BBC: What happened to global warming?

BBC has released an article by Paul Hudson:

What happened to global warming?

"This headline may come as a bit of a surprise," it says at the very beginning. You bet, Mr Hudson. It's a big surprise.

While the article repeats a lot of environmentalists propaganda - for example absurd claims that the "influence of solar activity on the climate was recently ruled out" - and it doesn't mention people like Svensmark or Shaviv, and it promotes the opinions of Latif or Corbyn instead, it is good that it was allowed to be born at all.

The article builds on the observation that 1998 - eleven years ago - was the warmest year so far. October 2009 is a somewhat paradoxical choice for such an article: cool years were followed by a pretty fast abrupt recent El-Nino-related warming. Consequently, September 2009 was the second warmest September on the UAH, RSS records (after 1998) as well as the GISS record (after 2005).

Don't worry. The GISS anomaly would have to jump between 0.80 and 0.90 °C for the rest of the year for 2009 to beat 2005 as their warmest year. It won't happen. If you want to know, despite the recent warming, UAH shows the January-September 9-month period of 2009 to be 7th warmest among the Jan-Sep periods of years 1979-2009. The average anomalies (multiplied by 9, i.e. the sums) are

{-1.09, 0.95, 0.57, -1.44, 0.89, -2.06, -1.96, -1.24, 0.67, 1.41, -1.35, 0.24, 1.72, -1.79, -1.74, -0.26, 1.21, 0.07, -0.07, 5.31, 0.43, 0.22, 1.61, 3., 2.18, 1.6, 3.01, 2.22, 2.86, 0.01, 2.08}.

Meanwhile, Australian defense officials remain unconvinced by the climate data.



The British government began its "Act on CO2" propagandistic campaign, in order to fight the growing skepticism among the citizens. After 10 years of intense brainwashing, most of them still think that global warming won't be a problem for them or their kids. The 2-star fairy-tale propagandistic video above is targeting 3-year-old girls as well as adults who are their intellectual equivalents.

For another result of the "Act on CO2" campaign, see this dramatic video. The narrator speaks like an excited general of an army who gives orders to the soldiers. The energy in the wires and CO2 emit strong light in the movie. Eventually, they melt the Earth. ;-)

Philip Stott compares the campaign to 1984, the book. Of course, unlike Orwell's world, our world often allows the people to find the right answers to the question, not just the government-paid untrue propaganda. So the U.K. government's investment is bound to be just a waste of money. They would have to execute millions of people, including Paul Hudson of BBC, to make a real difference.

Why? It's because one simple article by Paul Hudson compensates the lies in TV commercials that cost millions of pounds.

LHC physicist arrested for Al Qaeda links

A broken LHC in 2008. Which of the people could be the culprit? Shift/click to zoom in.

Breaking news: yesterday, a 32-year-old visiting CERN employee working for the LHC was arrested in Vienne, France for his or her probable links to Al Qaeda and terrorist organizations in Algeria. He or she has a brother. No plot has been uncovered so far.

See:

CERN press release, BBC, Daily Mail, CBS News, Nature, Google News

Osama Bin Laden hopes that the LHC black hole will be large enough to swallow the infidels but small enough to save the Allah's children - assuming that Osama Bin Laden knows what a black hole is. ;-)

Barack Obama wins 2009 peace Nobel prize

for his extraordinary efforts blah blah blah.

For a similar story, see: First-year grad student wins Nobel in economics

Scientific American links the award to Obama's anti-nuclear speech in Prague. Before Obama won the $1.5 million award, he diplomatically called his visit to Prague "a waste of time". ;-)



Barack Obama joins the group of left-wing U.S. politicians who have won the award. His equally famous colleague shared the 2007 peace Nobel prize:



This particular award has been a pathetic joke for quite some time and Obama actually ends up being one of the better recent picks. ;-)

Still, it's bad for the Norwegians to throw USD 1.5 million to someone for having no results, and here you have additional justifications in the Telegraph why Obama should turn it down.

