Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Hybrids to the rescue

Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news, courtesy of a professor at Oxford University.

The good news is that climate change is being taken care of.  All of the worries about ice sheets melting, sea level rise, and stronger storms can be set aside.

The bad news is that in order for all this to happen, humans have to be willing to have sex with aliens.

I wish I was making this up.  Young-hae Chi, a professor of Korean at Oxford, has published a book called Alien Visitations and the End of Humanity, in which he tells us that there are already some human/alien hybrids walking around.  There are four categories: small, tall and bold, insect-like, and scaly with cold, reptilian eyes.

What I'm wondering is, if there are all these hybrids walking around, why haven't I seen any?  Although I have to admit the first two categories are kind of vague, and Stephen Miller could easily fit into the last one.  But at least there aren't any insect people around, which is a good thing, because that'd be fucking creepy.

Still from "The Web Planet," from season two of Dr. Who.  Okay, these weren't so much creepy as ridiculous, especially considering the really annoying chirping sound they made.

"[T]hey come not for the sake of us, but for the sake of them," Chi says.  "[For] their survival, but their survival is actually our survival as well — the survival of the entire biosphere."

How exactly this works, or the specifics of how making lots of human/alien hybrid babies is going to stop climate change, Chi never says, and it sounds like he may not be clear on this himself.  "I'm looking for more evidence to support my view," he said.

I'll just bet he is.

Of course, even if there are intelligent aliens visiting the Earth, there's a serious problem with the hybridization claim, and it goes beyond supposing that humans and the aliens have the right combination of orifices and pokey-outy-bits to make it work from a mechanical standpoint.  While it's possible that extraterrestrial life would be DNA-based -- DNA and RNA nucleotides seem to be relatively easy to make abiotically, and are likely to be common in the universe -- it is extraordinarily unlikely that they would read it the same way we do.  The "translation chart," from which you can use the sequence of a messenger RNA molecule to determine the amino acid sequence of the protein it makes, is thought to be arbitrary, and there's no reason why even if there is some RNA-to-protein correspondence on the Planet G'zork, it'd be the same one we use.  (I emphasize the word thought in the previous sentence.  How the translation chart evolved, and whether it actually is arbitrary, is one of the unsolved problems of biological evolution.  If the translation chart was constrained to evolve the way it did, it might be that the decoding process is fairly uniform throughout the universe...  but I doubt it.)

So while I like Mr. Spock and Deanna Troi and B'Elanna Torres as much as the next Trek geek, that sort of thing is pretty certainly impossible.

Anyhow, I'm thinking that Dr. Chi is just making shit up, and should focus on his Korean classes and leave the astrobiology to the astrobiologists.

Still, it'd be nice to do something about climate change.  I mean, our current "leaders" are doing bugger-all, so maybe we should all welcome our alien overlords.  Although I draw the line at having sex with them.  I'm open-minded and all, but I do have my limits.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.






Monday, April 29, 2019

UFO report overhaul

New from the "Well, At Least They're Going About It The Right Way" department, we have: the US Navy's new guidelines for reporting UFOs.

Apparently, this rewrite was spurred by an uptick in reports of strange sightings, although the powers-that-be state in no uncertain terms that they're not saying any of these are alien spacecraft.   "There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO.  "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.  As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities.  A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

While I do tend to agree with Neil DeGrasse Tyson's view that the eyewitness testimony of pilots, policemen, ships' captains, and other people wearing uniforms isn't inherently better than that of the rest of us -- "it's all bad," he says -- I do have some niggling doubts about including pilots on that list.  After all, Tyson goes on to say that the frequency of reports of UFOs from astronomers is lower than that of the rest of the population because -- another direct quote -- "We know what the hell we're looking at!", ignoring the fact that pilots spend a lot of time looking up, too.  My guess is that a seasoned pilot wouldn't be taken in by such uncommon but perfectly natural phenomena as noctilucent clouds, lenticular cloudssun dogs, sprites, STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), and fallstreak holes.

And honestly, much of what pilots have reported don't admit of easy explanation.  According to Chris Mellon, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a large percentage of the sightings were of objects "flying in formation" and "exceeding the speed of the airplane."

I'm in agreement that those sightings deserve investigation, and there needs to be a lessening of the stigma of even making the report.  Mellon says that a lot of pilots who've seen UFOs have chosen not to report them because of fear of ridicule or of actually hurting their careers.

