Has the Sun Gone To Sleep? And thinking about the FDA

View 807 Sunday, January 19, 2014

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

The grandchildren are off to Disneyland and then back home to Washington. Roberta is still in bed, and I’m going to take her out to the doctor Monday. I’m not anywhere near up to normal energy.

Everyone I know – well nearly – has had flu shots yet many of them have come down with this long lingering flu-like affliction, which saps energy. Sudafed takes care of the stopped up nose, but not completely. It takes half the morning to clear the crud out from my sinuses and lungs, and it comes out a little at a time as fairly hardened grey crud. I’m sitting here trying to come up with enough energy to write on a number of interesting subjects I’ve found, but it’s hard slugging.

Has the Sun gone to sleep?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25771510 It is well worth your time to watch the video on Maunder Minimum that comes up when you visit this site. There are paintings of markets set up on the frozen Thames River during the Little Ice Age. It gets cold when the Sun dozes off, as many think it did back then.

Back when I was science editor of Galaxy – well, it really means I wrote the science column, A Step Farther Out – there were a number of articles in both the science and general press on whether the Sun had “gone out”: that is, if there had been a fundamental change in the way the Sun fuses hydrogen into energy. The then current theory of how the Sun works required there to be about 300% more neutrinos than were being detected. Perhaps, perhaps, the Sun had gone out? That there had been a fundamental change in the processing of hydrogen, something that might be restored as the Sun continued to contract; in other words that there might be a cyclical process at work.

Then theorists decided that neutrinos had mass after all, and they could wiggle in certain ways, and when they acted that way we would not expect to see so many of them since some would decay on the way from the Sun to the detector. Everyone was overjoyed. The Sun hadn’t gone out, after all. Of course it took thirty years to come up with a theory that explained why we weren’t seeing as many neutrinos as we had, and there are still dissidents pointing out that the Sun seems to vary in brightness in a cyclical way, and perhaps that has something to do with the neutrino detection rate. Note that a neutrino is pretty close to being nothing at all travelling at light speed. It doesn’t like to interact with anything, and mostly just goes on past without leaving any trace of having been there, so you don’t detect many of them anyway. Billions and billions of them pass through every square inch of everything – including you – every second, but since they don’t interact with you they don’t have any effect. Or at least we sincerely hope so.

One experiment detected precisely nineteen – that’s 19, 1.9 x 10^1 – neutrinos out of some 10^10 coming our way from a supernova in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Other detectors get larger numbers, but they remain quite small. Given that, the reliability of our estimate of just how many we should be able to see – or of the total flux based on what we do see – is subject to question.

The Maunder Minimum doesn’t refer to solar output, but to Sun Spots, but for all the time I was growing up it was assumed that solar output was lower during the centuries of the Little Ice Age (roughly 1350-1850 AD) and that the Maunder Minimum period (1645 – 1715) right in the middle of it was indicative of something related to that. It was a period of great cold, not just in the northern hemisphere. We know the Viking Warm period was warm in the northern hemisphere through all kinds of observations – longer growing seasons in Europe and China, grape vines in Vinland and Scotland, almanacs, monastery records, and the like. We don’t have much on Africa and the Southern Hemisphere although there are Inca records, sort of, that indicate it was warm there too in Viking times. But the Little Ice Age was global.

So. Has the Sun gone to sleep? If so, what does that mean, and how long will it go on?

For one speculation about life in a time of a renewed Maunder Minimum, I can recommend Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, Fallen Angels http://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Angels-Larry-Niven-ebook/dp/B005BJTZ1U/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1390176803&sr=1-5&keywords=Fallen+Angels. The book is largely satire and comedy, but we do some serious speculation in it. It’s also a lot of fun.

For more serious discussion, the last time we worried about reduced solar output a great number of books such as The Genesis Strategy were spawned, and Big Science told us to take it all seriously; but that was before the Great Global Warming Consensus that came about when global temperatures began to rise – by fractions of a degree Centigrade – in the 80’s and 90’s (up to 1997 or so) when they stabilized and may have begun to fall again. We don’t know how long that will go on, either.