In a poll organized by the Czech Press Agency, 79% of the visitors - including your humble correspondent - think that Obama doesn't deserve the award. At idnes.cz, it's 85%. A similar composition of reactions occurs for TRF readers and GOP members. ;-)

Fidel Castro lauds the choice: by giving the prize to the socialist politician, the committee has critized America's capitalist past. ;-)

IBM DNA transistor

The first sequencing ever done in the Human Genome Project cost USD 3 billion.



By drilling tiny holes into computer-like chips, these IBM guys may reduce the cost "slightly", ideally to USD 1 thousand. That would make personalized medicine reality. See more comments and videos on IBM DNA transistors, Google News.

Via Viktor K.

Klaus will sign Lisbon for a footnote

Update: Polish EU Parliament boss Buzek argues that Klaus wants a Czech opt-out right for the Bill of Rights: see his new statement. It's been previously speculated by Polish newspapers that Klaus's proposed footnote is meant to guarantee that the Sudeten German material claims can't ever be revived, not even by people from other EU countries who don't know the Central European history well and who could make such a big mistake to try to revise our key legislation concerning the 1945 confiscation of assets of Germans except for antifascists. Well, even if that's true, it doesn't mean that this topic is Klaus's only or main point. I still feel that it's a randomly chosen topic meant to split the EU and defeat the treaty at the end.

The Swedes have created a Facebook group, Support Václav Klaus, and a related anti-Lisbon petition with 5,000+ signatures (now).

I have always thought that the Czech president is a kind of an ingenious politician. He believes in great ideas and principles and he is courageous enough to defend them. However, as far as I understand, he's also playing politics like chess and he's often able to defeat seemingly stronger and more numerous foes.

Climate: Asian kids sue G8

The Irish Times inform that meters from the climate negotiators in Bangkok, Thailand (where the Big Cheeses are preparing for the big December 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen: Barcelona will be the only other preparation), the children from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, Philipines, and Thailand have been training for the imminent climate tribunal against the rich world:

G8 states could face class actions on climate change

It was not revealed whether the arrogant 13-year Indian bitch from the United Nations has also participated. ;-) You might think that these kids need a good spank except that it is not the kids themselves who are making this stuff up. These kids are just being brainwashed and manipulated by some people who should already be mature except that they are definitely not.

Liquid nuclear battery

Two years ago, Viktor Kožený, a well-known Czech financier (and inventor!) living on the Bahamas, sent a proposal to create minuscule nuclear centrifuges, besides other nuclear technology, to your humble correspondent and others.

Many of us were laughing.



But I was reminded today that something remotely similar is being realized by researchers in Missouri. Their paper was rated as outstanding at a July 2009 conference. Radioisotope batteries can give you 100,000 times greater power than the chemical ones. These powerful ones are somewhat dangerous but you can create safe ones, with 1 Watt of power, that can last for a decade: see the picture above.

The semiconductors around them have to be liquid rather than solid, in order for their structure to be immune against the decay products. Why it's not as unsafe as the adjective "nuclear" instinctively leads most people to believe, and what are the other issues can be read at

MU press release, PhysOrg, Next Big Future, Science Daily, Gizmodo, Crunch Gear.

Today, you may be disgusted by such gadgets, but in a few years, they may be inside most small devices that people will use. Jae Kwon, the main researcher behind the technology, plans to make the batteries thinner than a human hair in the future. ;-)

Assuming that people won't shrink this much themselves, I doubt that this much perfectionism will be needed. :-)

Herta Müller: even an anti-communist can win the Nobel prize

The 2009 Nobel prize in literature goes to

Herta Müller (Germany),

a Romanian-born ethnic German poet and novelist who has been depicting the brutal conditions for life in Romania under Ceauşescu before she emigrated to Germany in 1987.

After years if not decades when the literature Nobel prizes were given exclusively to communists, feminists, terrorists, postmodernists, and similar stuff, that's quite a pleasant shock!

Müller is quoted as an author "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." Congratulations!

(The photograph on the cover of the book on the right side that you will buy from amazon.com is by Mr Jan Saudek, a Czech photographer.)

