bulge is twice as large as the result of the calculation with the current values of the rotational frequency etc.

Now, just try to appreciate how stunningly idiotic such an answer is. The guy is saying that the calculation of the constant potential says that the sea level of the world ocean is 10 kilometers higher or lower than it should be - but the water just stays there, 10 kilometers above or below the right sea level, because it got used to do so in the recent billions of years.

Meanwhile, in the real world, if some volume of water happens to be 30 meters above the right level somewhere in Japan, a giant tsunami wave immediately spreads across the world. Within half a day, it reaches the opposite side of the world. Within a day or two, the new equilibrium is reached across the globe. If there is a non-uniformity of the sea level that exceeds the typical fluctuations common for ocean waves, it takes a day to fix the imperfection. And this guy thinks that a 10 kilometer high column of extra water just stays there for billions of years.

So of course, I downvoted this answer as well and viewed the situation as an alarming one, so I immediately posted the right answer as well. Astronauts are not dying in space shuttles but I found the situation urgent, anyway: it's my instinctive behavior. ;-) The only mistake in Mark's otherwise valid calculation is that he didn't appreciate that an ellipsoid has a spherically asymmetric gravitational field, too. If you're measuring the gravitational potential on a sphere composed of points of a fixed distance from the origin, the potential won't be constant if the matter distribution is a uniform ellipsoid - a non-spherical one.

It may be at least numerically calculated that this effect changes the linear term in the gravitational potential from "hg" to "hg-hg/2", to one half of the original value, and the calculated "h" will therefore be twice as large as Mark's value, in a good agreement with observations. With this halving of Mark's "hg" potential, you may say that a surface of a constant potential is located "exactly in the middle" between the "R=const" sphere and the actual surface of the ellipsoid - a compromise. (Extra corrections arise from the fact that the Earth is not an exact uniformly dense ellipsoid, either. And from higher-order terms in the (bulge/Earthradius)^N expansion. As numerical calculations showed, the correcting factor for the "hg" term is almost exactly 1/2 and quite possibly, it is exactly 1/2, but I don't have an analytic proof at this moment because that seems to require a double integral.)

Once I downvoted the other answers, the author of the "water stays 10 km above the ground for billions of years" answer immediately attacked me - correctly guessing that I gave him the first "-1" vote. It must be a great sin to downvote his answer! Well, it's not a sin: it's exactly the very purpose of the down arrow to label junk answers - such as a huge portion of answers from this moron - so that they disappear at the bottom and the original posters or other people who are interested in the question are more likely to get the more correct answers first. And the votes should actually be anonymous, for a good reason - a policy he has repeatedly violated.

Needless to say, I have already learned who this moron is. It's a guy who has recently completed his graduate studies at Penn State University - the world's headquarters of the hockey sticks and loop quantum gravities. So he may not deviate too much - it's normal for the hacks at that school to think that water stays 10 km above the ground for billions of years - and that a climate doomsday is imminent unless Republicans are defeated in all elections (Michael Mann).

But despite my rich experience with this sort of people, I am always stunned by the breathtaking stupidity coupled with arrogance of these hacks. This guy's name is Deepak Vaid and he would write his PhD as a collection of footnotes for papers by Bilson-Thompson who "constructs" the world out of knitted octopi inspired by loop quantum gravity. Bilson-Thompson himself or herself would be considered a crackpot even among physicists of a kindergarten caliber - and now imagine that someone wants to build his career by writing irrelevant confusing footnotes to this infinitely infantile nonsense. It's just amazing.

You can demonstrably get a PhD for this complete nonsense.

But it's possible in the Penn State. In a natural world, the likes of Deepak Vaid would be starving to death in the middle of India. In the politically correct world, such crackpots are brought to the U.S. and allowed to pretend that they're physicists even though - unlike many other superbright Indian thinkers I know - they don't have the slightest glimpse of knowledge or intuition or talent needed for the discipline. And for years, people are discouraged from telling such Vaids that they just suck. You would surely be a racist if you dared to inform an Indian chap that he sucks as a scientist, wouldn't you? The fact that the Indian folks belong to the same race can't change anything about it.

Just to get some context: in a graduate quantum mechanics course I once taught at Harvard, I and my TA have found out that two students were just plagiarizing all the homework. They waited until the official answer is posted on the web, they copied it with minimal modifications, and handed it in, pretending that they were just a little bit late. One of those two students was an undergraduate girl and the other student was a male graduate student from India. My TA in particular was very offended - but we eventually avoided any investigations and reports because I got convinced that the PC Nazis would surely accuse me of racism and sexism combined - because the two fraudsters in my class happened to be female and Indian.

What a surprise that many of those people just formally end up as physicists and they're convincing the mankind that water stays 10 kilometers above the ground for billions of years and that loop quantum gravity with knitted octopi is a good candidate theory of everything. Or that there is a climate threat for the mankind. That's just a direct result of the political correctness, the lack of will of many people to show the door to similar Deepak Vaids. The U.S. Academia is literally flooded with such know-nothings who simply shouldn't be there but who, because of the very large number of similarly incompetent hacks who have gotten into the system, just got very aggressive and effectively overtook the system.

