Well, to be honest, they've asked for funding to do the obvious experiment to test it. It's not particularly clever, only expensive. And, as has been pointed out repeatedly above, they haven't "discovered" this, it is part of the standard lexicon of QED and has been for maybe 60-70 years.

A clever way of testing it would be to use e.g. a free electron laser like the one we already have at Duke and shoot the laser beam into a "wiggler" -- a region of alternating crossed fields -- well downstream of the circulating ring. No need for two lasers, no need for massive new expense. In the frame of the photons, the region of alternating crossed EM fields looks like a photon heading the other way. You can make the wiggler field strength quite large and put a bending magnet just past it with detectors and look for positron-electron coincidences. This would actually have lots of advantages. Cheap. It uses existing hardware instead of building (much) new stuff. The pairs produced would not be in the rest frame of the lab (but in the "virtual" rest frame of the collision) and would only have to travel a short distance before encountering a field that could separate them before they annihilate. And when one was done, one could take the whole thing apart and go back to using the FEL for its many other purposes and say: Gee, guess quantum theory works after all and go about one's business. Unless of course, there are surprises, which seems to be to be class A unlikely but which is barely, barely possible and hence worth perhaps a MODEST expense to verify it.

rgb

Re: IBM Memo 92148 (Anonymous Coward/Slashdot) Can you make condoms with it?

Hmm, intriguing idea. Almost certainly, but out of which polymer? A rigid "Titan" condom could certainly cover more than one situation (and the idea had considerable appeal when we ran it over the flagpole among our senior execs to see who saluted it and who turned away blushing) but the boys here in R&D said there might be trouble fitting it into a wallet. However, the marketing boys said that we wouldn't even have to change the name -- Titan Condoms (made by IBM!) would sell like hot cakes even if one did have to keep them standing on a shelf or nightstand next to the bed. Besides, if they don't sell to the general population, a bit of retooling and they'll make gangbusters self-propelled grenade casings (especially in the larger sizes) -- although legal says that calling them "Titan missiles" might infringe some trademark or other.

R&D was, however, quite excited at the prospect of a brush-on "Hydro" condom -- one would never need to take it off. We had a number of volunteers for a pilot project, and it turns out that in fact, one might never be able to take it off. Apparently "Hydro" is also being considered as a nearly indestructible super glue because of all of its dangling, um, "bonds" but this was being investigated by another team. There were, unfortunately, a few drawbacks pointed out by those party-poopers over in legal and their paid shills from the medical profession, so the idea was tabled for the time being, which basically means that we're still going ahead with the project but looking for just the right test population -- males on dialysis or willing to undergo a critical surgical alteration of the liquid waste elimination pathway, for example. However, we're a lot more interested in large federal or state contracts; this is (for example) an intriguing idea for our prison systems, if we can get it past Engineering.

Keep up the good work, AC, and we are gratified that you are making this valuable suggestion anonymously, as it saves us from the tedious process of running you down and making you sign release forms or having you assassinated so that we can cleanly patent the idea as our own. Now you'll have to excuse me -- I have to go empty my cloaca.

Irving Bentabit
IBM (R&D)

And 1) is both true empirically (climate models are failing to accurately predict climate) and openly acknowledged to be true by, among others, the IPCC. Openly in AR3, relegated to selected paragraphs deep in the document in AR5, but there nonetheless.

2) is still an open question -- or rather, there are definitely feedback that mute the severity, but it is also claimed that there are positive feedbacks and it is not yet clear which one wins. CO_2 alone would produce between 1 and 1.5 C of warming by 600 ppm (some 0.5 of which we have already realized). Hansen believed (and probably still believes) that water vapor feedback would at least double, more likely triple it to between 3 and 5 C. Empirical evidence has gradually forced nearly all of the climate science community to cut back their "best estimates" (based on a statistically meaningless mean of the predictions of the broken climate models, see 1) above) of total climate sensitivity to roughly 2.7 C in AR5 and it is currently in free fall in the literature, increasingly constrained by the lack of tropospheric warming, "the hiatus" (as it is named and discussed in AR5) and Bayes theorem. Currently the argument is whether or not it will end up as high as 2.3C, with papers appearing arguing that it will end up being in more or less neutral net feedback territory -- 1 to 1.5 C -- and others covering the range of 1.7 to 2.3 C. Since basically this is a scientific crap shoot and has been from the 1980s on (partly because we are still learning about clouds, partly because the "physics" that the models supposedly are based on begins by averaging phenomena in a nonlinear Navier-Stokes equation from its Kolmogorov scale of around 1 mm to the cell size of around 100 km -- with adjustable parameters galore -- as if it does not matter) so you pays your money, you places your bet. Net negative feedback hasn't even been ruled out by the data, and the longer the hiatus continues the more likely it is that the feedback is indeed net negative.

