Newsweek and the Washington Post are hosting a dialogue on the subject of faith and the possibility of coexistence between religions. Contributors so far include the Dalai Lama and Mohammad Khatami. Interesting to hear them speak, and to see people's responses.

There has been significant progress towards sequencing Neanderthal DNA, and there are hopes of having an almost complete sequence in a year or so. This opens all kinds of doors to looking at what, genetically, makes us human.

On a related note, Slate is running an article about cross-species mating, and in particular why humans could or could not breed with other species. (This was prompted by a recent paper suggesting that humans and Neanderthals may have mated, and that's the origin of some of our modern cranial capacity genes)

Back in the land of geopolitics, a Chinese sub managed to sneak up on a US carrier group. Apart from sdragon's comment that someone O4+ is going to be in seriously deep shit over this, this suggests that they've been doing quite well on the technology needed to make highly silent motors and so on. (Whether they did so on their own or "acquired" this technology from elsewhere is an interesting question. China's military has certainly never suffered from not-invented-here syndrome.)

There's really a lot having to do with China going on right now. China and Iran are cementing an alliance, with Iranian oil getting ready to flow east. (Question: Anyone have some info as to what the routes are going to be? It looks like every possible path is going to involve some combination of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, which could make for some very exciting places to put oil pipelines. Don't forget what happened to Russia's Caspian -> Turkey pipeline, that once upon a time went through Chechnya...) Iran may well have had observers at N Korea's nuclear test. (Unconfirmed rumors, but wouldn't be all that surprising if true; those countries have been working hand-in-hand on this for a while.) China is similarly making alliances with a lot of other dubious places that have useful resources, like the Sudan and Zimbabwe, but that the West by and large wants nothing to do with. This certainly makes the notion of sanctions as a weapon pretty much infeasible, since that depends on some sort of unity, and could bring us back towards a bipolar world -- if, that is, China's "burn through the environment as fast as needed to get economic progress" algorithm doesn't hit a really nasty obstacle in the near future. Which is not something that I would bet against. (Side note: They're burning through this a lot faster than the US or Europe ever did, because they have a much higher population, and they have old systems in place which turn into a huge social unrest risk if they don't keep the economy flowing. Add to this an almost total willingness to sacrifice the countryside to protect the cities, again because of unrest risk, and there's a real problem brewing in China. Not that this would be useful to the furthering of US interests or anything.)

Really, China is in an interesting fix. They got where they are today by being the cheapest producer of all sorts of things. Now other Asian countries, especially in SE Asia, are thinking about competing with them; so what will China do? Keep trying to undercut them, or move into higher-end markets? The latter is more sustainable in general, but it doesn't necessarily scale to a huge population quite as smoothly, and China has been moving so fast that it hasn't really had time to transfer the benefits from its previous wave of growth to the population as a whole, so the moderating factor that that would create isn't available. And trouble from the countryside, local riots, complete collapses of regions due to ecosystem failure, and so on, keep happening more and more often, while people keep streaming into already-overloaded cities. It reminds me a bit of the USSR: it looks awfully menacing on the outside, but if you look at their underlying logistics and infrastructure, there's a very different thing going on.

Dammit, I'm not nearly enough of a China expert. Perhaps I'm going to need to start on that.

For once, have some good news. It looks like Katrina was a wake-up call for one group that realized it had a lot to lose from climate change: the insurance industry. And because insurance companies are very big, they have direct influence over the polluters at the same time that they're exposed to risk from the polluters screwing up. (If they were smaller and more specialized, that wouldn't be the case -- an insurer just of power plants wouldn't be nearly as worried about flood risks as a general insurer) So apparently, they're starting to do things about it.

I see this as really promising: It's a case where being very big gives a company a much broader perspective on consequences. (It reminds me of some recent articles comparing HMO's to the VA. Since the VA is stuck with people for their whole lives, in essence, it makes them think a lot more about preventive care, general quality-of-life, and so on, rather than on short-term solutions whose long-term costs they can remove by dumping patients. Sometimes, a company being big can be a very good thing for the world.)

Politics: Riots in Hungary, a military coup in Thailand. (Random note about the latter: when we were in Thailand a few months ago, I told autumnflames that it was good that we went then, since there had been unrest a few months before and there was going to be a coup by October. I don't actually know much of anything about Thai politics; it was clear enough that picking up the paper a few times and staring out the window was information enough to tell. It's too bad there isn't an obvious way to do something useful with "there will be a coup here on such a date" information, apart from the usual "get you and everyone you care about out of the way.")

Israel says it will pull the last of its troops from Lebanon by this weekend. At some point I'll write a big post about all of the politics around this, really.

Potentially (much) more important news: Major openings forming in the Arctic ice sheet. They quote Mark Drinkwater of the European Space Administration as saying that the North Polar Sea should be seasonally navigable in 10-20 years. Key conclusion: If you can get your hands on land way up North, especially useful sea ports, now would be a good time. There will be shipping traffic there, there will be oil exploration, and if James Lovelock's really gloomy predictions come to pass, it may be some of the most pleasant real estate left on the planet 100 years from now...

And your oddball news: A recent study of almost 25k women with breast implants showed that they did not have a significantly higher mortality rate than women without them. They did, however, have a 73% higher suicide rate than the population as a whole.

