Book Launch

Melissa Fyfe, writing for the Age's edition of Saturday 27 November, reported here on a recent book launch at a meeting of the Lavoisier Society in Melbourne on Monday 22 Nov. (Your lowly scribe, a paid up member of the Lavoisier Society, was 3000 km away in Perth attending a diamond conference which precluded his attendance, including the 40th anniversary of the 1964 OKGA class at Knox Grammar that weekend in Sydney, much to his regret. These facts establish me as a right winged climate sceptic though unlike others, I am a theological moron).

Presiding the meeting was Henry's contributor Hugh Morgan but after reading Melissa's report, I gain the vague impression Melissa needs to further develop the skill to discern fact from fiction.

She certainly does not seem to understand the meaning of the IPCC statement that climate is a coupled, non-linear chaotic system, and hence long term predictions of future climate states is not possible, which she can read here  in the IPCC Executive Summary. If we cannot predict future climate states, then what is she writing about?
   
If she did, she would have realised that global warmers are attempting to predict future climate states, in complete contradiction to the authoritative statement made by the IPCC on their behalf.  She should report on this important fact rather than uncritically repeat IPCC pronouncements.

Melissa Fyfe also does not seem to realise global warmers are funded by taxpayers - by one estimate greater than $4,000 million dollars US world wide, funds which climate sceptics have no access to, but then she resorts to the guilty by association argument by insinuating climate sceptics are funded by big Oil and Coal companies, who are morally in the same league as tobacco companies from their efforts to prove that smoking does not cause lung cancer. (As an aside, my deceased father, who was a surgeon and physician, always maintained that smoking was a symptom of a neurosis associated with people who develop cancer, having had many many patients who died of lung cancer without smoking a single cigarette).

It is difficult to contradict climate science when you are not given access to funding on an equal basis, but then what was that comment in "Animal Farm"? All are equal, except some are more equal than others?"

She reports that University of Melbourne Associated Professor of meteorology Kevin Walsh said that Kininmonth failed to present the evidence for natural global warming, though to this cranky geologist anyone predicting a future climate state, in complete contradiction to the fact that this is not possible, would be considered an even bigger curiosity. Logically this means that the Pleistocene Ice Age was also unnatural and caused by primitive humans? It is a geological fact that historically greater fluctuations in climate state have occurred than what we are experiencing now. Those are natural global warming and cooling periods. As the earth is readjusting to the last mini-ice age, it is fairly obvious that it is a natural warming, but of course if your geological knowledge is scant, these facts may not be apparent.

Here is a graph which I spotted on the John Daly Site

Note that Volcanic eruptions cause global cooling, and that the blue line, which I suspect is the Solar Index, related to Solar Activity, is strongly coupled with the global temperature. This suggests that the earth's temperature is strongly influenced by the Sun rather than anything else.

The other fact is that since 1979 the earth's temperature in the lower troposphere seems to have been remarkably steady, because if global warming theories are correct, it should have heated up.  It has not, of course, which would be extremely irrirating for the global warmers.

Melissa seems also unaware of the fact that while the peer-review system is laudable and usually works, scientists who present papers contradicting global warming cannot get published in those peer-reviewed journals, and hence need to resort to alternative publications. This is has been extensively commented on over the internet but why she avoids mentioning this is perplexing.

"So climate scientists are frustrated that the sceptics' arguments persist ?, even though they say they have addressed them." Perhaps Kevin Hennessy, senior research scientist at CSIRO's Atmospheric Research, might care to discuss the IPCC statement that "the climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Clearly the climatologists have not addressed the most fundamental criticism- that of predicting future climate states when theoretically we cannot. My readers might feel I am labouring this fact to the point of irritating repetition, but any one who, in light of the IPCC statement, then asserts that they can predict a future climate state, when in fact one cannot, has a serious case to answer. To those of us in the physical sciences, such facts only strengthen our view that geographers and climatologists have an incomplete scientific understanding of earth processes.

Here is a graph of measured atmosphere CO2 levels since 1800. To date no one has contradicted this data, so we can assume that Jawarowski's data is accurate and factual. Mellissa Fyfe should study this graph and then see whether her statement that CO2 levels have been constant at 280 ppm for the last 10,000 years needs editorial correction.

Water vapour is the most important greenhouse component, accounting for 95% of the warming effect, yet this crucial component remains totally intractable from a climate modelling perspective, and being unable to cope with this natural complexity, climatologists focussed on the miniscule simple CO2 component.

Academic Research Grants

Andrew Bolt writes in the Herald Sun  that the Australian Research Council hands out taxpayer funds to some bizarre academic research projects.

Here's a good one " $710,000 on a study of "attitudes towards sexuality in Judaism and Christianity in the Hellenistic Greco-Roman Era"? or these "$255,000 on a research project called "Feminist theory meets indigenous art", or $118,000 on a film expert's musings on "The Misfits and the iconography of post-war American acting"?