4-6) are what they are. Sea level rise is almost invariably given as the primary cause of catastrophic damage, yet it has also proven to be the one place where there is absolutely no sign of catastrophe. SLR rates have changed little for 140 years. It is also remarkably difficult to predict the rates at which land ice will melt, given the problems with 1) and 2) -- Hansen (as the primary author of the entire claim for future catastrophe) goes on TED Talks and with a straight face says that he expects 5 meters of SLR. Any other sane climate scientist I've talked to is now talking about anywhere from 30 cm to as much as a meter. The data itself suggests that we'd be unlucky to make as much as 30 cm by 2100. Public media are full of egregious claims of ongoing disaster (melting Himalayan glaciers, increasing tornado or hurricane damage) often and sadly backed by public figures in the scientific community that should no better as there is no evidence of any of the above). This quite correctly reduces the credibility of the other claims of these individuals -- if one went back and looked at the predictions that Hansen in particular has made in fully public view ex officio as head of GISS and how badly they've failed, it would be difficult to see how he has any credibility left. Beyond that, many -- although not all -- of the claims for damage due to "climate change" (something that happens all of the time naturally and hence is impossible to attribute or refute) are marginal results that are not statistically significant. And estimates for the damage resulting or likely to result from climate change often fail to take into account benefits accruing from climate change or the simple fact that nature has already accommodated the change given the smear of temperatures and climate ranges available between the equator and the poles.

All of this greatly complicates the discussion of costs and benefits. Not everything about global warming is bad. Indeed, the global warming that has been ongoing since the end of the Little Ice Age has been almost entirely beneficial. If SLR and climate sensitivity are admitted to be at best poorly informed guesses based on models that are in terrible agreement with the data (e.g. HADCRUT4) from 1850 to the present everywhere but the reference period (training set for the model, which does not count), as is clearly visible in figure 9.8a of AR5 it is by no means clear that "the science is settled" -- whatever that means when the "settled science" is based entirely on trying to solve what is arguably the most difficult computational problem ever attempted by humans with completely inadequate methodology and tools -- or what the most prudent course of action is for humans to take in the meantime.

Given the enormity of the investment required to do anything at all significant about CO_2 concentration -- where all of the measures taken by all of the world over the last 20 years, in spite of their enormous price tag, have done almost nothing -- the most prudent course is probably to wait and see before dumping another half-trillion or trillion dollars into the well without even the prospect of the investment impacting the overall rate of CO_2 increase globally -- while continuing to invest heavily on the keystone technologies that might actually eventually have a cost-effective impact. Solar power, for example, cannot form the basis of an actual global civilization as things now stand. It is barely cost-effective in ideal locations as a means of eking out fossil fuel derived power that is still required to bridge the substantial temporal gaps when the sun goes behind clouds, when it is night time, when it is winter and the sun is tipped to too great an angle for efficient generation. We have no cost-effective technology yet for storing solar power under any circumstances so that it could provide 24 hour power at global civilization rates in the middle of Death Valley or the Sahara. We have no way of transporting electricity generated in Arizona to Maine, or the Sahara to Finland -- current power transmission technology is limited to around 300 miles, and to get even to 3000 would require nearly linear scaling of e.g. high voltage transmission line dimensions, with a highly nonlinear scaling of their cost (that is, they would have to transmit power at order of ten million volts, instead of order (less than) one million, and air just isn't that good an insulator, especially when it is damp or electrically charged itself). Wind is even more problematic as even places with comparatively reliable wind can have windless weeks as easily as days. Nuclear is the only viable non-Carbon source of power, and as of this moment it has to be the primary electrical generation means eked out by alternatives as no alternative generation mechanism is capable of functioning as a primary. And many of the same people who oppose coal based electricity oppose nuclear just as vehemently.

In the comparatively rich West it is all too easy to forget that roughly 2/3 of the world's population is unbelievably energy poor. 1/3 of the world's population is just plain old poor -- living basically not even in the 19th century or early 20th century but in the 17th century. All global poverty, at its root, is energy poverty. With enough, cheap enough, electricity one can create clean water, plenty of food, jobs, air conditioning and heating, safe and comfortable houses, the means to cook food and light homes after dark that don't involve burning dried animal dung in a tiny hut while exposed to disease-bearing parasites that fly in through the smoke one is breathing. China and India, with a huge fraction of their populations who are in precisely this category, have sensibly enough chosen to mostly ignore the claims of possible future catastrophe because to do nothing to provide energy for these people right now is an ongoing catastrophe that the world blinds its eyes to while worrying about 2100 and CO_2.

