New Pournelle interview

Glenn Reynolds interviews Jerry Pournelle, at PJTV.

Compare and contrast: Tom Snyder interviewed Jerry Pournelle and Durk Pearson, back in 1979.

Nabokov was right about those butterflies

In the NY Times: Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated.

Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies.

He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

I wonder why the professional lepidopterists didn't take his ideas seriously? I suspect credential-related snobbery, a form of argument from authority. Looking at the science is more important than looking at the degrees of the scientists.

Update: more about VN and butterflies here. And: Neo-neocon has a thoughtful post on this.

Hardening a soft science

The study of cities might be called urbanology, or something like that. An area of sociology, perhaps. There does not seem to be much science to it. As described in "A Physicist Solves the City" in the NY Times Magazine, an actual scientist named Geoffrey West is working to put some science into what has been a matter of essays on lifestyles and matters of taste. If his work receives the followup it deserves, we may begin actually to learn something about the way that cities actually work. Found in Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Save the data!

Maurizio Morabito:

The prestigious collection of hundreds of years of weather observations, historical books and meteorological instruments from the Collegio Romano in Rome is at risk of being dispersed for good. Please sign the appeal to prevent such a disaster: http://www.petizionionline.it/petizione/salviamo-losservatorio-meteorologico-di-roma/2200 (in the signature section: “Nome”=First name; “Cognome”=Family name; “richiesto”=Mandatory field)

=========

A few days ago I have received the following letter via e-mail (translated and adapted in English from the original in Italian):

Dear friends,

It is with great sadness that I am forwarding the attached letter – press release by the staff at the Research Unit for Applied Meteorology and Climatology in Agriculture (in Italian: CRA-CMA), the direct descendant of the first Italian National Weather Station inaugurated in 1876 and headquartered at the Collegio Romano from 1879 (in an area previously occupied by the Meteorological Observatory built in 1782 by Abbot Giuseppe Calandrelli (the first to apply gravitational theory to cometary atmospheres)). I hope that those who have taken this decision will go back on it, at least reconsider this meteorological site, by declaring its historical importance for Italian meteorology. That would mean leaving untouched its Library, Historical Archives and the Museum of Ancient Meteorological and Seismographic Instruments, as well as the historic Calandrelli Observatory. The Library is at present unique in Italy, after the closure, in the 1990s, of the Air Force Weather Service Library.

Joanne Nova says,

How valuable is empirical evidence and long term data? The Collegio Romano is one of the few places in the world with multi-centennial meteorological and climate data series (228 years!) … Not many people in the world appreciate how important and rare those long temperature series and historic collections are.

If the warmingists were really interested in science, this would be a big deal. Al Gore has made enough on climate alarmism to buy the place, single-handed. It's just as well, though, since the alarmists have shown what they think of data. Data are to be extrapolated, adjusted, inferred, or deleted. The actual records can be so, uh, inconvenient. Look at New Zealand for a current case, if you're tired of Phil Jones.

From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Nuke the Gulf

See the update to the preceding post.

Eyjafjallajökull

That's the volcano in Iceland that's causing so much havoc. Looks like this:



They are saying it may erupt again. This, you see, is geoengineering, as done on the large scale, by Gaia herself. Piddling plans of self-styled climatologists to launch particles into the atmosphere to raise the Earth's albedo, to block those deadly warming rays from the Sun, are shown up as the silliness they always were. If we get another Tambora event ("eighteen hundred and froze to death") out of this volcano, will the cap 'n' traders and greenies finally realize that warmer is better? I expect not. There's too much money already invested in the contrary view.

Animals that live without oxygen

"It's life, but not as we know it, Jim!"

"O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!"
"There are more things in Heaven and earth …"

Deep under the Mediterranean Sea small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by 'poisonous' sulphides. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen.

Rand Simberg says, "Pretty cool. What does this say about prospects for extraterrestrial life?"

Could these be survivors from the Archaean, before photosynthesizing plants gave Earth its oxygen-rich atmosphere? (Not likely, but considering the next paragraph …)

This month's Analog has a related story, "At Last the Sun" by Richard Foss. It must have been written before this discovery was announced.

Update: Author Richard Foss has stopped by to comment that he did indeed write the story months before the discovery was announced. It's a good 'un, so go ye forth and buy that Analog.

Monckton's proposed personal briefing for Rudd

James Delingpole says, "If any of your idiot friends still believe in AGW, make them read this letter." Then he quotes some high points. The whole thing is at Watts Up With That.

