climate change Joe Oliver

Canada’s energy industry is in crisis mode. Our economy stands to lose over $45 billion annually due to the massive discount at which we sell oil to the U.S. because governments and environmental activists have blocked the construction of pipelines to tidewater.
Their opposition is based on a profound belief that we must rapidly reduce our dependency on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emitting fossil fuels or climate change will inflict irreparable harm to life on the planet. However, that belief is at best grossly exaggerated or simply false.
Dire prophesies about climate change have failed to materialize. Eleven years ago the World Wildlife Fund warned we had five years to save the world from catastrophic climate change. Seven years ago, the International Energy Agency predicted there were five years left.
Predictions have also been wrong, sometimes spectacularly, about temperature increases, endangered polar bears, disappearing polar ice and islands sinking into the sea. As well, computer models consistently overestimate warming.
Failed predictions should make alarmists more modest about their knowledge of climate science, which is a massively complex subject. Yet being wrong only increases their fervour, which has led to policies that seriously damage the Canadian economy, but do virtually nothing to solve the supposed problem.
For perspective, we should put our climate in a historical context. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, notes that over the past 600 million years global temperatures ranged from 12 degrees to 22 degrees Celsius. Currently, we are at 14.5 degrees, i.e. at the colder end of the range. GHG emissions are now 406 parts per million, compared to the historical average of 2,000 ppm where plants thrive.
Moore also points out that from 1910 to 1940 global temperature increased by 0.4 degrees Celsius. It fell between 1940 and 1970 creating panic about global cooling. It warmed up again by 0.4 degrees from 1970 to 2000, so catastrophists shifted their alarm back to the impending inferno.
Then temperatures remained basically flat for the next 18 years, so global warming was renamed climate change. Meanwhile, GHG kept rising during the warming, the cooling and the pause, suggesting CO2 cannot be the only cause of climate change. What will happen next? Who knows, but certainly not Al Gore.
Alarmists never acknowledge the positives of higher carbon dioxide which fertilizes plants and reduces vulnerability to drought, creating a larger tree canopy and more agricultural land. Also, cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study published in the Lancet.
We keep hearing that extreme weather events are increasing. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), no alarmist slouch, just released a report that found little to no evidence that global warming caused extreme weather events to increase.
In the meantime, the world hasn’t made progress in cutting global emissions, which is puzzling since political leaders claim progress is a precondition to species survival. To honour its Paris Accord commitments, Canada would have to reduce emissions equivalent to shutting down our entire oil and gas sector in 12 years. To meet the new IPCC requirements we would have to throw in three-quarters of our transportation sector.
An international effort, based on the faltering Paris Accord and costing trillions, might optimistically reduce global temperature by a fifth of a degree Celsius by 2100. Canada’s 1.6% of global emissions translates into an unmeasurable 3/1,000 of a degree Celsius in 81 years.
There is no disputing the debilitating cost of opposition to fossil fuel development. Because it lacks an adequate environmental justification and its proposed solutions are ineffective that opposition is a disgrace.
Joe Oliver is the former minister of finance and minister of natural resources.

p-value

The probability of getting data that shows a relationship  in an experiment when there is in fact no relationship.
Example. Coin a is not fixed=> the null hypothesis=no relationship between two measured phenomena. After flipping the coin 100 times, 66 heads show up. What is the probability of getting this data in a fair coin?
 

=> 100!/66!(34!)=580717429720889409486981450
p^n(1-p)100-n=0.5^66(0.5)^34=.5^100 since a^ma^n=a^m+n=0.0000000000000000000000000000007889
580717429720889409486981450 X 0.0000000000000000000000000000007889 =0.00045812798
OR the p-value is given the hypothesis is true, what is the probability that we would see a graph as such. If it is less than 5% chance over an assumed many repetitions in many drug and social science studies, we reject the hypothesis.

extinctions per year

There are two main lists used by scientists to keep track of the facts of extinction. -http://creo.amnh.org/creodata.html or https://www.iucnredlist.org/about/citationinfo Less than one species extinction per year. -https://wattsupwiththat.files.w
ordpress.com/2010/01/extinctions_birds_mammals_historical.jpg

Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam to Paul Samuelson

"Name me one proposition in all of the social sciences
which is both true and non-trivial."  -Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam to Paul Samuelson

5 Sigma What's That? By Evelyn Lamb | July 17, 2012 | 10

Chances are, you heard this month about thediscovery of a tiny fundamental physics particle that may be the long-sought Higgs boson. The phrase five-sigma was tossed about by scientists to describe the strength of the discovery. So, what does five-sigma mean?

In short, five-sigma corresponds to a p-value, or probability, of 3x10^-7, or about 1 in 3.5 million. This is not the probability that the Higgs boson does or doesn't exist; rather, it is the probability that if the particle does not exist, the data that CERN scientists collected in Geneva, Switzerland, would be at least as extreme as what they observed. "The reason that it's so annoying is that people want to hear declarative statements, like 'The probability that there's a Higgs is 99.9 percent,' but the real statement has an 'if' in there. There's a conditional. There's no way to remove the conditional," says Kyle Cranmer, a physicist at New York University and member of the ATLAS team, one of the two groups that announced the new particle results in Geneva on July 4.

Scientists use p-values to test the likelihood of hypotheses. In an experiment comparing some phenomenon A to phenomenon B, researchers construct two hypotheses: that "A and B are not correlated," which is known as the null hypothesis, and that “A and B are correlated,” which is known as the research hypothesis.