Maybe CO_2 will cause a global ecological and economic catastrophe. Maybe not -- the evidence is so far not at all clear or universal that it will do either one. In assessing the risks, however, one has to fairly balance out the costs of measures that everyone knows will do nothing to ameliorate the CO_2 level likely in 2100 (and are enormously expensive now) against the benefits that could be derived from the same level of investment trying to, say, ameliorate global poverty, global ignorance, and global disease right now. Half a trillion dollars, wisely spent, could probably come damn close to solving these problems over 20 years. In 20 years, we might also actually have accumulated enough actual evidence (as opposed to the "projected on the basis of dysfunctional General Circulation Models" not-really-evidence-at-all kind of evidence that is actively pushed at the moment) to have a much better idea of how the climate really functions. We might have fixed the models by then so that they come a lot closer to agreeing with the data. Money currently and wisely being invested in breakthrough research and technologies -- high density energy storage, lower costs photovoltaics, low hanging fruit like LFTR -- as well as longer shots such as high-temperature high-current superconductors capable of carrying energy the 10,000 miles necessary to provide Finland with electricity generated in the Sahara in winter, Maine with energy generated in Texas in the winter, or fusion (the universal solution to all of the world's energy woes if and when it works) might have time to mature.

That's the really silly thing. Solar technology is a no-brainer -- once costs drop to where one can amortize the investment over 10 years or less. At that point one doesn't have to "encourage" its adoption, one has to stand back and let the free market work. In some parts of the US, solar has marginally reached that (for corporate level investments) although for individual homeowners the amortization is still too long, more like 20 years. The latter is too long (and too close to the expected lifetime of the cells) to be a truly comfortable investment, but costs are dropping, the amortization along with it, and at some point new construction will often come with a solar roof not because it is mandated or "green", but because owning a house with most of its lifetime energy costs rolled into the mortgage at a discount relative to over-the-counter energy prices is an appealing prospect. At that point solar will rise to displace/eke out maybe 30% of our energy needs, perhaps even as much as 50% if people synchronize manufacturing energy demand to the daytime in sunshiny states. That will, of course, still not suffice to keep CO_2 levels from increasing (if the Bern model is correct) -- only the replacement of coal burning plants with nuclear power can do that, and if that were done solar itself would once again be a hammer looking for a nail, at least for a century or three.

Solar on top of mature base technologies is even more of a no-brainer -- if somebody perfects e.g. zinc oxide batteries or any of the other potential ultra-high-energy-density batteries people are working on (perhaps with breakthrough nanoscale techonology) tomorrow, that is a game changer. The global warming crisis would truly be over, because solar would become a viable replacement even for nuclear, and if one achieves enough energy density (e.g. anything within a factor of 2 or 3 relative to gasoline or fuel oil), one could ship electricity to Maine by charging a train-sized battery during the day in West Texas and running the charged batteries up to Maine overnight to deliver the next day's electrical power, then running it back the next day to be recharged once again. But until that happens solar will not be the basis of any real solution to the CAGW/CACC problem.

So far, I haven't heard one single solution proposed that makes sense and is capable of actually solving the problem, with the obvious exception of the adoption of global nuclear power for as long as our nuclear fuel resources hold out. Climate aside, the human species needs to solve the problem of generating power for the indefinite term in order to build a steady state civilization without the extremes of energy wealth and energy poverty clearly visible to anyone who doesn't have their head stuck in a mansion today. If that problem is solved, climate issues become moot. Until it is solved, measures being taken are simply transferring your money into the carefully selected pockets of those who make the loudest claims for greenness and have the right friends, who -- paradoxically enough -- turn out to predominantly be precisely those energy companies that everybody excoriates as being the cause of all evil. Who makes the most money out of the global warming crisis? Oil companies. Coal companies. Power companies. None of those companies suffer losses due to the "crisis" -- most of them are profitable at record levels because of the crisis.

Something to think about.

rgb

Was there an actual point in there? Is your optimism going to produce a battery capable of storing 20 GW-hours of energy or high temperature high current superconductivity capable of transmitting electrical energy 5000 miles (both cost-effectively)?

If you want to look at more than a couple of decades, you can look at the entirety of figure 9.8a in the IPCC's AR5 for the still appallingly short term, or the thermal record of the Holocene for a somewhat longer term view. Allowing for high-frequency vs low-frequency (proxy derived) information, the temperature is rising at an entirely non-alarming rate from a) the Little Ice Age, which was the lowest temperature in almost the entire Holocene (hence its name); b) the Dalton Minimum. Both of these were serious bouts of extreme cold as far as the Earth's "mean" interglacial climate is concerned, and it is both reasonable and fortunate that the Earth rebounded from them. If you look at the more recent data (e.g. 9.8a) you will note that the models of CMIP5 do a literally terrible job not only over the recent past but over the entire span of HADCRUT4 outside of the reference period. If you look at a fourier transform of the model predictions when their forcing is turned off -- I believe that there is one you can find in AR4 but I can't recall the specific page/section -- you will note that it is flat as a pancake for times greater than around 100 months. That is the basis of modeller's belief that the 20th century's warming stretch was due to CO_2 and not natural causes -- their models produce NO unforced warming in the long term as they do not permit the significant aggregation of natural fluctuations.

Of course nature has all kinds of unforced variation at timescales longer than a decade as a glance a the long term climate record clearly reveals.