By the way, the "fat Earth" wasn't the first context in which Deepak Vaid tried to attack me - and others - for the downvotes. Someone had asked why the pseudoscalar "E.B" wasn't the action for electromagnetism. The author of the question mentioned that Sean Carroll (rightfully) wanted his students to explain why "E.B" in the action didn't matter etc.

Deepak Vaid gave an answer in which he combined almost all conceivable mistakes you can make. First, he declared that a "pseudoscalar" is given by the behavior under time reversal (instead of the correct transformation, namely parity). Also, he apparently wrote that "E.B" did matter in the electromagnetic action (despite its being a total derivative that doesn't influence the equations of motion).

To add an idiosyncratic twist to his silliness, he confused the action with the right hand side of some equations of motion, and started to link "E.B" in the action to "E.B" on the right-hand side of the continuity equation for the electromagnetic current (which fails to vanish if there are anomalies). Needless to say, "E.B" in the action has nothing to do with gauge anomalies - for example, the former is perfectly harmless while the latter is perfectly lethal: he only wrote "random impressions" about anomalies (which were wrong in details, anyway) because he saw "E.B" at several places - and didn't understand any of the different roles that "E.B" could play. Again, he would scream after getting negative votes.

Hannes Alfvén Medal 2011: Syun-Ichi Akasofu

It's a Japanese month on TRF so this blog may take notice of events that wouldn't be normally discussed. Awards are among them.

You could think that the European Geosciences Union must be a totally politically correct institution, a part of the anti-scientific and anti-skeptics Inquisition. Maybe.

But that didn't prevent EGU from choosing a top Japanese Alaskan climate skeptic, Syun-Ichi Akasofu, as the winner of the 2011: Hannes Alfvén Medal:

EGU about the winner

Congratulations! The award is named after the 1970 physics Nobel prize winner, Hannes Alfvén, who studied plasma physics in general and magnetohydrodynamics in particular and discovered the Alfvén waves.




Akasofu has authored a dozen of books and 500+ papers, including some top-cited ones, on similar subjects - especially things such as aurorae. You may check that even in the top-cited sane climate scientists' hitparade by Prall, Schneider, et al., Akasofu is ahead of your humble correspondent (by four steps).

You must remember Akasofu as a scientist featured on The Great Global Warming Swindle who observed that it's normal for ice to melt, especially in Spring. ;-)

To compare, The Independent, an extremely politically correct British daily, looks at the qualities of Al Gore as a student:

Gore 'was lazy dope as student at Harvard'

The U.K. newspaper says that Gore's grades were worse than those of George W. Bush and, as testified by a college friend of Gore in the press, Gore was stoned a lot of the time.

A former has put the "contradiction between Gore's abilities and results" into positive light: he was a boy who shows a "lot of potential". Well, especially the potential to brainwash fellow morons as well as somewhat smaller morons - and to transform their stupidity and gullibility to a virtue (and Scandinavian precious metals).

Are earthquakes caused by man-made carbon dioxide?

Clean Technica, a green lobby's astroturf website whose traffic exceeds that of TRF by a factor of five, became the most recent champion of the idea that the earthquakes are caused by the evil American SUVs:

More Mega Earthquakes in a Climate Changed World Say Scientists

In her spectacularly titled text, Susan Kraemer is defending her irresistible idea that climate change is the cause of earthquakes; plate tectonics is nothing else than the heretics' propaganda.



Is this what climate change looks like, she asks?

What are her "arguments"? First, there have been many recent earthquakes - and recently, there has been some global warming, too. It follows, she thinks, that global warming is the cause of the earthquakes. Again, the logic is isomorphic to the logic blaming the Japanese earthquake on Apple that released iPad 2 on the very same day - except that the coincidence behind the iPad 2 explanation is 30,000 times more accurate than the coincidence behind Kraemer's explanation.




Of course, the piece of poultry (ko-ko-dák!) isn't able - or willing - to figure out that there were also many earthquakes in the 1960s - including the greatest modern earthquake ever recorded, in Chile in 1960, even though the 1960s were cooler than the 1950s, 1940s, and 1930s.

But how does she explain the mechanism that transforms global warming to earthquakes? Well, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was helped by erosion - quite plausible - and of course, erosion is caused by global warming - much like everything else. I will discuss the "global warming causes everything" mode of thinking (or lack of thinking) later.

To "explain" the 2011 Japanese earthquake using global warming, she refers to her "scientific" colleague, Ms Kathy Kattenburg. The latter scientist offers one sentence about her reaction of pure horror and then she refers to another piece of scientific literature, namely Grist.

In the Grist article, Christopher Mims asks whether climate change means more tsunamis. In a later added disclaimer, he apologizes to those who have thought that his article was trying to link climate change and tsunamis. It wasn't his intent, he says, and then he links climate change to tsunamis once again.

