Ireland surrenders. What will Klaus do?

The Irish voters have "corrected" their past "mistake".

After 15 months of brutal brainwashing, intimidation, lies, and "guarantees" that don't have the price of the paper on which they're written (because they were not ratified as additional international treaties in the member states), approximately 2/3 of the Irish voters have endorsed the Treaty of Lisbon. The Vatican that encouraged them to vote No couldn't change the result. The only regions where "Yes" lost in 2009 were both Donegals - the part of Ireland that would naturally join Northern Ireland if geography were the only issue.

The Polish president has promised to sign the treaty within days after the Irish "Yes".

Full LHC cooled to 1.9 K in two weeks

The end of the world is coming again! ;-)

A video was embedded here

Six of the eight sectors are already cooled to the operating temperature of -271.25 °C and the remaining two, now at 10 or 30 Kelvins, will follow quickly.

The video above looks encouraging. The narrator explains that the tʁajectoʁies are just teʁʁifique. ;-) In November, i.e. the next month, the beams should begin to circulate again. A few weeks later, first collisions should occur, too. Recall that the center-of-mass energy won't exceed 7 TeV for a while, half of the projected 14 TeV.

The collider has been given a new warning system that will fight against climate change in the superconductors, i.e. to fight against the so-called quenches that caused the problems one year ago. So the environmental God will surely forgive CERN its addition of one extra Geneva of electrical consumption. ;-)

Via Symmetry Magazine.

Australopithecus overshadowed by Ardipithecus

If you're younger than 45, chances are that as a schoolkid, you were taught that Australopithecus afarensis was the oldest known human ancestor.

That's because Lucy, a female representative of that ethnic group, was found by Donald Johanson in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974. Lucy lived 3.2 million years ago.

It was widely believed - in fact, since the very era of Charles Darwin - that even earlier ancestors had to be closer to chimps: this hypothetical link remained missing but it was expected that more chimp-like ancestors would be found soon.

The status of this speculation just changed dramatically, assuming that the new findings will pass the tests that they should pass. An older ur-woman was recently reconstructed from bones found in the Ethiopian desert between 1992 and 2009.

Ms Ardi from the Ardipithecus ramidus species lived 4.4 million years ago but she looked nothing like chimps. (See her extra pictures and don't ask me why they think that her boobs were so small).

This fact makes it somewhat more likely that the common ancestor of the humans and the apes looked like neither. You may check an up-to-date sketch of the evolutionary tree. The improvement may be just quantitative but it will surely require some textbooks to be rewritten.

The experts claim that the skeleton looks very primitive to them. Let me admit that I don't see the "huge difference in simplicity" from the contemporary humans. Do you?

See also Google News.

Lisa Randall et al. in the U.S. Congress

Live video was embedded here...

The live broadcast began at 11:00 am and ended at 1:00 pm, D.C. time. See the HTML page of the event and a hearing charter (PDF).

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Lisa and others presented very good introductory speeches. Politicians proposed various projects for the physicists to educate the public in the museums ;-) and similar bizarre things.

Why the Treaty of Lisbon is considered unconstitutional

The 17 Senators led by Mr Jiří Oberfalzer (conservative ODS) have submitted their new complaint against the Treaty of Lisbon to the Czech Constitutional Court in Brno. The chairman of the Constitutional Court immediately informed President Klaus that he is not allowed to sign the treaty until the court releases the verdict (which may be as early as in 4-6 weeks).

On those 44 pages, they explain that they consider the document unconstitutional because of many reasons. Most of the reasons should be understandable in all the EU countries; a few of them may be specific to the Czech legal system.

First, there is a problem with the format. The Treaty of Lisbon is recycling the legal material from the previous treaties. It is therefore extremely incomprehensible and it doesn't provide an easy survey. Moreover, although it substantially changes 90 percent of the rules listed in the previous treaty and, consequently, the arrangement of the EU, it is formally an amendment. According to the Senators, such a format is incompatible with the rule of law. It's because the Constitutional Court has previously banned the so-called "glued amendments" ("přílepky"). The Lisbon format is even worse than a glued addition, they argue.

Mitchell Taylor, polar bears, and AGW exile

Knut of Berlin, born on December 5th, like any cute bear ;-), no longer looks innocent and you don't want to meet him on the street.

Bob Ferguson sent me links to a new SPPI article by Joanne Nova:

Exile for non-believers (PDF, press release)

Mitchell Taylor is a world's leading polar bear expert. He has studied a greater number of polar bear populations than anyone else. He has caught more polar bears than anyone else.

He was going to attend the 2009 meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG). The name sounds technical, doesn't it? Unfortunately, in one of his papers, he wrote this somewhat self-evident, yet detailed, balanced, and carefully worded description of the polar bears' situation:

“The concern that polar bears will decline if the climate continues to warm is valid. However, the assertion that polar bears will become extinct unless immediate measures are taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions is irrational because it is inconsistent with the long-term persistence of polar bears through previous periods of warming and cooling; and because the IPCC climate model predictions 50 and 100 years into the future do not suggest a future with insufficient sea ice to support polar bears as a viable species.”