While we are on timescales of a decade, note well that very nearly all of the warming of the last 70 years occurred in a single stretch of roughly 15 years from 1983 to 1998. Temperatures were very, very nearly flat before this, actually descending from a high point in the mid-40's to the mid-70's, rising a tiny bit back roughly to par with the 40's by the early 80's, and then went up in the late 80's and early 90's capped with a sudden bump due to the 1998 super-ENSO event. Since then, temperatures have once again been nearly flat. Why is it that this one 15 year stretch is proof of AGW to you, but the rest of the 20th century (including the unforced increase in temperature from 1910 to 1945, almost equal in magnitude to the late-20th century bump) doesn't count?

Finally, why do you feel compelled to force the world to "transform", at enormous expense and the consequent perpetuation of human misery and death, to try to eke out renewable energy when the technologies that might make it work one day are still pitifully immature? Do you not understand that by making energy more expensive, you are directly increasing and perpetuating world poverty not for Al Gore or any of the comparatively wealthy people in the US, but in the third world where tens of millions of people die every year from poverty that can be directly linked to energy poverty?

Finally, you can wonder all you like about how well I understand statistics. The answer is properly "better than 99.99% of the people on the planet" -- at least 4 nines, probably 5 -- but the one relevant thing you might want to study to catch up on is encapsulated in a lovely little monograph entitled "How to Lie With Statistics" -- a well-known classic in the field, written for a lay person.

When you read it, then go back to read AR5, sections 9.2.2 and 9.2.3. To translate for you: "We haven't any justification for forming a MultiModel Ensemble mean and using it as if it is an axiomatically justified statistic. In fact, we have excellent reasons not to, and if we do we cannot possibly say what the result means or how it might predict the actual climate. But we're going to do so anyway."

And boy, do they! Confidence assertion everywhere, right and left! Not a whit of it supported by things like the Central Limit Theorem or anything even vaguely defensible using the actual theory of statistics.

A hint for you -- the mean of many predictive models is not guaranteed to converge to the true mean, and the variance of the distribution is not a meaningful predictor for how close that mean is to the true mean. So using it to make any statement of probability is -- um -- "creative" in precisely the sort of way described in How to Lie with Statistics.

rgb

Ha, very good sir! I'm assuming that he was using -- as we all do, in casual conversation, unless we are conversing with a mathematician about black sheep in Scotland -- his own personal, gravitationally oriented sense of up and down. In his personal reference frame the sun will indeed rise, and if it doesn't he can always do a sommersault.

Your warped Nietzsche quote, BTW, also has me gasping in admiration. Even your fondness for Penguins is admirable.

Well done!

You mean extrapolating from known behavior in the past sort of like what we do using -- Physics? Chemistry? Biology? Anything else in the entire compendium of human knowledge about the real world (as opposed to empty exercises in self-referential logic like pure mathematics)?

Or are you trying to imply that Hume's problem with extrapolating the past has finally got an analytical/logical solution as opposed to an axiomatic/statistical solution a la Jaynes?

I'm only asking because as soon as you remove empirical science from our system of knowledge -- which is all fundamentally extrapolation from past observations (that's the "empirical" bit) -- what is left as a non-joke prediction is being psychic. Which is, curiously enough, a bit of a joke.

(And yes, the examples given were deliberately obvious, but the point of the obvious is well taken -- we cannot be certain that the sun will rise tomorrow on the mere basis of either a compendium of observations that it has done so in many, many past tomorrows or even on the basis of observationally deduced laws concerning gravitation, the shape, location, and probable trajectory of the Earth relative to the Sun, the probable continuity of the processes that drive the sun, the probably true empirically based law that the angular momentum of the Earth will be conserved and that rotation will eventually "make the sun rise" yet again, because all conclusions about the future are ultimately based on the extrapolation of observed -- not really "known" -- behavior in the past, and as Hume noted, we cannot prove using any sort of pure reason that the future will be like the past, and the best proof of scientific induction that we have so far is the Cox-Jaynes axioms and probability theory as the logic of science.)

rgb

Incredibly well stated, sir. Sadly, nobody who reads proclamations of The Government as if they are gospel truth seems aware of the fact that we are currently extending the all time record interval without a category 3 hurricane making landfall in the US, that like it or not SLR is being measured at the terrifying rate of between 2.5 and 3.5 mm/year, within noise of its 140 year rate (and if anything, is currently actually decelerating, although statistically neither any observed "acceleration" nor "deceleration" is meaningful when compared to the historical record). Tornadoes are way down and have been for several years. We just had a record-setting cold year in the US (with daily cold records outnumber warm records maybe 2 to 1) with a record-setting cold winter. The current projection for midsummer sea ice is pretty close to normal. The antarctic has quietly been setting sea ice records for two or three years running without anyone paying the slightest attention (except maybe when boatloads of tourists travelling there to "document sea ice loss" get trapped for weeks in the ice, the boats that come to rescue them get trapped in the ice, and it takes large amounts of money and risk to rescue them).