Indeed, the latest round of observations confirms what I’ve been trying to say for a long time: we don’t really know where the climate is going. We know we’re pumping a fairly large amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it will be around a long time unless we do something about it – plant huge forest areas, encourage plankton blooms in the ocean, stop burning fossil fuels and run civilization on something else – it may well be something to worry about. The one thing we are not going to do, though, is reduce the amount of CO2 mankind puts into the atmosphere until we have new and economical ways to generate energy. We thought we had those in nuclear power, but we seem to have gone into panic mode on that score. We sure don’t have them in wind – very few windmills ever generate enough useful power over their lifetimes to build their replacement. We have only partial source in solar power. It works great to run air conditioners in hot areas, but storage of ground based solar power for use during bad weather and at night is hideously expensive. Electric cars, for instance, will never “save” as much CO2 as was produced in their manufacture – they tend to be coal powered cars.

And of course as I pointed out in A Step Farther Out – the book made up of many of my Galaxy columns http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_8?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=a%20step%20farther%20out&sprefix=A+step+f%2Cdigital-text%2C207 – what used to be called the third world isn’t interested anyway. “Hey man, I get you, now that I got a piece of this industrial revolution action you tell me to shut down the game. Let me tell you what I think of that —“ India and China add far more CO2 every year than the US produces already. And that beat goes on.

But there are some signs of returning sanity to the scientific community. With so many tenure positions and grants dependent on being a Global Warming Believer it will take a while to return to actual science in which theory is made to conform to data rather than data massaged so that it will fit the computer models, but we can have faith that reason will prevail. Especially since the Sun keeps going to sleep…

MS leukemia drug http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303465004579322403405913292

I had hoped to comment on this in some detail, because it illustrates a real problem in attempts to regulate. People willing to be government regulators tend to a certain personality type, a sort of civil service mentality cubed, with doses of megalomania and paranoia thrown in. Now the paranoia is justified: when you make recommendations intended to protect public safety but costing large and powerful corporations billions of dollars, you are going to be attacked if you can be attacked. They really are out to get you, and one thing they will do is accuse you of megalomania. It doesn’t take a lot of that to generate the notion that one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and better not to be hanged at all. Find rigid standards enforced by the courts, and stick to them.

The problem there is when the regulators also reach out as far as they can, no matter what their motive for doing so. It is one thing for the FDA to demand that a product do no unexpected harm; it is quite another for it to say that it must do good. That is: few would disagree that fraud ought to be prevented, and if someone wants to sell snake oil that will cure chilblains, pneumonia, gout, cancer, bad disposition, whooping cough, and measles, something should be done about it because the man is clearly a hoaxer. But what should be done? Put him out of business?

It would seem to be better if the FDA enforced truth: if Ol’ Doc Methuselah’s Genuine Snake Oil says it contains snake oil, then it better contain actual oil of actual snakes, or it is fraudulent. What it claims to be able to do is another matter. I’d be satisfied with a notice that “The FDA requires us to state that no one in their right mind should take this stuff. We have seen no evidence that this cures anything, and there is plenty of reason to believe it’s going to poison you. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. The Federal Drug Administration and the Bureau of Public Health have rated the value of this as JUNK. Have a nice day.”

Of course that won’t stop some people from selling the snake oil, but then I wouldn’t prohibit states and cities and counties and villages from having stronger ordinances about the stuff. I’m not in favor of snake oil cure-alls, but I do worry about too much power for the FDA.

This drug is a case in point: Europe and Canada have decided that it may well be valuable for treating MS, more so than the “standard treatments”. But the FDA is stuck with the ritual of the Double Blind Experiment. The problem is that this stuff has well known (and unpleasant) side effects, making “double blind” impossible : the treating physicians will know, absolutely and without doubt, which of their patients are getting the new experimental treatment and which are getting placebos and which are getting the old and not very effective standard treatment. Any patient with minimum curiosity and access to the Internet will also know whether she is getting the experimental treatment or not. If they know it’s a sugar pill they won’t be rigorous in taking them and may stop altogether; their hearts sure won’t be in it. There goes the last value of the double blind experiment.

Of course you might devise a placebo that makes people as sick as the treatment but which can’t possibly do them any good, and I expect there are regulators who might think that a good idea, but we don’t need to go there.

One can come up with ways to except this procedure from the usual rules and probably Congress will do so when enough Americans flee to England or Germany to get an MS treatment that has a chance of working, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: we may all agree that FDA ought to have power to protect from harm, but assuring effectiveness is a different and larger power, and prevents informed patients from trying measures of a last resort. We dealt with such a bureaucrat in ESCAPE FROM HELL, and few think we mistreated him.

And it is late afternoon, and this small amount exhausts me, and yes, I know I’ve done better. I expect to be getting better. I sure wish there’d been a shot for the brand of flu I got instead of what they protected me from last October…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.