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Physicists attacked for endangering the planet, for being less alarmist than the climate change cranks

Tommaso Dorigo of CMS discusses a new bizarre proposal to establish a U.S. commission that would evaluate the risks that the RHIC experiment will destroy our blue, not green planet:

New U.S. Science Commission Should Look At Experiment’s Risk Of Destroying The Earth

One of the two authors of the proposal in International Business Times above (a news outlet that is being cited by TRF positively in a vast majority of cases, but not this one!) is a law professor and the other one is an emeritus law professor. Recall that the destruction of the Earth by an accelerator "will" look like this:



Dorigo mentions several other scenarios by which the mad scientists called "physicists" plan to destroy the Earth and every molecule of it.




The production of a hungry black hole that swallows the Earth is the most popular scenario. But at New Island's RHIC experiment, people prefer to talk about the strangelets. A strangelet is a hypothetical macroscopically large nucleus that doesn't contain just up-quarks and down-quarks as the usual nuclei do (it's the two quarks in the protons and neutrons); about 1/3 of its mass is composed of the strange-quarks.

This mutated composition may make it energetically favorable for the strangelets to grow indefinitely and eat the surrounding atoms along the way (the hadrons containing strange-quarks are clearly not favored if the hadrons are small enough: a strange-quark adds something like \(150\MeV\) to the rest energy). The final product wouldn't differ from the Earth-mass black hole mass as far as the practical implications go.




Like in other cases, there exist numerous arguments indicating that the threat is de facto non-existent. I recommend you e.g. the 2000 analysis of the RHIC cataclysms written by 4 authors including my Twitter follower and Nobel prize winner Frank Wilczek.

The "we are safe" arguments are diverse and exist at many levels. Much like in the black hole case, the arguments that are most comprehensible and least dependent on "impenetrably deep theory" are arguments that de facto say that "it would have already happened if it could happen now" and that promote this proposition to some quantitative, empirically rooted reasoning. If strangelets could be created by such "not so unusual" collisions, we would already be observing strangelets around us, like one that would have eaten the Moon, and so on. Because the celestial bodies haven't been eaten yet, despite the collisions with the high-energy cosmic rays, it either means that the strangelets are not created at all; or they are created and stop growing once they reach a particular, macroscopic size (the maximum size has to be large enough to pose a threat for the Earth; but small enough not to contradict the observations – i.e. smaller than the Moon). The latter assumption is fine-tuned, unnatural, and therefore unlikely.

It's a very interesting theoretical question whether strangelets exist or may exist somewhere in the Universe – whether the nuclear matter energetically prefers this setup with many strange quarks. If it does, the strangelets may exist in the Universe. They may even be responsible for some dark matter or all dark matter. The evidence is mixed on that question; Edward Witten and Arnold Bodmer would present some initial evidence supporting the answer "Yes" while Robert Jaffe and Ed Farhi coined the "strangelet" trademark. However, the question about the "in principle" existence of a strangelet is an entirely different question from the question whether strangelets may be produced in collisions on man-made accelerators which would pose a threat for the life on Earth.

The previous sentence about the difference is completely analogous to the difference between the claim "the greenhouse effect exists as a matter of physics principle" and the claim "emissions of greenhouse gases represent a threat for the Earth". The probabilities of the "more ambitious", dangerous statements are lower than the probabilities of the first statements by many orders of magnitude (perhaps dozens of orders of magnitude). The laymen – and even some people who shouldn't belong among the laymen but they do – are often extremely sloppy when they hear a buzzword, like a "black hole" or a "strangelet" or the "greenhouse effect" and they are intrigued by the "potential dangerous real-life implications" of the concept which completely prevents them from seeing that the concept itself is a neutral concept in science that is almost certainly safe for us even if it exists.

Indeed, the probability that a strangelet will consume the nuclei on Earth is as ludicrously tiny as the probability that the CO2 emissions will lead to the extinction of life on Earth before 2100. Someone could say that the probability of the "strangelet Armageddon" is even tinier, perhaps much tinier, but I don't really agree. Both probabilities are tiny. In the strangelet case, we are talking about a "more extreme kind of destruction" which makes it less likely but we are also actually playing with some more extreme and potentially "less tested" forms of matter when we collide nuclei at high energies which adds "some" uncertainty. In the case of the climate, we know very well that a warming by several degrees, even if it were caused by the CO2 emissions, wouldn't threaten the life because those things have occurred many times in the Earth's history.

