IPCC AR5 not acknowledging cosmoclimatology

In a few years, the IPCC climate panel plans to release the fifth assessment report, AR5. Alec Rawls (firstname at lastname dot org) has leaked the current draft (he thinks it's 100% legal to do so) and he, much like other skeptics, seemed to be enthusiastic about the IPCC's finally admitting the existence of natural climate drivers, especially those related to the Sun.

Dana Nuccitelli, a notorious climate demagogue and fearmonger writing for Skeptical Science.com, wrote a guest blog for the Guardian blogs where he claims that the IPCC isn't saying anything of the sort even though he thinks it's possible to determine what the IPCC is saying by not looking in the IPCC draft at all – it's enough to look in some pet pro-alarmist maximally anthropogenic papers of himself, he thinks. The Earth isn't spinning, it's just the human hot air that matters. Is that really to hard for you, Mr Nuccitelli, to figure out that by your ostrich methodology, you simply can't determine what the IPCC AR5 draft is admitting and what is not?

I was agnostic about both claims but now I see that Rawls is surely having a point but my excitement is much weaker than his. In fact, I would say that not much is changing in the IPCC.




The WUWT article offers download links for the draft; search for "peeje" on that page. After some limited time I spent by looking at the documents, I believe that the Chapter 7 on clouds and aerosols is the "most powerful endorsement" of the thesis that the Sun and the cosmic rays could be important for the climate – via their effect on the clouds. But as I will argue below, the "most powerful endorsement" still means that it's not an endorsement at all.

If you click at the link above and then "create a download link" and "click here to download", you will get a PDF document. So how much of cosmoclimatology has been incorporated into these summaries of literature? Look for Svensmark, for example – that's quite an important name here. You will find it at 8 places in the chapter. Only 3 of them appear in the main text; 5 are in the literature.

All the 3 appearances of the word "Svensmark" are followed by remarks that his or their results haven't been proved to be robust; haven't been corroborated; and Kirkby showed that the contribution of those mechanisms to the relevant climate change questions is negligible. I think it's an extremely biased summary of the findings in the literature but that's not the main point I want to argue about here.

My main point is that it doesn't seem to me that this chapter has concluded that cosmoclimatology is important.

Rawls mentions one more quote, "Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system..." That's nice but the text continues and the continuation is trying, quite universally, to dismiss the results with the the modest negative evidence in the literature and some general, vague claims that those results are not robust, they're not reproduced, and so on.

Quite generally, you can say that if there are many papers making an alarmist point, the "right" interpretation is that these papers corroborate each other. If there are many papers showing empirical relationships between some climatic time series and the galactic cosmic rays, it means that these many papers haven't been corroborated by anything else. The fact that the pieces of evidence are numerous, observational as well as lab-based, experimental as well as theoretical (mechanism is known), doesn't seem to matter for the conclusion.

It's clearly the same biased attitude we would expect from the previous IPCC reviews. Perhaps Svensmark et al. may be pronounced now as they have lost their "taboo" status but the draft is still closer to a dirty alarmist propaganda than to a proper scientific evaluation of the literature and if I were asked for a recommendation, I would still recommend a life in prison for all the people who participate on this IPCC monstrosity.

Chapter 8 makes these things even worse. It claims that the dominant man-made explanation not only survived but has strengthened and it completely ignores the investigation in Chapter 7 when it assumes that the Sun may at most influence us by the total irradiance and that's negligible – no amplifying mechanisms are allowed to be even considered, as far as Chapter 8 goes. Yes, the folks behind Chapter 8 deserve a somewhat harsher punishment than the life in prison.

I am not saying that I can prove that cosmoclimatology is the most important thing; but what I can prove is that the same situation in the literature is evaluated very differently depending on whether the conclusions are convenient or not. And the Sun and cosmic rays are probably still better than other natural drivers and potential explanations – oceans and just accumulated random weather – whose existence and contribution isn't admitted by the draft at all.

The situation, as I see it, is that the IPCC writing process is still controlled purely by the staunch, stubborn alarmists. They may have just split into several camps that differ in the opinion whether it should be legal to pronounce the name of Henrik Svensmark, albeit with a negative sentence required immediately afterwords, or whether his name should remain a blasphemy. I am not too interested in these sectarian divisions of these loons and liars – for me, all of them are still the same scum, whether or not they successfully execute the members of the opposite sect.

And that's the memo.

Shooting in Connecticut

It's insane. Dozens of children and other people (at least 27 casualties in total, including the principal, the psychologist, and – most disgustingly – 18 children, hundreds of shots were heard; the murderer was most thrilled by shooting in the pre-school class) were shot in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. I only know Newton, Massachusetts. One lunatic (probably a 24-year-old father of a female student equipped with 4 guns and a vest: he was finally shot; or a 20-year-old student and Asperger sufferer Adam Lanza) and maybe two or three (very unlikely now) can kill almost as many people as Hurricane Sandy. One must see such things in the proper perspective. Even if people knew how to eliminate all hurricanes from the face of the Earth, that would be very far from preventing all tragic premature deaths.

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German biogeochemistry postdoc proposes to extinguish the "unsustainable" Sun

Nathaniel Virgo (SE) is a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Jena. His DPhil was about the effect of limited energy supply on organisms. You may see lots of similar "conventional physics" topics that are always "tainted by the environmentalist ideology" a little bit.



Two hours ago, he asked a question at the Physics Stack Exchange that made me LOL. He has already made all the important general plans and only asks the physics users to help him with a technical detail. So his question is:

What is the easiest way to stop a star?

No kidding. You're going to learn something about the mainstream science at the mainstream scientific institutes that do research into Earth sciences. ;-)


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What is the easiest way to stop a star?

