Since the climate has achieved neither of these equilibria in four billion years, despite massive changes to the solar constant (early quiet sun), atmospheric composition and land-coverage by plants, we can be sure on this basis that the models are wrong. Which is not surprising, because the models are unphysical: they contain small but significant approximations to the true physics that mean it would absolutely astonishing if long term integrations resulted in anything remotely resembling reality.

This is not to say that climate models are useless or "global warming is a hoax", but that we should be extremely cautious in their interpretation. There are excellent reasons to not dump gigatonnes of GHGs into the atmosphere without precise models, and its not as if some gang of left-wing idiots are trying to hijack our need to make relatively modest tweaks to global capitalism and "change everything" in some doomed revolutionary experiment of the kind that failed so frequently and bloodily in the 20th century, so there's really no reasonable impediment to taking modest steps toward a cleaner world, such as replacing some fraction of income tax with carbon taxes.

After all, who but a wealth-hating socialist would oppose reducing the tax on something basically good (income) in favour of a tax on something basically bad (GHG emissions)?

"The satire will continue until the killing stops": http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

We should all be making as much fun of Islamists and their blessed prophet as we can. I like my caricature of Mohammed more than yours, though:

~0:-{=

(complete with bomb in turban, like in the Jyllands-Posten cartoon: http://www.zombietime.com/moha...)

This.

My own contribution to the cause (CC NC Attribution Share-Alike), a satirical poem based on Lewis Carol's "The Walrus and the Carpenter": http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

The Peaceful Prophetâ(TM)s followers
were shooting infidels,
beheading them with axes
and flinging them down wells
proclaiming, âoeIâ(TM)m for Paradise!â
while making Earth a Hell.

Apologists snapped angrily
because they thought the war
against Enlightenment and law
was all of that and moreâ"
âoeHow rude of people to point out
religionâ(TM)s blood and gore!â ...and so on...

I'm a deaf person in a hearing person's body and a myopic person's body. There are technological fixes for those things, and I apply them. I don't see why other people with different problems than mine shouldn't apply technological fixes to their issues.

But of course there are always going to be those who scream "FOUR EYES" and otherwise bully the kid with glasses, or hearing aids, or is otherwise using technology to help them be functional and happy in this crazy old world.

Unfortunately, we don't have a technological fix for bitterness and hatred just yet, and people who are full of hatred and bitterness would be unlikely to use it if we did, as they seem to like their bitterness and hatred, which is rather sad, really.

Or we could spend some time coming up with additional consequences that might allow indirect tests. For example, does this effect have any consequences for the spectrum of Hawking radiation (just to consider one area were entangled pairs and high gravitational fields are involved)?

How about the structure of the very early universe?

Or are there ridiculously subtle interferometric effects that might allow the detection of the phenomenon? Or other quantum effects?

Consider the Mossbauer Effect as an example of measuring stupidly small energy splittings so many orders of magnitude below any reasonable detector resolution that no doubt some smug bastard made fun of the people doing the hard work of calculating them "because no one will ever be able to measure that!"

That's an interesting point, but on my reading of the paper (which was pretty cursory, admittedly) the extra mass term comes from the joint wavefunction, which means both particles would have to be measured. It looks like the pair has greater mass, not the individual particles.

This makes sense because insofar as they are entangled it doesn't even make sense to talk about the individual particles. Furthermore, if one were to measure either of the particles individually, that would break the entanglement and the extra mass term would fall to zero.

Thing of the highly idealized experiment of two sources on a balance beam, one that emits pairs of non-entangled particles, one that emits pairs of entangled particles. The theory says that the balance will tip toward the side of the entangled pairs, but it does not follow from this that measurements on any of the individual particles will reveal increased mass.

Exactly, and the thing that extrapolative SF authors are really, really bad at is predicting the future. Why anyone would even bother to consider Stoss's opinions on such matters is unclear.

He certainly has no particular track record of accuracy in predicting the future of aerospace technology. Has he written on the economics of hub/spoke vs alternative route configurations? Non-metalic fuselage technology? Hypersonic propulsion and the various approaches being investigated to reduce wave drag? How about his work on the medium-haul market in the late '90's? Did he invest in Bombardier in '95 and get out in 2000 for a 750% gain?

If you were to build the Concord today the design would be very different, and much more efficient. Expect a number of smaller, lighter, more efficient supersonic transports to be built in the next decade. Expect the same companies to be keeping an eye on hypersonic and sub-orbital research. NYC or LA to Beijing in a few hours would be worth money if the cost/time/safety equation can be balanced, and it's way too soon to say it can't.

My prediction is that before the end of the 21st century a sufficiently rich person will be able to book a regular flight from from NYC to Beijing or Delhi that takes less time than any regular flight from NYC to London or Paris, because hypersonic/suborbital will make economic sense in the former case but not the latter. Meanwhile, delays at airports because of security etc will mean it will be possible to get anywhere in the world in under 10 hours, and nowhere in under three hours.

First we have to agree on what kind of problem we have.