Again, not yet the big politics post. Instead, some interesting things:

Grigory Perelman declined the Fields Medal, as he has declined a host of other honors and awards in the past, for his proof of Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture. This conjecture basically states that there are eight basic pieces, and some simple surgery rules, out of which all possible three-dimensional compact surfaces can be built, and therefore we can classify all 3D compact surfaces. A compact surface is roughly speaking one that fits into a finite region; for example, in two dimensions, the surface of a sphere is compact, as is the surface of a donut, but a flat plane isn't. Proving Thurston's Conjecture also proves the Poincaré Conjecture, which roughly states that the only 3D compact surface that has no holes in it that you could wrap a string around (like you could wrap a string around the inner hole of the surface of a donut, and it couldn't shrink because it would get "caught") is a 3-dimensional sphere. It's a major problem in mathematics that has been open for over a century, and Thurston's conjecture is a regular tool of various fields of physics and applied math.

And perhaps even more excitingly, a smoking gun for the existence of Dark Matter has been found. A team pointed the Chandra X-ray observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and various other telescopes at a place where two clusters of galaxies had collided and gone through each other. They could clearly see that the "luminous" part of the galaxies had gone past one another and were well-separated, but 90% of the mass -- as visible by its gravitational effects on light -- was somehow still in the middle, and completely transparent. Apparently, the luminous matter had kept on going, but there was so much dark matter that the two big lumps from each galaxy cluster had rammed into each other and come to a stop. This confirms the existence of what's technically known as non-baryonic cold dark matter. "Dark" means that it isn't luminous or visible to the eye; "cold" means that it isn't a gas of photons or neutrinos, since those disperse much more quickly; "non-baryonic" means that it isn't made of any ordinary kind of matter, and we know that because of how transparent it is relative to its mass. (In fact, its transparency tells us that whatever it is doesn't interact electromagnetically very much, or perhaps at all.) Previous investigations have suggested that the universe is about 70% dark energy (which is not visible to the eye, but unlike dark matter, doesn't form clumps or shapes; it's just uniformly spread out), 27% dark matter, and 3% luminous matter; this experiment confirms the dark matter / luminous matter ratio, and all previous hypotheses about the dark matter, very beautifully.

Now, the next question is just what it is made of...

I just finished reading through the second part of the GISS-E climate modelling paper. I'll write a summary later, either a technical one for climatepapers or a non-technical one for here, but that's going to take a while, and this is important.

Everyone, you need to read this document carefully, specifically sections 6-8, including the figures. Those sections require not much more than knowing what a standard deviation is and that a "climate forcing" means "any input to the ecosystem that can affect climate." The first five sections, short version, say that the model has proven pretty good at predicting global-scale climate change for 1880-2003, it's not as good at predicting regional change, and its main weaknesses are an ocean model that doesn't understand El Niño and a sea ice model that nobody really trusts. My professional opinion is that it's definitely good enough to rely on its numbers for global-scale analyses, but it may underestimate ice melting. (And the authors freely admit the latter)

Sections 6-8 talk about their models for the period 2003-2100, according to five models: "alternative", "2C", and three from the Intl Panel on Climate Change.

I know this is a bit of a technical thing to be asking people to read, but this is probably the most important thing that's crossed my desk in years, and we need to start planning urgently. Pay particular attention to figures 19, 20 and 22.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem. This outweighs anything on the political arena short of global thermonuclear war. I don't think I could summarize what IPCC scenario A2 would look like by 2100 and have you believe me; but I would say that that scenario implies a real chance of a major population collapse, up to and including extinction and certainly impacting the viability of civilization.

The good news is, the two best scenarios (Alt and 2C) would leave us coming out fairly OK, and both of those are reachable with modern technology and not too much trouble; getting from here to there seems to require policy changes rather than anything enormously terrifying. The figures in the paper describe what emissions goals we would have to hit.

I'll write up a more detailed summary later, and try to pull the key information out of this document.

BTW, I posted the first part of the first paper to climatepapers

Per the previous post, I just created the climatepapers community. Everyone who's interested, sign on!

As a result of various conversations recently (and especially hearing Al Gore give his new talk a few weeks ago -- preemptive plug, when his new movie An Inconvenient Truth comes out, go see it. If it's half as interesting as his lecture it will be worth it), I've started to get very interested in learning about the state of the art in understanding the climate and how it's changing.

The short answer is somewhere between "real trouble" and "REALLY BIG trouble." But I'd like to understand things a bit more specifically than that.

To that end, I've started to assemble a list of papers that seem to represent the current state-of-the-art in the field, and this list is sure to grow as I read through more of them and follow reference chains. In fact, I'm planning on posting something soon with a generally readable summary of one of them.

But this got me thinking: Learning a subject is better done with many people. Would anyone be interested in forming an impromptu online journal club to learn about climate modelling, climate change, and all things related? (For those of you who haven't participated in these before, what would be involved is everyone picking a paper, [or part of one for a really long paper] reading it thoroughly enough to write a good summary and explain everything that goes on in it, and then posting their summary and having a discussion about it. A typical rate is every week, someone else is responsible for a paper. It's a great way to learn a new technical subject.)

The minimum background for doing this seems to be a reasonable science or engineering background; from what I've read of the papers so far, they don't have a lot of obscure jargon beyond "stratosphere" and "sea ice," just a lot of graphs, plots, and discussion of how they got them. For those without a heavy tech background, it should still be possible (and fun, and interesting) to be part of the discussion.

I've got a few papers in my list already, from the GISS-E group:
( Possible papersCollapse )

Anyone interested?

Edit: It now exists: climatepapers. Join up!

There is liquid water on Saturn's moon Enceladus.