Why doesn't anyone want to talk about the known increase in solar radiation over the last 30 years?
Because there isn't one. See here. Solar irradiance has been on average flat since 1960, although there were some ups and down until the mid-1980s, after which it's definitely been quite flat on average. (By flat I mean the trend; there's the usual 11-year solar cycle oscillation too.) If anything there's been a very slight decrease over the last 30 years.
AFAIK, we don't have numbers going back any further, but it seems fairly obvious that if there is more solar radiation entering the earths atmosphere, the climate will change.
We do have numbers going back further, although they're pre-satellite, and if you go even further back they become indirect (inferred from counting sunspots and such).
The fact is, the average amount of solar radiation entering the Earth's atmosphere has changed very little over the last 30 years. Even if you ignore the greenhouse effect, increases in solar irradiance are far too small to produce the observed warming.
Maybe we won't run out of oil because it isn't really made from dead trees and dinosaurs.
Ok, not only is that a totally crackpot theory, but it's also irrelevant. Our estimates of how much oil there is aren't based on adding up how many dead trees and dinosaurs we think there used to be. They're based on going all over the world and digging for oil and seeing how often we find it. How the oil got there doesn't matter to our measurements of how much is there now.
The oil companies have a massive financial interest in how much oil is left. I can assure you, they have studied this question thoroughly from every angle, even more than the scientific community has.
All the problems with non-biogenic oil formation theories aside, it's possible to tell the difference between organic and non-organic carbon sources by looking at isotopic ratios. Oil is made of organic carbon. (That's one of the several lines of evidence which tell us that the excess carbon now in the atmosphere is due to our burning of fossil fuels, by the way.)
I've been meaning to find some numbers, but I have a hard time understanding the amount of decaying organic matter necessary to create the 80+ million barrels/day of oil pumped from the ground in 2005. I know were talking about geologic time scales here, so I'd be interested in seeing some numbers about how many trees and dinos that adds up to.
I'd also be interested to find out how trees and dinos ended up 10k+ feet below the surface of the earth. Some of these are 35k+ feet (7+miles) deep.
You can build up a lot of material on top of it over 500 million years. Also, rock is porous. Oil sinks.
I doubt there were many trees or dinosaurs on Hyperion or Titan, 2 of Saturns moons. Yet, they have pools of hydrocarbons,
"Hydrocarbons" aren't always oil; the pools on Titan are things like methane and ethane, which are formed by chemical reactions in Titan's atmosphere. Hydrocarbons exist even in comets and interstellar dust, but they're not oil.
I'm just concerned that global warming is really another scam to take more of my money in the form of taxes to "save the earth".
Sheesh, lay off the conspiracy theories. Scientists don't get together in a back room and decide what scam to cook up next. There is plenty of legitimate scientific evidence, starting from basic atom-light physics and conservation of energy, and working up to our understanding of atmospheric and ocean circulation.
If I remember correctly, when I was a kid, the big fear was we we
That doesn't contradict the previous poster's point, which is that models if anything have been conservative in their predictions of climate change. (Sea level rise is also faster than modeled.)
wow, who would have thought that systems and cycles on this planet are dynamic and will constantly change and adapt.
Again, that's not the point.
I don't claim to know all the answers to questions related to climate change, but I do know that there are far better ways we can be spending our money than on "man-made CO2" which may or may not have an effect on climate change.
You "know" that, huh? So where's the cost-benefit analysis you've run?
We know with certainty that pollutants in our water have negative health effects, we know for certain that toxins in the air we breath have negative health effects, but hey, lets forget all that and focus on something that occurs naturally in the environment with or without human influence.
That's wrong in so many ways.
First, that's a false dichotomy. No one is saying to forget other environmental hazards, they're saying that climate change is an additional and serious hazard that must be dealt with along with all other hazards, environmental and otherwise. It's like saying "Why build levees to protect from hurricanes when we could be spending the money on treating cancer?" You need to do both.
Second, while climate change occurs naturally, that has nothing to do with the current problem of harmful human-caused climate change. CO2 does have a significant effect on climate change and will have an even greater effect as emissions continue.
Third, scientific uncertainty when applied to policy doesn't work the way you seem to think. Your argument appears to be "We shouldn't spend any money on something which is uncertain, if we can spend it on things which are certain". But a policy of "no reduction in CO2 emissions" is only justified when you're CERTAIN that there will be little damage. If you're UNCERTAIN about future climate change, then the best policy is to buy insurance against the possible hazard, which in this case means reducing CO2 emissions. (Not as much as you'd reduce if you were certain of severe damages, but some reduction nonetheless, and certainly more than we're doing now.)
In any other situation with uncertainty people recognize the need to insure against risks, but somehow all that logic disappears when applied to climate change. This is what Bjorn Lomborg got hammered for by economists when he advocated the same thing (ignore climate change in favor of malaria and other threats): it's the risk of the lower probability but high impact events that really drives the need for insurance, and if you ignore uncertainty and pick lowball or even middle-of-the-road estimates and pretend you're certain about them, you're going to come up too low on the amount of insurance you really need.
Fourth, while there are hazards whose effect are more certain, they're not always the ones which need to be most urgently addressed. We know the bubonic plague is deadly but that doesn't mean we should be worrying about that first. In the U.S., air and water pollution still exist, but they are no longer really severe health hazards. I agree, if the river in your back yard is on fire or you live in one of China's smog-infested cities, those problems are pretty urgent. But climate change is also important, particularly in places that no longer have severe pollution problems. Climate change affects people's water and food supplies, where they can live, damages from extreme weather events, and many others effects of first-order importance.
Fifth, the problems are interrelated. A lot of air pollution comes from the same burning of fossil fuels that produces CO2. To an extent you can tackle both problems by reducing fossil fuel use (which also addresses the problem of dependence on foreign oil to boot).
And that of the people predicting climate disaster now many are the same ones that predicted climate disaster back in the '70's, but the other way (ice-age).
Oh really? Who are these people who are predicting ice ages in the 1970s, and which of them are today predicting climate disaster?
"Scientists in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age" is a myth, based on basically one paper by Rasool and Schneider, plus some confusion with scientists talking about ice ages in thousands or tens of thousands of years.
On the contrary, they reproduce temperatures quite well and precipitation decently.
The data is really spotty until 50 years or so ago so there's no idea how accurate they are.
We have reasonable data for over 100 years, and even 50 years of data tells us a lot about how accurate they are, as the measurement error is quite smaller than the visible trend.
None of them are predictive.
That's nonsense. Even a simple two-equation energy balance model is decently predictive for global temperature, and the GCMs do much better, not just time trends but also spatial patterns, for atmospheric and ocean temperatures, top-of-atmosphere radiative fluxes, precipitation at least at the zonal level, etc.
And none of them match the spotty historical data without what they call "forcing"
You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
Of course they don't match the historical data without forcing. Forcing is what makes the climate change: changes in greenhouse gases, solar irradiance, sulphate aerosols, etc. With no forcing, the climate just hovers around an equilibrium state.
You're simply saying "models can't reproduce warming temperatures unless you include a source of heating". Well duh.
and what everyone else calls "fiddling with parameters until it looks kinda right".