But aside from all of that, the assertion that we could deliver all of the world's current energy requirements at all, with almost unlimited investment, without carbon is almost without foundation. Almost because if we invested sufficiently heavily in nuclear power and successfully developed e.g. LFTR (Thorium) as an alternative nuclear power resource, it is barely possible that with enormous investment and the building of hundreds if not thousands of plants and the extensive mining of e.g. Monazite sand we could make it. Assuming, of course, somebody were willing to foot the bill for the third world and the rapidly developing nations like India and China.

As for solar, I love it to death, and as time passes and technology develops it might eventually be a prime-time player. In the meantime, it is expensive compared to carbon, useless above a certain latitude, and useless at night. We do not have any mature, cost-effective technology for storing energy from solar to deliver at night, and we are in all probability at least decades away from having one. Wind power is even more problematic -- you can't even be guaranteed of having power during the day, and it has to be stored/buffered on a minute by minute basis as the wind is highly intermittent nearly everywhere. Long range delivery of electricity is also still not feasible, so we cannot generate electricity in Arizona and ship it to Maine, not without a truly monumental investment in e.g. ultra-high voltage trans-continental transmission lines or the development of new technologies. In the meantime, both of these power sources are completely inadequate as standalone energy resources without substantial backing from fuel-burning resources -- either carbon or nuclear. Even things like electric cars, touted as being better than gasoline, suffer from serious energy density storage problems and have pitiful ranges (as well as numerous other issues). Biofuels do better -- I can actually believe that we might manage to break even or win a bit on biofuels within the next decade, especially if new genetically engineered organisms and improved technologies there help out. But not even biofuels are prepared AFAIK to take on the full burden of generating not only automotive power but general electrical demand, and there are major questions about how scalable they will end up being even produced on an industrial scale.

So precisely how could we eliminate the use of fossil fuels, or carbon based fuels, worldwide, without any negative impact on life style? I track the technologies that are out there pretty closely, and am a physicist (and thereby "probably not an idiot") and I cannot see any possible way we could manage it with a HUGE negative impact as the required technologies simply don't exist yet (and some of the ones that might enable it are even unproven, as in a super-efficient, compact storage battery, commercial fusion, LFTR as a scalable long term energy generating technology (although perhaps it is close). Solar and wind and water etc cannot even conceivably provide electricity in northern Finland in mid-winter. They don't do so well in Germany in mid-winter either -- or really anywhere in Northern Europe, Canada, Alaska, Siberia, anyplace where winter is long and dark and the wind is uncertain, and no, we cannot ship electricity from the Sahara to Northern Europe by any technology I'm aware of. See:

http://science.howstuffworks.c...

Hmm, maximum range of around 300 miles, line voltage around 1 million volts or less, huge towers required to prevent a million volts from arcing to ground. To bump range to 3000 miles -- still far from long enough to go from the tropics to the polar circles -- we would probably need voltages at least 10x higher, and (speaking as a physicist) it is damn difficult to confine ten million volts at all over even rather long distances to the nearest ground. Ten million volts laughs at glass, for example -- unless it is around 1 meter thick. It would require at least 6 or 7 meters of air between the power lines and any accessible ground (and a lack of e.g. sharp points on both power line and nearby grounds that would enable the corona effect to facilitate breakdown or the line to leak current) to be able to manage a rainstorm or partially ionized air during a thunderstorm. That means that the transmission towers would have to be enormous -- and stable in all levels of weather and wind. Again, scaling up our existing towers by a factor of ten would be a good first order estimate. To go from the Sahara to Finland -- assuming one could take a short cut over the Straits of Gibraltar or go around via the Middle East without paying some enormous toll and/or risking a real disaster if terrorists chose to cut the line -- would probably require another factor of at least two, maybe three.

And then there is still the storage problem. Yes, the Sahara gets dark at night, and no, we cannot ship electricity from India or from the middle of the Pacific when Europe goes dark, not with existing technology, maybe not with existing physics.

If anyone disagrees, I'd be thrilled to see a feasible plan that proved this assessment wrong, one that doesn't include any science fiction in its content. As in, no "we'll build huge solar arrays and just as we finish them we'll have invented miracle batteries that can store a GW-hour in a half a cubic meter and high-current room-temperature superconductors", or "we'll build massive orbital solar power collectors and beam the energy down as microwaves and we won't worry about the fact that geosync orbits are necessarily equatorial, orbiting gigawatt masers are basically weapons awaiting a master, and that it takes hundreds if not thousands of megajoules of energy to put something into geosynchronous orbit with rockets, making it an interesting question of whether or not 1 kg of solar cells plus its share of the other hardware can generate and deliver even ONE GJ of energy to merely break even before a coronal mass ejection fries the whole system, and oh yeah we'll still have to invent the superefficient battery for when even the geosync orbit is in the shade and the long range delivery system because no, we cannot suspend a satellite directly above Finland."

Real solutions, based on real technology, with an actual cost-benefit study. Otherwise, this is just yet another of the many myths, that we don't really need carbon based power to prevent the collapse of civilization as we know it, at least until any number of technologies mature.