I'm concerned that the stars are using up hydrogen nuclei at an unsustainable rate. If I was a sufficiently advanced civilisation I might want to do something about this, so that the hydrogen could be burnt in fusion reactors instead. That way, a much higher proportion of the available energy could be put to some use before it eventually becomes thermal radiation.

So my questions are:

1. What would be the most energy-efficient way (using known physics) to blow apart a star or otherwise prevent or greatly slow the rate at which it performs fusion? We're assuming this civilisation has access to vast amounts of energy but doesn't want to waste it unnecessarily, since the aim is to access energy from the hydrogen the star would have burned. In order for this to be worthwhile, the energy gained from doing this would have to be substantially more than the energy the process takes.
2. What would be the astronomical signature of such an activity? If it was happening in a distant galaxy, would we be able to detect it from Earth?

LM:

I emphasized the words "concerned" and "unsustainable" to make it clear that this Gentleman is firmly within the "mainstream" discourse of the Earth sciences that is currently fully controlled by the environmental whackos.

The idea that the Sun wastes too much energy so we should better extinguish it (almost all life on Earth would stop within weeks) is such a funny ramification of the environmentalist thinking (or, more precisely, the absence of it) that I didn't resist and had to repost the question here.

For the sake of completeness, here's my answer:

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Burning (and fusion) is "unsustainable" by definition because it means to convert an increasing amount of fuel to "energy" plus "waste products" and at some moment, there is no fuel left.

I am not sure whether the word "unsustainable" was used as a joke, a parody of the same nonsensical adjective that is so popular with the low-brow media these days, but I have surely laughed (because it almost sounds like you are proposing to extinguish the Sun to be truly environment-friendly). The thermonuclear reaction in the Sun has been "sustained" for 4.7 billion years and about 7.5 billion years are left before the Sun goes red giant. That's over 10 billion years – many other processes are much less sustainable than that. More importantly, there is nothing wrong about processes' and activities' being "unsustainable". All the processes in the real world are unsustainable and the most pleasant ones are the least sustainable, too.

But back to your specific project.

When it comes to energy, it is possible to blow a star apart without spending energy that exceeds the actual thermonuclear energy stored in the star. Just make a simple calculation for the Sun. Try to divide it to 2 semisuns whose mass is \(10^{30}\) kilograms, each. The current distance between the two semisuns is about \(700,000\) kilometers, the radius of the Sun. You want to separate them to a distance where the potential energy is small, comparable to that at infinity.

It means that you must "liberate" the semisuns from a potential well. The gravitational potential energy you need to spend is\[

E = \frac{G\cdot M\cdot M}{R} = \frac{6.67\times 10^{-11}\times 10^{60}}{700,000,000} =
10^{41}\,{\rm Joules}

\] That's equivalent to the energy of \(10^{24}\) kilograms (the mass of the Moon or so) completely converted to energy via \(E=mc^2\), or thermonuclear energy from burning the whole Earth of hydrogen (approximately).

You may force the Sun to do something like the "red giant" transition prematurely and save some hydrogen that is unburned. To do so, you will have to spend the amount of energy corresponding to the Earth completely burned via fusion.

But of course, the counting of the energy which was "favorable" isn't the only problem. To actually tear the Sun apart, you would have to send an object inside the Sun that would survive the rather extreme conditions over there, including 15 million Celsius degrees and 3 billion atmospheres of pressure. Needless to say, no solid can survive these conditions: any object based on atoms we know will inevitably become a plasma. A closely related fact is that ordinary matter based on nuclei and electron doesn't allow for any "higher-pressure" explosion than the thermonuclear one so there's nothing "stronger" that could be sent to the Sun as an explosive to counteract the huge pressure inside the star.

One must get used to the fact that plasma is what becomes out of anything that tries to "intervene" into the Sun – and any intruder would be quickly devoured and the Sun would restore its balance. The only possible loophole is that the amount of this stuff is large. So you may think about colliding two stars which could perhaps tear them apart and stop the fusion. This isn't easy. The energy needed to substantially change the trajectory of another star is very, very large, unless one is lucky that the stars are already going to "nearly collide" which is extremely unlikely.

Physics will not allow you to do such things. You would need a form of matter that is more extreme than the plasma in the Sun, e.g. the neutron matter, but this probably can't be much lighter (and easier to prepare, e.g. when it comes to energy) than the star itself. A black hole could only drill a hole (when fast enough) or consume the Sun (which you don't want).

However, if you allow the Sun to be eaten by a black hole, you will actually get a more efficient and more sustainable source of energy. Well, too sustainable. ;-) A black hole of the mass comparable to the solar mass would have a radius about 3 miles. It would only send roughly one photon of the 3-mile-long wavelength every nanosecond or so in the Hawking radiation and it would only evaporate after \(10^{60}\) years or so. It would be so sustainable that no one could possibly observe the energy it is emitting. However, the black hole would ultimately emit all the energy \(E=mc^2\) stored in the mass.

If there are powerful civilizations ready to do some "helioengineering", they surely don't suffer from naive and primitive misconceptions about the world such as the word "sustainable" and many other words that are so popular in the mentally retarded movement known as "environmentalism". These civilizations may do many things artificially but they surely realize that the thermonuclear reaction in the stars is a highly efficient and useful way to get the energy from the hydrogen fuel. Even some of us realize that almost all the useful energy that allowed the Earth to evolve and create life and other things came from the Sun.

The Sun may become unsustainable in 7.5 billion years but according to everything we know about Nature, it's the optimum device to provide large enough civilizations – whole planets – with energy.

Concerning ambitious but less crazy plans in the outer space, look at NASA's plans to produce a "warp drive": HTML, PDF.

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