Google Maps: Prague StreetView goes live

Click to zoom in.

You may start e.g. near

the "statue of the horse" on the Wenceslaus Square, (click)

near the National Museum or the Old Town Square or the Lesser Quarter Square (in front of the dept. of maths and physics) or the math/physics student hostels in Trója or the math/physics building at Karlov.

StreetView only gets you to places where you can get with a car. That may sound surprising but the reason is actually that the StreetView pictures were taken with a car (the Google Van). ;-)

Seven smaller towns near Prague (Mělník, Beroun, Příbram, Benešov, Říčany, Brandýs nad Labem a Poděbrady) and seven largest cities of Canada became accessible at the same moment.

2009 chemistry Nobel prize: ribosome

The 2009 Chemistry Nobel Prize went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Cambridge U.K., born in India), Thomas A. Steitz (Yale), and Ada E. Yonath (Weizmann, Israel) for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. That could look like a biological discovery but the methods were pretty "chemical" or even "physical".



This picture doesn't directly describe the work of the winners but it may be good to be reminded what a ribosome does.

Crystallographer Dr Yonath whose victory was correctly predicted by some media broke the 45+ years when women receeived no physics or chemistry Nobel prize. Whether or not she was chosen purely by meritocratic criteria, there's one aspect you could have expected. By pure statistics, it shouldn't be too shocking for you to learn that the first woman to succeed in this way is Jewish. ;-)

An Ashkenazi Jew is 40 times more likely to receive the Fields medal than a random non-Jewish white: it may be similar for similar awards. Because there are about 10 million Ashkenazi Jews, you may see that their combined odds exceed those of the non-Jewish U.S. whites. ;-)

Let's hope that Israel, an island of relative wisdom, peace, and advanced civilization, will survive in the sea of a relative lack of wisdom, peace, and advanced civilization. ;-)

You know, in the Israeli-Iranian nuclear standoff, there's one consideration I view as important while most others don't. Who has the right to possess the nukes? Well, the Jewish scientists have contributed to the science that was needed for nuclear energy much more profoundly than the Persian scientists did.

So I find it completely logical and deserved that they can possess the weapons while Iran cannot. They can also be expected to act more wisely with this technology - something we have already checked in the most recent decades.

P.S. Ada Yonath seems to be of Sephardic origin, according to some sources. This group has the same IQ distribution as average Europeans. Because the group is rather small, you can see that my "typicality" argument above doesn't work.

NASA: Spitzer finds giant ring around Saturn

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, soon to be superseded by the European Herschel, is looking at the Universe in the far infrared and submillimeter spectrum.



Artist's idealization: click to zoom in...

And imagine what happened when it looked closely at the neighborhood of Saturn.

There is a new giant ring around the planet whose radius is 300 times larger than the radius of Saturn. The ring, tilted by 27 degrees relatively to the main plane of rings, is too thin to visibly reflect the solar radiation but the dust emits its own infrared, 80-Kelvin thermal radiation that could have been seen by Spitzer.

The outer moon Phoebe orbits inside the new ring and it is probably no coincidence.

See NASA or Google News.

Antarctic ice most resilient in recorded history.

In Geophysical Research Letters, Tedesco and Monaghan published an article observing that the amount of melting ice in Antarctica between October 2008 and January 2009 (the most recent local summer) was the lowest figure in the recorded history - i.e. from 1980:

An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability

World Climate Report notices the deafening silence about this record, so different from the loud claims about a melting Greenland.

Pilsner law school: fast diplomas for money

The Czech newspapers dedicate their first pages to a scandal that is emerging in my hometown of Pilsen. The Law School of the (local) Western Bohemian University seems to be the culprit of widespread fraud.



The law school in Pilsen. My mother used to work in this building (as a librarian).

While the "magister" degree normally takes 5 years to obtain, about 400 people were able to get the degree in less than 4 years. Many of them have studied other schools and their achievements elsewhere could have been counted as part of their Pilsner adventures.

