Month: May 2021

With all of the new discoveries that seem to be making almost monthly, it is sometimes hard to remember that finding exoplanets is still a relatively new and difficult science. As part of these ongoing discoveries, a team announced back in 2018 that it had found a planetary candidate around Barnard’s star, one of the closest to ours. Now another team has reanalyzed the data, collected some new data, and determined that the planet detection was likely false positive.

A variety of factors have been suggested as the cause of the false positive. However, the easiest thing to do is to consider the method of detection, the star’s period of rotation, and a signal processing artifact.

The team that originally discovered the planet was known as CARMENES, a consortium of Spanish and German astronomers. They performed their due diligence and monitored the star over a period of 23 years using 7 different data collection tools. In fact, they weren’t the first group to suggest that the star system, second closest to our own, might have a planet. In 1963, an astronomer named Peter van de Kamp claimed to have found a planet around the star in what was then the first discovery of an exoplanet. This finding was later unmasked by a large number of researchers who also used the astrometry method, but could not reproduce the “wobble” found by van de Kamp.

Discussion of the astrometry method of exoplanet hunting.
Photo credit: ESA YouTube Channel

Fast forward to 2018 and the CARMENES team announce their new planet around Barnard’s star, which they found using the radial velocity method (RV). This method relies on the slight blue and red shift that occurs when a star approaches or retreats from us, caused by the gravitational pull of a planet it orbits.

Some factors confuse these RV measurements. One that appears to have caused the false positive around Barnard’s star results from the star’s period of rotation. Barnard’s star has an extremely slow rotation – about 145 days, which is almost six times longer than the Sun’s 25-day period of rotation.

Barnard’s star is close enough that it can actually move against the stellar background over the decades. It has the fastest rate of motion of any star
Photo credit: Steve Quirk

This period of rotation is important for several reasons. First, sunspots are difficult to account for in RV measurements because they can easily be interpreted as a displacement. To take this into account, scientists usually collect data for more than one revolution in a row to see if they can track the sunspot as it rotates around the star. Unfortunately, the total observation time of Barnard’s Star is only about 270 days, which means that scientists cannot collect data over two full revolutions at the same time. Sunspots can also exist on M dwarf stars (of which Barnard is one) for more than 10 revolutions, so that sunspots can influence the RV values ​​of the star even over several observation periods.

According to a team at the Habitable Planet Finder (HPF), that’s exactly what happened. What she first pointed out to this possibility was the orbital period of the proposed planet. After 233 days it could be detected during a single observation window. However, there is a quirk of signal processing called aliasing that makes this period unlikely.

Example of the aliasing of a periodic signal. If samples are only taken at points 1,5 and 9, one of the two signals will match the data.
Photo credit: Andrew Jarvis, Wikimedia Commons

Periods of 145 days (the star’s rotation period) and 233 days (the proposed planet’s orbit) are aliases of each other. Aliasing occurs when data is only sampled intermittently. This is exactly what happens when ground-based telescopes can no longer observe the star due to the earth’s rotation or its position around the sun – hence the 270-day observation window mentioned above.

When a signal is sampled “sparingly”, the resulting data can be fitted by several sinusoidal patterns. These sparsely sampled data points can also be affected by the sunspots noted above. In fact, they can do so in ways that can create a false positive that the HPF team believes happened in the case of the exoplanet at Barnard’s star.

UT-Video Video in which Barnard’s star is partly discussed as the closest star in the northern hemisphere.

To prove their point, they re-analyzed the old data and also collected new data about the star. The new data collection has been simplified, as astronomers typically use the relatively stable Barnard’s star as a calibration tool for commissioning their instruments. With this new dataset, they couldn’t find any evidence of a planet. When they re-analyzed the data and compared it to three different expected models of the system. The first would be if the system had a planet with no star activity (i.e. sunspots), the second would be if there was a planet but there would also be star activity, and the third would be if there was no planet but still star activity.

Using Occam’s razor, they found that the third model, lacking a planet, best fits the entire data set. All of this means that things don’t look good for a planet to be at Barnard’s star.

UT video about finding exoplanets and the new telescopes used to find them.

The CARMENES team themselves suggested that this might be possible and stated in their original paper and press release that they could not be 100 percent certain of the presence of a planet. As part of the scientific process, they can review the paper written by the HPF team and determine if they agree with their conclusions or provide some other explanation for their original finding.