Of course, we can always go back to nineteenth century "civilization", or worse, to the seventeenth century. We can always release a mass plague that wipes out most of the human species, or fight a huge war to accomplish the same thing. But to actually end world poverty, disease, and hunger, we need to produce more carbon based electricity -- a lot more. Enough so that somebody living in the horn of Africa has as much energy per capita as I use to keep my life comfortable and secure, with clean water, sewer services, cheap light instantly available at the touch of a button at night, air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, with cheap transportation and a wide range of goods and services including access to mass produced medicines and medical services (most of which require electricity to produce and energy to transport) and a good job (that will almost certainly use electrical energy and cheap transportation in countless ways).

In the meantime, there is no point in pretending that taking any measures actually likely to have a nontrivial impact on worldwide average production of CO_2 -- other than building nuclear power plants that most of the same people who agitate for carbon control oppose equally vehemently -- will not constitute a global economic catastrophe right now, not one that might or might not happen 80 years into the future.

And then, there is the very interesting question (as you note) -- who is actually making out like bandits because of the Great Climate Panic? Oh, wait, would that be -- the energy companies? Who are all making record setting profits because anything that raises energy prices benefits them first as they make a marginal profit at a base percentage rate on whatever they can sell energy for? What companies are investing in, and building, the major solar grids? Who is getting grant money to develop alternative energy technologies, and who is heavily investing in anything that looks promising. Would that be energy companies? Who is the one group guaranteed to get richer as public policy demonizes carbon. Could it be -- energy companies like Exxon, Duke Power, Pacific Gas and Electric?

Or does someone have some illusion that it is going to be some humble private entrepreneur working out of his or her garage?

Oh, puh-LEEZE don't throw me into that briar patch, Br'er Fox. We rabbits are skeered to death of briars.

Right.

rgb

he universe was opaque and this light is lost.

Not exactly lost, just thermalized. The mean free path of photons was simply short relative to cosmic distances, and gravity hadn't yet pulled enough hydrogen down into a gravitational well to ignite it, the distribution of matter was still fairly uniform except where it was gravitationally coalescing.

Once the stars lit up, radiation pressure quickly enough swept their immediate vicinity clear and created "shockwaves" of moving stellar wind that nucleated lots more gravitational structure as it propagated. You can see this process continue today in star-forming regions of our own galaxy.

But the light produced by the recombination era -- which was not all that short, or all that violent -- is what eventually became the CMB, "frozen out" once the universe's density dropped to where the mean free path of a photon reached "infinity".

rgb

...and one could go on and on. Line by line, Genesis is pretty much nonsense, and isn't even particularly good poetry in places where it is poetic. Heaven and Earth first. Darkness on the face of the deep, where from the next sentence it is clear that the "deep" is the waters, that is, the ocean. Then light, which divides light from darkness, with light called day and dark night. Note well that there is still no sun, but there is day and night. Then he creates a "firmament" -- that would be a solid bowl -- to divide "the waters above from the waters below" and called it heaven. Then he causes the waters under the big bowl to collect so that dry land appears, leaving behind seas. Still no sun, but light and darkness, day and night. Then he covers the earth with grass and fruit trees. Only then, on day four does he actually get around to creating the stars -- and what is their purpose? To fill an enormous visible Universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars each? Oh, no, for signs and for seasons. God created the stars so he could use them as portents and so that we could tell when to plant. Afterwards, he finally gets around to creating two "lights", one greater and one lesser, the Sun and the Moon, to give light to the night and day. That is, Genesis doesn't even grasp that the Moon isn't a light at all, it is a passive reflector of sunlight, a big ball of rock, as opposed to the Sun, which is a star just like those lights that mark out the seasons. Then he created whales and birds and fish -- after land-based vegetation that managed without a sun, and only then did he create land animals ending with humans.

So let's see, we've got a flat earth, a solid bowl of heaven hung with a tiny handful of stars to mark out the seasons, a completely wrong and absurd order of appearance of the living species and pretty much all of the matter in the Universe, and there isn't a hint of the possibility that the Earth itself isn't even a pimple on the backside of the Universe, it isn't even a single cell on a pimple on the backside of the Universe, it is a single atom in a single cell on the backside of the Universe (to scale).

Then there is Genesis 2, which tells a completely distinct and different account of creation, where Adam was created before the animals and had to name them, one at a time (good luck with that, even today) as God created them and then had to beg for God to create a woman only after it became clear that all of the animals had females but he didn't. Note well that naming a species a second it still would have taken years to name even a reasonable fraction of them; not exactly the sort of thing that could possibly be finished in a day.

Then there is Genesis 3, with the completely absurd story of God creating a tree with magical fruit that gives you knowledge of good and evil, telling the original couple not to eat any of the fruit, which they proceeded to do anyway because -- duh -- they didn't have a knowledge of good or evil so they had no way of knowing that what they were doing was wrong (where clearly, by the way, it wasn't), and then punishing them for doing what He had preordained from the beginning of time etc that they would do just so that God wouldn't die of boredom.