(By the way, do you know that the mankind went nearly extinct 100,000 years ago? Only about 5,000-10,000 people were alive on Earth; they could be comfortably seated in the Shayba Arena in Sochi. You could think that the cold weather during the ice age was the reason. Or drought. But the likely reason was a sequence of pandemics that destroyed almost all humans except for a few mutated ones whose new gene didn't allow Escherichia coli and Streptococcus type B to bind to sugars that the extinct humans were producing – causing bad diarrhea and children's meningitis. Due to the near extinction, the mankind lost the ability to synthetize these sugars on the surface of cells but we gained the survival. I wouldn't be surprised if I were possessing the extinct gene again. Infections are still vastly more likely to kill the mankind than any other threat that has become popular.)

Now, when it comes to similar "wars about the panic", people may obviously err in both directions. They may waste lots of resources due to silly, unjustified fears; in principle, they may also underestimate real threats and pay dearly. Needless to say, these two classes of errors are often linked to each other; when you overestimate some threat, you are likely to overlook many threats that are more real and more important. There is no universal recipe to avoid such errors. Democracy isn't a universal cure that would produce flawless policies. Mindless listening to a group of experts or a commission or a single anointed expert isn't a flawless solution, either. No individual is infallible; no group is infallible, either. Quite generally, it is true that the more stupid the people in charge are, the more stupid the policies codified by them will be in average. When it comes to the physics of strange-quarks, the two lawyers are clearly dumb as a doorknob, perhaps more so than your janitor.

The guys who propose the new "RHIC cataclysm commission" conjecture that the physicists are in a clash of interest:

But after public concerns subsided, critics emerged, assailing the risk-assessment method as flawed. Dr. Rees wrote that theorists “seemed to have aimed to reassure the public … rather than to make an objective analysis.”

...

Richard Posner noted [...] that the scientists on the Brookhaven risk-assessment team were either planning to participate in RHIC experiments or had a deep interest in the RHIC’s data.

Their point is that one can't believe the RHIC physicists' testimony because these physicists are among the people for whom the production of new RHIC data is more important than the secondary question whether the Earth is destroyed or not. ;-)

That could sound as a joke but we may check whether this assumption about particle physicists' thinking is realistic by investigating the views of a particular particle physicist. What about Tommaso Dorigo himself? Does he care whether the Earth is destroyed or not?

One last thought: regardless of the evidently significant disappointment of losing our entire planet, mankind, and our artistic heritage (where else in the Universe is there a Chopin, or a Mozart ? Alas, I fear we will never know, strangelets or not), I fail to be seized by the fear of dying a much premature death by being turned into strange matter, as I know that I would be going down with absolutely everybody and everything else. Am I the only one feeling unconcerned?

He's not concerned at all so the lawyers' worries seem to be fully justified.

Tommaso Dorigo is unconcerned for the very same reason that we would discuss just a few hours ago. I wrote that left-wingers want to make the Earth a sh*ttier place to live. SteveBrooklineMA has corrected me. What they really like about it is that the world will be an equally sh*tty place for everyone, and that's a good thing because equality is the most precious value they struggle to achieve.

You may notice that Tommaso Dorigo's thinking exactly agrees with Steve's template. Tommaso doesn't care whether the Earth is gonna be destroyed because everyone and everything would be going down with him, in a nicely egalitarian way! (I have actually heard an almost identical answer from Nathan Seiberg during a formal theoretical seminar where he was asked whether SUSY would be doomed. He answered something like this: "If SUSY is shown inconsistent, I will go down but I will take many people with me!" Equality seems to be really important for the left-wingers.)

So it seems that Yes, you must create a commission asking "are these mad scientists going to destroy the Earth" for every experiment whose team is composed of mad left-wingers like Tommaso Dorigo. But I would still like to inform the lawyers who wrote the idiotic article in The International Business Times that several sane, competent, conservative members of an experiment who consider the cataclysm scares to be silly and who can present the evidence are pretty much enough to eliminate worries.

Conservative physicists generally care whether the Earth is going to be destroyed – its destruction would be a bad thing whether or not it would be done in a nice, egalitarian way! And we are generally not too impressed by the argument that the strangeletization of the Earth would be painless; there's nothing wrong with pain because pain is just a useful signal that sometimes helps us to avoid some real threats. So just investigate whether there are at least some conservative physicists at RHIC and if the answer is Yes, just splash your weird proposal for the cataclysm commission into the toilet where it belongs. Thank you very much.

NewsBusters, WUWT, Climate Depot, and other skeptical websites have been mocking Michio Kaku's CBS shtick:



Kaku has "explained" the snowy Northeast and Midwest and the relatively dry Californian weather in recent months as the result of the same cause, the "instability of historic proportions" that affects the polar vortex. He could have added the floods in the U.K. as a consequence, too – so that his fairy-tale would become even more global. ;-)

The climate skeptics are making fun of the string field theorist's new book about futurism and the mind. Kaku seems to be keen on telepathy and ESP, according to some sources, which is insane.