Another aspect of this entire exercise is that scientists must exercise caution when calibrating new highly sensitive instruments. Even standard calibration tools such as Barnard’s Star, used for decades, are active at a level that the most delicate instruments made today can detect. If this activity is ignored, planets around a neighbor aren’t the only false positives emanating from these new instruments.

Learn more:
PSU – A very furtive pseudonym: the cheat planet of Barnard’s Star
arXiv – Stellar activity manifested in a year-long alias, explains Barnard b as false positive
Forbes astronomers rule out super-earth around Barnard’s star
S&T – A team of astronomers with new data and analysis deny claims that a super-earth orbits near Barnard’s star
UT – Amateur Astronomer Chases Barnard’s Star – You Can Too!

Mission statement:
Artistic impression of the putative exoplanet, which may not exist.
Photo credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser

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Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h / t Breitbart; Following official proposals, the Wuhan laboratory leak hypothesis is being seriously tested by the US government. Facebook announced that users can now share their Wuhan laboratory leak virus origins theories with friends.

Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30 p.m. PT:

Given the ongoing research into the origins of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer dismiss the claim that COVID-19 is human-made or made from our apps. We continue to work with health professionals to keep up with the evolution of the pandemic and to update our guidelines regularly as new facts and trends emerge.

…

Read more: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/#removing-more-false-claims

Other topics like discussing whether fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election will likely still get you banned. So don’t let the generosity of Zuckerberg’s decision to expand the range of allowable Covid topics confuse you if you believe other restrictions have also been lifted.

Of course, it is really President Trump’s fault that the Liberals initially rejected the Covid Lab Leak Hypothesis. As ABC presenter Sara Haines recently stated, Trump’s “racist terms and dog whistles” made it impossible for liberals to consider Trump’s theories about the origin of Covid-19 until President Biden signaled that public discussion of the laboratory leak hypothesis was no longer an act Infidelity or riot.

Imagine what life would be like if these clowns got their hands on real power.

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It is often said that the universe was in a hot, dense state in its earliest moments. While that’s a pretty accurate description, it’s also pretty vague. What exactly was hot and dense and what condition was it in? Answering this question requires both complex theoretical models and high-energy experiments in particle physics. But as a recent study shows, we learn quite a bit.

According to particle physics and the Standard Cosmological Model, matter appeared within the first microsecond of the universe. This initial affair is believed to be a thick soup of quarks interacting in a sea of ​​gluons. This state of matter is known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The behavior of QGP is determined by the strong force that follows the laws of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). While we understand QCD relatively well, the math of the theory is so complex that it is difficult to compute. Even with supercomputers it is difficult to calculate the state of dense quark-gluon interactions.

A look in ALICE at the Large Hadron Collider. ALICE is one of the LHC’s four particle detectors. Image: CERN / LHC

The alternative is to use the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Smash particles at almost the speed of light and you can make a quark-gluon soup for a brief moment. The ALICE Collaboration studied these types of collisions to not only study the state of QGP, but also how the plasma transitions to hadrons. The two most common types of hadrons are protons and neutrons, which make up the atomic nucleus.

One of their surprising discoveries is that, like other plasmas, quark-gluon plasma does not behave like a dense gas. Instead, like water, QGP acts more dense than a dense liquid. As a result, its overall density is smoother. This difference is subtle, but it could hold keys to understanding the critical shift that likely occurred in the early universe.

In the Standard Cosmological Model, the early universe underwent a dramatic phase change to transform into the universe we see today. Before the QGP period, the universe had a period of exponential expansion. Almost immediately, the observable universe expanded by a factor of 1026 and cooled down by a factor of 100,000. This expansion and hypothermia ushered in the QGP period. Understanding fluid behavior therefore helps us study this transition period.

There is still a lot to learn about the early universe. Studies like this one from the ALICE collaboration are crucial to our understanding. They are reaching the limits of high energy physics and continue to exceed our expectations.

Reference: Acharya, S. et al. “Measurements of mixed harmonic cumulants in Pb-Pb collisions at sNN = 5.02 TeV.” Physics Letters B (2021): 136354.

