The "Global Warning Hoax"

With the release of formerly secret documents from a global warming thinktank, accusations of a great global warming fraud are permeating the internets. Take a look:

CBS News:

A few days after leaked e-mail messages appeared on the Internet, the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change.

Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," according to a transcript of a radio interview posted on his Web site. Aides for Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, are also looking into the disclosure.

The leaked documents (see our previous coverage) come from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

Last week's leaked e-mails range from innocuous to embarrassing and, critics believe, scandalous. They show that some of the field's most prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data ("have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots"), cheered the deaths of skeptical journalists, and plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

One e-mail message, apparently from CRU director Phil Jones, references the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act when asking another researcher to delete correspondence that might be disclosed in response to public records law: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise." Another, also apparently from Jones: global warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." (Jones was a contributing author to the chapter of the U.N.'s IPCC report titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.")

In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

For its part, the University of East Anglia has posted a statement calling the disclosure "mischievous" and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation.

The statement also quotes Jones, CRU's director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Jones said that the word trick was used "colloquially as in a clever thing to do" and that it "is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward."

Also unclear is the ultimate impact of the leak, which came before next month's Copenhagen summit and Democratic plans for cap and trade legislation.

On one hand, over at RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt, a modeler for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been downplaying the leak. Schmidt wrote: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research ... no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."

On the other, groups like the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, the target of repeated derision in the leaked e-mails, have said: "We have argued for many years that much of the scientific case for global warming alarmism was weak and some of it was phony. It now looks like a lot of it may be phony."

ScienceMag.org published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages to hide them from a FOI request is a crime in the United Kingdom. George Monbiot, a U.K. activist and journalist who previously called for dramatic action to deal with global warming, wrote: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."

Complicating matters for congressional Republicans who'd like to hold hearings is that East Anglia, of course, is a U.K. university. The GOP may intend to press the Obama administration for details on how the EPA came to rely on the CRU's predictions, and whether the recent disclosure will change the agency's position. Another approach lies in e-mail messages discussing grants from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to East Anglia; one says: "We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious."

The irony of this situation is that most of us expect science to be conducted in the open, without unpublished secret data, hidden agendas, and computer programs of dubious reliability. East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way.

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Obama Makes Good Decision on Stem Cells

Even though I am not the biggest fan of the President, I have to give him credit for this. The President has okayed more federal funding for stem cell research. The media is saying that President Bush banned federal funding, even though he was actually the only President to okay federal funding for the science.

This money will go towards curing or lessening some of our worst diseases and afflictions and within twenty years we could see a major breakthrough. American federal aid is not as significant as public or European research, but is still helpful.

Unfortunately, the President used a partisan tone by stating, "It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda - and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,"

Stick to strict policy, Mr. President. Don't make your views on the previous Administration change your policies on science.
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For Some Reason, People Still Don't Believe in Evolution

Darwin's 200th birthday is coming up, and for some odd reason, people still don't believe in evolution. This is 2009, people. Airplanes fly in the sky and we have landed on the moon. What's so difficult to believe that maybe we have changed as a lifeform just a wee bit over the last 4.5 billion years?

I'm a Republican and I believe in God, but I also stringently believe in evolution. The only reason it's still a theory is because we don't have a time machine to make it fact. It's high time that we yield to evidence and take it at face or near-face value.

And the evolutionary evidence is immense. We have fossils and living beings that go very far to prove evolution. Even the fact that we have opposable thumbs should cause some folks to question creationism! But, no, they don't want to see the obvious.

You know who doesn't believe in evolution? Osama bin Laden! Why? Because he believes that the Earth was created in seven literal days. We can at least say that the Earth is more than a few thousand years old, or are we unable to concede this obvious fact?

If we need any proof among the living, the breeding of dogs from wolves clearly show us how evolution could work. While in this case, it was aided by man, just a few thousand years caused such massive disparities in the canine world.

This is not like global warming, where we've just been studying it a few years. This has been going on for 150 years and is backed by fossils and current life. Climate change is yet mostly unknown and fluid.

This is NOT a satire piece. It's meant to say, please take a look at the evidence.



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Joe's Technology of the Week

Joe C. has returned from the far reaches of the future, peering into such faraway times as 1900. From these lofty peaks, Dr. Joe is ready to wow the peons with his next pick of tomorrow!

Joe's Technology of the Week:
Medical Bleeding

Tired of always getting sick from the bad thoughts in your mind? Well, no longer will your children die of diphtheria because you looked at the milk maid too long. With the process of bleeding, you can get rid of all of the malevolent blood that your lust has caused.

