Climate coverage
I have just read your editorial, which discusses the current situation in the field of climate change research (28 November, p 5). In particular you say “that there should be a place in the scientific dialogue for critics to make their views known, for the heretics who are not part of the scientific consensus”.
In so far as some sceptics and deniers are proclaiming that carbon dioxide-induced anthropogenic global warming may be “the scientific fraud of the century” then surely the issues surrounding it must be the scientific debate of the century. I suggest that New 杏吧原创 should lead the way by providing a forum for critics.
From Brian Brown
Your editorial urges climate change researchers not to “treat their detractors as enemies”. However, I wonder if you realise just how combative your own language is when you call those who might challenge climate change orthodoxy “deniers” 鈥� people who reject the truth. Even the word “sceptic” implies mistrust of another.
The language used feeds a feeling of ill will towards those who might question current orthodoxy. 杏吧原创s should treat each other with respect, even if they are in disagreement.
Dronfield, Derbyshire, UK
The editor writes:
鈥� New 杏吧原创 reports on findings from peer-reviewed literature, and our coverage of climate change reflects this. Our Opinion section provides a forum for airing various views on the subject 鈥� such as our report in the same issue on the hopes of leading figures for the Copenhagen conference (28 November, p 28).
Mustn't do better
Michael Bond’s article on the relationship between IQ scores and rational decision-making was interesting (31 October, p 36).
When I left university in 1965,I graduated well inside the lower quartile, yet within 10 years of starting work at General Electric I’d accumulated more than 10 patents, then a total of more than 20 over the next 10 years.
In discussion with two senior colleagues holding numerous patents, it turned out none of us had performed well at university, yet a Rhodes scholar colleague held just a single patent. I suspect we should cease measuring intelligence using IQ scores until we know more about it, because the result is clearly misleading.
Starship fantasy
Marcus Chown suggests that we might achieve interstellar travel with the use of a fantastic starship consisting of a million-tonne black hole which will be created at the focus of a parabolic mirror, providing a massive thrust due to the reflection of Hawking radiation (28 November, p 34).
The question is: once the ship has started moving, how do you persuade the black hole to tag along? It does, after all, weigh a million tonnes. A cavity-wall fixing screwed into its middle will hardly suffice.
Apart from other small details, the energy needed to accelerate it to near light speed will, even assuming an improbable 100 per cent efficiency, consume more than all of the energy it has to give. Braking would also be a problem, let alone getting home.
From Rafe Culpin
Chown proposes a starship powered by a form of dark matter which annihilates itself when compressed, but he fails to explain why such a form of dark matter would not have vanished immediately it appeared shortly after the big bang, when it was extremely compressed, like normal matter.
He also suggests a ship powered using the Hawking radiation from a small black hole without explaining why the black hole would follow it. Perhaps a huge static charge on the hole and some kind of electromagnetic field from the ship?
London, UK
Sleepfighter
I have suffered since early adulthood from a sleep disorder in which I fight in my sleep, like the person described in your recent article on sleepwalking (28 November, p 12). Thirty-five years ago I came within an ace of strangling my wife while, I thought, repelling the onslaught of a little yellow duck from Barclays Bank. I vividly recall the dream to this day.
The simple and effective solution to this problem, at least for the safety of my wife, was for us to swap sides of the bed. Ever since then, the most dramatic effect has been for these struggles to be brutally terminated by my falling 2 feet to the floor, leaving many surreal memories of fights to the death, while my wife snoozes happily at my back.
Rainforest fears
Discussing the destruction of rainforests for financial gain, Eric Worrall rightly points out that rich countries are in no position to lecture poorer ones on conservation (10 October, p 27).
But he fails to consider that there are means by which rainforest areas can be used without wrecking them, such as those noted by E. O. Wilson in , his book on ecosystems in crisis. Cultivation of trees, integrated farming and game ranching are all alternatives. In the UK, old-fashioned mixed farming is often cited as the basis of today’s biodiversity.