Again, duh. Pretty much every model in the world requires its parameters to be calibrated from data; you can pretty much never calculate anything from first principles, unless you're talking particle physics. That doesn't mean that models aren't predictive. The question is whether you can adjust the parameters to reproduce the observed climate without substantial input from anthropogenic forcings, and the answer is no.
Here's an interesting paper (from a real journal).
That's not a real journal, it's an un-peer reviewed newsletter, and the paper was written by a journalist, not a scientist. Monckton's "critique" is just a horrible train wreck of absurd errors, some of which are being detailed here, here, and here.
Since you quote that part specifically, I should note that his claim that the IPCC takes its feedbacks from one paper is absurd. The feedback factor is just another word for "climate sensitivity"; model based computations of the feedbacks are found in chapter 8 of the latest IPCC WG1 report, and observational estimates of the sensitivity are found in chapter 9. The relevant sections cite dozens of papers.
Dismissing valid objections with supporting evidence just because it doesn't say "Climate Modeller" on a business card is foolish.
Let me know when you have any valid objections with supporting evidence.
Hansen's data set is skewed to support his theories.
Prove it.
Notice how it doesn't seem to agree with the other temperature records out there.
All of the temperature records disagree with each other to a small extent. The GISTEMP record is not wildly out of line with any of the others, and some of them show slightly more warming than GISTEMP. See here for a comparison of the surface records.
Thats because Hansen has built into his system factors for changing the raw data based on his conclusions.
Again, prove it. Hansen has factors to correct for systematic biases in the instrumental observations. ALL the temperature records do (both surface and satellite), although they use different methods to make the corrections. That is quite different from corrections which change the data "based on Hansen's conclusions", which is an accusation of intention and fraud and requires proof.
Try using one of the satellite records where the data hasn't been fiddled with and you get a trend that is very different from what Hansen is predicting,
Actually, you don't. The trends are slightly different, but all within each other's error bars. Here is a visual comparison.
Furthermore, the satellite data is "fiddled with" as well. Indeed, the UAH data famously showed recent cooling before they discovered there was a mistake in their error-correction algorithms. Satellite records are by no means objectively superior to the surface station data.
I have no idea where that quote above came from about "Hansen's latest graph", but GISTEMP looks very similar to the other data sets even in the last 10 years; see the above graph.
If the difference between Hansen's numbers and three other temperature records isn't enough to convince you something is screwy with his data then check out all the issues with his temperature stations
If you throw out the temperature stations Watts classifies as "bad", you still get results that are quite close to the GISTEMP record. Or if you throw out the urban stations and only include the rural ones. And finally GISTEMP is quite similar to the satellite records.
There may be station siting issues, but they're clearly not dominating the trend visible in the global temperature time series.
I don't think anyone at all would argue with you on that, the problem is grouping CO2 in there.
The statement is correct as stands: humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere that wouldn't be there otherwise. To be precise, CO2 levels have increased about 35% since pre-industrial times due to human emissions.
CO2 exists naturally in the environment. CO2 is not a pollutant, it is a requirement for life. The amount of CO2 that humans emit is dwarfed by the naturally occuring CO2.
CO2 exists naturally in the environment, but some of it is currently also due to humans. Whether CO2 is a "pollutant" depends on the definition of the term, and is really irrelevant to whether human CO2 is causing global warming. Naturally occurring CO2 is larger than human emitted CO2, but that doesn't change the fact that humans have still contributed a 35% increase in total atmospheric CO2 over the last 150-200 years.
References: couldn't find the latest study, here and here for earlier comet-impact groundwork.
Note that the latest research being reported here is just new evidence for a comet, not new evidence specifically for a comet-climate link.
I know everyone likes a "big outer-space thing smashing the Earth" story, but there are certainly other theories of what caused the Younger Dryas cooling; the prevailing theory is a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation due to fresh water from Lake Aggasiz as the Laurentide ice sheet began to disintegrate. (Remember, this occurred just after substantial warming had already taken place.) There is a fair amount of evidence that this happened, although the clues are hard to piece together.
This comet-cooling theory is new (less than a year old, although pieces were in place three years ago), and it will take years to settle amongst the paleoclimate community. My understanding from other reading is that they try to piggyback on the THC collapse idea instead of competing with it, since there is evidence for it and it's hard to explain a cold snap of such a long duration (1000-1500 years) with a comet alone. I think the idea is that the cometary impact was responsible for the freshwater flux by breaking up the ice sheet. That is, it wasn't the warming that dumped water into the Atlantic, it was a comet. I'm personally somewhat skeptical, given the extent of the ice sheet and the timing of the event (right after a large amount of warming). Then again, maybe a cometary strike at the right place could do it, or could finish off an already-weakened ice sheet. I'm not a geologist.
Anyway, my point is that this is a very new result which has not yet had time to be thoroughly critiqued, and there are already existing hypotheses. This one isn't necessarily better, and it's also possible that a combination of factors were at work.
perhaps the people that think human byproducts have the biggest impact on the climate will wake up after more reports like this. That Earth isn't a closed system, that there are huge fucking things flying around this tiny blue marble that effect our climate much more than humans making some unpleasant gases.
You are very confused.
The existence of large extra-terrestrial influences on climate doesn't somehow negate the possibility of large human influences on climate.
Yes, if a giant comet or asteroid hit the planet tomorrow, that would seriously screw up the climate, moreso than human actions. That doesn't mean that humans aren't currently having a big impact on changes in climate, or that people who are concerned about this need to "wake up" from anything.
I'd like to start by asking why every global warming proponent seems to treat anyone who doesn't immediately bow down to their group-think, like a holocaust denier?
I'm not treating you like a holocaust denier, I'm treating you as ignorant, which your comments continue to demonstrate.
And there you go, proving my point for me.:-)
Correctly pointing out dreck as dreck does not prove your point. In fact, you give one such example of dreck yourself ("climate is unpredictable because weather is unpredictable"), and allude to another ("cooling in the past implies a natural cause of warming in the present").
If you'd like to propose your own "critical analysis", I can evaluate it for you. Perhaps then you will start to understand why the common skeptical positions are typically bad science.
I'll see your "uneducated drek" and raise you a pile of selective data harvesting.
Fine, which of the main lines of evidence supporting AGW is based on "selective data harvesting"? I note your responses are rather thin on actual science.
I'd also like to throw in "the little ice-age" and get your theory to explain that one.
The little ice age is largely attributed to a decrease in solar irradiance combined with an increase in volcanic activity. Some of the early 20th century warming can be explained in the opposite way (increase in solar irradiance, decrease in volcanism). But that explanation notably fails to explain the accelerated period of late 20th/21st century warming, when you look at trends in solar activity and volcanism during that period. Indeed, natural sources of climate change over that time, by themselves, seem to imply a slight cooling.
I'll agree with your reasoning when you can demonstrate sufficient understanding of the Earths climate to predict what the weather will be like tomorrow.
First off, we largely can predict tomorrow's weather pretty well; it's only over longer periods of time that numerical weather prediction skill vanishes.