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Reposted from Climate Litigation Watch

Posted on May 26, 2021

More Institutions Enlisted in Climate Litigation March, Hint at Possible Climate “Criminal Litigation”

Judicial Briefings beginning in 2019 Seemingly Prompted by 2018 Federal Court Setbacks

Move to ‘Fact-Block’ What Judges Hear on “Climate” Reminiscent of Social Media’s “Fact-Checkers” Campaign

Energy Policy Advocates’s website reveals a recent Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Energy that caught CLW’s eye. Specifically, the background included in the request established the public interest in the records for purposes of fee waiver… but also raises a few eyebrows.

It involves the wave of “climate” cases being filed nationwide. The defendants in these cases naturally and routinely remove the matter to the more appropriate federal forum. What EPA lays out is one apparent reaction of the climate litigation industry to the unnerving (to them) prospect of federal judges who conclude that their draw does indeed implicate federal jurisdiction, and keep the case, rather than send it to state courts where the plaintiffs think they stand a much better chance.

What EPA suggests is a scheme created in response to two federal judges doing just that, keeping the case, and ruling against the plaintiffs. The scheme reveals an attempt to co-opt yet another institution to try to help this novel litigation campaign remain in friendlier state courts.

EPA’s federal FOIA request asks for correspondence relating to the participation by Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Ben Santer — a Union of Concerned Scientists Fellow who CLW readers may recall either from ClimateGate or a much more recent tantrum (see below) — in a unique February 24-25, 2021 event co-hosted by the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), a creature of Congress.

A quick reminder of UCS and its role:

It seems that the February FJC event was just the most recent among a privately financed series of sessions for federal judges, seemingly designed to supplement the “climate” plaintiffs’ legal plan and the product of some impressive establishment teamwork.

The activist, member-organization and lobbying group American Association for the Advancement of Science — AAAS having selected Washington, DC for its headquarters rather gave its game away — writes on its website:

You read that right, it wasn’t a typo:

Notwithstanding protestations by the series’ financier, the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), that it is “providing such knowledge impartially and without ideological tilt”, these sessions ensure the presentation of a carefully limited view on climate science.  Indeed, it involves making the plaintiffs’ case “to judges who will be deciding these cases.” Here is how.

The co-host “The Federal Judicial Center Foundation is authorized to accept gifts to support Center programs” (https://www.fjc.gov/about); discrete programs are often specifically paid for by outside foundations. (See, e.g., https://www.fjc.gov/education/programs-and-resources-judges, https://www.fjcfoundation.org.*)

The spate of such major litigation before the courts is surely the reason behind this deployment and escalated use of FJC to reach the judiciary.**

For 2020, the year preceding the event at the core of this request, FJC only cites one private, activist group-funded event, which also was an ELI-financed “seminar on climate science.” https://www.fjcfoundation.org/page/reports. The year before that, 2019, the same activist organization, Environmental Law Institute (ELI), “paid the travel expenses for judges to attend four programs on climate science.” Id.

Out of seven total such 2019 events, four were on “climate science”, which makes five out of eight listed FJC events for those two years. That’s six of nine with the February 2021 event which, given FJC’s otherwise limited calendar of such privately financed events, does suggest an effort underway since 2019 to influence the courts on a matter now flooding the judiciary, “climate” litigation.

That presents an interesting chronology. In the Summer of 2018, the climate plaintiffs learned the hard way that leaving the adversarial process to its own devices might result in individual judges giving both sides the opportunity to introduce the court to the issue. And that did not work out for proponents of the agenda Mr. Santer so closely aligns himself with using his taxpayer-funded position.

Tis lesson came in two courtrooms, one on the East Coast and one on the West. In the latter, in City of Oakland et al. v. BP p.l.c., et al. (17-cv-06011), Federal Judge William Alsup (N.D. CA) kept the plaintiffs’ “climate” nuisance case in federal court and, after holding a day-long tutorial affording both sides to make their case, ruled that there is no federal cause of action, dismissing the plaintiffs’ suit. (See, e.g., Myles Allen, “The Alsup Aftermath,” RealClimate.org, April 25, 2018).

Within months, the Environmental Law Institute organized and financed a spate of “workshops”, working through the FJC to place before federal judges a rather more controlled presentation on the dispute. In charge of this? Paul Hanle, former president of Climate Central, which is a participant in the climate industry’s campaign to assign specific “attribution” for different weather events to, well, climate defendants.