Roger Penrose: physics is wrong

Discover Magazine just published a rather embarrassing interview with Roger Penrose:

Roger Penrose says physics is wrong, from string theory to quantum mechanics.

Its innocent parts discuss Penrose's childhood, his low speed in mathematics as a kid, his family of achievers, and the history of some of the famous mathematical constructions he invented (such as Penrose tiles and Escher pictures). The other part is dedicated to his critical opinions about physics.

2009 physics Nobel prize: fiber optics, CCD

One half of the prize went to Charles Kuen Kao, a Hong Kong and U.K. engineer and a pioneer in fiber optics (left).

In 1966, one year after his PhD, he demonstrated that the high loss of the fibers of that time was caused by impurities in the glass rather than an inherent problem of the technology.

The other half is equally shared by Willard Boyle, a Canadian-born physicist (middle), and George Smith, a born Yankee (right), who invented the CCD while working in now defunct Bell Labs, New Jersey, in 1969.

CCDs, or charged-coupled devices, are gadgets designed to delay analog signals by transferring the electric charge to neighboring capacitors. They are used in digital cameras and similar machines.

As far as I know, no one has predicted these winners. And frankly, even after having heard about the decision, I wouldn't say that it was the best choice that could have been made. There are already way too many applied, engineering price of this type.

100th Medicine Nobel Prize

... was announced at 11:30 am, Central European Time.

Watch Nobel YouTube Live (click)

It was the first global YouTube live broadcast ever.



The prize goes to Elizabeth Blackburn (UC San Francisco), Carol Greider (Johns Hopkins), and Jack Szostak (Harvard Medical School) - see the picture in this order - for the 1984 discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.

You can see that the lag is 25 years, the dominance of the U.S. is strengthened by this award, and the percentage of women increases. We will see whether the women's physics & chemistry score of 0 in the last 45 years will be changed this year.

The winners were pre-promoted by the 2006 Albert Lasker award

see the 2006 Lasker description of their discovery

and correctly predicted as the 2009 Nobel prize winners by Thomson Reuters and others. The ladies also received the March 2009 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter science prize. No, Paul Ehrlich is a different guy than the population bomb nutcase.

The previous Medicine Nobel Prizes were described on this blog, too:

2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008

Copenhagen Treaty Draft & gender

The taxpayers in the world have gained the access to the recent draft of the Climate Treaty in Copenhagen:

UN FCCC Copenhagen 2009 (click)

I recommend you to read those 181 pages that sketch the plans for a future World Carbon Government only if your stomach is really strong. ;-)

Pretty much all kinds of disgraceful far-left postmodern ideologies attempting to reignite the class struggle are heavily represented in the text. You can see that this stuff has almost nothing to do with solving a problem: it's all about left-wing utopias to reorganize the society.

To demonstrate this point, let me select and repost the paragraphs of the draft that talk about gender or sex. The treaty will be full of carbon feminism, too. I suppose that the square brackets indicate the only variations of the text that are open to further negotiations and votes.

... 5. Recalling that [besides adversely affecting all developing countries, climate change pose significant challenges to] [[the adverse effects of climate change will be felt most acutely by [those segments of the] [vulnerable countries and] [in developing countries, particularly in low-lying and other small island countries, countries with low-lying coastal, arid and semi-arid areas or areas liable to floods, drought and desertification, and developing countries with fragile mountainous ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change and by the most fragile ecosystems and] population [particularly in] [within] developing countries who have contributed least to climate change but [who are already in vulnerable situations [owing to factors such as geography, poverty, gender, age, indigenous or minority status and disability]]]. ...

... 10. Led by developed country Parties, [an economic transition is needed [that shifts] [in order to adjust] global economic growth patterns towards a sustainable [low-emission economy] based on development of innovative technologies, more sustainable production and consumption, promoting sustainable lifestyles and [climate-resilient] [sustainable] development [while ensuring a just transition of the workforce]. The active participation of all stakeholders in this transition should be sought [, be they governmental, including subnational and local government, private business or civil society, including the youth and addressing the need for gender equity].] Those developing countries that were and are low carbon economies need sufficient financial incentives and appropriate technology transfer to keep avoiding GHG emissions in their path to sustainable development and to prevent adopting the high GHG emission trajectories of developed countries. ...