Second and more importantly, climate is not weather. Climate is average weather. I can't predict the temperature in New York City on December 13, but I can predict that it's going to be on average colder than it is today, and I can quantify how much colder it will be. While weather prediction is dominated by chaos on fairly short time scales (it's unpredictable even in theory past about 2 weeks or so), climate is dominated by much broader effects such as "net heat flux into/out of the atmosphere": if you add more heat to the system, it will in general warm, even though you can't predict the specific turbulent eddies and whatnot over specific cities. This is in fact the basis of the entire statistical-mechanical theory of thermodynamics: under an assumption of molecular chaos, you can nevertheless predict the ensemble-averaged value of observable quantities like "energy" and "pressure".
Can you first tell me what mechanisms are responsible for global warming ?
The current global warming is due in part to the natural effects I mentioned above, but mostly due to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, as well as various feedback effects which amplify the GHG-induced warming. (For instance, any source of warming leads to increases in water vapor which in turn is a greenhouse gas which adds further warming.)
What is the causal link ?
Ultimately, the greenhouse effect. You may have heard of it. It's based on very straightforward and well understood physics of atom-photon interactions, without which the Earth would be a frozen ball of ice. Of course, the underlying greenhouse effect gets modified by other aspects of climate.
and I've yet to hear any theory that describes the mechanism by which man is supposed to be primar
So, does this mean that a geocentric universe was "proven" by science in the 1st century BC?
It means that geocentrism is a reasonably good theory in terms of predictive skill, although not as good as the theories of orbital mechanics which came after (heliocentrism, Keplerian ellipses, Newtonian gravity, Einsteinian gravity,...)
Our best global warming climate models are extemely *inaccurate* compared to this relatively accurate device.
So?
Yet we accept the (modern) inaccurate models on faith
No, we don't. You ever open up the IPCC report and see the big error bars? Everyone knows that modern climate models come with substantial uncertainty. All models have uncertainty, some more and some less. The point with climate models is that, even with large error bars, you can still exclude hypotheses such as "the warming is mostly natural" or "the warming in 2100 will be less than 1 degree under business-as-usual emissions scenarios".
and reject the (ancient) accurate model that this device "proves"
Regardless of how accurate ancient models are, modern models are more accurate still, which is why we reject them in favor of newer models. This is the same as why we reject older climate models (e.g., simple energy balance models) in favor of modern general circulation models. No, they're not as accurate as even old theories of orbital mechanics; orbits are simple and predictable. That doesn't mean that they're not useful, or not scientific, or have no predictive skill.
There are a whole bunch of "scientists" out there running computer similations that are far less predictive than this device that is likey based on a geocentric theory of the universe.
Again, so?
And what's with the scare quotes around scientists? Are you going to claim that climate scientists aren't real scientists?
Group-think is firmly on the side of global-warming as a fact and any alternative critical analysis of this position is treated with scorn.
Critical analysis is not treated with scorn. It's simply that most of the "critical analysis" of global warming circulating the web is uneducated dreck. There is plenty of legitimate debate within the scientific community about things like, e.g., the anthropogenic effects on hurricanes, sea ice disintegration, etc. It's the claims that "humans have nothing to do with global warming" that are the problem, since the evidence is pretty strongly on the other side, and as the evidence has accumulated people have had to make increasingly desperate arguments to conclude otherwise.
The anthropomorphic global warming theory is not sound science.
This from someone who can't even spell "anthropogenic"?
It's a good theory but it's far from proven.
On the contrary, AGW is supported by both theory (spectral adsorption) and agreement with observations (global warming, stratospheric cooling, polar amplification, downward penetration of ocean heat, reduced diurnal temperature variation), etc. By contrast, the leading alternate hypotheses (e.g., solar or volcanic variability, ocean heat upwelling,...) do not agree with observations (disagreement in timing, rate, and magnitude of warming, do not produce observed signatures such as stratospheric cooling, ocean warming, etc.)
There are still too many variables and unknowns.
"AGW is not sound science" requires stronger justification than hand-waving about there being uncertainty. There is always uncertainty. That doesn't mean that you can't do sound science or conclude anything with reasonable confidence.
So fine, tell me: what variables and unknowns are there which have uncertainties large enough to change the conclusion of global warming with a primarily anthropogenic cause? Please, be specific and quantitative.
By far the loudest voices screaming about global warming are coming from the proponents of the theory.
The people who say the most about global warming are those who support the theory? Shocking.
Re:It only works in the top slot
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Inside Steve's Brain
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· Score: 2, Informative
Steve Jobs got where he is because he never worked for anyone else-- he's never been homogenized inside the corporate zoo.
Jobs worked for HP and Atari before Apple, although not for long.
I mean, wouldn't Harvard or Yale or MIT be willing to shell out monster bucks to say they have him in their institution?
Eh, I don't know. They don't need a status symbol scientist near the end of his career; they already have plenty of status. He's more valuable to newer upstart institutions that want to make a name for themselves, like Perimeter.
Yes, dark energy is different from dark matter. Dark energy is needed to explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, something that no form of matter (which slows the expansion of the universe through its gravitational attraction) can explain.
I am not sure I agree about the consistency. MoND is pretty consistent.
MOND itself is inconsistent with relativity, although people have made attempts to embed something like it within a relativistic theory (e.g., TeVeS). TeVeS is complicated enough, requiring three different kinds of gravitational fields which interact in a very specific and rather ad-hoc way.
But the internal consistency aside, MOND isn't that consistent with observational evidence, which is the real test. See this post.
Logical or not, requiring that people ASSUME that most of the universe is made of barely- or non-detectable matter or energy is introducing outside complications of huge proportions.
Why? There are no shortage of dark matter candidate particles which may very well exist for completely independent reasons. Already we know there are neutrino particles, why is it so hard to accept the possibility of heavier neutrino-like particles? The axion, which was proposed to solve the strong CP problem in QCD, is a good dark matter candidate. Supersymmetry, which provides cleaner running of the coupling constants at grand unification scales and which helps with the hierarchy problem, provides another good dark matter candidate (the lightest supersymmetric partner). There are plenty of theoretical reasons why dark matter may likely exist other than its use in solving various astrophysical mysteries.
Ergo: Occam's Razor does not favor "dark matter" or "dark energy"... there are several other hypotheses that are "simpler" in some pretty major ways.
MOND doesn't fit the data as well as people claim, once you try to simultaneously fit it to ALL the data, and it doesn't look very simple once you try to make it consistent with other theories of physics like relativity.
Both Dark Matter and Dark Energy are funny, unreal concepts. We need new, better Physics to explain these things properly.
That's funny, because the "new, better physics" you desire sounds just like the existing physics.
Something like Heim Theory in which gravitation is repulsive for great distances:
That's exactly what the most conventional theory of dark energy is: the cosmological constant is a modification to general relativity which makes gravity repulsive at large distances.
Heim says that the energy of this gravitational field corresponds its own field mass. This field mass again produces a second additionally gravitational field which is very weak. Again this field possesses its own field mass which produces a field. So you receive an infinite series, which however converges very fast against a calculable limit value.
This is a feature of any nonlinear theory of gravity, including general relativity: the mass-energy of a gravitational field itself gravitates. When you start with a linear graviton theory and incorporate the infinite series of self-gravitating corrections to it, you arrive at general relativity, as shown by numerous physicists including Deser, Feynman, Weinberg, etc.