So far, so good.  But then Luis Elizondo, who runs the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, got involved, and took the new recommendations and leapt right into hyperspace.  "If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security," Elizondo said.  "This type of activity is very alarming, and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding."

Now just hang on a moment.

There's about a light year's distance between "I saw an unexplained light in the sky" and "this is a spacecraft that defies the laws of physics and is just waiting to deploy a nuclear device against us."  I mean, on the one hand, I think what Elizondo is saying is that by the time an alien spaceship did deploy a nuclear weapon, it'd be too late to do anything about it, which is true as far as it goes; but don't you think the first step would be to establish that what people have seen are alien spaceships before we go into collective freak-out mode?


And I am absolutely sick unto death of people claiming that these alleged aliens can "defy the laws of physics" and "are beyond our understanding."  Maybe I'm being a little cocky and defensive, here, but the laws of physics are pretty damn well established, and I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that if there are aliens out there, they obey the same laws of physics we do.  I'd also be willing to wager that even if there is some hitherto-unknown bit of physics that is allowing the aliens to do their aerial gymnastics, it's not "beyond our understanding."  Physicists are by and large pretty smart women and men, and my guess is they would be perfectly capable of understanding it, if the aliens would just land their spaceships and sit down and discuss it with them.

So simultaneously mythologizing and catastrophizing these sightings isn't very productive, or even very realistic.  Yes, they should be investigated.  I'm also with Michio Kaku that if even one in a hundred credible UFO sightings are unexplainable as natural terrestrial phenomena, that 1% is worth looking into.  But we need to keep our heads on our shoulders and not assume that everything we haven't explained will turn out to be something we can't explain.

I think the US Navy has the right idea, though, in making it part of their policy to take UFO sightings by pilots seriously.  And hell, maybe one of the reports will turn out to be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  Believe me, no one would be more thrilled than I am if this turned out to be the case.  But it's important to keep looking at these things skeptically, always questioning and looking for alternate (natural) explanations, especially if the more out-there explanation is something we'd very much like to be true.

Because everyone -- even pilots, astronomers, and people in the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program -- are subject to confirmation bias.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.






Saturday, April 27, 2019

Trouble brewing

A general rule of historical anthropology is that societies only last so long, and inevitably go into decline and are superseded.

The causes, though, are numerous and often mysterious, which is why your typical one-line explanations -- like "classical Rome collapsed because of the invasion by barbarian tribes" -- are inaccurate oversimplifications at best.  Sure, the barbarians didn't help matters, but centuries of misrule, overreach by emperors greedy for land (leading to revolt in outlying provinces they no longer had the military strength to control), unfavorable alterations in climate, and repeated outbreaks of the plague were all major contributors to the downfall of the Pax Romana.

Some civilizations have collapsed more suddenly, and for a few of them, we have no real idea why.  Mycenaean Greece, the "Golden Age of Heroes," went into decline around 1200 B.C.E., and by 1100 was erased entirely, their cities and palaces abandoned.  From a hastily-scrawled clay tablet found at the Palace of Pylos, one of the main Mycenaean strongholds, we get the impression that invasion (in this case by the Dorians, a tribe from northern Greece) may have been a contributor:
The enemy grabbed all the priests from everywhere and without reason murdered them secretly by simple drowning.  I am calling out to my descendants (for the sake of) history. I am told that the northern strangers continued their (terrible) attack, terrorizing and plundering (until) a short time ago.
[It may interest other linguistics geeks that the above passage was translated by Michael Ventris, who along with Alice Kober finally deciphered Linear B -- a script which beforehand was entirely mysterious, even as to what language it represented and which characters stood for which sounds.  In fact, it wasn't even known whether the characters stood for single sounds, syllables, or entire words.  Imagine facing that as a task...]

Anyhow, it's unlikely that the Dorian invasion is the sole reason Mycenae fell.  After all, these are the people who kicked some major ass during the Trojan War; a bunch of invading barbarians wouldn't have successfully eradicated the Mycenaean civilization unless there had been other factors at work as well.

My point is, what destroys civilizations, not to mention what keeps them alive, is seldom a single factor.  But some anthropologists working in South America have identified one that seems to be critical to a society's survival:

Beer.