One gets the feeling that academic research is like a black hole, sucking in vast amounts of money for little practical gain.

New Species Discovered

At least 154 new species of fish have been discovered by marine scientists here which is unusual because we are being told that human activity is supposed to lead to species extinction.

Variable Radioactivity

Many scientific breakthroughs tend to go unnoticed and this one, on the discovery that radioactive decay is not constant at all but dependent on astronomical cycles  has profound implications for the physical sciences.

If radioactive decay is influenced by gravitational effects (though some of us who are familiar with Plasma physics will suggest that it is the earth's electric field which is the crucial factor) then the assumptions of absolute dating are false, and absolute dating isn't.

This means that some of the hallowed dates used by various academic sects become extremely problematical, perhaps invalidating their theories.

Pleistocene Extinctions - more computer modelling.

It is amazing how the humble computer seems to be involved with all sorts of academic research.

Recent papers have been published and reported here and here which reckon that from computer modelling humans killed the large Pleistocene species.

This is known as the Blitzkrieg Extinction theory, first developed by the American Anthropologists who asserted that with the arrival of the Clovis peoples in America some 12,000 years ago, the Mammoths and Mastadons were killed off for food.

There are some gaping holes in this theory. The Clovis peoples arrived with only rudimentary spears and clubs, and with these primitive weapons are thought to have exterminated all the large animals in the Americas. If this were so, then clearly the Africans, with similar weapons would have killed of all the African elephants, but that did not happen.

And if one is a hunter and gatherer, logic would suggest that one hunts for the easiest prey like Musk Ox. Now the interesting thing about the Musk Ox is that they are quite easy to kill as any hunter would recount. Shoot one of their small herd, and the rest encircle it as a protective ring. The problem is that to get at the dead beast, the hunter has to kill all the herd. Why Musk Ox don't flee at the sight of their human predators remains a mystery to this day, because Bison and all other herbivores have developed this adaptation.

Since Musk Ox were contemporaneous with Mammoths and Mastadons and were
easier to kill than an elephant, why did the Clovis people not kill off these animals too?

In fact the real danger of elephant extinction occurred only recently with the development of guns. Primitive spears and clubs are useless in killing elephants - these weapons would bounce of the tough hide of an elephant.

No the Pleistocene extinctions cannot be attributed to man, and with the discovery of variable radioactive decay, the dating assumptions for these studies will add further problems for the authors.

There is a disturbing trend developing in academia in which humanity has been elevated to a position of omnipotence - affecting climate and responsible for Pleistocene extinctions.

Benny Peiser in his CCnet newletter noted a new mania gripping the UK

HOLY GRAIL MANIA GRIPS BRITAIN

Has the mystery of the Holy Grail been solved? The Guardian, 26 November 2004

New clue to mystery of Holy Grail This is London, 26 November 2004

Researchers tackle 'Holy Grail' code ABC Online, Australia, 26 November 2004
 
Code cracked as hunt for Grail goes on The Scotsman, 26 November 2004

IT is one of the most enduring myths of Western European literature, a cryptic message which has inspired tales from Arthurian legends to Dan Brown's best ...
 
Letters remain the holy grail to code-breakers Telegraph.co.uk, 26 november 2004

For 250 years it defied all code-breakers. Darwin had a go; Dickens, and Wedgwood too. But the 10-letter inscription ...
 
Codebreaker scores success in search for the Holy Grail Independent, 26 November 2004
 
Holy Grail Riddle Solution 'To Be Revealed' The Scotsman, UK - Nov 24, 2004
 
Experts to reveal Holy Grail code BBC News, UK - Nov 24, 2004
 
Hope of solution to Holy Grail riddle ic Birmingham.co.uk, UK - Nov 25, 2004
A team of Second World War codebreakers was today poised to reveal the solution to a cryptic 18th century riddle in Staffordshire which is rumoured to reveal ...
 
Experts to reveal Holy Grail code BBC Birmingham, UK - Nov 24, 2004

Here is a good summary of it in the Wikpedia

Finally we come across something quite bizarre -

Stuffing 3D into 1 D

"WILLIAM Phillips works in what's definitely a three-dimensional physics laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland. But he has spent the past few months stuffing three-dimensional atoms into a one-dimensional world - just to see what happens". Rest of it here

Now I am not sure whether this is a practical joke or not, but a one dimensional world does not exist.  We live in a 3 dimensional world, X,Y and Z or Cartesian axes. A 2 dimensional world is a plane X,Y. A one dimensional world is therefore a "point". Now a point has no dimensions, and has no physical existence. Mathematically it has, of course, and is a very useful abstraction for simplifying complex data but attempting to stuff 3D into 1D? Maybe in a computer simulation, but certainly not it reality.

But reading the article you soon discover that all is not what it seems - what these scientists are actually dealing with is very cold states of matter - close to what is known as Absolute Zero, a state of matter in which the motion of the atoms is zero.

This gentle reader, is what your hard earned taxes fund. One wonders whether other more important things are worth funding.