Among other things the phenomenon of the cosmic red shift can be explained now as a gravitational effect.
Cosmological redshift is already explained as a gravitational effect: redshift due to the expansion of space can be interpreted either as a gravitational redshift or a Doppler velocity redshift.
If you were standing on that orbiting pulsar, how long do you think your watch would read [relative to an Earth observer]?
There are two kinds of time dilation. There is the time dilation which comes from the velocity of the orbiting pulsar. If the pulsar system is at rest with respect to the Earth, this will be small, since the pulsar's orbital speed is pretty low compared to the speed of light, unless its orbit has decayed and it's about to ram into its binary partner.
There is also gravitational time dilation, due to the gravity on the pulsar's surface. That would be on the order of 10-20% slowdown in time; see here (PDF). Not as huge as you suggest, but not negligible either.
Newton thought that light was made up of particles, but then it was discovered, as we have seen here, that it behaves like a wave. Later, however (in the beginning of the twentieth century) it was found that light did indeed sometimes behave like a particle. Historically, the electron, for example, was thought to behave like a particle, and then it was found in many respects that it behaved like a wave. So it really behaves like neither. Now we have given up. We say: "It is like neither."
There is one lucky break, however — electrons behave just like light. The quantum behavior of atomic objects (electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and so on) is the same for all; they are all "particle waves," or whatever you want to call them.
This has always bugged me; how in the heck do you quantize geometry like |x>?
|x> isn't geometry, it's a position variable. Geometry is described by a metric (or a connection), i.e., a tensor field. Simple perturbative quantization of a rank-2 tensor (the graviton field) doesn't work, but one can hope to try more subtle approaches. In the quantum geometry of loop quantum gravity, for instance, you represent a spatial eigenstate as a spin network, whose edges carry quanta of area and whose vertices carry quanta of volume.
I was under the impression there wasn't a good way to do that without losing isotropy.
That's the problem that many straightforward discrete approaches run into (e.g., lattice quantum gravity). If you break up space into a regular grid, then doesn't it have preferred directions? That's one reason why people look at things like random triangulations, random networks, etc.; you can hope that their small-scale structure is smeared out isotropically in the classical limit.
Moreover, wouldn't that screw up the coordinate transforms that we use to talk about some of the only analytically solvable systems in quantum, like the two-body central force problem?
Why?
Moreover, given that momentum and position are Fourier conjugates, does that quantize momentum as well?
Momentum is already quantized in ordinary quantum mechanics, at least for bound systems.
I guess if I can accept a continuous basis for position states I should have no problem with a countably infinite one, but it still confuses me.:-)
Quantum gravity is more subtle than merely making space into a countable lattice. And note that even in that case, if geometry really is quantum mechanical, a classical spatial state would probably look like an infinite superposition of different discrete lattices, not any single one.
Finally, (and this shows I haven't gotten very far in quantum), I'm troubled by the asymmetry between position and time in the formalism I learned, that is, position is a state, but time is merely a parameter. To be consistent with relativity, do you need to make time a state as well? How does that change \hat{U}(t)?
There isn't a "time operator" in string theory or loop quantum gravity, either. Even in quantum field theory (quantum mechanics coupled to special relativity), you don't have one. The theory still works.
My understanding is that relativity has been directly observed several times, whereas quantum theory is still just based on the interpretation of a series of controlled laboratory experiments, which mostly amounts to sifting through the wreckage of a high-energy collision and trying to derive the original state from the leftover pieces.
Oh, just based on a series of controlled laboratory experiments. Unlike relativity??
I have no idea what "directly observed" means, but quantum mechanical behavior is no less directly observed than relativistic behavior. In fact, it is far better studied, since atomic physics is more accessible to experiments than relativistic physics. And it by no means is limited to high energy colliders (which is where you tend to see relativistic effects the most, by the way); atomic spectra, basically all of chemistry, condensed matter and material science, lasers, etc. all depend on quantum physics. Indeed, the quantum theory of electrodynamics is the most precisely verified theory in the history of physics; some of its predictions (like the electron g factor) are accurate to something like 12 decimal places when compared to experiments.
Isn't it about time to abandon the concept of the graviton and just accept that gravity is not a fundamental force, but is simply the observed effect of the curvature of spacetime due to the presence of matter and energy?
If you accept that matter is described by quantum mechanics, then general relativity is wrong, because you can't consistently couple a classical field to a quantum source. (Consider what happens when you want to describe the gravitational field of matter which exists in a quantum superposition of states.) Believe me, if it were that easy to produce a theory of gravity which is consistent with what we know about matter, people wouldn't have been searching for 50+ years for a theory of quantum gravity.
Once you accept that gravity needs to be quantized, then you are inevitably led to something like a graviton: it's what you get when you quantize the linearized approximation to general relativity, and is actually more general than that: any field which couples to stress-energy (which is the source of gravity in general relativity) is described by a rank-2 tensor, which in quantum mechanics means a spin-2 particle (graviton). A theory of quantum gravity won't have gravitons as truly fundamental — the perturbative theory of gravitons is inconsistent — but any such theory (e.g., string theory, loop quantum gravity) will necessarily have graviton-like behavior as a low energy limit, assuming that it also has a relativistic theory of gravity (like general relativity) as a classical limit. That is not inconsistent with GR's description of gravity as curved spacetime: that's the classical behavior of a graviton-like field, although different theories recover that limit in different ways. (String theory has strings which vibrate in graviton-like ways which are observationally indistinguishable from spacetime curvature; other theories try to quantize geometry directly.)
No one with real expertise wants to be stuck in a bureaucratic agency, shuffling the papers and attending meetings at least 6 hours a day. My father retired from DARPA a few years ago, and he thought it was the most fun of anything he'd done in his career.
He started out as a bench engineer, but he's always been a "big picture" kind of guy, so he liked getting into a position where he could survey the field and have input into where it would go in the future. World experts in technology came in to brief him on all kinds of exciting new developments. He got to go on training exercises with Special Operations forces to learn more about their needs, and loved the "field trips" — it's not always just sitting behind a desk. He also liked being in a position of giving out money to people, instead of having to ask for it from guys like him.
I've been a low-level engineer in one of the military's RDT&E agencies (not DARPA), and everyone there who has ever had any technical skill complains of skill atrophy, boredom, and endless unproductive bureaucracy. DARPA doesn't have any low level engineers, and doesn't do any engineering work itself. It has program managers (grant officers), who review proposals and making funding decisions. It's completely different from an actual engineering agency.
As for why you'd work as a civil servant... it's really hard to get fired? DARPA intentionally rotates out its program managers after about 5 years, to keep things fresh. Unless you're very senior (they do need management continuity), DARPA is not the path for a cushy civil service job to last the rest of your career. It's more a chance to be involved with defining the direction of cutting edge research.
Academics are not open to new ideas that may upset their world view. New Einsteins would do just that, disrupt their world view. Small problem with your logic: Einstein was an academic.
But the portrayal of academics as closeminded fools is pretty much what I'd expect from a crackpot — ahem, "scientific rebel", as per your Homepage — such as yourself, who rails against the "chickenshit voodoo" physics establishment.