I'm not making this up.  Patrick Ryan Williams (Field Museum), Donna Nash (Field Museum and University of North Carolina Greensboro), Josh Henkin (Field Museum and University of Illinois at Chicago) and Ruth Ann Armitage (Eastern Michigan University) are the authors of a paper in Sustainability that was released last week, looking at the role of breweries in the Wari society, which flourished in what is now the western half of Peru for over five hundred years.  The authors write:
Utilizing archaeometric methods, we evaluate the nature of production of feasting events in the ancient Wari state (600–1000 CE).  Specifically, we focus on the fabrication of ceramic serving and brewing wares for the alcoholic beverage chicha de molle.   We examine the source materials used in the creation of these vessels with elemental analysis techniques. We then assess the chemical traces of the residues present in the ceramic pores of the vessels to detect compounds indicative of the plants used in chicha production. While previous research has identified circumstantial evidence for the use of Schinus molle in the production process, this research presents direct evidence of its existence in the pores of the ceramic vessels.  We also assess what this material evidence suggests about the sustainability of the feasting events as a mode of political interaction in the Wari sphere.  Our evaluation indicates that regional resource use in the production of the ceramic vessels promoted locally sustainable raw material procurement for the making of the festivities.  Likewise, drought resistant crops became the key ingredients in the beverages produced and provided a resilient harvest for chicha production that was adopted by successor groups.
"This study helps us understand how beer fed the creation of complex political organizations," said study lead author Patrick Ryan Williams in an interview in Science Daily. "We were able to apply new technologies to capture information about how ancient beer was produced and what it meant to societies in the past...  It was like a microbrewery in some respects. It was a production house, but the brewhouses and taverns would have been right next door...  People would have come into this site, in these festive moments, in order to recreate and reaffirm their affiliation with these Wari lords and maybe bring tribute and pledge loyalty to the Wari state...  We think these institutions of brewing and then serving the beer really formed a unity among these populations, it kept people together."

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons http://www.pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=&pg=8748]

Which makes total sense to me.  I don't know about you, but getting together with friends for a nice pint is often the high point of my weekend.  And yeah, we could get together and have soda and Shirley Temples, but... it just wouldn't be the same, somehow.

So next time you have a beer, keep in mind that you're not just drinking a fizzy, mildly alcoholic beverage, you're actually helping society to cohere.  Which, I think, is a noble thing we're all doing.

Bottoms up!

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Friday, April 26, 2019

The view from afar

One of the strangest phenomena in the universe -- and there's a lot of competition in that regard -- is the neutron star.

This is the ultimate fate of stars of mid-range mass -- between 10 and 29 solar masses.  With stars this size, when they exhaust their hydrogen fuel, the outward pressure from fusion of hydrogen into helium stops, and the core collapses, heating it up catastrophically.  The result is a supernova, in which the outer atmosphere of the star is blown away completely.  The remnant of the core is crushed inward, forcing the electrons into the nuclei of the atoms -- literally squeezing all the space out of the matter inside.  The electrons and protons, presumably present in roughly equal numbers, are smashed together, canceling out their net charge and resulting in a great big ball o' neutrons.

I remember learning about this when I took an astronomy class in college, and asking the professor in some astonishment, "So, neutron stars are basically enormous atomic nuclei?"

He said, "Essentially, yes. They're degenerate matter -- made up entirely of neutrons pushed as close together as possible."

There are a couple of mind-blowing results from this.  One is that because ordinary matter is largely empty space and the degenerate matter in neutron stars isn't, neutron stars are dense beyond what you can imagine.  The estimate is that a matchbox-sized chunk of a neutron star would weigh three billion metric tons.  The other thing that is bizarre about them is that because most -- probably all -- stars spin, as the core collapses into a neutron star, reducing a spinning ball that was on the order of two million kilometers in diameter to one that is ten kilometers across, its spin rate increases.  A lot.  The Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum implies that if a spinning body decreases in radius, it has to increase in rotational rate -- something seen when figure skaters bring in their arms, making them spin faster and faster.

But that increase is peanuts compared to what happens here.  One of the first neutron stars discovered, at the center of the Crab Nebula, is spinning thirty times a second.  This makes it seem to flash off and on at that rate as beams of radiation aligned with its magnetic field sweep across the Earth like the beam from a lighthouse.  This is so hard to imagine that when they were first identified by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967, pulsars -- the name she gave to these flashing stars -- were thought to be signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence, and went by the code name LGM (Little Green Men).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA/Hubble, Moving heart of the Crab Nebula, CC BY 4.0]

All of this is by way of background for a news story that astronomers have observed, for the second time ever, the merger of two neutron stars.