What was the answer? He wasn't allowed to participate. Here is Mr Andrew Derocher's letter:

Hi Mitch,

The world is a political place and for polar bears, more so now than ever before. I have no problem with dissenting views as long as they are supportable by logic, scientific reasoning, and the literature.

I do believe, as do many PBSG members, that for the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human induced climate change are extremely unhelpful. In this vein, your positions and statements in the Manhattan Declaration, the Frontier Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute are inconsistent with positions taken by the PBSG.

I too was not surprised by the members not endorsing an invitation. Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears - it was the positions you've taken on global warming that brought opposition.

Time will tell who is correct but the scientific literature is not on the side of those arguing against human induced climate change. I look forward to having someone else chair the PBSG.

Best regards,
Andy (Derocher)

Wow. It's amazing how he's not even trying to hide anything. He's apparently proud that he's harassing a top member of his group for political reasons.

The world may be a political place but a scientific institution is simply not allowed to become a political place. That's exactly what PBSG has become. Let me waste no more time with this scumbag and simply urge all decent people in the world to spit on this Derocher garbage whenever they meet it on the street.

Polar bears: costs of salvation

Polar bears are extremely unlikely to go extinct. But imagine, just for the sake of an argument, that the Arctic is going to warm up sufficiently for them to get drowned. Can we save them?

You bet.

There are 20,000-25,000 polar bears in the world. Each of them can get a modern, air-conditioned boat with GPS and other useful gadgets. Such a vehicle may save them whenever they need it. It may be programmed to follow the bear, so that he never gets lost. Or you may invent better algorithms. Imagine that Mercedes wins the contract. Their price is USD 10,000 per boat.

A simple calculation reveals that it's about USD 250 million to save polar bears. I can give you analogous stories with analogous numbers, describing the price of "subsidized" meat that they may require every year. After all, it may be a good idea to feed them so that they don't kill so many precious baby seals. You know, if the civilization wants to save the polar bears, it's a pretty cheap task. The details of my project to do so are not yet optimal - it's a fast idea - but the conclusion that it would be relatively cheap is robust.

The point is that the polar bears are being used as an argument to pay tens of trillions of dollars in the decades to come. That's about 100,000 (one-hundred-thousand) times bigger an amount of money! You don't have to be cooling down a whole planet (moreover, using a very inefficient, CO2 greenhouse effect) in order to protect a few thousand animals from drowning or temporary hunger.

Clearly, someone is not thinking rationally here. And someone is doing everything he can to guarantee that others won't be thinking rationally, either. What about you?

Beaten with hockey sticks: Yamal tree fraud by Briffa et al.

I will open a discussion thread about this development, too. Steve McIntyre has broken another hockey stick:

Yamal: a divergence problem (click)
... a copy at Climate Audit (click)

Because Climate Audit is overloaded, here's the Google cache.

The finding is very easy to describe. Briffa et al. (Science, published September 2009, see also Briffa et al., Philosophical Transactions 2008) offered another version of a "hockey stick graph", a would-be reconstruction of the temperatures in the last 2000 years that claimed to show a "sudden" warming in the later part of the 20th century, much like the discredited paper by Michael Mann et al.



Papers by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes in 1998 and 1999, included as a symbol of global warming into the previous IPCC report in 2001, indicated constant temperatures before 1900 and a dramatic warming afterwards. However, the papers have been proven wrong.

If you haven't heard about the lethal bug of the Mann methodology yet, the problem of the MBH98, MBH99 papers was that the algorithm preferred proxies - or trees (or their equivalents) - that showed a warming trend in the 20th century, assuming that this condition guaranteed that the trees were sensitive to temperature.

But even if such a 20th century trend occurred by chance for a certain tree (and a fraction of the trees inevitably satisfies this condition), the corresponding tree would influence Mann's final graphs a lot. Effectively, the algorithm picked a lot of trees that didn't show any correlation with the temperature but they were rather composed out of random data - red noise - before 1900, and an increasing trend in 1900-2000.

You can't be surprised that the average of such trees looked like a hockey stick even if the temperature didn't. The noise before 1900 averages to a constant temperature or something close to it while the 20th century warming survives. See

PDF preview, Mathematica notebook

demonstrating this mechanism. But let us return to 2009 and the new paper by Briffa et al. In this case, the problem is less mathematically sophisticated so please don't stop reading.



The new authors used trees from the Yamal Peninsula, Northern Siberia, so their hockey stick was supposed to be an "Arctic hockey stick". Yamal means the "end of the world" in the local native language of the "Nenets" tribes (see the picture above) - which you may interpret in various ways. ;-)

Political racketeering

Special welcome to the Swedish EU presidency.

Two interesting examples of blackmailing in politics emerged today.

Iran vs West (click)

A hardcore Iranian lawmaker said that Iran could quit the nuclear non-proliferation treaty if the pressure from the West continues.

Eurocrats vs Czechia (click)

Mirek Topolánek, the leader of the Czech center-right ODS party, said that he was effectively told by Jose Barroso that all EU countries but Czechia will have a commissioner if President Klaus doesn't become another puppet of the EU bureaucracy and doesn't sign the Treaty of Lisbon. ;-)