But I must say that his musings on the polar vortex look at least slightly more sensible than most other phenomena routinely attributed to the "climate change" by the man-made global warming cultists. At the end, I think that the effect is too small and most of the measurable quantities cancel – or at least they are not making any things worse – but his "theory" has a point.




Recall that a polar vortex is a persistent large-scale cyclone located near the North Pole (and another one near the South Pole). You must realize that it's normal for the pressure near the poles to be lower; see the current wind and pressure map near the North Pole.



Now the question is how clear, sharp, and straight the boundaries of the polar vortex are and how close to the pole the center of the polar vortex may be – and how these questions depend on the polar-equatorial temperature difference. I think that if we assumed some overall warming, the rate of the warming would indeed be faster near the poles because of the extra strong positive feedbacks such as the ice-albedo effect (in the tropics, the negative feedbacks may dominate). In the case of the North Pole, this evolution is being observed; in the Antarctica, the warming of the pole is not seen. So the empirical evidence that could back the paradigm is mixed.

But let's just assume that the Northern polar-equatorial temperature difference is decreasing with time, whatever the reason is. What the consequences would be?

The primary consequence of such a drop is the expected decrease of overall temperature variations – although the effect may be too small to be measured. It's easy to see why: if the interval of temperatures achieved on the Earth is shrinking, so are the intervals that one may achieve at any place of the globe. You should realize that much of the extremely warm/cool weather in your town is due to the winds going from the tropics/pole, respectively, so if the difference between the pole and the tropics shrinks, so do the temperature variations induced by Southern and Northern winds.

The overall storminess is expected to decrease, too. That's because much of the storminess is fed by the temperature gradients. The polar-equatorial difference is a major source of the gradients so if this source goes down, so should the storms. Again, the effect may exist just in principle and it may be undetectable when the actual temperature changes are substituted.



But another expected effect resulting from the smaller polar-equatorial differences is pretty much what Kaku mentioned. The polar vortex "sits" near the North Pole because it's a bottom of a bucket. When the temperature differences go down, the bucket becomes shallower, so it is easier for the water to spill from the bucket. So the jet streams – winds that pretty much move along the boundary of the polar vortex in our case, to simplify the discussion – have a smaller reason to follow the parallels of latitude. Latitude's importance for determining the temperature decreases, so the trajectories of the jet streams may become more chaotic.

Just to be sure, jet streams are always meandering – meanders are the wiggles similar to those on the rivers – but I do agree that if the polar-equatorial temperature difference goes down, one should expect the amplitudes of these meanders to increase. So the winds of the type we know from the Arctic are more likely to get further to the South, and vice versa: the "out of the polar vortex" weather may sometimes get into the Arctic. I believe that with the observed changes of the polar-equatorial differences, the effect is still pretty small and, when the noise is taken into account, it is probably unobservable (especially because the Arctic weather itself is getting less extreme). But I do agree that in principle, Kaku has a point.

My order-of-magnitude estimate of the effect. If the polar-equatorial temperature difference drops from 39 °C to 36 °C, for example, by less than 10 percent, the typical distance from the North Pole where the jet stream "often" reaches could grow by 10 percent, too – from 3000 km to 3,300 km, for example. So potentially, some of the more Arctic weather in a thin strip of America could be largely attributed to the wider meanders.

Completely different questions are: What is the reason that the pole-equatorial difference is shrinking (on the Northern Hemisphere) if it is? Why the Southern Hemisphere doesn't seem to follow the trend? And if these changes are occurring, are they good or bad for the mankind and for individual regions, ecosystems, and economies?

I would like to stress that the polar-equatorial temperature difference is independent from or orthogonal to the global mean temperature, in the sense of the spherical harmonic's being orthogonal (I mean \(Y_{00}(\vartheta,\varphi)\) and \(Y_{20}(\vartheta,\varphi)\) in this case), and this polar-equatorial temperature difference is arguably more important than the global mean temperature. During many geological eras, it has changed by dozens of degrees (recall palm trees in the Antarctica). Ask Richard Lindzen, he will tell you why the difference has been more important for the character of the climate on much of the Earth than the global mean temperature. So it is highly contrived to blame "global warming" (and/or CO2) for the changes of the temperature differences.