The first time, you might recall, was almost two years ago, when two neutron stars in tight orbit finally coalesced, resulting in a pulse of gravitational waves that gave powerful support to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  This time, the merger was caught on x-ray camera -- as the collision occurred, it caused a shower of x-rays and left behind a single larger neutron star with an unimaginably huge magnetic field -- called a magnetar.

"We’ve found a completely new way to spot a neutron star merger," said Yongquan Xue, astronomer at University of Science and Technology of China and lead author of a paper on the subject that appeared two weeks ago in Nature.  "The behavior of this X-ray source matches what one of our team members predicted for these events."

I haven't told you what's the coolest thing about this.  The colliding neutron stars Xue et al. are studying aren't even in our own galaxy.  What they've done is develop a way to study the collision of two blobs of highly peculiar matter from a distance of six billion light years.

Which is not only an unimaginable distance, but means that the collision happened six billion years ago.  At that point, the Earth hadn't even completely coalesced from the primordial ring of dust and debris that formed it.  Six billion years is just shy of half the time between the Big Bang and now.

So I think you can label my mind blown.

Despite some of the stupid things humans do sometimes, you have to admire our ingenuity.  Sitting on this little speck of rock orbiting an ordinary star in the edge of one arm of an ordinary galaxy, we've found a way to probe the deepest secrets of the cosmos.  Or, as Carl Sagan put it:  "We are a way for the universe to know itself."

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Thursday, April 25, 2019

A map from the home world

One of the most persistent -- dare I say, canonical -- stories of alien abduction is the tale of Betty and Barney Hill.

The gist of the story is that the Hills, a couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from their vacation in September of 1961, and near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire they saw a UFO that seemed to be following them.  After observing it for a while, including through binoculars, they experienced a time-slip -- they found themselves back home without any memory of how they'd gotten there.  The following day, they noticed some oddities -- Barney's new dress shoes were scuffed, the leather strap on his binoculars was broken, neither of their watches worked, and there were several shiny concentric marks on the hood of their car.

They were puzzled, but no explanation seemed forthcoming, so they forgot about it -- until Betty started to have dreams about being aboard a spacecraft.  This eventually led to some hypnosis sessions in which both of them claimed to have suppressed memories of being abducted and examined (our lore about aliens doing, shall we say, rather intimate examination of abducted humans comes largely from Barney's claims under hypnosis).

All of this would be nothing more than your usual Close Encounter story -- lots of wild claims, nothing in the way of hard evidence -- if it weren't for one thing that Betty revealed.  While she was on the spaceship, she said, she was shown a star map that had the aliens' home world and various other star systems with lines between them showing "trade routes."  She attempted to reconstruct a two-dimensional drawing (she said the map she'd been shown was three-dimensional), and here's what she drew:


Now, potentially, this could be interesting.  One of the more eye-opening things I learned when I was a teenager watching the original Cosmos series was that the constellations in our night sky only seem 2-D from our perspective, but there's actually a third dimension -- depth -- that we can't see from Earth.  If you add that third dimension, it becomes obvious that what we call "constellations" are actually random assemblages of stars that only seem near each other from our perspective, but are actually at greatly varying distances from us.  This means that if they were observed from a different vantage point the constellations would look nothing like they do here at home, and in fact, many of the stars that appear to be close together would be widely separated in the sky.  (One of the coolest animations from the series was looking at the stars of the Big Dipper, first from the Earth, then making a huge circle around it -- it doesn't take much of a difference in angle to make it look nothing at all like the Big Dipper.)

So if Betty Hill's recollection of the alien star map was real, then it'd be pretty convincing -- because the aliens presumably would have drawn the stars from the perspective of their home star system, not ours.  This would be mighty hard to fake now, much less 58 years ago.  So the race was on to try and figure out whether the map Betty Hill drew conformed to any known configuration of stars as viewed from somewhere else in the galaxy.

The person whose answer is the most commonly accepted by UFO enthusiasts is Marjorie Fish, who identified the home world of the aliens as Zeta Reticuli (thus kicking off all of the claims that the Annunaki, the "Greys," and various other superintelligent species have come here from that star system).  Starting from that star, Fish said, there are nearby stars that could represent the ones on the Hill map.

Which brings up the problems with the claim.