This guy is clearly as dumb a jerk as his female colleagues - but at least, a big fraction of his insane text has been scraped after protests from the Grist readers whose IQ was above 60. But let me return to Ms Kraemer, the first nutcase whose text I have linked to. The typical chain of reasoning goes like this:

In the case of regions like Haiti, the deforestation – caused by years of drought, caused by climate change – is rendering the earth’s crust more unstable, posited geologist Shimon Wdowinski at the meeting. Deforestation leads to erosion and mudslides – and Haiti is 98% deforested.

The main format of the argument is "A is caused by B which is caused by C which is caused by D ... which is caused by Z." Except that all these 25 causal relationships are weak or non-existent, some of them have a wrong sign, and by multiplying 25 similarly low correlation coefficients, you get a correlation coefficient that can't possibly be distinguished from zero.

In this case, there is really no global deforestation; the amount of biomass stored in the trees has been growing in recent times - you know, trees like higher CO2 levels (and usually also higher temperatures). Moreover, most of the deforestation and reforestation doesn't influence the geologically relevant forces.

But the defective brains who defend the climate threat don't want to distinguish the statement "A is exactly equal to B" and the proposition "A has at least one elementary particle remotely related to at least one elementary particle in B." The difference between the equivalence and a homeopathic or a remote, speculative relationship between two objects is totally invisible to those - let me describe them extremely politely - mental cripples.

The convoluted explanatory chains of the type "Z causes Y causes X ... causes B causes A" are pretty much equivalent to the following game that Jon McLoone played with Mathematica 8 yesterday:

The Distance between “Zero” and “Hero”: Exploring Synonym Chains with Mathematica

The main idea behind his article is that different pairs of English words are pairs of two synonyma - that are equivalent, at least partially and at least under certain circumstances. You may draw a combinatorial graph and connect each pair of words that may be synonymous. It turns out that a large fraction of the English words become synonymous with each other: the largest group of "synonyma" in his database contains 19,754 words. Yes, with this global-warming-like understanding of a "synonym", each word in the group has 19,753 synonyms.

For example, it turns out that "age" is synonymous with "wisdom". Why? Well, here is Jon McLoone's computer-generated proof:

age = maturate,
maturate = grow,
grow = get,
get = aim,
aim = purpose,
purpose = resolve,
resolve = firmness,
firmness = soundness,
soundness = wisdom.

You couldn't find similarly huge clusters in Czech. I know that lots of U.S. patriots are reading this blog but I can't hide it: it is surprising for me that a language that is as vague and ambiguous as English may be used by brighter animals than chimps. ;-)

At any rate, you get my point. The proofs that "global warming cause something" are as "robust" as the proof above that "age" is the same as "wisdom".

Some geological order-of-magnitude estimates

I believe that everyone understands why climate change can't possibly have a measurable impact on earthquakes but let us go through a couple of relevant numbers.

What are the forces that are pushing rocks in one direction or another? Well, we may express them in terms of pressure - force per unit area (in pascals which are newtons per square meter). The pressure caused by the whole atmosphere above us is just one atmosphere i.e. 100,000 pascals. That's equivalent to the pressure at 10 meters beneath the water level. Or the pressure from a 6 meters high column of soil. Or 4 meters of granite. That's the rock equivalent of the whole atmosphere above us.

Now, imagine that the temperature grows by 0.27 kelvins, which means 0.1% of the absolute temperature of the Earth's surface. You may imagine that the density of the air changes by a similar percentage - by 0.1%. It takes 20 years or so for such a temperature change to take place. After 20 years, you could perhaps change the pressure by 0.1% of 4 meters of granite - by 4 millimeters of granite.

Would it matter?

Well, it surely wouldn't, especially because the pressure would change globally. More importantly, 4 millimeters of granite doesn't make any difference relatively to the 6,378,000,000 millimeters which is the Earth's radius. ;-)

Even more obviously, the tectonic plates are moving by 1-10 centimeters per year. This horizontal motion is faster than the hypothetical change of the overall pressure by two orders of magnitude. It's also faster than the sea level rise by more than one order of magnitude. Even if those changes that are "remotely related" to the climate mattered, they would be negligible relatively to the natural changes caused by geological processes that have been around for billions of years.

Similarly and even more clearly, one may see that the temperature change can't be directly felt in the depth of dozens of kilometers which is where earthquakes typically originate. The temperature changes on the surface don't propagate to this depth at all. To get some intuition why, just realize that your apartment is separated by a 10- or 20-centimeter-thick wall from the cold atmosphere outside your house. Those 10 or 20 centimeters are enough to virtually completely protect you against the cold outside weather - which may be 40 degrees cooler than your home.

Now realize that the depths which are relevant for earthquakes are 2,000,000 centimeters or so - 100,000 times thicker. This is a basically infinite isolating layer and if you solve the heat equation and try to figure out how much heat has propagated to the rocks because of global warming, the result will be indistinguishable from zero. In fact, we haven't measurably changed even the temperature a few meters beneath the surface; the temperature change of rocks that are dozens of kilometers below the surface don't require to be discussed at all. Even Al Gore knows that the Earth's interior is extre-hehe-mely hot. Well, it's not several million degrees, as Al Gore believes, but it's hot, anyway.