Second, whatever the cause is, if the effect is happening, the consequences are probably small and probably as beneficial as harmful. The net benefits may be very small and of uncertain sign. This adds up to the clear positive benefits of the expected lower overall storminess which seems to be the primary consequence. So it is completely irrational to start to panic as if something bad were happening. Even if the climate is changing in this way, it doesn't follow that there is any bad news going on. The climate is always changing. Changes are always good for someone and bad for someone else.

It is adequate to mention that most of these "explanations" are not really "explanations" at all. They are just rephrasing the problem and the data (snow here and there, no snow there, and so on) in different words (meander's shape having an extra wider wiggle etc.) – perhaps more specific words but still words that don't allow us to predict things. The cold or snowy weather in some parts of the U.S. may be partly attributed to the more wiggly meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves that get further away from the North Pole) but we still don't really know the cause of either and we can't predict what will happen with these quantities in the coming years or the distant future. Sometimes, the meanders are wider, sometimes they are narrower. They may get narrower in 30 years on the Northern Hemisphere but the effect may move to the Southern Hemisphere in 2073. Nobody knows. It's mostly a chaotic system controlled by its internal, largely unpredictable processes.

The dry weather in California and the snowy Northeast etc. may be "grouped" into the same story but their anticorrelation isn't a general rule. There are other stories that would describe very different combinations of the weather conditions in various regions of the globe. So if we draw, hype, and personify a "global picture" of the weather, we're not really explaining anything. We're just merging several previously independent pieces of data. It is utterly preposterous to say that there is a "big story" going on here. It's just some weather – a pretty random thing – at random places of the globe. Meanders and gradients have always existed and they were behind lots of harsh winters. People were not religiously obsessed with these phenomena and they were not attributing far-reaching consequences and interpretations to the effects that caused one kind of weather or another. By being less exposed to this scientific terminology without a scientific beef, they were paradoxically acting more rationally than many folks today including Michio Kaku.



Something off-topic, only linked by the Asian ancestry. Play the video above to see what you have to learn, dear Caucasian and African Ladies and Gentlemen, if we want to remain competitive with Asia. Good luck. ;-)

I guess that many TRF readers are following the Olympic Games.

Anthony Watts wrote about the attempt by the climate activists to politicize the event. Even the whacko-in-chief of 350.org Bill McKibben has endorsed the petition to fight the climate change.



However, it was only supported by about 105 Olympic athletes, mostly Americans. About 96% of the Olympic athletes silently endorsed the opinion that the climate activists are obnoxious self-serving jerks and scammers.

It is really crazy if some athletes were expecting harsh winter conditions in Sochi.




Someone should have told them that Sochi is one of the most Southern Russian cities and its most famous summer resort. At least that's how it used to work in the communist era. As a schoolkid, I would hear about Sochi pretty often. Apparatchiks would enjoy many of their summers in Sochi. Stalin himself had the most favorite personal summer cottage in Sochi. I understand that the American and other readers may be unfamiliar with Sochi but Sochi, a Black Sea resort, was a kind of the Soviet answer to Florida and California. ;-)




It shouldn't be hard for someone to find the climate data for Sochi. The February temperatures are –12.6 °C (record low), +2.5 °C (average low), +6.0 °C (daily mean), +10.4 °C (average high), +23.8 °C (record high). So it's clearly not like Moscow. Russia is a pretty large country, you know, and not all of its towns have the same climate as Moscow (or Siberia)! ;-)

To compare, the warmest month in Sochi is July; the five temperatures defined above are +12.6 °C, +19.8 °C, +23.8 °C, +28.0 °C, +39.4 °C. Even CNN was able to figure out and "explain" that Sochi's climate is rather warm.

The Russians were surely thinking about the question whether a summer resort is a good venue for the Winter Olympics. Their conclusion was Yes and I think that they were right. If they're able to provide the place with enough good snow and ice, it's simply better to pick a place that has major advantages in the summer. My understanding is that Sochi has lost some of its tourist fame and vitality after the fall of communism. But the chances of other Russian places to become a tourist paradise are smaller still.

Well, I would conjecture that Russia is not terribly competitive in most of these activities – including tourism – mostly because the rouble is still overvalued. And I think it is overvalued because of Russia's relative wealth when it comes to natural resources, especially fossil fuels. The fossil fuels are responsible for a significant part of the Russian exports which implies that the balance only needs a small amount of other exports, and those may therefore be largely uncompetitive.

But I think it was sensible for Russia to invest $50 billion to the Sochi Olympics. If a town except for the capital has a chance not to become a ghost town after the event, it is Sochi. Russia is working hard to attract the wealthy Russians to the Black Sea resort. Sochi is the new Florida again, they are told.