Recall that the map is the only hard evidence -- if you can call it that -- to come out of the Hill story.  Brian Dunning, of the brilliant blog Skeptoid, is critical of the claim right from the get-go:
Several years [after the alleged abduction], a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish read a book about the Hills.  She then took beads and strings and converted her living room into a three dimensional version of the galaxy based on the 1969 Gliese Star Catalog.  She then spent several years viewing her galaxy from different angles, trying to find a match for Betty's map, and eventually concluded that Zeta Reticuli was the alien homeworld.  Other UFOlogists have proposed innumerable different interpretations.  Carl Sagan and other astronomers have said that it is not even a good match for Zeta Reticuli, and that Betty's drawing is far too random and imprecise to make any kind of useful interpretation.  With its third dimension removed, Betty's map cannot contain any useful positional information.  Even if she had somehow drawn a perfect 3D map that did exactly align with known star positions, it still wouldn't be evidence of anything other than that such reference material is widely available, in sources like the Gliese Star Catalog.
The problem runs deeper than that, though.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I did a while back on ley lines -- the idea that there are towns and sacred sites that are aligned because there are "energy currents" beneath the ground that flow in straight lines, and were the why the ancients chose to build on those specific sites.  The trouble is (as my post describes), in any arrangement of random dots, you can find strings of dots that are close to falling in a straight line, just by random chance.  No "energy currents" required.

Here, the difficulty is magnified by the fact that we don't just have a couple of hundred dots (or, in this case, stars), but tens of thousands, and that's just counting the relatively nearby ones.  Also, they're not on a flat surface, as with the ley lines; they're in a three-dimensional grid, which you're allowed to look at from any perspective you want to.

If those are were Marjorie Fish's constraints, it's actually astonishing that she took years to find a group of stars that matched Betty Hill's map.

We're pattern-finding animals, we humans.  As with pareidolia -- our capacity for seeing faces in inanimate objects like clouds, walls, and grilled-cheese sandwiches -- if there's no pattern there, our brains will often invent one.  Add to that confirmation bias and just plain wishful thinking, and it's not hard to see that the Hill map -- still considered the best evidence for the Hills' story -- is actually not much in the way of evidence at all.

Allow me to emphasize that I'm not saying Betty and Barney Hill weren't abducted.  It's just that -- to end with quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- "As a scientist, I need more than 'you saw it...'  If you have an actual object taken from a spacecraft, though, you'll have something of alien manufacture, and anything that has crossed interstellar space to get to Earth is going to be interesting.  So show me an object you've taken from the spaceship, and then we can talk."

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Wednesday, April 24, 2019

The terrible cost of inaction

I try not to be a one-issue voter, but it would be very hard for me to support a candidate for state or federal office who is not explicitly in favor of addressing the causes of anthropogenic climate change.

The jury is still out, of course, as to whether we might already be too late to avoid some of the worst repercussions.  The temperature is climbing at a rate not seen since the globally-catastrophic Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55-some-odd million years ago, and it's possible that the rate of the increase we're seeing now is actually higher.

And yet our politicians sit on their hands.  "The scientists are still uncertain" -- despite the fact that the ones harping on all the doubt are the mouthpieces of the fossil fuel industry, who are scared stiff that there'll be an administration that actually takes climate change seriously.  "It's a natural warm-up" -- despite mountains of evidence that this alteration in the climate is caused by man-made greenhouse gases like carbon and methane.  "It'd cost too much to fix" -- despite the fact that the cost of not doing anything is projected to run into the trillions of dollars.  (More on that in a moment.)  And -- most maddening of all -- "it was cold in January so the world isn't warming" -- which you hear from politicians who evidently failed ninth-grade earth science and never figured out the difference between "weather" and "climate."

We had two more pieces of research recently published that highlight how dire the situation has become.  In the first, a team led by Eric Rignot of the University of California - Irvine showed that the rate of ice loss from Greenland -- which has the world's second-largest on-land ice sheet -- has increased sixfold in the last fifty years.  Between 1980 and 1990, an estimated 51 billion tons of ice melted from the Greenland Ice Sheet; between 2010 and 2018 -- a two-year shorter time span -- 286 billion tons melted.  Of the rise in sea level attributable to Greenland ice melt, over half of it has occurred in the last eight years.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christine Zenino from Chicago, US, Greenland Ice Sheet, CC BY 2.0]

