Friday, November 13, 2009
Two years ago the elected council of the American Physical Society adopted
a strongly worded statement calling for reduction in the emission of
greenhouse gases. The statement called the evidence for global
warming "incontrovertible," which is about as far as you can go in that
direction. There are, however, eminent physicists who do not agree. They
petitioned the Council for a reconsideration of its statement. APS
president Cherry Murray appointed an ad hoc committee, chaired by Dan
Kleppner, to consider whether the statement needed to be revisited. The
council overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the statement with
one favored by those who deny anthropogenic climate change, but the
society's Panel On Public Affairs will review it for "possible
improvements."
There is no place else to go. If global warming is real and we're the
cause, we need to mend our ways. We are not going to clean up the Earth's
atmosphere by burying carbon. There are just two things we can do: make
fewer people, and use energy more efficiently. The first seems to be
mostly a human rights problem; the second falls squarely on our shoulders,
but it won't help if the fertility rate remains high. But what if carbon
in the atmosphere is not a problem as the deniers insist? We ought to
promote efficiency anyway, if only for the sake of future generations.
Cell phones may lead to neural atrophy as mindless chatter is substituted
for coherent information, but they don't cause brain cancer. This week,
however, a doctoral thesis at a university in Sweden suggested that cell
phones are linked to some brain cancers. It went around the world in
Science Daily on Wednesday. This imaginary link is "discovered" about every
five years or so. Photons induce cancer by the photoelectric effect,
breaking chemical bonds and creating mutant strands of DNA. In 2001, I was
invited to write an editorial on cell phone hazards for the Journal of the
National Cancer Institute (JNCI, Vol. 93, Feb 7, 2001, p. 166). I pointed
out that the photoelectric effect would require photon energies at the
extreme blue end of the visible spectrum, which is why it's the ultraviolet
rays in sunlight that cause skin cancer. Microwave photons are about
10,000 times less energetic. In a classic 2001 op-ed, LBL physicist Robert
Cahn observed that Albert Einstein discovered in 1905 that microwaves
couldn't cause cancer. The cell phone scare was launched in 1993 on the
Larry King Live Show, which is not peer reviewed. It almost strangled the
infant cell-phone industry in its crib, but researchers found nothing.
Ten days ago as CERN prepared for the turn on the giant collider their work
was interrupted by dangerous overheating in sector 81. A bit of a
baguette, perhaps dropped by a passing bird, fell into an electrical
substation on the surface far above. Why would a bird do this? Or was it
a bird? Could it be, as we reported a month ago, that God just doesn't
like the Higgs? http://bobpark.umd.edu/WN09/wn101509.html Or has the
staggering responsibility of searching for the God particle finally driven
some physicists at CERN over the edge?
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