It doesn't take very long for infrared radiation to scatter through the atmosphere into space, but the greenhouse effect does reduce the rate at which heat escapes the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't anyone want to talk about the known increase in solar radiation over the last 30 years?
Because there isn't one. See here. Solar irradiance has been on average flat since 1960, although there were some ups and down until the mid-1980s, after which it's definitely been quite flat on average. (By flat I mean the trend; there's the usual 11-year solar cycle oscillation too.) If anything there's been a very slight decrease over the last 30 years.
AFAIK, we don't have numbers going back any further, but it seems fairly obvious that if there is more solar radiation entering the earths atmosphere, the climate will change.
We do have numbers going back further, although they're pre-satellite, and if you go even further back they become indirect (inferred from counting sunspots and such).
The fact is, the average amount of solar radiation entering the Earth's atmosphere has changed very little over the last 30 years. Even if you ignore the greenhouse effect, increases in solar irradiance are far too small to produce the observed warming.
Maybe we won't run out of oil because it isn't really made from dead trees and dinosaurs.
Ok, not only is that a totally crackpot theory, but it's also irrelevant. Our estimates of how much oil there is aren't based on adding up how many dead trees and dinosaurs we think there used to be. They're based on going all over the world and digging for oil and seeing how often we find it. How the oil got there doesn't matter to our measurements of how much is there now.
The oil companies have a massive financial interest in how much oil is left. I can assure you, they have studied this question thoroughly from every angle, even more than the scientific community has.
All the problems with non-biogenic oil formation theories aside, it's possible to tell the difference between organic and non-organic carbon sources by looking at isotopic ratios. Oil is made of organic carbon. (That's one of the several lines of evidence which tell us that the excess carbon now in the atmosphere is due to our burning of fossil fuels, by the way.)
I've been meaning to find some numbers, but I have a hard time understanding the amount of decaying organic matter necessary to create the 80+ million barrels/day of oil pumped from the ground in 2005. I know were talking about geologic time scales here, so I'd be interested in seeing some numbers about how many trees and dinos that adds up to.
This overview has some numbers.
I'd also be interested to find out how trees and dinos ended up 10k+ feet below the surface of the earth. Some of these are 35k+ feet (7+miles) deep.
You can build up a lot of material on top of it over 500 million years. Also, rock is porous. Oil sinks.
I doubt there were many trees or dinosaurs on Hyperion or Titan, 2 of Saturns moons. Yet, they have pools of hydrocarbons,
"Hydrocarbons" aren't always oil; the pools on Titan are things like methane and ethane, which are formed by chemical reactions in Titan's atmosphere. Hydrocarbons exist even in comets and interstellar dust, but they're not oil.
I'm just concerned that global warming is really another scam to take more of my money in the form of taxes to "save the earth".
Sheesh, lay off the conspiracy theories. Scientists don't get together in a back room and decide what scam to cook up next. There is plenty of legitimate scientific evidence, starting from basic atom-light physics and conservation of energy, and working up to our understanding of atmospheric and ocean circulation.
If I remember correctly, when I was a kid, the big fear was we we
Meanwhile, the Antarctic ice is growing.
That doesn't contradict the previous poster's point, which is that models if anything have been conservative in their predictions of climate change. (Sea level rise is also faster than modeled.)
wow, who would have thought that systems and cycles on this planet are dynamic and will constantly change and adapt.
Again, that's not the point.
I don't claim to know all the answers to questions related to climate change, but I do know that there are far better ways we can be spending our money than on "man-made CO2" which may or may not have an effect on climate change.
You "know" that, huh? So where's the cost-benefit analysis you've run?
We know with certainty that pollutants in our water have negative health effects, we know for certain that toxins in the air we breath have negative health effects, but hey, lets forget all that and focus on something that occurs naturally in the environment with or without human influence.
That's wrong in so many ways.
First, that's a false dichotomy. No one is saying to forget other environmental hazards, they're saying that climate change is an additional and serious hazard that must be dealt with along with all other hazards, environmental and otherwise. It's like saying "Why build levees to protect from hurricanes when we could be spending the money on treating cancer?" You need to do both.
Second, while climate change occurs naturally, that has nothing to do with the current problem of harmful human-caused climate change. CO2 does have a significant effect on climate change and will have an even greater effect as emissions continue.
Third, scientific uncertainty when applied to policy doesn't work the way you seem to think. Your argument appears to be "We shouldn't spend any money on something which is uncertain, if we can spend it on things which are certain". But a policy of "no reduction in CO2 emissions" is only justified when you're CERTAIN that there will be little damage. If you're UNCERTAIN about future climate change, then the best policy is to buy insurance against the possible hazard, which in this case means reducing CO2 emissions. (Not as much as you'd reduce if you were certain of severe damages, but some reduction nonetheless, and certainly more than we're doing now.)
In any other situation with uncertainty people recognize the need to insure against risks, but somehow all that logic disappears when applied to climate change. This is what Bjorn Lomborg got hammered for by economists when he advocated the same thing (ignore climate change in favor of malaria and other threats): it's the risk of the lower probability but high impact events that really drives the need for insurance, and if you ignore uncertainty and pick lowball or even middle-of-the-road estimates and pretend you're certain about them, you're going to come up too low on the amount of insurance you really need.
Fourth, while there are hazards whose effect are more certain, they're not always the ones which need to be most urgently addressed. We know the bubonic plague is deadly but that doesn't mean we should be worrying about that first. In the U.S., air and water pollution still exist, but they are no longer really severe health hazards. I agree, if the river in your back yard is on fire or you live in one of China's smog-infested cities, those problems are pretty urgent. But climate change is also important, particularly in places that no longer have severe pollution problems. Climate change affects people's water and food supplies, where they can live, damages from extreme weather events, and many others effects of first-order importance.
Fifth, the problems are interrelated. A lot of air pollution comes from the same burning of fossil fuels that produces CO2. To an extent you can tackle both problems by reducing fossil fuel use (which also addresses the problem of dependence on foreign oil to boot).
And that of the people predicting climate disaster now many are the same ones that predicted climate disaster back in the '70's, but the other way (ice-age).
Oh really? Who are these people who are predicting ice ages in the 1970s, and which of them are today predicting climate disaster?
"Scientists in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age" is a myth, based on basically one paper by Rasool and Schneider, plus some confusion with scientists talking about ice ages in thousands or tens of thousands of years.
You might read this to start.
And they're all dead wrong.
On the contrary, they reproduce temperatures quite well and precipitation decently.
The data is really spotty until 50 years or so ago so there's no idea how accurate they are.
We have reasonable data for over 100 years, and even 50 years of data tells us a lot about how accurate they are, as the measurement error is quite smaller than the visible trend.
None of them are predictive.
That's nonsense. Even a simple two-equation energy balance model is decently predictive for global temperature, and the GCMs do much better, not just time trends but also spatial patterns, for atmospheric and ocean temperatures, top-of-atmosphere radiative fluxes, precipitation at least at the zonal level, etc.