The Japanese earthquake started at the depth of 32 kilometers. The pressure at those depths is something like 10 thousand atmospheres. I decided to write the number in terms of words so that it doesn't get misinterpreted (as a decimal point or something like that). It's really huge. The atmosphere (including its composition and temperature) is completely irrelevant for geological processes such as earthquakes.

Instead, the motion of the tectonic plates - by 1-10 centimeters a year - often creates tensions and imbalances. And those tensions are sometimes released by a rearrangement of the planetary mass - which typically occur near the boundaries of the tectonic plates. The idea that we can visibly influence those things by some second-order subleading effects from some trace gas that we add to some atmosphere - and the atmosphere is geologically irrelevant even in its entirety - is beyond ridiculous.

But such ideas can still be sold to the uneducated masses. The proponents of the climate alarm are deliberately building upon the most primitive forms of human ignorance about the most elementary scientific questions. They are happy that billions of people on the Earth think that CO2 is a poison that will probably kill you if its concentration doubles (its concentration has to be multiplied by 100+ to cause health problems to us).

They are happy when people think that temperature changes can cause earthquakes. Of course, they will never do anything to clarify some people's rudimentary myths about science because the more stupid an average citizen is, the easier it is for the global warming alarmists to sell their irrational pseudoscience.

On the other hand, there also exists an important portion of the public that has started to be interested in those basic scientific questions and that can already semi-quantitatively understand why e.g. earthquakes can't be caused by the "global climate change". The confrontations between the people who know at least something about science and those who are complete idiots ready to be brainwashed by anyone - the latter group is officially represented by the global warming alarmists - may continue to boil.

The increasing scientific knowledge of each individual helps the good guys - us - but the overall deteriorating trend of the scientific knowledge (each new generation is dumber than the previous one) - is helping the bad guys, in this case the global warming alarmists. It remains uncertain at this point who will win.

Fifth greatest earthquake since 1900

Japan has experienced a magnitude 8.9 earthquake several hours ago. Later, the magnitude was upgraded to 9.0.

According to USGS, it was the fifth greatest earthquake since 1900. Only O(2000) people have died after the largest Japanese earthquake in 140 years (temporary figure); the number of casualties would be counted at least in tens of thousands if the country were not as developed as Japan. For example, the 2010 Haiti earthquake killed 100,000-300,000 people although its magnitude was just 7.0 - one hundred times smaller.

The Japanese managed to extinguish a fire in a nuclear power plant but this struggle is clear not yet over.

Tsunami in the Pacific isn't over yet.



Japanese researchers study a black hole

This blog already existed and discussed the Indonesian tsunami on December 26th, 2004 (third strongest since 1900), as well the Chilean earthquake on February 27th, 2010 (sixth strongest since 1900). So three out of six largest earthquakes since 1900 took place in the recent 6 years.




Frankly speaking, I am surprised that the media haven't begun to inform the people about the looming doomsday. Well, it's probably because no one has yet invented a good story that has a well-defined culprit and that would allow him or her to get richer.

What is the probability that 3 or more out of 6 largest earthquakes in a 111-year period (1900-2010+) takes place during the last six years of the interval? Well, for one earthquake, it is 6/111. For three earthquakes, it is (6/111)^3. However, any triplet of top 6 entries is equally good, so we should multiply the odds by (6 choose 3) = 20 (the probability of 4 or more is double-counted etc. but I neglect those small terms). The result is

20 x (6/111)³ = 0.003

One gets a similar figure for the probability that 2 out of 6 greatest earthquakes occur in the last 1.1 years.

That means that we have exactly a three-sigma or 99.7% confidence that the recent earthquakes show that Apple is destroying planet Earth with its new iOS devices - or whatever will be the preferred explanation of the earthquakes.

In particular, the Japanese earthquake was caused by iPad 2 which is being released exactly today while iPad 1 was released exactly one year ago, i.e. 2 weeks after the Chilean earthquake. At the time of the Indonesian tsunami, Apple changed its suppliers and opened its first store in Europe (London) and sold its 200-millionth song via iTunes. The science is clearly settled. My 300-to-1 proofs are even stronger than the proofs of AGW which are based on 3-to-1 odds.

To try to avoid a lawsuit from Apple, I have to emphasize that the previous two paragraphs were a joke: well, some people won't believe me it's a joke, anyway, but I have tried, Steve.

As I have repeatedly emphasized, 3 standard deviations is not a terribly strong piece of evidence. It's because one can often fine-tune the "disciplines" in which strong "bumps" may be found by accident - and because there are so many disciplines, it's not such an accident if you find a three-sigma bump.

The average year in which the 16 largest earthquakes in 1900-2011 took place is 1964.8. The middle of the interval is just 1955.5. The probability that the average is 1964.8 or higher, instead of the expected 1955.5, is 12 percent or so. Not a terribly strong signal. Thanks, Wolfram Mathematica.

You know, statistics happens. Events and combinations of events whose probability is nonzero will ultimately occur if they're given a sufficient number of attempts when they may occur.