To the post-modernist left climate change is, always has been and always will be a social and moral problem, and the only way to solve it is abstinence.

To post-modernist right (the anti-science, "words mean whatever I want them to" right) climate change is a political problem that needs to be solved by political manipulation (denialism).

To anyone who isn't an ideology-addled moron climate change is a technological problem that can be solved by the usual mix of minor tweaks to tax policy and technology policy that has fixed every major issue the developed world has faced in the past century. Carbon taxes (and concomitantly reduced income taxes, a move that only a wealth-hating socialist could oppose) will actually do most of the job to incentivise industry to move in the right direction, although direct government support for conventional nuclear and advanced nuclear research would help as well.

Since no one on the left or right is much interested in doing anything with climate change except whipping up outrage in their base, not much gets done, but slowly technologists and technocrats will push our focus towards actually solutions to the actual problem.

False. Many countries are social democrat, but no country outside of a tiny number of failed states like Cuba are socialist.

Socialism, as an economic system, is defined by public ownership of the means of production and nothing else. German fascism was "socialist-like" by this definition because corporations were under government control and direction to an extent that was indistinguishable from ownership (the right of use and disposal).

It has become common in recent years to bandy about "socialism" to describe any social democratic system, but this is a debasement of the term and results in a profoundly confused debate, because social democracy is at best a very distant cousin to socialism. Social democracies have thriving private sectors that are heavily regulated but free to pursue business opportunities, capital expansion, etc, within fairly broad constraints.

In a socialist economy, there is no private sector, at least above the cottage-industry scale.

You've gotta stop using 1998 as the benchmark year.

We are indeed in a hiatus with respect to the thermodynamically meaningless quantity "global average temperature": http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

Anyone who claims that the hiatus is a result of cherry picking is a liar or a fool, but like the trained monkeys they are if you use the year 1998 they will bark "cherry picking" just as surely as Pavlov's dog salivated at the bell.

Far better to say, "The temperature has not risen in the past decade or so... the precise point you start with doesn't really matter in the 2002-2004 range." This will probably still get you a "Cherry picking!" response because Warmists are stupid, but they have a better chance of looking stupid when they do so.

Now of course, you also have to admit that any given decade in the past century has reasonable odds of having a temperature profile as flat as the most recent one, so making any very strong inference from the perfectly real, non-cherry-picked hiatus is going to make you look stupid too, but that's what this debate is all about: which side can look the most stupid most of the time?

Translation: "I am ignorant of what this term means to physicists, and I declare my ignorance trumps their knowledge."

This is a scientific paper being written for the author's peers, none of whom would ever misinterpret it. I've seen this issue come up in a couple of places where laypeople are confused by the language of physics.

This is not a problem with the language of physics: it is a problem with laypeople.

I'm all for clear scientific communication, but at the end of the day, communication is hard and worrying about how some random person on the 'Net might misinterpret a term you use every day in your professional work is just not a good use of anyone's precious attention.

When I write poetry I do so in a pretty technical way. If people don't appreciate that, sucks to be them, because they are not my audience. I'm the same way in scientific communication: I write for my peers, and everyone else does the same. Let the popular science authors do the translation. They need the work.

I had the same thought, but it turns out not to be the case. Given the model he's working with, the neutrinos will be as much above the speed of light as they would have been below it if they had the same real mass (0.3 eV or something like that.)

For ~10 MeV neutrinos this gives gamma absurdly close to unity, and it's as impossible to distinguish neutrinos traveling just over c from ones traveling at c from ones traveling just under c.

The paper actually mentions SN1987A and talks a bit about the time resolution required.

Widom-Larsen requires an implausible mix of scales. The effective mass of heavy electrons in the solid state is a collective phenomenon happening over distances and time-scales that are large relative to the nucleus and nuclear time-scales and affect the dynamics of the electron's interaction with the lattice, on those scales. To impute to these large-scale effects efficacy at the nuclear scale is very unlikely to be correct.

Consider a car analogy: a car moving along a freeway in dense traffic interacts with all the cars around it. If the driver accelerates, they will pull up close to the care behind and that driver may speed up a bit too, sending a diminishing wave of acceleration through the traffic, so compared to the same car alone on the road the car in dense traffic appears to have a much higher effective mass. Alone, you hit the gas and speed up a lot. In traffic, you hit the gas and speed up a little bit. That's what the electron in the surface looks like: a car in traffic.

But on the scale of car-car interactions, the "bare" mass of the car is what matters. If two cars collide you get an energy of 0.5*m*v^2, not 0.5*Meff*v^2.

Yeah, there are multi-car pileups that muddy the analogy, but they add up to nothing like the effective mass of the whole traffic block, so there. And the difference in scales between "cars and traffic" is tiny compared to the difference in scales between "nuclei and the lattice", so the effect that analogy hopefully makes obvious will be that much larger in the latter case.

While I don't disagree on the smell, Gates is richer than God, and the first thing I thought on seeing this was that if I had that kind of money I might spend a bit of it on wigged-out ideas, just in case. It's like me throwing a panhandler a buck just 'cause I can.