And none of them match the spotty historical data without what they call "forcing"
You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
Of course they don't match the historical data without forcing. Forcing is what makes the climate change: changes in greenhouse gases, solar irradiance, sulphate aerosols, etc. With no forcing, the climate just hovers around an equilibrium state.
You're simply saying "models can't reproduce warming temperatures unless you include a source of heating". Well duh.
and what everyone else calls "fiddling with parameters until it looks kinda right".
Again, duh. Pretty much every model in the world requires its parameters to be calibrated from data; you can pretty much never calculate anything from first principles, unless you're talking particle physics. That doesn't mean that models aren't predictive. The question is whether you can adjust the parameters to reproduce the observed climate without substantial input from anthropogenic forcings, and the answer is no.
Here's an interesting paper (from a real journal).
That's not a real journal, it's an un-peer reviewed newsletter, and the paper was written by a journalist, not a scientist. Monckton's "critique" is just a horrible train wreck of absurd errors, some of which are being detailed here, here, and here.
Since you quote that part specifically, I should note that his claim that the IPCC takes its feedbacks from one paper is absurd. The feedback factor is just another word for "climate sensitivity"; model based computations of the feedbacks are found in chapter 8 of the latest IPCC WG1 report, and observational estimates of the sensitivity are found in chapter 9. The relevant sections cite dozens of papers.
Dismissing valid objections with supporting evidence just because it doesn't say "Climate Modeller" on a business card is foolish.
Let me know when you have any valid objections with supporting evidence.
Hansen's data set is skewed to support his theories.
Prove it.
Notice how it doesn't seem to agree with the other temperature records out there.
All of the temperature records disagree with each other to a small extent. The GISTEMP record is not wildly out of line with any of the others, and some of them show slightly more warming than GISTEMP. See here for a comparison of the surface records.
Thats because Hansen has built into his system factors for changing the raw data based on his conclusions.
Again, prove it. Hansen has factors to correct for systematic biases in the instrumental observations. ALL the temperature records do (both surface and satellite), although they use different methods to make the corrections. That is quite different from corrections which change the data "based on Hansen's conclusions", which is an accusation of intention and fraud and requires proof.
Try using one of the satellite records where the data hasn't been fiddled with and you get a trend that is very different from what Hansen is predicting,
Actually, you don't. The trends are slightly different, but all within each other's error bars. Here is a visual comparison.
Furthermore, the satellite data is "fiddled with" as well. Indeed, the UAH data famously showed recent cooling before they discovered there was a mistake in their error-correction algorithms. Satellite records are by no means objectively superior to the surface station data.
I have no idea where that quote above came from about "Hansen's latest graph", but GISTEMP looks very similar to the other data sets even in the last 10 years; see the above graph.
If the difference between Hansen's numbers and three other temperature records isn't enough to convince you something is screwy with his data then check out all the issues with his temperature stations
If you throw out the temperature stations Watts classifies as "bad", you still get results that are quite close to the GISTEMP record. Or if you throw out the urban stations and only include the rural ones. And finally GISTEMP is quite similar to the satellite records.
There may be station siting issues, but they're clearly not dominating the trend visible in the global temperature time series.
I don't think anyone at all would argue with you on that, the problem is grouping CO2 in there.
The statement is correct as stands: humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere that wouldn't be there otherwise. To be precise, CO2 levels have increased about 35% since pre-industrial times due to human emissions.
CO2 exists naturally in the environment. CO2 is not a pollutant, it is a requirement for life. The amount of CO2 that humans emit is dwarfed by the naturally occuring CO2.
CO2 exists naturally in the environment, but some of it is currently also due to humans. Whether CO2 is a "pollutant" depends on the definition of the term, and is really irrelevant to whether human CO2 is causing global warming. Naturally occurring CO2 is larger than human emitted CO2, but that doesn't change the fact that humans have still contributed a 35% increase in total atmospheric CO2 over the last 150-200 years.
References: couldn't find the latest study, here and here for earlier comet-impact groundwork.
Note that the latest research being reported here is just new evidence for a comet, not new evidence specifically for a comet-climate link.
I know everyone likes a "big outer-space thing smashing the Earth" story, but there are certainly other theories of what caused the Younger Dryas cooling; the prevailing theory is a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation due to fresh water from Lake Aggasiz as the Laurentide ice sheet began to disintegrate. (Remember, this occurred just after substantial warming had already taken place.) There is a fair amount of evidence that this happened, although the clues are hard to piece together.
This comet-cooling theory is new (less than a year old, although pieces were in place three years ago), and it will take years to settle amongst the paleoclimate community. My understanding from other reading is that they try to piggyback on the THC collapse idea instead of competing with it, since there is evidence for it and it's hard to explain a cold snap of such a long duration (1000-1500 years) with a comet alone. I think the idea is that the cometary impact was responsible for the freshwater flux by breaking up the ice sheet. That is, it wasn't the warming that dumped water into the Atlantic, it was a comet. I'm personally somewhat skeptical, given the extent of the ice sheet and the timing of the event (right after a large amount of warming). Then again, maybe a cometary strike at the right place could do it, or could finish off an already-weakened ice sheet. I'm not a geologist.
Anyway, my point is that this is a very new result which has not yet had time to be thoroughly critiqued, and there are already existing hypotheses. This one isn't necessarily better, and it's also possible that a combination of factors were at work.
perhaps the people that think human byproducts have the biggest impact on the climate will wake up after more reports like this. That Earth isn't a closed system, that there are huge fucking things flying around this tiny blue marble that effect our climate much more than humans making some unpleasant gases.
You are very confused.
The existence of large extra-terrestrial influences on climate doesn't somehow negate the possibility of large human influences on climate.
Yes, if a giant comet or asteroid hit the planet tomorrow, that would seriously screw up the climate, moreso than human actions. That doesn't mean that humans aren't currently having a big impact on changes in climate, or that people who are concerned about this need to "wake up" from anything.
I'd like to start by asking why every global warming proponent seems to treat anyone who doesn't immediately bow down to their group-think, like a holocaust denier?
I'm not treating you like a holocaust denier, I'm treating you as ignorant, which your comments continue to demonstrate.
And there you go, proving my point for me. :-)
Correctly pointing out dreck as dreck does not prove your point. In fact, you give one such example of dreck yourself ("climate is unpredictable because weather is unpredictable"), and allude to another ("cooling in the past implies a natural cause of warming in the present").
If you'd like to propose your own "critical analysis", I can evaluate it for you. Perhaps then you will start to understand why the common skeptical positions are typically bad science.
I'll see your "uneducated drek" and raise you a pile of selective data harvesting.
Fine, which of the main lines of evidence supporting AGW is based on "selective data harvesting"? I note your responses are rather thin on actual science.
I'd also like to throw in "the little ice-age" and get your theory to explain that one.
The little ice age is largely attributed to a decrease in solar irradiance combined with an increase in volcanic activity. Some of the early 20th century warming can be explained in the opposite way (increase in solar irradiance, decrease in volcanism). But that explanation notably fails to explain the accelerated period of late 20th/21st century warming, when you look at trends in solar activity and volcanism during that period. Indeed, natural sources of climate change over that time, by themselves, seem to imply a slight cooling.
I'll agree with your reasoning when you can demonstrate sufficient understanding of the Earths climate to predict what the weather will be like tomorrow.