By slashing your wrists, our doctors are able to extract up to three gallons of your unnecessary blood. This will then be burned ritually as a sacrifice to ward off spirits. Afterwards, you can immediately begin such fun and productive activities as loading hay into a barn or lifting a cow. With the lack of this bad blood, you'll feel better than ever, and your skin will look more vibrant.

So give bleeding a chance, even if you don't appear sick! You can never have too little blood!

Cool: Immortal Jellyfish

There's a neat story on the web about how one type of jellyfish is able to revert into its younger self, and may actually be immortal.

The jellyfish are originally from the Caribbean but have spread all over the world.

Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self.

It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation.

Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.

While most members of the jellyfish family usually die after propagating, the Turritopsis nutricula has developed the unique ability to return to a polyp state.

Having stumbled upon the font of eternal youth, this tiny creature which is just 5mm long is the focus of many intricate studies by marine biologists and geneticists to see exactly how it manages to literally reverse its aging process.

Solution to Global Warming: Dumping Iron into the Ocean

Well, no matter if global warming is man-made or not, we may want to be careful about some... extreme measures. A country like Germany, not known for extremes, is pushing one really strange option. Dumping iron into the sea!

Dumping iron in the ocean to reverse global warming evokes strong reactions and epitomizes the political hot potato. The German government lead resistance to attempts to use the fertilization of plankton growth in oceans for commercially offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, ultimately promoting an international convention restricting iron fertilization. The irony was not lost on many when Germany's own Alfred Wegener Institute announced plans for a large scientific study of iron fertilization. And this potato got so hot, the German science ministry suspended approval for the experiment pending further analysis -- even as the research ship Polarstern cruised toward the planned destination for the iron dump.

Independent Review of Ocean Fertilization Study
Independent reviews of the study were evaluated by both the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. The reviews affirmed the green light for the project. "After careful study of expert reports, I am convinced there are no scientific or legal objections to the German-Indian marine research project," said Science Minister Annette Schavan, as quoted at The Earth Times.

Joe's Technology of the Week

Doctor Joe C., MD, has been so kind to lend his knowledge of all thing scientific-y and write us a weekly column. Dr. Joe has decided that every Wednesday, he will pick out an up-and-coming technology and tell us why it's just awesome.

This week's technology:
ZeppelinsI know that all of you gathered here have heard a lot about the flying machines. Well, this one is a dolly of a new technology. Invented by the merging of science and religion, these new-fangled balloons will take you from Manchester to Calcutta in just six months! And there are genuine servant-boys on board, willing to pour your gin, and not spill it, neither.
The Zeppelin is the pinnacle of human engineering, and by the year 2000, will represent 40% of the global economy. As long as those nightmare Huns don't get the technology first! We must be ever-vigilant in order to make sure that these indestructible behemoths are not used for the purposes of piracy!

The Zeppelin, the wonder of tomorrow!

...Particle Collider May Actually Destroy Earth Yet

Here we are, sitting quietly on this blue marble, safe and secure. Yet, it appears that science's attempts to create mini black holes may actually cause us all to die.

Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted.

Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer — perhaps even more than a second, a relative eternity in particle colliders, where most objects decay much faster.

Joe's Technology of the Week?

Teleportation Done by Scientists! Awesome!

Some neat news:

Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the "Star Trek" feat of teleportation. No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter - about a yard.

This is a significant milestone in a field known as quantum information processing, said Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, who led the effort.

Teleportation is one of nature's most mysterious forms of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons (a unit, or quantum, of electromagnetic radiation, such as light) over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third.

None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.

Now the JQI team, along with colleagues at the University of Michigan, has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a meter. That capability is necessary for workable quantum information systems because they will require memory storage at both the sending and receiving ends of the transmission.

In the Jan. 23 issue of the journal Science, the scientists report that, by using their protocol, atom-to-atom teleported information can be recovered with perfect accuracy about 90 percent of the time - and that figure can be improved.

"Our system has the potential to form the basis for a large-scale 'quantum repeater' that can network quantum memories over vast distances," Monroe said. "Moreover, our methods can be used in conjunction with quantum bit operations to create a key component needed for quantum computation."

A quantum computer could perform certain tasks, such as encryption-related calculations and searches of giant databases, considerably faster than conventional machines. The effort to devise a working model is a matter of intense interest worldwide.