... (b) [[Particularly vulnerable populations, groups and communities] [All vulnerable groups whose adaptive capacity is low] [Groups requiring special protection] [The most vulnerable communities and groups] [especially] [such as] women [and] children [the elderly and indigenous peoples] [, and local communities and rural populations] [including through promoting a gender perspective and a community-based approach to adaptation] [in particular gender and youth concerns, recognizing that women and children are particularly affected by the impacts of climate change];] ...

... 19. [[These plans] [National adaptation programmes and activities] [shall] [should] [could] [be a component of low-emission development strategies and]:

(a) Be consistent with the particulars provided under the international framework of adaptation;

(b) Be developed through broad and wide consultations of stakeholders, taking into account gender consideration and the most vulnerable groups and be country driven and approved by the highest political levels within the country and communicated to the COP; ...

... 19. [[These plans] [National adaptation programmes and activities] [shall] [should] [could] [be a component of low-emission development strategies and]: ...

... (k) Take into account relevant social and economic conditions, which should be consistently defined and include gender considerations in order to enhance women’s capacity to act and to contribute to adaptation actions effectively.

(l) Integrate a gender perspective and a community-based and participatory approach to adaptation; ...

... 56. In order to support the implementation of the adaptation [actions][framework][programme], [existing [institutional arrangements][institutions at the international and regional levels] [shall][should] be enhanced] [and][the new institutional arrangements mentioned in paragraph 57 below should be established] with a view to, inter alia:5

(a) [Facilitating][Enhancing][Supporting][Ensuring][Encouraging][Promoting] [[the implementation of] adaptation] [action[s]][framework] [in all countries][in developing country Parties] [at the most appropriate level][including at local, [subnational,] national and regional levels][now, up to and beyond 2012] [, recognizing the important roles of [state and regional] governments and recognizing gender equity as an integral part of effective implementation of adaptation;] ...

... 59. [National and, where appropriate, regional coordinating [bodies][entities] should be established, or enhanced where they exist, to address all aspects of the means of implementation for adaptation, including gender-balanced participation, and to strengthen the institutional capacity of national focal points and all stakeholders.] [All Parties should promote the coordination and sustainability of activities undertaken within this framework, including the efforts of national coordinating mechanisms and entities and focal points.] ...

... 61. [The centres and networks mentioned in paragraph 60 above [should] operate with a view to, inter alia:] ...

... (c) [Assisting and raising funds for] [Financing the planning] Planning, designing, [implementing,] monitoring and evaluating adaptation activities, and facilitating informed decision-making [at all levels] [at the national and regional levels, especially between countries with shared natural resources], taking gender considerations into account; ...

... 63. [Progress [in the compliance of financial commitments of Annex I Parties and][in the delivery of means of implementation to developing country Parties][in the implementation of][under] the adaptation [framework][programme] [is necessarily linked to the finance, transfer of technology and capacitybuilding. All of these aspects should be monitored and reviewed.] [, including [in] the delivery of means of implementation to [all] developing country Parties, particularly low-lying and other small island countries, countries with low-lying coastal, arid and semi-arid areas or areas liable to floods, drought and desertification, and developing countries with fragile mountainous ecosystems that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change and progress in building resilience and reducing vulnerability], [should][must] be [monitored][reviewed][and evaluated] to ensure the [agreed] full implementation of adaptation actions [and commitments of developed country Parties under Article 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 of the Convention] [supported by finance and technology and commitments relating to financial and technology support [in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner,] utilizing scientific as well as sex-disaggregated socioeconomic data and in the context of transparency, mutual accountability and robust governance].] ...

Hardcore stuff, indeed. I doubt that there is a sentence on these 181 pages that would be acceptable to me.

See Anthony Watts' blog that discusses the wealth transfer in this treaty, with a new and improved dignity penalty. ;-)