Good luck with the part about making them read it.

Neuroscience meets global warming

See this at Wizbang:

ClimateGate (Inadvertently) Explained

Via a link from InstaPundit, here is an eye-opening article from the current issue of Wired: "Accept Defeat - The Neuroscience of Screwing Up":

Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he began an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University.

... Dunbar brought tape recorders into meeting rooms and loitered in the hallway; he read grant proposals and the rough drafts of papers; he peeked at notebooks, attended lab meetings, and videotaped interview after interview. He spent four years analyzing the data. "I'm not sure I appreciated what I was getting myself into," Dunbar says. "I asked for complete access, and I got it. But there was just so much to keep track of."

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."

You really need to read the rest, because it provides a fascinating insight into the frustrations encountered by research scientists on a regular basis. I spent the better part of a decade working in a testing and analysis laboratory. We never did "pure research" -- all of our work was based on well-known analysis methods and verified by standard quality control procedures. Still, we occasionally had to re-do entire sets of tests if our quality controls indicated errors. Researchers can sometimes trace unexplained results back to commonly encountered problems with laboratory equipment, reagents, or calibration standards, but many times there is no clear understanding of why the results of carefully planned experiments end up being "wrong."

The Instapundit reader who emailed this story to Glenn Reynolds wryly noted, "Wired Magazine unknowingly explains Climategate." How true. As I have previously noted, the ClimateGate scientists, most notably Michael Mann and Phil Jones, seem to have fallen prey to the temptations of celebrity recognition and unlimited research funding that are promised by those in power when scientific research seems to be producing the "right" answers. Mann, Jones, et. al. undoubtedly believed that they were on to something significant, but chose to disregard objectivity when confronted with the fact that much of their research data apparently resided in that damnable 50% - 75% category of errant or unexpected results.

There is more.

Sorting through the junk (DNA)

A large proportion of the human genome is far from being understood. Some of this is casually referred to as "junk DNA." Scientists are beginning to sort through this stuff. Glenn Reynolds links to this:

8 Percent of Human Genome Was Inserted By Virus, and May Cause Schizophrenia

The rise of psychopharmacology has led doctors to not only treat mental illnesses like regular diseases, but think of them as such as well. Turns out, schizophrenia may be more than just a disease in concept, but actually a virus itself. According to new research, as much as eight percent of the human genome consists of viruses that inserted themselves into our DNA for replication, including the gene that causes schizophrenia.…

Science has long known that some components of our DNA are relics of viruses that entered into our genome in some past infection. However, no one ever thought that virus remnants formed this much of our genome, or that one of the viruses might lead to disease, let alone something as complex as mental illness.

Sorting through the junk will pay off, as we learn to distinguish between trash and treasures. Next step, still a long way off: the clean-up.

Update: More on the schizophrenia virus: "Our DNA carries dozens of copies of Perron’s virus, now called human endogenous retrovirus W, or HERV-W, at specific addresses on chromosomes 6 and 7."

Hockey sticks in the ice (cores)

Some sharp comments at this post by Neo-neocon, The WaPo goes rogue …, mentioning Sarah Palin's op-ed on Climategate. Commenter rickl suggests mailing this around: Hockey stick observed in NOAA ice core data. One of several striking graphs:

Those are years B.C. to A.D. across the bottom. Mann's hockey stick is visible on the far right. Or,

over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP. Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.

Nice interglacial we have going here. Let's not mess it up.

Eric S. Raymond on Climategate

ESR has been looking at the emails and at the code, in a series of posts:

• Hiding the Decline: Prologue
• Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate
• Hiding the Decline: Part 1 – The Adventure Begins
• Facts to fit the theory
• AGW fraud unravels at an accelerating pace
• Facts to fit the theory? Actually, no facts at all!
• "The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room"
  

I dare say there will be more. And he points out that Ken Burnside has started a blog, Data Against Demagogues, which will deal with, among other things, an effort by himself and collaborators to get the datasets and run the models, to see if any of the AGW work can be replicated in an open source way. Along the way, Burnside links to the "complete list of things caused by global warming" at Number Watch. A small sample:

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Al Qaeda and Taliban Being Helped, allergy season longer, alligators in the Thames, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), anaphylactic reactions to bee stings, ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, animals shrink, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks,

Each item is a link. It goes on.

Climategate, still growing

Lots of Real Life^TM to deal with, lately, so I am just trying to follow developments, not doing much blogging. As you might have noticed.