Of course, putting these ideas into practice requires investment and a willingness to cut down on luxuries, or even forgo them entirely. Though it is ecologically insane to clear rainforests for cheap foodstuffs, biofuels and minerals, the destruction is lucrative for some, and generates jobs in the short term.
Sounder alternatives need investment up front and a desire to put both local people and conservation ahead of western consumers’ convenience.
From Bryn Glover
Eric Worrall seems to believe that the destruction of rainforests provides significant long-term benefit for these areas’ indigenous peoples. While such activities may allow a few individuals and their families to lift themselves out of poverty, the greatest beneficiaries will be the investors from the developed world who are behind the deforestation. Any local benefits will be short-lived; poverty will return once all the timber has gone.
He also repeats the notion that the rainforests belong to the indigenous peoples. Human beings have long acted as if the world exists for their benefit: the rich world has pursued this fallacy for centuries, and the result has been environmental chaos. It will only get worse if we continue on the same path.
Worrall suggests that the only way to protect the remaining rainforests may be for the rich world to buy off the poor world. If that really is the only option, then however much it may cost, and for however long it is necessary, that is what must happen.
Cracoe, North Yorkshire, UK
Noddy in space?
Feedback mocks the statement made by Noddy Holder of Slade in the lyrics of their song Far Far Away, “I’ve seen the sunset in the East and in the West”, suggesting the band must have travelled to Venus in order to achieve this (Feedback, 28 November).
Seeing “the sunset in the east” is not the same as seeing “the sun set in the east” as you know very well. A ticket to John O’Groats on the furthest tip of Scotland would give Feedback an opportunity to see the sunset in the North.
From Andrew Fisher
Holder need not go to Venus to see the sun set in the east. In near-Earth orbit travelling east to west he could see the sun set in the east every 90 minutes or so. A westward-travelling Concorde would also have done the trick, and even a subsonic airliner at high latitudes can provide this experience.
Weybridge, Surrey, UK
From John MacLeary
The most plausible explanation for Slade having seen the sun set in the east is that the band have actually been around since before the last geomagnetic reversal. Before the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, approximately 780,000 years ago, the sunrise would have been in the west.
Winsford, Cheshire, UK
Blaming his tools
Paul Collins’s review of Jimena Canales’s book A Tenth of a Second states that Canales argues that the effect of human reaction time was highlighted by “astronomers recording the transit of Venus in 1874: precisely timing anything through an eyepiece was bedevilled by human error” (24 October, p 49).
However, Glenn Schneider and I have shown that the accuracy of the transit-of-Venus results were in fact bedevilled by the “black-drop effect” 鈥� the distortion of the outline of Venus as it completes its passage across the face of the sun (see, for example, ).
Based on space observations of a transit of Mercury, we showed that the black-drop effect can be explained as a composite of the inherent resolution limit of the telescope being used and the apparent darkening of the edge of the sun’s disc due to light being absorbed by gases surrounding the sun. These effects imposed about 1 minute of uncertainty on observations of 18th and 19th-century transits of Venus 鈥� far greater than the effect of human error.
Fly like a bird
The wingsuit adventurers who wish to land without parachutes might benefit from an afternoon’s observation of the goings-on in my backyard (14 November, p 41).
When birds come in to land on a tree, they swoop lower than the branch they are aiming for, then glide upwards. This slows them almost to a standstill as they land on their chosen perch.
The wingsuit flyers could follow their example: select a place like the Grand Canyon, swoop into the canyon just below the rim, then glide upwards to clear the rim and cut their speed.
Do it right, and they may not even need to bend their knees on landing. It would, of course, be safer to overshoot slightly than to fail to reach the rim.
For the record
鈥� The Ordnance Survey’s 3D maps are more precise then we reported (28 November, p 24). They are accurate to 4 centimetres in each direction.