In an interview in the Washington Post, Rignot was unequivocal:
The 1980s marked the transition time when the Earth’s climate started to drift significantly from its natural variability as a result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases...  The entire periphery of Greenland is affected.  I am particularly concerned about the northern regions, which host the largest amount of potential sea-level rise and are already changing fast. 
In Antarctica, some big sleeping giants in East Antarctica are waking up, in addition to a large part of West Antarctica being significantly affected. None of this is good news.  We ought to prepare ourselves for what is coming up and take action as soon as possible to avoid the most drastic scenarios.
The second study, led by climatologist Dmitry Yumashev of Lancaster University, looked at it from the perspective of the only thing that seems to motivate most politicians -- money.  The authors write:
Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change through carbon releases from thawing permafrost and higher solar absorption from reductions in the surface albedo, following loss of sea ice and land snow.  Here, we include dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE to explore nonlinear transitions in the Arctic feedbacks and their subsequent impacts on the global climate and economy under the Paris Agreement scenarios.  The permafrost feedback is increasingly positive in warmer climates, while the albedo feedback weakens as the ice and snow melt.  Combined, these two factors lead to significant increases in the mean discounted economic effect of climate change: +4.0% ($24.8 trillion) under the 1.5 °C scenario, +5.5% ($33.8 trillion) under the 2 °C scenario, and +4.8% ($66.9 trillion) under mitigation levels consistent with the current national pledges.
Catch that?  Under the best case scenario, the economic cost by 2100 is projected at almost twenty-five trillion dollars.  That's "trillion," with a "t."  And the current Paris Agreement pledges don't even meet that.  If all the signatories meet their pledged targets for carbon emission, the cost is projected to be well over twice that.

Oh, and the United States, one of the top carbon emitters in the world, withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June of 2017 under an explicit directive from Donald Trump, using the excuse that the mandated targets would be "too expensive" and "economically disastrous for the United States."

You want to see economic disaster, Mr. Trump?  You ain't seen nothing yet.  Wait till rising sea levels start inundating coastal cities, requiring massive relocation.  And from the Rignot et al. study referenced above, the wait may not even be that long.

"It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us," Yumashev said in an interview with The Guardian.  "We have the technology and policy instruments to limit the warming but we are not moving fast enough."

Disheartening?  I'd call it "alarming," myself.

I know I've rung the changes on this topic many times, but I feel duty-bound to keep bringing it up because our leaders are still not doing anything.  There's been some lip-service to addressing climate change, but the propaganda machine that is bound and determined to label any recommendations for mitigation as left-wing ultra-green economically unfeasible claptrap has worked all too well.  So don't expect this to be the last time you hear about it here -- and, hopefully, elsewhere.  We'll keep yelling until the politicians wake up or get voted out of office.

It's too important an issue to do otherwise.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Bleach treatment

As I've commented more than once, every time I think I've plumbed the absolute nadir of human stupidity, I turn out to be wrong.

I found out about my most recent underestimate of idiocy thanks to a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link from Wonkette about a newly-formed church that has, as part of their doctrine, a recommendation to drink bleach.

It's called the "Genesis II Church," and is based in Washington State, where founder and... um... minister?  reverend?  head chemist?  Borgia-wannabee? Tom Merry promoted his religion via Facebook with the following:
I am thrilled to help bring effective alternative healing to the Pacific Northwest! Everyone knows someone sent home to die by their doctor because mainstream medicine can't do anything more for them. Bishop Mark Grenon will be leading the seminar and introducing attendees to Chlorine Dioxide Therapy, otherwise known as MMS; sharing the history of the discovery and development of MMS and its protocols by Jim Humble; and giving testimonies of health recovery wonders from around the world that are nothing short of miraculous.  Donation for registration is $450 per person; $800 for couples; and $400 for returning seminar students. And includes:
1. Membership Certificates.
2. 1 year membership.
3. Package of Sacraments (MMS, Activator, MMS 2, DMSO, Spray bottle, capsules, etc...)
4. Membership Id card. (Following the Seminar you must email us your photo and we will then make and mail your ID card to you, this is included in the Seminar Donation)
5. Light lunch for Sat. and Sun. Snacks & Coffee break also.
6. Genesis II Church Seminar pamphlet.
7. Link for all the Protocol Videos, PDF of Jims and Mark's ebooks, etc.
8. Free sign up to our Video course online, where you can study all the material and take the exam and become a G2 Church Health Minister.  You will have the knowledge to help heal many people of this world's terrible dis-eases.  Only now will you need to go and gain the experience. Go forth and heal!!!
"MMS" stands for "Miracle Mineral Solution," and for those of you not well-versed in chemistry, chlorine dioxide is the active ingredient in Clorox, and is also used to chlorinate swimming pools and bleach wood pulp.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons W. Oelen, Chlorine dioxide gas and solution, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So yes, the Wonkette headline was entirely accurate: they're trying to cure what ails you by getting you to pay $450 for the opportunity to drink bleach.  But hey, they're bringing snacks, so what the hell, right?

