Climate Change, Rusalka, and this is pledge week.

View 810 Monday, February 10, 2014

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

Syrian loyalists claim that the UN is allowing rebel snipers who have been shooting civilians in Homs to escape with their families just as the government was about to eliminate them, this in the guise of humanitarian aid. The government supporters are Alawites, and the UN is helping the Sunni rebels.

Which is one more instance of the problem of trying to spread liberal democracy in a society that does not have any such tradition. And no, I don’t know what we ought to be doing over there. At one time the US was able to aid Lebanon in seeking independence from Syria, which considers Lebanon as part of Syria for historical reasons.

And in Libya, now that the mad colonel is gone, it is not at all clear who will be in charge of what. Khadafy was not replaced by liberal democracy, and the history of Libya has not ended – or indeed even been written.

Global-Warming Slowdown Due to Pacific Winds, Study Shows

By Alex Morales

Stronger Pacific Ocean winds may help explain the slowdown in the rate of global warming since the turn of the century, scientists said.

More powerful winds in the past 20 years may be forcing warmer seas deeper and bringing cooler water to the surface,

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-09/global-warming-slowdown-due-to-pacific-winds-study-shows.html

Apparently this is not part of the extremely expensive models of the climate. Perhaps the effect will be added, but no one knows why the winds have become stronger. Global warming, perhaps, except that the warming causes higher winds which cause cooling; but that bit of negative feedback hasn’t been folded into the models, because it wasn’t expected.

IR Expert Speaks Out After 40 Years Of Silence : “IT’S THE WATER VAPOR STUPID and not the CO2″

I’m a professional infrared astronomer who spent his life trying to observe space through the atmosphere’s back-radiation that the environmental activists claim is caused by CO2 and guess what? In all the bands that are responsible for back radiation in the brightness temperatures (color temperatures) related to earth’s surface temperature (between 9 microns and 13 microns for temps of 220K to 320 K) there is no absorption of radiation by CO2 at all. In all the bands between 9 and 9.5 there is mild absorption by H2O, from 9.5 to 10 microns (300 K) the atmosphere is perfectly clear except around 9.6 is a big ozone band that the warmists never mention for some reason. From 10 to 13 microns there is more absorption by H2O. Starting at 13 we get CO2 absorption but that wavelength corresponds to temperatures below even that of the south pole. Nowhere from 9 to 13 microns do we see appreciable absorption bands of CO2. This means the greenhouse effect is way over 95% caused by water vapor and probably less than 3% from CO2.

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/ir-expert-speaks-out-after-40-years-of-silence-its-the-water-vapor-stupid-and-not-the-co2/

I am not an IR astronomer and I don’t know many of them, but we have several among the readership here, so if this is nonsense I expect someone will tell me. I do know that Freeman Dyson has been pointing out that CO2 is not likely to be effective anywhere but in cold, dry areas, and we ought to be able to test this by observation.

Arrhenius about the turn of the 20^th Century thought that doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere would cause warming; his model was essential on the back of an envelope, but it is not clear that it was much less accurate than the extremely expensive climate models in current use. Everyone knows that the Earth has been warming since the interruption of the Ice Age (beginning of the Interglacial Period) and at one time most of the concern about climate change was that the Ice Age would return. That was of course the thesis of Fallen Angles, by Niven, Pournelle and Flynn, and was a major concern of Karl Sagan and others before the current warming trend resumed in the 1980’s.

It does seem that modern concern about climate change is impervious to falsification: any development is incorporated into the theory as another indication of support. There does not appear to be any crucial experiment or observation to be applied. The problem is that preparing for global warming if the real threat is cooling can be vastly expensive, sufficiently so as to make preparation for cooling prohibitively expensive. Simple Bayesian analysis would say that the optimum strategy would be to reduce the uncertainty.

Proof of the Iron Law in action

http://chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

No surprise, but nice to have confirmation.

Phil

I used to think I knew something about Black Holes, but they do not seem to be so simple as we once thought:

Hawking On Black Holes

Kevin L Keegan

A few days ago, Mr. Dobbins posted a comment about the latest Steven Hawking paper on black holes with the sensational subject that black holes don’t exist after all. You invited comment from those who think about such things…

Black holes have been a problem for physicists since they were discovered lurking in the equations of General Relativity. The notion of a black hole is much older, though; when scientists put Newtonian Mechanics together with the discovery that light has a finite speed, the idea of a "dark star" was born. John Mitchel wrote about the idea in 1783, a star so large that its escape velocity was greater than the speed of light. Most scientists hoped that they could not exist, but General Relativity put that hope to rest.