However, I don't suggest that the earthquakes occur randomly in the sense of Poisson distribution - random beeps that you may hear from the Geiger-Müller counter. It seems pretty clear to me that the earthquakes are correlated with each other - both spatially and temporarily - a little bit like fractals with some characteristic scaling laws describing the autocorrelation.

The series of earthquakes in the 1960s is unlikely to be an accident and there exist good theoretical reasons why one earthquake could make it easier for its followups to take place as well.



Tsunami have been smaller than expected. Well, I guess that the proximity of the epicenter to a big island is what doesn't allow the waves to grow much.



A NOAA visualization of the wave's height at some moment (or at the maximum-height moment chosen separately for each point? It sounds more likely given the radial shapes), via Andrew Revkin.

Models are wrong: ice sheets grow from the bottom, too

Some people have rather insanely claimed that the climate models are OK - they are qualitatively settled. We can trust their predictions for the future centuries because the models' treatment of the phenomena is unlikely to change much in the following decades.

But the reality is that their half-life may be counted in months. Every few months, some lethal bug is being discovered in the prevailing description of various processes that are important for the climate.



Antarctic subglacial mountain ranges

Five days ago, the media have reported that

'Squishy' ice shifts climate models, study says (MSNBC)

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Antarctic ice sheet built 'bottom-up' (BBC)

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Widespread Persistent Thickening of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet by Freezing from the Base (Science)

Lead scientist Robin Bell of Columbia University said that the models of ice sheet - which are relevant for the behavior of Greenland and Antarctica, which subsequently influence the sea level, ice-albedo feedbacks, and other things - were as wrong as models of cars without tires. What happened?




Well, even a week ago, everyone would think that the ice sheets are completely made out of ancient frozen snow. The ice sheets must grow at the top, and disappear at the top.

However, radar pictures similar to the picture above have revealed that there are also subglacial mountains and they help the deep water to melt and/or refreeze. Consequently, ice sheets also grow or disappear from the bottom up. The East Antarctic ice sheet seems to grow in this way all the time, as the title in Science says.

Now, should we be shocked? If one is not creative enough, he could probably assert that the ice can only change at the top. But imagine that someone asks you the question in such a way that you are told about the other possibility.

"Can ice sheets grow from the bottom up?"

What would you say? Well, I think that some of us would think about subglacial lakes. If there are subglacial lakes, and Vostok is the most famous one, they can grow or get smaller. Many other things may happen. After all, mountain ranges may be created in similar way as ordinary mountains. Why not? Maybe, we would answer.

What I want to say is that the truth is rather natural. There is really no reason why the ice sheets should only be changing from the top down. In some sense, the denial of possible transformations at the bottom of the ice sheet is similar to the denial of geological processes or continental drift.

And now we know - indeed, the pictures show that there is a whole new exciting quasi-geological world at the bottom of the ice sheets. It's a beautiful discovery in a particular scientific discipline. It's also "just another story" we have to emphasize to fight against the people who have declared the "end of science" - and the "beginning of a new religious bigotry".

The ultimate theory of nearly everything, or TONE, may have been found, and we probably know what is approximately TOE, too. But its possible manifestations in various situations are uncountable.

But let me return to the climate models. Even if one fixes the directions from which the ice may grow and retreat, which will make at least the East Antarctic ice sheet much more resilient, it will still be far from being certain that the ice sheets are described correctly. There are lots of other things that the ice sheets are doing and we (and surely James Hansen) understand many of them incorrectly. Some of the flaws in the assumptions are known to some people; other flawed assumptions are not known to anyone.

The same shocks are repeatedly shattering with our ideas about mundane phenomena such as cloudiness as well as rarer phenomena such as lightnings - which produce positrons, among other things. In some sense, each of those comparable breakthroughs may change the predictions of important climatic variables in the future by dozens of percent.

What do you think that happens with our climate models after 10 such modifications? Just if you need the following identity, 10 times 10 percent is equal to 100 percent. In a few years or so, the predictions of pretty much everything may change their sign or double.

We only understand the things that we understand - at the depth (sometimes literally) and the level of accuracy at which we understand them. The previous sentence is a complete tautology and it would normally be vacuous. However, many people using the word "science" have mentally returned to the Middle Ages and the tautology is no longer trivial for them because they deny that there may be anything wrong about our understanding of the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, and their relationships.

Sometime in the future, children may know that there are growing subglacial mountain ranges - 2100 meters beneath the surface of Antarctica - just like some people know that the Earth is not flat today. They may laugh at their ancestors who used to think that what matters for the fate of the ice sheets is the air temperature 2100 meters higher - at the surface.

The thickness produced by the growth from the bottom may "only" be one half of the total thickness or less; but the changes of the flows etc. caused by the new paradigm are substantial.

Poland, EU are joining the shale gas revolution

Shale gas is natural gas (NG) produced from shale i.e. from finely grained sedimentary rock composed of mud, flakes, and fragments of minerals.



Czech readers may want to know that "shale gas" is "plyn z břidlic", something we don't usually talk about. ;-)

Benny Peiser has distributed links to a couple of articles showing that the EU is getting serious about shale gas - which has been increasingly important in the U.S. from 2000 or so.