Or, you can spend $800 for the couples rate, and at least have the romantic perk of dying together.

I know people can fall for some silly pseudoscientific claims at times, and even more when those claims are attached to spiritual trappings, and even more when you throw in some fear-talk about "terrible dis-eases."  But for cryin' in the sink, you wouldn't think you'd have to explicitly say, "Oh, but don't drink bleach."  What's next?  Spelling out the reasons why you should keep your feet out of bear traps?  Not grab high-voltage wires?  Not pour weapons-grade plutonium on your head?

The Genesis II Facebook page has, as of this writing, been taken down, but Robyn Pennacchia, who wrote the Wonkette piece, said amongst other things it had a video of one of their people forcing a screaming, malaria-stricken baby in Uganda to drink "MMS."  As a selling point.

Besides malaria, the Genesis II people claim that drinking chlorine dioxide solution will also cure HIV, autism, acne, diabetes, and cancer (all kinds), as well as "counteracting the negative effects of x-rays and vaccinations."  So yes, we've now roped in yet another idiotic claim, the anti-vaxx thing, as well as scaring people about getting medically-necessary x-rays as part of diagnosing what is really wrong with them.

I'm finding it hard to believe that these people aren't being prosecuted for making false medical claims, but to be fair, I don't know the details of which laws would apply.  The makers of a lot of "alt-med" curealls avoid being sued by writing -- usually in very small print -- "this product is not intended to cure, treat, diagnose, or heal any human ailment" somewhere on the bottle, but here, it's hard to see how what they wrote can be construed as anything other than literal medical advice.

But the Facebook page is down, which is a start.  I mean, I'm a believer in caveat emptor and all that kind of thing, and that the Darwin Award Principle means that idiotic behavior improves the quality of the gene pool for the rest of us, but this is just flat-out indefensible.  And it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether they're calling it a "religion;" what they're claiming, and to judge by the video from Uganda actually doing to people, is causing significant harm.

So somehow, someone needs to step in and stop these people.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Monday, April 22, 2019

Going against the flow

Two of the most extensively-tested laws of physics are the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics -- and in the nearly two centuries since they were first formulated, there has not been a single exception found.

The First Law is the less shocking one.  It's sometimes called the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, and says simply that in a closed system, the total amount of matter and energy does not change.  You can turn one into the other, or change its form, but the total quantity doesn't vary.  Unsurprising, and in fact can seem a little circular given that this is how a closed system is defined in the first place.

The Second Law is where things get interesting.  It can be formulated a variety of ways, but the simplest is that in a closed system, the amount of entropy (disorder) always increases.  If entropy is being decreased somewhere (the system is becoming more orderly) it always requires (1) an input of energy, and (2) that somewhere else entropy is increasing, and that increase is larger than the localized decrease.  An example is the human body.  When you go from a single fertilized egg cell to an adult, your overall entropy decreases significantly.  But in the process, you are taking the food molecules you eat and (1) extracting their energy, and (2) increasing their entropy monumentally by chopping them up into little pieces and strewing the pieces about.  So you're able to locally decrease your own entropy, but you leave behind a trail of chaos wherever you go.

Or, as my thermodynamics professor in college put it, a lot of years ago: the First Law says you can't win; the Second Law says you can't break even.  Explaining why the United States Patent Office's official policy is that any application that claims to have a working model of a perpetual motion machine goes directly into the trash without being read any further.

The Carnot Heat Engine [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this is by way of background for a paper that appeared last week in Science, called, "Heat Flowing From Cold to Hot Without External Intervention by Using a 'Thermal Inductor," by Andreas Schilling, Xiaofu Zhang, and Olaf Bossen of the University of Zurich.  Because in this paper, the three physicists have demonstrated the passage of heat energy from a colder object to a warmer one, without any external energy input -- something first shown as impossible by French physicist Sadi Carnot in 1824.

The authors write:
The cooling of boiling water all the way down to freezing, by thermally connecting it to a thermal bath held at ambient temperature without external intervention, would be quite unexpected.  We describe the equivalent of a “thermal inductor,” composed of a Peltier element and an electric inductance, which can drive the temperature difference between two bodies to change sign by imposing inertia on the heat flowing between them, and enable continuing heat transfer from the chilling body to its warmer counterpart without the need of an external driving force.
When I read this, I sat up, squinted at my computer screen, and uttered an expression of surprise that I will leave to your imagination.  In my AP Biology class, I always described the Laws of Thermodynamics as two of the most unshakeable laws of science -- two rules that are never, ever broken.  The idea that three scientists in Switzerland had taken a simple Peltier element -- a type of heat pump often found in refrigerators -- and made it run without expending any energy was earthshattering.