First off, we largely can predict tomorrow's weather pretty well; it's only over longer periods of time that numerical weather prediction skill vanishes.
Second and more importantly, climate is not weather. Climate is average weather. I can't predict the temperature in New York City on December 13, but I can predict that it's going to be on average colder than it is today, and I can quantify how much colder it will be. While weather prediction is dominated by chaos on fairly short time scales (it's unpredictable even in theory past about 2 weeks or so), climate is dominated by much broader effects such as "net heat flux into/out of the atmosphere": if you add more heat to the system, it will in general warm, even though you can't predict the specific turbulent eddies and whatnot over specific cities. This is in fact the basis of the entire statistical-mechanical theory of thermodynamics: under an assumption of molecular chaos, you can nevertheless predict the ensemble-averaged value of observable quantities like "energy" and "pressure".
Can you first tell me what mechanisms are responsible for global warming ?
The current global warming is due in part to the natural effects I mentioned above, but mostly due to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, as well as various feedback effects which amplify the GHG-induced warming. (For instance, any source of warming leads to increases in water vapor which in turn is a greenhouse gas which adds further warming.)
What is the causal link ?
Ultimately, the greenhouse effect. You may have heard of it. It's based on very straightforward and well understood physics of atom-photon interactions, without which the Earth would be a frozen ball of ice. Of course, the underlying greenhouse effect gets modified by other aspects of climate.
and I've yet to hear any theory that describes the mechanism by which man is supposed to be primar
So, does this mean that a geocentric universe was "proven" by science in the 1st century BC?
It means that geocentrism is a reasonably good theory in terms of predictive skill, although not as good as the theories of orbital mechanics which came after (heliocentrism, Keplerian ellipses, Newtonian gravity, Einsteinian gravity, ...)
Our best global warming climate models are extemely *inaccurate* compared to this relatively accurate device.
So?
Yet we accept the (modern) inaccurate models on faith
No, we don't. You ever open up the IPCC report and see the big error bars? Everyone knows that modern climate models come with substantial uncertainty. All models have uncertainty, some more and some less. The point with climate models is that, even with large error bars, you can still exclude hypotheses such as "the warming is mostly natural" or "the warming in 2100 will be less than 1 degree under business-as-usual emissions scenarios".
and reject the (ancient) accurate model that this device "proves"
Regardless of how accurate ancient models are, modern models are more accurate still, which is why we reject them in favor of newer models. This is the same as why we reject older climate models (e.g., simple energy balance models) in favor of modern general circulation models. No, they're not as accurate as even old theories of orbital mechanics; orbits are simple and predictable. That doesn't mean that they're not useful, or not scientific, or have no predictive skill.
There are a whole bunch of "scientists" out there running computer similations that are far less predictive than this device that is likey based on a geocentric theory of the universe.
Again, so?
And what's with the scare quotes around scientists? Are you going to claim that climate scientists aren't real scientists?
Group-think is firmly on the side of global-warming as a fact and any alternative critical analysis of this position is treated with scorn.
Critical analysis is not treated with scorn. It's simply that most of the "critical analysis" of global warming circulating the web is uneducated dreck. There is plenty of legitimate debate within the scientific community about things like, e.g., the anthropogenic effects on hurricanes, sea ice disintegration, etc. It's the claims that "humans have nothing to do with global warming" that are the problem, since the evidence is pretty strongly on the other side, and as the evidence has accumulated people have had to make increasingly desperate arguments to conclude otherwise.
The anthropomorphic global warming theory is not sound science.
This from someone who can't even spell "anthropogenic"?
It's a good theory but it's far from proven.
On the contrary, AGW is supported by both theory (spectral adsorption) and agreement with observations (global warming, stratospheric cooling, polar amplification, downward penetration of ocean heat, reduced diurnal temperature variation), etc. By contrast, the leading alternate hypotheses (e.g., solar or volcanic variability, ocean heat upwelling, ...) do not agree with observations (disagreement in timing, rate, and magnitude of warming, do not produce observed signatures such as stratospheric cooling, ocean warming, etc.)
There are still too many variables and unknowns.
"AGW is not sound science" requires stronger justification than hand-waving about there being uncertainty. There is always uncertainty. That doesn't mean that you can't do sound science or conclude anything with reasonable confidence.
So fine, tell me: what variables and unknowns are there which have uncertainties large enough to change the conclusion of global warming with a primarily anthropogenic cause? Please, be specific and quantitative.
By far the loudest voices screaming about global warming are coming from the proponents of the theory.
The people who say the most about global warming are those who support the theory? Shocking.
Steve Jobs got where he is because he never worked for anyone else-- he's never been homogenized inside the corporate zoo.
Jobs worked for HP and Atari before Apple, although not for long.
I mean, wouldn't Harvard or Yale or MIT be willing to shell out monster bucks to say they have him in their institution?
Eh, I don't know. They don't need a status symbol scientist near the end of his career; they already have plenty of status. He's more valuable to newer upstart institutions that want to make a name for themselves, like Perimeter.
Yes, dark energy is different from dark matter. Dark energy is needed to explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, something that no form of matter (which slows the expansion of the universe through its gravitational attraction) can explain.
I am not sure I agree about the consistency. MoND is pretty consistent.
MOND itself is inconsistent with relativity, although people have made attempts to embed something like it within a relativistic theory (e.g., TeVeS). TeVeS is complicated enough, requiring three different kinds of gravitational fields which interact in a very specific and rather ad-hoc way.
But the internal consistency aside, MOND isn't that consistent with observational evidence, which is the real test. See this post.
Logical or not, requiring that people ASSUME that most of the universe is made of barely- or non-detectable matter or energy is introducing outside complications of huge proportions.
Why? There are no shortage of dark matter candidate particles which may very well exist for completely independent reasons. Already we know there are neutrino particles, why is it so hard to accept the possibility of heavier neutrino-like particles? The axion, which was proposed to solve the strong CP problem in QCD, is a good dark matter candidate. Supersymmetry, which provides cleaner running of the coupling constants at grand unification scales and which helps with the hierarchy problem, provides another good dark matter candidate (the lightest supersymmetric partner). There are plenty of theoretical reasons why dark matter may likely exist other than its use in solving various astrophysical mysteries.
Ergo: Occam's Razor does not favor "dark matter" or "dark energy"... there are several other hypotheses that are "simpler" in some pretty major ways.
MOND doesn't fit the data as well as people claim, once you try to simultaneously fit it to ALL the data, and it doesn't look very simple once you try to make it consistent with other theories of physics like relativity.
Both Dark Matter and Dark Energy are funny, unreal concepts. We need new, better Physics to explain these things properly.
That's funny, because the "new, better physics" you desire sounds just like the existing physics.
Something like Heim Theory in which gravitation is repulsive for great distances:
That's exactly what the most conventional theory of dark energy is: the cosmological constant is a modification to general relativity which makes gravity repulsive at large distances.
Heim says that the energy of this gravitational field corresponds its own field mass. This field mass again produces a second additionally gravitational field which is very weak. Again this field possesses its own field mass which produces a field. So you receive an infinite series, which however converges very fast against a calculable limit value.