EU countries promote risky gas drilling (Spiegel)

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Oil has joined the past: NG is the future (Business Insider)

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LNG Energy joins Polish shale gas project (press release)

I added the last link because it's very fresh. For CO2-obsessed people, natural gas produces about 20% less CO2 per kWh than oil and about 40% less than coal. Clearly, not so much difference for a CO2 fundamentalist. ;-)




More importantly, there are lots of reserves. The proved oil reserves are about 1.2 trillion barrels. However, the shale gas contains the equivalent of more than 1.2 trillion barrels, too. And it's likely that the estimate will keep on increasing.

Poland may soon become another "shale" Norway. One week ago, the Czech media would inform us that foreign companies came to look for shale gas in our homeland, too.

In particular, BasGas (Australia) and Cuadrilla Resources (United Kingdom) are going to check the territory around Valašské Meziříčí (Northeast of the country, near Poland) as well as the region near Barrandeum - between Beroun and Prague, one that is seen from the train if you travel from Pilsen to Prague - named after paleontologist Joachim Barrande who studied the rocks over there.



Nearby neighborhood of Prague, Barrandov, is also named after him and is the main Czech counterpart of Hollywood or at least Bollywood. In fact, this plate on the Barrandov Hill could even be viewed as the counterpart of the letters "Hollywood" in Hollywood even though it's a little bit smaller. :-)

I find the rocks in the Barrandeum fascinating and I wouldn't be too happy if they were destroyed by miners. On the other hand, they're fascinating because they look like the Moon landscape, and maybe the character wouldn't change much if the hills became a new powerful source of shale gas. ;-)

Magnetic pole: motion sped up by 800 percent

The North Magnetic Pole is the place on Earth where the magnetic field has a vertical direction.

This place doesn't coincide with the Geographic North Pole, linked to the axis of the Earth's spin. Because the Earth doesn't carry any significant electric charge, there's no God-given law that the two types of poles have to coincide. And in fact, the relative orientation is changing with time.



Salem News posted a worried article titled

Magnetic Polar Shifts Causing Massive Global Superstorms

in which it is claimed that the motion of the North Magnetic Pole towards Russia sped up from 8 km per year to 60 km per year in recent years (from 1989 or so) and that storms similar to the (technical) Category 6 cyclone Yasi may flood the whole Earth because of the looming or ongoing reversal, bringing us 500 km/h winds all over the world. Nice. ;-)




The reversals are usually relatively rapid. Here you have the graph showing the recent 5 million years.

The present era is found at the top and it is black which means "the same direction of the magnetic field as we have experienced so far". The opposite orientation, denoted by white bars, was most recently seen 0.78 million years ago.

The latest reversal, the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, took something between 1,200 and 10,000 years, depending on the location where the apparent duration was measured. So when I say "rapid", you shouldn't imagine "a few years". But I would actually guess that the shorter duration is more likely to be right - and the longer one is just due to errors in measurements and diffused proxies.

A year ago, National Geographic attributed the recent changes to some "plumes" emerging from the deeper core closer to the surface.

I can't predict whether the magnetic pole will switch the direction in coming years or centuries - and how quickly. But do I believe that it will bring us Yasi-like superstorms? Well, I don't. I even suspect that the authors of that text could have confused tropical storms with geomagnetic storms whose essence is not linked to the climate at all and that are caused by space weather rather than internal changes of the Earth's core.

However, it's obvious that even changes of the magnetic field - that may be faster than in recent millennia (and maybe not because the changes haven't been observed for too long) - may add their contribution to the tenths of a degree of temperature change that the globe is experiencing.

While the article about Yasi-like superstorms all over the world is alarmist in character, at least it doesn't urge us to ritually sacrifice power plants. ;-)

Via Marc Morano

Yellowstone supervolcano and Michio Kaku

Rebecca Hillman of CNN (blogs) decided to interview an expert about the Yellowstone caldera.



As you can see, she picked her universal science expert, namely Dr Michio Kaku, a co-father of string field theory. :-)

I think he is very entertaining. Even if his science has flaws, which is likely, he could be hired for similar jobs but there should be some real experts who pre-check what he is going to say. Nevertheless, his comments overlap with science, at least at some popular level, but volcanologist Erik Klemetti was driven up the wall.




Kaku's message is pretty simple: the big volcano erupts once in 600,000 years or so, it's about the right time for it to erupt again, plus (not minus) 100,000 years, and when it does, the U.S. as we know it will be destroyed: 100 miles around the epicenter will be killed and 500 miles will be lethally contaminated by ash etc. (the latter is probably nonsense). He says that volcano monitoring is black magic so we have no idea when it erupts. When it does, you should run.

A similar eruption contributed to the K-T demise of dinosaurs, he says. (In combination with an asteroid impact, he says: I personally don't believe that such rare events are often "double whammies" - in my opinion, it's more natural to have one true cause.)