It isn't, in fact, the case that Genesis is anything like a good metaphor for the scientific account of the big bang through the present, which in any event is not a creation as we have no evidence of "creation" ever happening anywhere in the sense that the Bible uses the term, ex nihilo. In fact, we have these lovely conservation laws that pretty much say "creation never happens", mostly because we never see it happening no matter where and how hard we look.

Hinduism does much better, but even the Vedic creation myths and stories, treated as metaphor or not, are not a terribly good account of the scientific history.

Finally, last time I read about (and taught) astronomy, the Big Dark was supposed to have been broken at around 200 million years, not a billion. I seem to recall pictures of the very earliest galaxies being dated to around 400 million years post-BB, with a fairly safe presumption that individual stars preceded the organization of stars into galaxies by at least a few hundred million years. Wikipedia puts the end of the Big Dark at 150-800 million years post-BB, with one documented galaxy at 380 million years pBB (and again, probably lots more we haven't found yet).

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No real argument, but next we're going to be referencing "The Tragedy of the Commons" and "The Tyranny of Democracy" and related works. Human society works because we all make certain trade-offs of our personal freedom against our security. If we were rational, we would actually do a cost-benefit analysis of our legal system to determine whether it makes more sense to eliminate (for example) intellectual property laws, making it perfectly legal to copy any work or produce anything we know how to produce, or maintain any variant of the existing IP laws. Sadly, we're not. But a lot of the drug laws -- pot in particular -- are low hanging fruit. There is really no question that it costs far more to keep pot illegal than it ever could cost society legal.

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I can attest -- Lawdy, Lawdy -- that the drug prohibition laws are far more expensive than any possible effect of the drugs themselves. Marijuana, for example, is in no way as bad for your health as being arrested for possessing marijuana. Its direct cost to a user -- once all of the artificial price increase associated with it being illegal is removed -- is orders of magnitude less costly than the complex mix of legal expenses to the user and the state, the cost of enforcing the law, and of course the cost of punishing (usually incarcerating) the user if they are caught with anything less than a tiny amount of the substance. The cost of drug laws worldwide is credibly estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars -- say half a trillion. One could feed the hungry and bring about World Peace if one diverted all of this insanely spent money to other purposes and just let drug users use drugs, with fairly benign restrictions on what they can do while they are doing so.

Even the really bad, scary, truly dangerous drugs are in some sense self-limiting in proportion to their danger. Heroin is mighty bad, and extremely addicting. Like tobacco, only not quite as addicting. But if heroin were inexpensive and legal, instead of being horrendously expensive and illegal, an entire shadow government and underworld would be instantly starved for money and would wither and die, and heroin addicts would be no worse off trying to work and manage their lives with a daily fix of cheap heroin than they would be with a daily fix of expensive methadone. They'd have about the same chance of getting tired of it and deciding to kick the addiction, or maybe even a greater one if we spent a tiny bit of the money we wouldn't be spending in the war on heroin on free addiction treatment programs and public education.

People who end up fond of much worse combos -- PCP plus cocaine plus heroin -- well, I'm sure that it is really bad for them, but for better or worse that sort of thing will very likely kill them quickly, and even that is comparatively cheap compared to the lifetime costs of arresting them, putting them into prison for decades where they contract HIV and come out real criminals with a whole lot of anger and a expensive chronic diseases to manage while still not being over whatever it was that cause them to be a hard core addict in the first place.

Drug cartels, my friend, exist because drugs are illegal. Legalize pretty much everything, and "cartels" vanish overnight. We've already been through this once -- Prohibition was the best thing that ever happened to organized crime in the US, at least until drug prohibition came along with an even higher profit margin. Lose the prohibition, empty the prisons of all drug offenders who don't have an associated violent crime tagged on, and watch crime rates, murder rates, the number of police in our police state, the number of lawyers (drug laws being a huge boon to lawyers, of course) and courts, all plummet. There isn't any real money in drugs without the prohibition -- anybody can grow pot in their back yard, cocaine would cost a few dollars a pound if it weren't for drug laws, heroin ditto. And most people would still avoid both of these, because both of them are pretty dangerous and addiction or life problems associated with them would be expensive and embarrassing, just as they are now for smokers and alcoholics.

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And I was wrong when I said that I have no vices. I definitely want to buy kitty porn. Would you believe that I've never seen cats doing it? Kitty porn must be rare and hard to get.

I didn't realize that governments regulated it so strictly, though. For the rest of my life, I'll never be able to drive past the Tom Cat Club (a local, err, "massage" parlor that has been around on the US-70 corridor for fifty years or so) without going into hysterics. Purveyors of kitty porn, pictures of hot pussies. Arrgh.

Damn, coffee all over the keyboard again.