Teleportation and entanglement

Physicist Richard Feynman is quoted as having said that "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understands quantum mechanics." Or sometimes he is cited thusly: "I think I can safely say that nobody understand quantum mechanics."

Nonetheless, here is how the University of Maryland describes Monroe's work.

Teleportation works because of a remarkable quantum phenomenon called entanglement which only occurs on the atomic and subatomic scale. Once two objects are put in an entangled state, their properties are inextricably entwined. Although those properties are inherently unknowable until a measurement is made, measuring either one of the objects instantly determines the characteristics of the other, no matter how far apart they are.

The JQI team set out to entangle the quantum states of two individual ytterbium ions so that information embodied in the condition of one could be teleported to the other. Each ion was isolated in a separate high-vacuum trap, suspended in an invisible cage of electromagnetic fields and surrounded by metal electrodes.

The researchers identified two readily discernible ground (lowest energy) states of the ions that would serve as the alternative "bit" values of an atomic quantum bit, or qubit.

Conventional electronic bits (short for binary digits), such as those in a personal computer, are always in one of two states: off or on, 0 or 1, high or low voltage, etc. Quantum bits, however, can be in some combination, called a "superposition," of both states at the same time, like a coin that is simultaneously heads and tails - until a measurement is made. It is this phenomenon that gives quantum computation its extraordinary power.

Laser pulse initiates process

At the start of the experimental process, each ion (designated A and B) is initialized in a given ground state.

Then ion A is irradiated with a specially tailored microwave burst from one of its cage electrodes, placing the ion in some desired superposition of the two qubit states - in effect "writing" into "memory" the information to be teleported.

Immediately thereafter, both ions are excited by a picosecond (one trillionth of a second) laser pulse. The pulse duration is so short that each ion emits only a single photon as it sheds the energy gained by the laser and falls back to one or the other of the two qubit ground states.

Depending on which one it falls into, the ion emits one of two kinds of photons of slightly different wavelengths (designated red and blue) that correspond to the two atomic qubit states. It is the relationship between those photons that will eventually provide the telltale signal that entanglement has occurred.

Beamsplitter encounter

Each emitted photon is captured by a lens, routed to a separate strand of fiber-optic cable, and carried to a 50-50 beamsplitter where it is equally probable for the photon to pass straight through the splitter or to be reflected. On either side of the beamsplitter are detectors that can record the arrival of a single photon.

Before it reaches the beamsplitter, each photon is in an unknowable superposition of states. After encountering the beamsplitter, however, each takes on specific characteristics.

As a result, for each pair of photons, four color combinations are possible - blue-blue, red-red, blue-red and red-blue - as well as one of two polarizations: horizontal or vertical. In nearly all of those variations, the photons either cancel each other out or both end up in the same detector. But there is one - and only one - combination in which both detectors will record a photon at exactly the same time.

In that case, however, it is physically impossible to tell which ion produced which photon because it cannot be known whether the photon arriving at a detector passed through the beamsplitter or was reflected by it.

Thanks to the peculiar laws of quantum mechanics, that inherent uncertainty projects the ions into an entangled state. That is, each ion is in a superposition of the two possible qubit states. The simultaneous detection of photons at the detectors does not occur often, so the laser stimulus and photon emission process has to be repeated many thousands of times per second. But when a photon appears in each detector, it is an unambiguous signature of entanglement between the ions.

When an entangled condition is identified, the scientists immediately take a measurement of ion A. The act of measurement forces it out of superposition and into a definite condition: one of the two qubit states.

But because ion A's state is irreversibly tied to ion B's, the measurement also forces B into the complementary state. Depending on which state ion A is found in, the researchers now know precisely what kind of microwave pulse to apply to ion B in order to recover the exact information that had been written to ion A by the original microwave burst. Doing so results in the accurate teleportation of the information.

Teleportation vs. other communications

What distinguishes this outcome as teleportation, rather than any other form of communication, is that no information pertaining to the original memory actually passes between ion A and ion B. Instead, the information disappears when ion A is measured and reappears when the microwave pulse is applied to ion B.

"One particularly attractive aspect of our method is that it combines the unique advantages of both photons and atoms," says Monroe. "Photons are ideal for transferring information fast over long distances, whereas atoms offer a valuable medium for long-lived quantum memory ... Also, the teleportation of quantum information in this way could form the basis of a new type of quantum internet that could outperform any conventional type of classical network for certain tasks."

The work was supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity program under U.S. Army Research Office contract, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics at the Information Frontier Program, and the NSF Physics Frontier Center at the Joint Quantum Institute.