Well, I have no doubt that Kaku's knowledge about the volcanoes is tiny in comparison with Klemetti's knowledge. At the same moment, I think that Klemetti didn't do a good job in explaining what's wrong with Kaku's claims. You can't just make a list and say that everything in it is wrong, Dr Klemetti.

In particular, it's obvious that Klemetti is primarily upset by the comment that volcano monitoring is "black magic" because this proposition undermines the respectability of the discipline. However, could Dr Klemetti please explain what can actually be predicted, how much time in advance it can be predicted, and what evidence do we have that these predictions will be valid?

The phrase "very sophisticated monitoring" with a broken link (that would answer the questions anyway) simply can't replace either of these answers that people like me are waiting for. In this sense, Kaku's summary, despite the sensationalism I am fully aware of, was more convincing for me than Dr Klemetti's page.

It's plausible that Dr Klemetti can BigThink, as the website indicates, but he should also learn how to use his BigMouth because the BigThink remained largely invisible.

New director of the American Geophysical Union: Chris Mooney

Willie Soon has sent me an incredible link that raised up my adrenaline level by several orders of magnitude; it has just blown me away:

AGU board of directors

Chris Mooney, a holder of an English degree, is one of the AGU directors. No kidding. Click at the page above.




He was clearly elected not just despite the fact that he is just an obnoxious verbal terrorist attacking most of the American nation for purely ideological reasons most of the time: they elected him because of that. His outrageous texts politicizing science such as The Republican War on Science didn't hurt him: they actually helped him.

How could the unlimited corruption of the AGU become more manifest than if a director is a person who has demonstrably no knowledge about the scientific discipline, or any scientific discipline, for that matter, and who doesn't even hold a minimal scientific degree?

I am flabbergasted that I could have lived in a near vicinity of the breathtakingly immoral people who make such brutally outrageous things possible because these things clearly help those people materially, too. Their decision was a deliberate act to spit into the faces of all the remaining genuine scientists who are still AGU members and who refuse to become paid whores of extreme political movements - if there are any.

The message to the real scientists simply is: behave. Note that even a totally stupid and obnoxious jerk identifying science with the left-wing delusions may become your boss - making 50 years of your education and research secondary - as long as he has the right political colors. This guy will be telling you what you should say and what you shouldn't say.

They have clearly declared a War on the Republican Scientists. Moreover, Mooney is not just uneducated and ideologically blinded. He is also self-evidently corrupt. He, a fanatical atheist, changed his tone towards religion once he received some funds from the Templeton Foundation.

Let me be honest: I despise you, folks, and your conference in San Francisco deserves a huge targeted earthquake that will end most of your lives because you are just contaminating the intellectual and moral landscape of our planet and limiting the freedom and dignity of the people who actually want and deserve both.

For 15 years, I have lived in a late communist regime and the communists were doing many bad things but I honestly don't remember this kind of a flagrant raping of a top scientific institution by their political party or any political movement. The communists allowed the scientific institutions to do their scientific job. Communists were clearly overrepresented among the bosses of such institutions but all of them were actually scientists.

The modern American leftists are more brutally arrogant than any European communist party of the 1980s.

And that's the memo.

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P.S. After having looked at a few other pages, most people - even on the left side - realize that this is just profoundly wrong. That includes most readers of Bad Astronomy (Phil Plait).

3-5 °C of warming was great for the tropical life

A new paper in Science written by Carlos Jaramillo and 28 other authors looked at the tropical life during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, 56.3 million years ago) event:

Effects of Rapid Global Warming at the Paleocene-Eocene Boundary on Neotropical Vegetation (abstract)

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Environmentalists exaggerated threat to tropical rainforests from global warming (Daily Mail)

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Global warming replenishes rainforest (Medical Daily)

At the beginning of Eocene, the temperatures jumped by 3-5 °C. It used to be said that such a jump was bad, especially for the regions that were warm to start with.

However, the authors found that life began to flourish and the biodiversity exploded. New taxa of flowers, especially angiosperms (see the picture for an example), began to spread.




Recall that at the very beginning of PETM, the temperatures quickly jumped by 6 °C which was why some modern classes of mammals - not too far from ourselves - could begin to enjoy life on Earth.



The temperatures have been mostly cooling since PETM and now they are about 4 °C cooler than during PETM.

While the paper speaks a very clear language whether the warming by 3-6 °C was a good thing for life - it surely was - the crooks in the media are trying to obscure this basic finding of the paper. Some of them write "we are afraid to say that it was like that because some people may start to say that several degrees of warming would be a good thing".



The PETM CO2 concentrations were higher than today (390 ppm), and according to some measurements, as high as 2,000 ppm.

Well, indeed, some extra people will start to say it because it is what the science - as well as common sense - is unambiguously demonstrating, and whoever wants the people not to make this conclusion, is a nasty liar and crook who should get a proper thrashing.

And that's the memo.

Megafauna not killed by climate change

One of the claims of the proponents of the catastrophic climate change theory is that the climate change is a killer. More concretely, the extinction of the Australian megafauna - including giant goannas, five-meter-long pythons, and huge kangaroos, lizards, and marsupials - used to be explained by the climate change because the dead animals looked dry and stressed. ;-)



New research shows that it was not the case. A January 2007 paper in Geology shows that the population of these big mammals was a nearly constant function of the climate: a wet climate is supposed to be better for them but they survived the dry periods without any problems.

