Blog

Just over a week ago I received an interesting call from a science magazine reporter. He asked me what do I think about the recent discovery of the Quantum Electrodynamic (QED) produced vacuum birefringence around neutron stars. It was an interesting surprise as my colleague Jeremey Heyl at the University of British Columbia and I had what seemed to be a bizarre prediction back in around 1998, a prediction which seems to have been verified almost 2 decades later. So, what is the effect and what was measured?

Willis Eschenbach had a post on wattsupwiththat.com attacking my post on this blog, which explains why the new sunspot reconstruction may be irrelevant to the solar climate link and also discusses the recent paper I have co-written. I am not writing it as comments on whatupwiththat is for several reasons, but the main one is because Eschenbach's comments were condescending and pejorative.

After being asked by 5 independent people about the new sunspot number reconstruction and that it doesn’t show that the sun should have contributed any warming to the 20^th century, I decided to write about it here. I have one word to describe it – irrelevant. It is also a good opportunity to write about new results (well, one that saw the light of day a few months ago) showing again that the sun has a large effect on climate. Yet, the world will still continue to ignore it. Am I surprised? No I’m not.

Two weeks ago a science magazine paper appeared claiming that once various systematic errors in the sea surface temperature are corrected for, the global warming “hiatus” is gone. Yep, vanished as if it was never there. According to the study, temperatures over the past 18 years or so have in fact continued rising as they did in the preceding decades. Here’s my two pennies worth opinion of it.

I recently stumbled on a transcript of Bill “the science guy” Nye’s interview on CNN last week. In it, he said that climate skeptics (i.e., people like myself), are at least as bad as people who deny that smoking causes cancer. There are quite a few things he misses, in fact, he got things totally wrong, but I do like the his analogy to smoking and cancer as you’ll see.

Last month I visited the U of Washington to give a talk in which I discussed the effects of cosmic rays on climate. At the end of it, not one, but two people independently asked me about Overholt et al., which supposedly ruled out the idea that passages through the galactic spiral arms affect the appearance of glaciations on Earth. I told them that the paper had really stupid mistakes and it should be discarded in the waste bin of history, but given that Overholt et al. is still considered at all, I have no choice but to more openly euthanize it.

Since I look for interesting science bits (mostly astro bits) for the Monday coffee of our astrophysics group, I realized that I could share it with the readers including some interpretation (and hopefully some added value) by your humble servant. So, here’s my try. If it works (and won’t be too much time) I’ll continue! Although for the coffee I bring mostly astrophysics and some planetary science, here I’ll also try to bring interesting results in climate (those that aren't lame...).

The recent bashing of Willie Soon from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the NY Times exemplifies, I think, how the climate debate has long left the realm of science, and it also demonstrates how scientific research is most often funded, quite the opposite of what is generally portrayed!

I was recently asked to write an article to “The Institute Letter” of Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where I am spending a wonderful sabbatical year. It briefly describes a very interesting discovery that my colleagues and I made, which is that the 32 million year oscillation of the solar system perpendicular to the galactic plane can clearly be seen in the paleoclimate data. In the article, I also discuss how the discovery came and some of its implications. I am bringing a slightly expanded version here (with more figures and elaborated caption), and references of course. Enjoy.

About a year ago I decided to upgrade the site, but didn't get to finish it. The fact that the old site was eventually infected with a virus left me no choice but to finish the job! I hope you like it. Also, given that I am now on sabbatical, it is not unlikely that you will even get to see fresh posts!

I just found out that a dear friend had passed away. Nigel Calder was the voice of rationality within a sea of extreme, something which is very much missing in the global warming debate. He didn't accept things for granted, but on the other hand didn't make extreme claims in the opposite direction either. He was simply driven by science (i.e., curiosity). One of his interests was of course that of climate.

The IPCC summary for policy makers is out, and as I started writing these lines so was the last draft of the main report. Of course, it will take a while to digest the 2200 pages of the full report (it has a lot of starch!). Until I do, here are my first impressions from having read the summary and having skimmed the full scientific report.

Spring weather here in Israel was rather strange. Although winter with most of its precipitation should have been over, we had a few very rainy days. We're now in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures as much as 20°C higher than just a week before. In between there was a nice gravity wave appear over the Arava Valley, the first one I have ever seen in a rain radar!

A very interesting paper recently appeared in nature. It describes the detection of a precursor eruption of a supernova progenitor more than a month before the supernova explosion itself. It is particularly interesting because this detection was not serendipitous—it was based on my prediction.

Last month I participated in EIKE's (Europäisches Institut für Klima und Energie) conference on Climate Change. They video record the lectures, which means that mine is now online. I thought I'd share it with you. Have fun.