Granting the illegal bit, illegal does not equate to "causing harm to someone". Would that it did -- that would be so very rational. However, there are plenty of things one might want to spend money on that are illegal but harm no one but arguably yourself. Drugs is one obvious example, but in many parts of the world buying pornography or sexual toys/aids is illegal, all the way up to being a capital crime. In China or much of the Moslem world, an enormous number of things are illegal that don't harm anyone or anything but the nominal reputation of Islam or Mohammed or Allah, or that represent freedom for repressed majorities like women. We're not really talking only about the relatively permissive US or Western Europe, in other words.

Of course people will use this to do some things that are directly intended to harm others in non-victimless-crime ways: Steal/pirate and resell IP of various sorts, fence stolen goods, arrange for a hit on your alimony-hungry ex-wife (maybe, dunno if that is a "commodity" it can handle), engage in human trafficking, sell arms. But some people will use it to buy freedom from oppressive governments that have made a whole lot of things that harm no one illegal because they violate some statement made in a piece of pure scriptural crack if you squint your eyes just right when you read it. Because there is rarely any percentage in prosecuting crimes of this sort once one cannot detect them or stop them for long enough for violations to become commonplace, it might even motivate social change.

To me personally, the tool is not going to be terribly useful. I'm heterosexual and married, my primary vices are at least quasi-legal and tolerated where I live, and I consider buying stolen goods of most varieties to be unethical. It isn't clear that I'd resort to it if I lived in e.g. a Moslem country and had a thing for porn -- no matter how nominally secure, the penalties are pretty horrendous. But I'm guessing that there are those who will value it who aren't planning to use it to hurt others.

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Yeah, yeah. What you said. If DM/DE is an elephant in the room, it's an elephant that we know only in the sense of the blind men trying to describe the elephant by feel -- one says it is long and pliable, like a snake, another says that it is flat and massive, like a house, a third says that it is floppy and flat, like a large tree-leaf. We cannot yet see the whole elephant, and part of what we CAN see may turn out to be only the shadow of the elephant cast on the walls of Plato's Cave in some projection, nothing like the actual multidimensional elephant. Our knowledge of physics (so far) helps define a few of the projective dimensions or the parts of the elephant we can feel out, but it, too, is incomplete, being part of an even bigger elephant known in various projections by the blind...

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Well said, sir. Repeatedly, even. Although (as a physicist also) I do have to say that DM/DE are a) one of several possible explanations or models that we have -- so far -- and while it has emerged as one of the most consistent that doesn't make it either unique or right. We may not have even hypothesized the right model yet (given the indirect nature of the data, that would hardly even be surprising, if true). b) One of the problems with having a huge amount of mass-energy out there, effectively decoupled to electromagnetic forces, in addition to making said mass-energy literally invisible is that one can imagine entire "universes" of field theories underneath the very loose constraint of the observational data. Does DM couple to e.g. the nuclear force? Are the quanta of DM stable? Is DM not really "dark", but merely very, very weakly interacting, e.g. massive neutrinos? IIRC it is possible to explain the cosmological data by giving three flavors of neutrinos a mass-energy order of an eV. And then we have to ask -- what if there are more than three flavors, and DM is a "leftover" neutrino from a super-heavy lepton that hasn't existed since the big bang so that the neutrinos have nowhere to go? DE is even more difficult to cope with -- are we talking about the massless quantum of a fifth force altogether, or is it somehow tied to the four fields we already know about?

Given that we have yet to fully reconcile gravitation and relativity in a consistent quantum theory and that we lack a TOE (meaning there is still room enough to drive -- err, "elephants" through the gaps:-) we are, as you say, working with descriptive phenomenology -- classical theories of gravitation, or relativistic theories of curved spacetime, quantum models of nuclear (strong and weak) and electromagnetic interactions that works (so far) pretty well in specific contexts. But we don't even know if DM interacts strongly enough with sufficiently dense "known" matter -- matter e.g. in the heart of suns -- to be able to slow down in transit and accumulate. We don't know if DM remains stable and decoupled at energy densities like those accessible inside the cores of stars, or for that matter inside e.g. neutron stars. We don't know if DM interacts with other DM to be able to provide the "friction" needed to cause gravitational collapse of DM. All we know is that when we examine galaxies, the profile of orbital velocities observed is consistent with their being more matter in the galaxy than we can see, distributed in a very unusual way.

Personally, I think it is all very interesting (although definitely not my field), but don't take any of the many assertions about DM or DE too seriously yet. Both are the ultimate "invisible fairy theory" -- literally invisible -- where the fairy is known only indirectly by means of the "the fairy must have done it" argument. This is right up there at the edge of religious thinking, because as long as the fairies remain invisible, it remains almost impossible to falsify any assertion about what the fairies do or do not cause in the observational data. I'd mumble about Ptolomeic epicycles vs gravitation, or the many gods of the many gaps over human history, but in the end, until somebody puts salt on the tail of a darkon or manages to build a TOE that includes DM/DE consistently, explains all observations, and has a prayer of being verified/falsified by more than crude phenomenological agreement it is all in the same category as supersymmetry, string theory, etc -- pretty stories, but which one (if any) of the myriad of possible models within the general approach is true?

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