Watts Up With That is staying on top of it, with a big accumulator page, and plenty of regular posting.

Such as: Lord Monckton’s summary of Climategate and its issues: "The Whistle Blows for Truth." Most recently: Now it’s serious, Daily Show’s Jon Stewart mocks Gore and Global Warming. As I said quite a while ago, more jokes, please!

Climategate: AGW conspiracy exposed, or so it would appear

Updated and bumped.

This could be

Huge!

if it gets coverage.

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has been keeping up with this. I'll post some links here, for reference.

ClimateDepot has a roundup post that's being updated.

Bishop Hill's concise list of summaries of emails is also available at Watts Up With That.

Slashdot: Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked.

Searchable database of the emails. Does not appear to include code or data.

Another searchable database that does include documents other than mail.

James Delingpole at the Telegraph: Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

Andrew Bolt: Warmist conspiracy exposed? And: The warmist conspiracy: the emails that most damn Jones.

Andrew C. Revkin at NYT: Hacked E-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics. (Revkin has changed the title since I posted this; I do not know if he has also changed the text.) No comments on this one. But Revkin has blogged it, and comments are there: Private Climate Conversations on Display. He seems more offended by the hacking than by the conspiracy. Whistleblowing is a great thing when one agrees with the whistleblower. If not, then not so much.

Watts Up With That: Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

Follow-up at Watts Up With That (mirrored from ClimateAudit.org): Mike's Nature Trick

Luboš Motl: Hacked: Hadley CRU FOI2009 Files

John Hinderaker: a lawyer examines some evidence. The Alarmists Do "Science": A Case Study. Revkin is mentioned.

Richard Fernandez at PJ Media: The CRU Hack.

Big roundup and a nifty graphic (ad for "Al Gore's Corn Ethanol Based Global Warming Vodka: Preferred drink of progressive elites") at American Power: Global Warming Hoax Breaks Wide Open as Hackers Target East Anglia Climate Research Unit!

Gotta link Althouse, just because: Climategate. And: "Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as 'prats' and 'utter prats.'"

Charlie Martin, at PJ Media, lines out the big picture of three different scandals at the same time: Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?

Another piece at PJ Media, by Rand Simberg: Global WarmingGate: When Scientists Become Politicians, has a comment linking to someone looking at the code, who says, "This isn't science, it's gradeschool for people with big data sets."

Monckton weighs in: Viscount Monckton on Global WarmingGate: ‘They Are Criminals’

From way back in August, but related, Frank J. Tipler at PJ Media: Climate Data: Top Secret!

Here earlier: Climate Money.

More to come, no doubt.

Climate money

By Joanne Nova. "The Climate Industry: $79 billion so far – trillions to come." (PDF)

As Jerry Pournelle says, "with that much money at stake, does science as science have a chance?"

Norman Borlaug, R.I.P.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner who deserved it. The real "Green Revolutionary." 1914—2009.

He left the world a better place than he found it.

Humanity resembles a pulsating mass of maggots

Oh yeah? I think we're a lot more like a writhing mass of maggots. If we're going to be maggots at all, we should writhe.

Michelle Malkin has been keeping up with looking into John Holdren. Read them all. The "maggots" business comes from this article, "The Challenge of Man's Future," by Harrison Brown (PDF).

[A] substantial fraction of humanity today is behaving as if it would like to create such a world. It is behaving as if it were engaged in a contest to test nature's willingness to support humanity and, if it had its way, it would not rest content until the earth were covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.

Writhing mass, dammit. Or perhaps we could pullulate.

What our masters think of us. In their rare candid moments.

Human beings are a resource, not a liability. Affluence is a goal, not a problem. People who tell you that affluence is a problem — those people are a problem.

Added, after commenting here: Holdren's plenary address to the AAAS in 2007 can be heard here, or downloaded as PowerPoint. It is dedicated to Brown: "My pre-occupation with the great problems at the intersection of science and technology with the human condition – and with the interconnectedness of these problems with each other – began when I read The Challenge of Man’s Future in high school. I later worked with Harrison Brown at Caltech."

Update: On rereading, I see that I was so irked by the pulsating that I missed the writhing, which was indeed mentioned. So that's better? Anti-humanists ought not to be in government. It's like hiring a vegetarian chef at a steakhouse.

Here earlier: Let's take a closer look at that book.