But before you dust off your plans for a perpetual motion machine, read the next lines in the paper:
We demonstrate its operation in an experiment and show that the process can pass through a series of quasi-equilibrium states while fully complying with the second law of thermodynamics.  This thermal inductor extends the analogy between electrical and thermal circuits and could serve, with further progress in thermoelectric materials, to cool hot materials well below ambient temperature without external energy supplies or moving parts.
I'm not going to claim I fully understand how this all works, and how despite the system's bizarre behavior it still obeys the Second Law, but apparently the key point is that despite the heat energy flowing the "wrong way," the system still gains entropy overall.

Which, I must say, was a bit of a relief.

It's still a pretty fantastic discovery.  "With this very simple technology, large amounts of hot solid, liquid or gaseous materials could be cooled to well below room temperature without any energy consumption," study co-author Andreas Schilling said, in a press release from Phys.org. "Theoretically, this experimental device could turn boiling water to ice, without using any energy."

So don't believe any of the hype that I'm already seeing on dubiously-accurate websites, to the effect that "An Exception Has Been Discovered to the Laws of Thermodynamics!  Physicists Dismayed!  Textbooks Will Have to be Rewritten!"  It's a curiosity, sure, and pretty cool, and sounds like it will have a good many applications, but you shouldn't discount everything you learned in physics class quite yet.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Saturday, April 20, 2019

Whoozagooboy?

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers of Skeptophilia that I am a dog person, given how often they come up in my posts.

Dogs, in general, like me way better than people do.  Years ago I went over to a friend's house for the first time, and she warned me about her neurotic, high-strung dog who -- direct quote -- "you should just ignore because otherwise she freaks out."  Within fifteen minutes, said high-strung dog was lying next to me on the couch, head in my lap, snoring.

My own dogs, Guinness and Lena, are a bit of an odd pair themselves.  Guinness is a pit bull/husky mix who is sweet and cuddly sometimes, and at other times seventy pounds of spring-loaded bounce. 

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille."

Lena, on the other hand, is a redbone/bluetick coonhound cross who is beautiful, laid-back, and has the IQ of a PopTart.  We had a good laugh at her yesterday because we called to the dogs out of our second-floor window, Guinness immediately looked up, saw us, and started wagging, whereas Lena spent the next fifteen minutes looking behind trees and bushes, wondering where Mommy and Daddy were hiding.

She never did find us.  Mommy and Daddy are pretty damn intrepid.

"Hi!  I love you!  You look familiar!  Who are you, again?"

So it's no wonder that I'm fascinated with dog behavior, and also the history of the human/dog association.  Which is why I was really excited to read about some research done jointly by Historic Environment Scotland and the National Museum of Scotland to reconstruct an ancestral dog from a 4.500 year old skull found in the Orkney Islands.

This Neolithic pooch was one of 24 dog skulls found at Cuween Hill, a burial site dating from about 2,500 B.C.E.  Archaeologists have surmised that this sort of thing generally means that the animal in question was some sort of totem; other tombs in the Orkneys have had similar deposits, one of the bones of sea eagles, the other of red deer.

"Perhaps the people who lived in the [Cuween Hill] area at the time saw themselves as 'the dog people'," said Alison Sheridan, principal archaeological research curator in the department of Scottish history and archaeology at the National Museum.  Whether or not that's true, these people, she said, clearly had a "special association" with their dogs.

"When you look at a Neolithic dog, it somehow communicates human relationships, and I can relate to that," said Steve Farrar, interpretation manager at Historic Environment Scotland.  "I can empathize with the people whose ingenuity made Orkney such an enormously important place.  When this dog was around, northwest Europe looked to Orkney."

So without further ado, here's a photograph of the reconstruction:

I think we can all agree that this is definitely the face of a Good Boy.  [Image courtesy of Santiago Arribas/Historic Environment Scotland]

So the dog/human relationship has been around for a long, long time.  Doesn't surprise me, really, given how easily they find their way into our hearts.  But I'm going to have to wind this up, because Guinness wants to play ball, and y'know, priorities.

**********************************

Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]