This is a feature of any nonlinear theory of gravity, including general relativity: the mass-energy of a gravitational field itself gravitates. When you start with a linear graviton theory and incorporate the infinite series of self-gravitating corrections to it, you arrive at general relativity, as shown by numerous physicists including Deser, Feynman, Weinberg, etc.
Among other things the phenomenon of the cosmic red shift can be explained now as a gravitational effect.
Cosmological redshift is already explained as a gravitational effect: redshift due to the expansion of space can be interpreted either as a gravitational redshift or a Doppler velocity redshift.
If you were standing on that orbiting pulsar, how long do you think your watch would read [relative to an Earth observer]?
There are two kinds of time dilation. There is the time dilation which comes from the velocity of the orbiting pulsar. If the pulsar system is at rest with respect to the Earth, this will be small, since the pulsar's orbital speed is pretty low compared to the speed of light, unless its orbit has decayed and it's about to ram into its binary partner.
There is also gravitational time dilation, due to the gravity on the pulsar's surface. That would be on the order of 10-20% slowdown in time; see here (PDF). Not as huge as you suggest, but not negligible either.
In "Six Easy Pieces", Feynman says:
Newton thought that light was made up of particles, but then it was discovered, as we have seen here, that it behaves like a wave. Later, however (in the beginning of the twentieth century) it was found that light did indeed sometimes behave like a particle. Historically, the electron, for example, was thought to behave like a particle, and then it was found in many respects that it behaved like a wave. So it really behaves like neither. Now we have given up. We say: "It is like neither."
There is one lucky break, however — electrons behave just like light. The quantum behavior of atomic objects (electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and so on) is the same for all; they are all "particle waves," or whatever you want to call them.
This has always bugged me; how in the heck do you quantize geometry like |x>?
|x> isn't geometry, it's a position variable. Geometry is described by a metric (or a connection), i.e., a tensor field. Simple perturbative quantization of a rank-2 tensor (the graviton field) doesn't work, but one can hope to try more subtle approaches. In the quantum geometry of loop quantum gravity, for instance, you represent a spatial eigenstate as a spin network, whose edges carry quanta of area and whose vertices carry quanta of volume.
I was under the impression there wasn't a good way to do that without losing isotropy.
That's the problem that many straightforward discrete approaches run into (e.g., lattice quantum gravity). If you break up space into a regular grid, then doesn't it have preferred directions? That's one reason why people look at things like random triangulations, random networks, etc.; you can hope that their small-scale structure is smeared out isotropically in the classical limit.
Moreover, wouldn't that screw up the coordinate transforms that we use to talk about some of the only analytically solvable systems in quantum, like the two-body central force problem?
Why?
Moreover, given that momentum and position are Fourier conjugates, does that quantize momentum as well?
Momentum is already quantized in ordinary quantum mechanics, at least for bound systems.
I guess if I can accept a continuous basis for position states I should have no problem with a countably infinite one, but it still confuses me. :-)
Quantum gravity is more subtle than merely making space into a countable lattice. And note that even in that case, if geometry really is quantum mechanical, a classical spatial state would probably look like an infinite superposition of different discrete lattices, not any single one.
Finally, (and this shows I haven't gotten very far in quantum), I'm troubled by the asymmetry between position and time in the formalism I learned, that is, position is a state, but time is merely a parameter. To be consistent with relativity, do you need to make time a state as well? How does that change \hat{U}(t)?
There isn't a "time operator" in string theory or loop quantum gravity, either. Even in quantum field theory (quantum mechanics coupled to special relativity), you don't have one. The theory still works.
My understanding is that relativity has been directly observed several times, whereas quantum theory is still just based on the interpretation of a series of controlled laboratory experiments, which mostly amounts to sifting through the wreckage of a high-energy collision and trying to derive the original state from the leftover pieces.
Oh, just based on a series of controlled laboratory experiments. Unlike relativity??
I have no idea what "directly observed" means, but quantum mechanical behavior is no less directly observed than relativistic behavior. In fact, it is far better studied, since atomic physics is more accessible to experiments than relativistic physics. And it by no means is limited to high energy colliders (which is where you tend to see relativistic effects the most, by the way); atomic spectra, basically all of chemistry, condensed matter and material science, lasers, etc. all depend on quantum physics. Indeed, the quantum theory of electrodynamics is the most precisely verified theory in the history of physics; some of its predictions (like the electron g factor) are accurate to something like 12 decimal places when compared to experiments.
Isn't it about time to abandon the concept of the graviton and just accept that gravity is not a fundamental force, but is simply the observed effect of the curvature of spacetime due to the presence of matter and energy?
If you accept that matter is described by quantum mechanics, then general relativity is wrong, because you can't consistently couple a classical field to a quantum source. (Consider what happens when you want to describe the gravitational field of matter which exists in a quantum superposition of states.) Believe me, if it were that easy to produce a theory of gravity which is consistent with what we know about matter, people wouldn't have been searching for 50+ years for a theory of quantum gravity.
Once you accept that gravity needs to be quantized, then you are inevitably led to something like a graviton: it's what you get when you quantize the linearized approximation to general relativity, and is actually more general than that: any field which couples to stress-energy (which is the source of gravity in general relativity) is described by a rank-2 tensor, which in quantum mechanics means a spin-2 particle (graviton). A theory of quantum gravity won't have gravitons as truly fundamental — the perturbative theory of gravitons is inconsistent — but any such theory (e.g., string theory, loop quantum gravity) will necessarily have graviton-like behavior as a low energy limit, assuming that it also has a relativistic theory of gravity (like general relativity) as a classical limit. That is not inconsistent with GR's description of gravity as curved spacetime: that's the classical behavior of a graviton-like field, although different theories recover that limit in different ways. (String theory has strings which vibrate in graviton-like ways which are observationally indistinguishable from spacetime curvature; other theories try to quantize geometry directly.)
I had no idea he was a computer science crackpot as well as a physics crackpot. Figures.
I call shenanigans. DARPA doesn't let you use research funding to construct buildings! Unless the building itself is the research project.
He started out as a bench engineer, but he's always been a "big picture" kind of guy, so he liked getting into a position where he could survey the field and have input into where it would go in the future. World experts in technology came in to brief him on all kinds of exciting new developments. He got to go on training exercises with Special Operations forces to learn more about their needs, and loved the "field trips" — it's not always just sitting behind a desk. He also liked being in a position of giving out money to people, instead of having to ask for it from guys like him. I've been a low-level engineer in one of the military's RDT&E agencies (not DARPA), and everyone there who has ever had any technical skill complains of skill atrophy, boredom, and endless unproductive bureaucracy. DARPA doesn't have any low level engineers, and doesn't do any engineering work itself. It has program managers (grant officers), who review proposals and making funding decisions. It's completely different from an actual engineering agency.
But the portrayal of academics as closeminded fools is pretty much what I'd expect from a crackpot — ahem, "scientific rebel", as per your Homepage — such as yourself, who rails against the "chickenshit voodoo" physics establishment.
It doesn't take very long for infrared radiation to scatter through the atmosphere into space, but the greenhouse effect does reduce the rate at which heat escapes the Earth.