Science news

In a piece of original research which took place on the evening of June 29, 2009, a serving of ice cream (mixed chocolate and vanilla) was eaten by your correspondent. Following this, a puppy was allowed to lick the cup. This step shows that when a larger creature is done with some food, a smaller one may still be able to get some good out of what is left. (A more commonly encountered proof is provided by ants at picnics, ubique.) When the puppy was done, the cup appeared to be pretty well cleaned up. It then was replaced on the patio table, and ignored for a while. When next it was looked into, a lightning bug had continued the scavenging of leftovers. This demonstrates that the principle of leftovers, above, can apply more than once to the same dessert. (Leftovers are recursive.) It also demonstrates that at least one lightning bug likes ice cream. Your correspondent suggests that lightning bugs are not commonly thought of as being fond of ice cream because they rarely have the opportunity to feast on a very thin film of it which in turn is on a hard surface, which saves their tiny feet from the possibility or indeed likelihood of sinking into the ice cream substrate.

Preliminary conclusion: Multi-specific mutualism. Humans benefit from puppies; puppies benefit from humans; lightning bugs benefit from puppies; humans benefit from lightning bugs. Ice cream is a constant, or fudge factor, in the system of relations. Did someone say fudge?

Thus it is shown that some of the best things in the world, to wit, puppies, lightning bugs and ice cream, have a closer, one might say more intimate relationship, than previously believed. And now, when I think of ice cream, I will think of lightning bugs, and vice versa. Not forgetting the puppy. Who could forget the puppy? Not I.



The ice cream gets melty, in between the human and puppy. That makes this observation a demonstration of trickle-down economics, and how, in practice, it benefits bipeds, quadrupeds, and hexapodia. In the next installment, the relationship between ice cream and fireworks. The lightning bug may have something to say about nocturnal illuminations.

(The second picture, on the right, gets a great deal bigger if clicked.)

"There Is No Evidence"

That's what Australian former warmingist David Evans says about AGW. There's a quick summary at There Is No Evidence dot com, with a link to a much fuller discussion (PDF).

Last sentence from the PDF: "It appears at this point that the CO2 theory is doomed, and it is only a matter of time before its bubble bursts." A matter of time? How much time do we have before the Senate vote on their version of Waxman-Markey? Bursting before then, please.

Evans runs Science Speak, "a scientific modeling and mathematical research company." From their homepage I learned that his colleague there, Joanne Nova, has written a guide for the climate skeptic, called, appropriately enough, The Skeptics' Handbook, and has an informative blog.

Pournelle: "Authority to accomplish the impossible implies absolute power."

An aphorism is born. I hope Dr. Pournelle won't mind if I quote this whole passage.

That is a world-level statement

Mr. Pournelle,

"Authority to accomplish the impossible implies absolute power" is an eye-opening statement. It is very good. You might want to spread it around. Much like that "power corrupts" statement.

Nathan Okun

Thank you. On reflection, perhaps the principle deserves some kind of title analogous to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but I haven't thought of a suitable name yet. It does hold up to inspection. The statement was that just as in logic a false statement implies the universe class, in human affairs authority to accomplish the impossible implies absolute power, and that does seem true enough.

And now the House has passed perhaps the worst bill in its history, 1,000 pages that no one had read giving enormous regulatory power in pursuit of the impossible. The actual effect of US adoption of cap and trade on climate is essentially nil. China and India will continue to burn coal and oil as they industrialize. CO2 levels will continue to rise. Global temperatures will continue to rise. US self destruction may affect the global temperature in the year 2100, but I know of no theory that can show the effect will be greater than 1 degree C (that is, global temperature would be 1 degree C less without US contribution to CO2) and that is a very extreme limit; few of the theories show our contribution to be large enough to have that much effect. The most likely outcome is an enormous hamper to US economic recovery and no effect whatever on global temperature.

The President speaks of this as a jobs bill. The cost of each job created by this is enormous. Economic growth and energy cost have a high negative correlation and always have, and this is an energy tax; it will raise the price of energy, whatever else it does. Nearly all "green" energy produces energy at a cost great than the equivalent of $150/bbl oil.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Indeed. Dr. P. understates the number of pages in the bill, but that number was changing so fast, it's a trivial error.

Elsewhere, tangentially to a note about the unwillingness of alarmist modelers to share their source code, Dr. Pournelle notes a distressing possibility:

[T]he charges of "Climate Change Deniers" continue to circulate, while the number of falsifiable hypotheses from the consensus group does not increase. The very nature of science may be at stake: consensus as more important than falsifiability.

Though of course science has always suffered from the problem of consensus. Cases in point, Semmelweis, Wegener.