A review of these presentations shows the group is presenting to judges the “plaintiffs’ case”, not the effort reflective of “practitioners and organizations on all sides of the political spectrum” or “providing such knowledge impartially and without ideological tilt” its financier went to such pains to proclaim, when posting an explanation for its efforts.

Although the seminars are funded, prepared, and staffed by activists presenting one side of a key issue before the courts, a quick scan of the agendas and ELI proclamations could lull a judge or others into assuming these are innocuous or even balanced. That is, until one reads the faculty bragging about how biased they are. For example:

“Santer says that during his NAS briefing, he specifically referred to the nuisance cases, which seek to recover damages from oil majors for their climate liability as well as for misleading shareholders over the risks of climate change…Santer acknowledges he is not a neutral observer in the debate and believes fossil fuel companies should be held accountable. He adds that attribution science has advanced enough ‘to pinpoint a company’s contribution . . . and assign liability based on their total contributions.’”

(Dawn Reeves, “DOE Scientist Begins Briefing Federal Judges On Climate Attribution,” Inside EPA, May 10, 2021; ellipses in original) 

Santer later topped this by “ending his affiliation with [Livermore] lab over its invitation for Steven Koonin to give a seminar”. Koonin, a former Provost of CalTech, was undersecretary for science in the Obama Department of Energy (that would be Santer’s Department, which under Obama became ever more of a “climate” agency).

Santer’s activism is such that he cannot tolerate knowing that Steve Koonin was permitted to speak to fellow scientists, with his message of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) really says and confrontation of apocalyptic climate advocacy in science. It seems reasonable to view Santer as even less likely to participate in what ELI claims it is running, a balanced presentation to federal judges who might hear these cases.

And indeed, he did not. This most recent panel affirms the program’s bent toward presenting for judges the views of outwardly and often aggressively ‘partisan’ advocates (Santer, plaintiff’s expert Wuebbles). The other presenters included “one of the 14 scientists behind an amicus curiae brief supporting the plaintiff in the historic 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency”, and an academic affiliated with several openly activist groups. Again, not what ELI advertises.*** 

These seminars appear to represent — when viewed with the charitable grants underwriting at least one leading “climate” tort firm which has academic “experts” on retainer — yet another vehicle for activist donors to support the climate litigation industry.

The party financing these “workshops” to present to federal judges a particular point of view on “climate science” — Environmental Law Institute — has a Board populated almost exclusively by activists in the field, and a leading member of its governance team at the time of these events was one of those same donor-funded professors, UCLA’s Ann Carlson, who at the same time all of these events were arranged for also served on the same tort law firm’s team.******

Former New York Times and current City Journal science writer John Tierney describes Facebook “affiliate[ing] with a nonprofit group called Science Feedback … in what it calls a ‘fight against misinformation.’” There, as here, “[t]he group describes itself as ‘nonpartisan’… [though] The fact-checkers were actually fact-blockers. The Wall Street Journal…  concluded that Science Feedback is engaging in ‘counter-opinion masquerading as fact checking’… Facebook and Science Feedback are using their “fight against misinformation” as a weapon to spread their own version of it.” This sounds familiar in the context of this campaign to educate federal judges who might hear climate cases.

It is no secret that you cannot get good decisions when the decision maker is only hearing one side of the story. The reality presented in the Summer of 2018 that federal judges might keep these cases, and — gasp — may ask to hear more than one side’s position seems to have struck a nerve with the climate litigation industry. After which, we see, yet another institution enlisted in the campaign, this time to have witnesses/potential witnesses present the plaintiffs’ case to federal judges, outside of court, about what the judges ought to think in the event the parties meet again.