Einstein hated the idea of a black hole. If all things fell in and nothing came out, the black hole would have a temperature of absolute zero, breaking thermodynamics pretty badly. Stephen Hawking rescued thermodynamics in 1974 by showing that all black holes must emit radiation through quantum effects and that the amount of radiation emitted exactly balanced the expected entropy of the black hole. His work tied together General Relativity, Quantum physics, and classical thermodynamics for the first time. His work was not, however, a general treatment of gravity in Quantum field theory.

By showing that black holes radiate energy, thermodynamics was saved, but Quantum theory was destroyed. Quantum theory depends upon the notion of strict causality, which is to say that the past, once set, cannot be changed. This means that information cannot be destroyed. If information can be erased from the universe, there is no way we can know with any certainty what the past actually was, so, in principle, it CAN be changed and we would never know it.

When a classical black hole swallowed matter and energy and kept it locked up forever, quantum physics was safe because, while the information may be inaccessible, it still existed somewhere. That was good enough to keep quantum physics consistent. When Hawking showed that black holes radiate energy, but the source of the radiation was never IN the black hole, that changed the whole landscape. The black hole could radiate away to nothing while releasing none of its information!

The quantum physics community was in an uproar. Many did not want to believe the Hawking results. Others looked for ways that the information carried in a black hole could be preserved. Leonard Suskind wrote a complex paper claiming that the information in a black hole is "imprinted" on its event horizon and therefore was never hidden at all. Many quantum physicists were happy with the notion, but it was quite a reach.

It occurred to me that the problem was simpler to solve than this. If we are going to treat a black hole using Quantum principles, then the notion of an event horizon as an absolutely fixed set of points in space around a black hole had to go. The event horizon would have to fluctuate rapidly and randomly at all points in space, coming closer to the black hole in one moment and further away at another. If a photon were orbiting the black hole at the event horizon, which many should be at any given moment, and the event horizon suddenly fluctuated inward, it could allow that photon to escape to space. Now something that was in the black hole can get out of the black hole. The magnitude of the fluctuations should be inversely proportional to the radius of the event horizon, which is another way of saying that they will be inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole, just like Hawking radiation. And the notion explains how the escaping virtual particle of Hawking radiation achieved the energy necessary to become a real particle in the first place. It seemed like a neat solution, providing a mechanism to generate Hawking radiation and allow information from inside the black hole to get out.

I am not a physicist, however, and could not even begin to write a paper about this that anyone would read. I did put the ideas forth in a letter to Scientific American, but it did not get published. I feel somewhat vindicated, because Hawking’s latest paper puts this very idea forth in a more rigorous manner, even though the proper treatment of gravity under Quantum Field Theory does not yet exist to properly prove the concept.

So, the classical event horizon is gone, replaced by a fluctuating plane in space that allows a black hole to leak its information back into the universe at large, rescuing thermodynamics and quantum theory and getting rid of Suskind’s complicated model (which may, in the end, be an equivalent but messy description of the situation). The sensationalism is somewhat justified — if a black hole can slowly radiate away its information, it is not truly black at all, just very, very, very dim.

Saturday Roberta and I went to a local movie theatre at 0930 in the morning: we saw Rene Fleming in Dvorak’s Rusalka as part of the successful movie theater showings of Metropolitan operas. It was wonderful. Dvorak was greatly influenced by Wagner in that he does not stop the action for arias, but he does write arias into the opera. The Met production was extremely well done, and as part of the presentation you get to be backstage while they are making set changes. Recommended.

This is Pledge Week for KUSC, the Los Angeles Public Radio Classical Music station, which means it is pledge week for Chaos Manor. Alas, Chaos Manor hasn’t been operating at full capacity for the past few weeks, but we hope to remedy that. This place operates on the Public Radio model, which is to say, it’s free, but if it doesn’t get support it can’t stay around. It exists on the support of patrons, and I try to keep it worth the rather modest amounts required for subscriptions. If you have not renewed your subscription for a while, this would be a great time to do it; and if you read this and don’t subscribe, this would be a good time to subscribe.

I only harangue you for money during the pledge weeks, and I hold mine when KUSC holds theirs (and yes of course I subscribe to KUSC). You can subscribe here.

And yes, I’ll probably bug you all week, even though I feel a bit guilty about not providing quite as much content as I would like to. This flu like thing is letting go its hold over me, but it does so slowly, and I lose energy.

And it’s late and I am out of energy. Good night.