• The Australian
• News.google.com
• The paper

The animals died within 20,000 years after the arrival of the real culprit. His name was homo sapiens but you may call him Aborigine, too.

USC geologists: humans cause 2% of warming

George Chilingarian, PhD is a professor of petroleum geology at University of Southern California (USC), the author of 53 books, and a Knight of Arts and Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Leonid Khilyuk, PhD is a consultant in mathematical modelling and a former boss of the Applied Math Department of the Kiev Technological University.

In their paper

• On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved?

published in Environmental Geology 50 (Springer-Verlag) in Summer 2006 they looked at various sources of changes of the global climate from a very unconventional perspective. They argue that the humans are responsible for 0.01 Celsius degrees of warming from the 0.56 Celsius degrees warming during the 20th century. Geophysical sources of temperature periodicity such as tectonic pressures and the solar factors are by 4-5 orders of magnitude more important than the anthropogenic effects, they argue in sentences that are hard to believe and that will be especially hard to believe for generic members of the climate science community where a strikingly contradictory hypothesis has recently become very popular.

Their estimate of the modulation of the temperatures due to the changing orbit of the Earth and its fluctuating eccentricity is 7.5 Kelvin degrees. Well, I would be careful before accepting any of these numbers, but it could be a mistake for the climate scientists not to look at their reasoning.

You will see many graphs of various quantities at geological timescales as well as the recent instrumental record plus the cooling in the last 1000 and 3000 years.




They calculate that the Kyoto protocol is an example how to achieve minimum results by maximum efforts and they recommend to abandon it as meaningless and harmful which is, in my opinion, uncontroversial even if some of the USC authors' intermediate steps - such as their replacement of the greenhouse effect by "direct heating" - look strange to me. ;-)

Comments by World Climate Report. A rebuttal by W. Aeschbach-Hertig. Unfortunately, I would agree with many points of the rebuttal...

Great Dying: space rock probably replaces global warming

What was the most striking event in the history of life on this planet that can be justified by geological observations? Yes, it is the Great Dying, technically known as the

• Permian-Triassic exctinction event
  

that occured 252.3 - 251.4 million years ago; both numbers have error of 0.3 million years. More than 90 percent of marine species plus 70 percent of terrestrial species went extinct. 20 million years later, dinosaurs appeared - so their existence can probably viewed as a consequence of the Great Dying.

What is the explanation of the event? If you asked left-wing mainstream media, such as the Washington Post, which theory would they favor, what would they answer? Yes, it's always global warming. It's the same greenhouse effect that is going to kill all of us soon after we return from Al Gore's scariest movie we have ever seen. ;-) Volcanos were suddenly active for one million years and the species were dying. Why not? It's self-consistent. Volcanos can decide to turn on for 1 million of years if the animals don't behave, can't they? ;-)

There have always been people who said that a space rock had to hit the Earth, but no rock was ever found. The global warming theorists were happy and their politically correct theory could have been considered as the best one.

Alternative theories are based on some phenomena that look too slow to be able to kill so quickly - continental drift (Pangaea was formed 1 million years before the dying), atmospheric H2S buildup or methane ice that suddenly evaporated from the seabeds. They also include speculative fast events such as gamma rays from a nearby supernova explosion.

All these theories-not-laws are great - except that three days ago, Ralph von Frese from Ohio State University with Laramie Potts and others have found

• a rather likely crater as large as Ohio
• (BBC, news.google.com)
  

in Antarctica - hidden half a mile beneath ice - that is apparently linked to the event. They used the fine measurements of gravity with NASA's GRACE satellites plus airborne radar images of the ground under ice that displayed a concentration of mass ("mascon") along the boundary of a disk (a circle) of diameter of 483 kilometers.

There exist possible alternative explanations but if the crater was due to an impactor, the new Wilkes Land crater was caused by an impactor that was 6 times larger than the object that has caused the

• Cretaceous-Tertiary exctinction event

that eventually and probably killed most dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago and that created the Chicxulub crater. Needless to say, some people deny all the craters as the cause of anything, and they argue that the exctinction of dinosaurs - much like the Great Dying - was caused by too low carbon taxes that the dinosaurs were paying to the budget at that time. ;-)

If we observe relatively fast events that seem dramatic, I personally prefer explanations based on processes that are known to be fast and dramatic rather than processes that are hypothesized to be important and fast enough by politicized speculative science.

Climate modelers devastated

Incidentally, 10 million years after the death of dinosaurs, i.e. 55 million years ago, the Arctic was full of ice that eventually melted because of global warming. Shockingly, it was shown 3 days ago that at that time, there was already no ice in the Arctic at all. This insight all but destroys the climate modelers' picture of this piece of geological history, and reinforces the belief that the warming in polar regions is primarily an increasing function of the number of hurricanes.

Via Benny Peiser