• * See also, “The Board, however, acting primarily through its chair, will inform potential donors about the FJCF and the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) and its work. In this regard, Center staff should inform the Board of projects in which outside donors might have an interest and provide, to the degree practicable, the information listed in § 2.a.2.e, infra…2) The Board regards the following as helpful but non-binding, non-exclusive factors to consider in assessing whether gifts would, or would appear to, compromise of judicial branch or Judicial Center integrity and independence….e) The following factual attributes of potential donors …2. The existence of any pending major litigation before any federal court, including the nature of the claims raised and the status of the action;” https://www.fjc.gov/fjcfoundation/procedures.html (described as “For a more complete description of factors the Board considers in deciding whether to accept a gift, see the guidelines adopted by the Board.” https://www.fjc.gov/fjcfoundation/information.html).
• ** See, e.g., “In the US and around the world, there is a growing tide of litigation on climate mitigation and adaptation, climate regulation, and climate accountability matters. Judges, generalists who rarely have a background in science, are the gatekeepers of scientific evidence and in many cases the finders of fact. The Climate Judiciary Project provides the information and training needed to meet judges’ need for a basic familiarity with current climate science to keep pace with the climate issues emerging in courtrooms and the law.” https://www.eli.org/judicial-education. See also, “Over the last several years, the number of lawsuits related to effects of climate change has grown from a few major cases about a decade ago to scores of cases ranging from tort-based actions to challenges to administrative decisions within which climate implications are imbedded.” https://www.eli.org/vibrant-environment-blog/educating-judges-climate-litigation-today-and-tomorrow.
• *** A lazy rationalization by the organizers would be that, well, this *is* “the science” because defendants opted in those two cases to not present other witnesses but instead challenged the plaintiffs’ scientific claims through attorney-argument, pointing to roles played by population and economic growth and uncertainties in models and actual data (all as acknowledged even by the IPCC.) Although this approach — no doubt heavily influenced by anxious public affairs departments — prevailed before both Judges Alsup and John F. Keenan in the Southern District of New York and therefore is unlikely to change, it did not somehow lock in that ok climate science will not be contested, by these or other defendants, or amici, in the dozens of other cases.
• **** One charitable foundation, Resources Legacy Fund, has made “grants” of nearly three million dollars in just three years (2017-2018) directly to the private tort law firm leading the climate litigation campaign, Sher Edling, LLP, the one that has Profs. Carlson and Columbia’s Michael Burger on its team. Styled each year as “land or marine conservation” ($432,129 (2017) https://climatelitigationwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/RLF-2017-990.pdf), “advancing healthy communities ($1,319,625 (2018) https://climatelitigationwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/RLF-IRS-Final-990-12.31.18-Public-Copy-4829-6612-8044.pdf, “Land or Marine Conservation, Promotion of Education and/or Healthy Communities ($1,110,000 (2019) https://tinyurl.com/28y8pjpz), the most reasonable explanation for this is that the foundation is underwriting the firm’s aggressive pursuit of climate litigation, for which it also has lucrative contingency fee agreements under which the plaintiffs’ tort law firms receive a sliding scale of tens of millions of dollars on each tranche of hundreds of millions expected in any verdict or settlement. For example, the San Francisco agreement with the law firm Sher Edling LLP sets forth that a settlement or verdict of $100 million just for that city would yield the lawyers $25 million, which goes to $32.5 million for a settlement or verdict of $150 million, $36.25 million out of $200 million, and so on. Boulder, Colorado has agreed to pay 20% of its haul to the lawyers. Minnesota agreed to pay Sher Edling “16.67% of the first $150 million recovered, and 7.5% for any portion greater than $150 million.” https://govoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/AGO-LAC.pdf. Add to this donor funding of universities to provide faculty to support the same firm [See, e.g., https://climatelitigationwatch.org/activists-academics-plan-legal-assaults-with-a-bunch-of-state-and-local-prosecutors-nationwide/, https://climatelitigationwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Carlson-Discretionary-Fund-Explainer-thread.pdf].
• ***** See, e.g., William Allison, “Bombshell: Naomi Oreskes On Retainer With Plaintiffs’ Law Firm”, Energy in Depth, May 13, 2021, https://eidclimate.org/bombshell-naomi-oreskes-on-retainer-with-plaintiffs-law-firm/, citing to, inter alia, https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/13/business/exxon-climate-change-harvard/index.html, “The company said Naomi Oreskes, one of the main authors of the study, is on retainer with a law firm that is leading lawsuits against Exxon and others in the industry. Exxon called this a ‘blatant conflict of interest.’ Oreskes was not immediately available for comment.”
• ****** UCLA Law Professor and Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law, Ann Carlson, was in late January 2021 “appointed by the Biden administration to serve as the chief counsel for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The agency is in charge of climate standards for cars and trucks, which is why they have recruited me for the position.” https://climatelitigationwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/A.Carlson-Leave-Records-21-8782.pdf. Carlson also served during this period as a consultant to Sher Edling, LLP, while also serving on ELI’s Board and governance committee. https://climatelitigationwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Carlson-reporting-forms-Responsive-Documents-20-8525.pdf. 

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