The researchers then assume the null hypothesis (because it's the most conservative supposition, intellectually) and calculate the probability of obtaining data as extreme or more extreme than what they observed, given that there is no relationship between A and B. This calculation, which yields the p-value, can be based on any of several different statistical tests. If the p-value is low, for example 0.01, this means that there is only a small chance (one percent for p=0.01) that the data would have been observed by chance without the correlation. Usually there is a pre-established threshold in a field of study for rejecting the null hypothesis and claiming that A and B are correlated. Values of p=0.05 and p=0.01 are very common in many scientific disciplines.

High-energy physics requires even lower p-values to announce evidence or discoveries. The threshold for "evidence of a particle," corresponds to p=0.003, and the standard for "discovery" is p=0.0000003.

The reason for such stringent standards is that several three-sigma events have later turned out to be statistical anomalies, and physicists are loath to declare discovery and later find out that the result was just a blip. One factor is the "look elsewhere effect:" when analyzing very wide energy intervals, it is likely that you will see a statistically improbable event at some particular energy level. As a concrete example, there is just under a one percent chance of flipping an ordinary coin 100 times and getting at least 66 heads. But if a thousand people flip identical coins 100 times each, it becomes likely that a few people will get at least 66 heads each; one of those events on its own should not be interpreted as evidence that the coins were somehow rigged.

So where do the sigmas come in? The Greek letter sigma is used to represent standard deviation. Standard deviation measures the distribution of data points around a mean, or average, and can be thought of as how "wide" the distribution of points or values is. A sample with a high standard deviation is more spread out—it has more variability, and a sample with a low standard deviation clusters more tightly around the mean. For example, a plot of dogs' heights would probably have a larger standard deviation than a plot of heights of dogs from a particular breed, even if that breed had the same average height as dogs in general.

For particle physics, the sigma used is the standard deviation arising from a normal distribution of data, familiar to us as a bell curve. In a perfect bell curve, 68% of the data is within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% is within two, and so on.

Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping

Educators rely heavily on learning activities that encourage elaborative studying, whereas activities that require students to practice retrieving and reconstructing knowledge are used less frequently. Here, we show that practicing retrieval produces greater gains in meaningful learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. The advantage of retrieval practice generalized across texts identical to those commonly found in science education. The advantage of retrieval practice was observed with test questions that assessed comprehension and required students to make inferences. The advantage of retrieval practice occurred even when the criterial test involved creating concept maps. Our findings support the theory that retrieval practice enhances learning by retrieval-specific mechanisms rather than by elaborative study processes. Retrieval practice is an effective tool to promote conceptual learning about science.

entangled diamonds

OTTAWA -- An Ottawa physicist's team has "entangled" two diamonds, bringing the mysterious world of quantum physics to objects big enough to see.

Entanglement is a process in quantum mechanics by which two objects act like a single object even though they're not physically connected.

It usually involves very small objects -- atoms or molecules, for example.

Now Ben Sussman of the National Research Council has entangled objects far bigger than molecules -- pieces of diamond about half a millimetre thick. It's a step toward extremely fast quantum computing.

Sussman and his group write that "our intuition about the natural world" says quantum physics rules the tiny scale of atoms, while "classical" laws of motion cover objects big enough to see, such as cars or golf balls.

Quantum physics has been stretched to larger objects already, but there are usually special circumstances. For instance, scientists have used ultracold superconductors isolated from their surroundings.

These diamonds are large and operate at room temperature, some 15 centimetres apart. Sussman said they could, in principle, be even more distant. (He used synthetic diamonds to avoid impurities, but natural stones would work too.)

Entanglement contradicts what our senses tell us. It means two distinct objects have a relationship where a change in one means a simultaneous change in the other.

Physicists sometimes use the analogy of a teeter-totter: When one end goes up, the other has to go down at the same time.

But entangled objects aren't physically joined like the teeter-totter's two ends.

Einstein didn't like the concept; he called it "spooky action at a distance." Still, experiments show it's real.

The quantum world has captured popular imagination for decades with its puzzles. There's Edwin Schrodinger's cat, where the principle of uncertainty says the cat may be alive and dead at the same time.

There are possibilities of teleportation and time-travel -- staples of science fiction that always want to bend reality. The concept of entanglement leads to dreamy notions that everything is connected to everything else.

Now the reality of quantum mechanics is leading toward a more matter-of-fact goal: computers faster and more secure than anything made today.

Sussman's group used diamonds because they react to laser light by showing some characteristics of the quantum world, and their extreme hardness helps preserve that quantum character.

"This (entangled diamonds) is a state that simply can't be described with classical physics," Sussman said.

"There's great interest in understanding the transition between this microscopic world of quantum mechanics and our macroscopic world, which we live in every day."

What the diamonds shared "is a bit ethereal," Sussman said. "They shared a deep connection. They shared a vibration. They shared the same state. In a sense, these two objects shared each other. They became one... It's a bit romantic, but could be suitable, given that they're diamonds.

"They're both about steps toward quantum computing and are really fascinating because we've been able to make all this microscopic quantum stuff exist at large sizes (millimetres) and at room temperature," he said.

"I've been using the idea of building on our 'quantum workbench' -- something quantum that you can really get your hands on."