Podcasts about physicist michio kaku

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Latest podcast episodes about physicist michio kaku

Big Think
Einstein failed to solve the Universe. Here's what it would take to succeed. | Michio Kaku

Big Think

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2024 12:01


If Einstein couldn't solve the theory of everything, could anyone? Physicist Michio Kaku explains what it would take. Albert Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life pursing a “theory of everything,” aiming to find a concise equation summarizing the fundamental laws of the Universe. His downfall? Subatomic particles. Physicist Michio Kaku offers an alternative to Einstein's elusive theory: “string theory.” We could try to explain it, but he does a much better job. After all, he's one of the co-inventors of it. If you aren't sold on string theory, Kaku breaks down the three criteria needed to figure out what makes our Universe tick: it must incorporate Einstein's theory of gravity, explain particle physics, and be mathematically sound. No pressure. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Go Deeper with Big Think: ►Become a Big Think Member Get exclusive access to full interviews, early access to new releases, Big Think merch and more ►Get Big Think+ for Business Guide, inspire and accelerate leaders at all levels of your company with the biggest minds in business -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Michio Kaku: Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as New York University (NYU). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arik Korman
How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

Arik Korman

Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2023 17:50


Physicist Michio Kaku, science correspondent for CBS This Morning, discusses what quantum computers could do, how we can implant memories and possibly even skills like in the movie The Matrix, and how the adoption of quantum computing would impact the workforce. Dr. Kaku's latest book is Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.

Come Here To Me: Relationship Experts Walk the Talk

Couples Therapy Works is a new series from the Come Here To Me team delving into the complex work of couples therapy from the ground up. Each episode will feature one or more of Empathi's own counselors as they examine the truths and challenges of relationship repair.This week, Empathi veteran Karen Gordon joins Figs to discuss the inner workings of relationship systems: The Cycle. Explore how everything two partners are doing can make sense, even as they make things worse for themselves, and discover how a simple (and deceptively hard to reach) shift in perspective can change every part in your relationship.Physicist Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace and a Theory of Everything" (the fish story): https://mkaku.org/home/articles/hyperspace-and-a-theory-of-everything/Check out Karen and Figs' live episode here on 01/18/23, 12 PM PST:  https://youtu.be/RnzpLTgfvGoTo leave feedback, email figs@empathi.com or leave a comment on YouTube, Instagram, or Apple Podcasts.If you or someone you love are struggling in your relationship, visit empathi.com for quizzes, courses, and consultations.

ScotThoughts
Heart and Soul 24/10/21

ScotThoughts

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2021 45:54


Physicist Michio Kaku explains the contents of his book "The God Equation". Jeremy Irons reads Psalm 109. Judy Gentis contrasts Mary's attitude to work with her sister Martha.. Alan Sorensen suggests some guidance on giving directions. MUSIC PLAYED ON THE PROGRAMME 1. "How great thou art" sung by the East Valley Chorale 2. "Great God of every Constellation" sung by Choir of Dunblane Cathedral. 3. "Creation sings the Father's Song" sung by Kristin Getty 4. "Somebody bigger than you or I" sung by Elvis Presley. 5. "What a faithful God have I" sung by Robert Critchley. 6. "Brother let me be your servant". 7. "If I can help somebody" sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford. 8. "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" sung by the Hudson Taylors.

Drinkin' Bros Podcast
Episode 819 - Special Guest Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku

Drinkin' Bros Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2021 86:58


Ross Patterson and Dan Hollaway are joined by theoretical physicist and the New York Times Best Selling author of “The God Equation,” Michio Kaku to discuss String Theory, the existence of God and other dimensions, how humans could (and should) colonize the universe and one day learn to manipulate space and time, and what he believes the destiny of the human race should be.   Go to ghostbed.com/drikinbros and use code DRINKINBROS for 30% off EVERYTHING (Mattresses, Adjustable Base, and more) -- plus a 101 Night Sleep Trial and Mattresses Made in the USA!   Go to CardoMAX.com and use promo code DB, and you get Buy One Get One FREE on your first order.

united states god db new york times bestselling physicists string theory michio kaku theoretical physicist buy one get one free god equation dan hollaway ross patterson drinkin' bros physicist michio kaku adjustable base cardomax night sleep trial mattresses made everything mattresses
Drinkin' Bros Podcast
Episode 819 - Special Guest Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku

Drinkin' Bros Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2021 86:58


Ross Patterson and Dan Hollaway are joined by theoretical physicist and the New York Times Best Selling author of “The God Equation,” Michio Kaku to discuss String Theory, the existence of God and other dimensions, how humans could (and should) colonize the universe and one day learn to manipulate space and time, and what he believes the destiny of the human race should be.   Go to ghostbed.com/drikinbros and use code DRINKINBROS for 30% off EVERYTHING (Mattresses, Adjustable Base, and more) -- plus a 101 Night Sleep Trial and Mattresses Made in the USA!   Go to CardoMAX.com and use promo code DB, and you get Buy One Get One FREE on your first order.

united states god db new york times bestselling physicists string theory michio kaku theoretical physicist buy one get one free god equation dan hollaway ross patterson drinkin' bros physicist michio kaku adjustable base cardomax night sleep trial mattresses made everything mattresses
Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Dr. Michio Kaku: The God Equation

Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2021 65:12


When Isaac Newton established the laws of motion in 1687, he created a foundation of understanding that still guides physicists to scientific discoveries today. As studies evolve, scientists get closer to understanding the deepest mysteries of space and time. Once physicists can successfully combine theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, all forces in the universe will be recognized and tied into one. Physicist Michio Kaku seeks to document this epic journey of uniting theories of space in his new book The God Equation. Dr. Kaku, once mentored by theoretical physicist Edward Teller, graduated summa cum laude and first in his physics class from Harvard University. Now, Dr. Kaku strives to continue Einstein's search for a “theory of everything,” seeking to popularize science and unify the four fundamental forces of the universe—the strong force, the weak force, gravity and electromagnetism. Join us as Michio Kaku talks about physics pioneers looking to understand the complexity of the universe. SPEAKERS Dr. Michio Kaku Professor of Theoretical Physics, City College of New York; Author The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything; Twitter @michiokaku Kara Platoni Science Editor, Science, Wired.com—Moderator In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on April 16th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Dr. Michio Kaku: The God Equation

Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2021 64:57


When Isaac Newton established the laws of motion in 1687, he created a foundation of understanding that still guides physicists to scientific discoveries today. As studies evolve, scientists get closer to understanding the deepest mysteries of space and time. Once physicists can successfully combine theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, all forces in the universe will be recognized and tied into one. Physicist Michio Kaku seeks to document this epic journey of uniting theories of space in his new book The God Equation. Dr. Kaku, once mentored by theoretical physicist Edward Teller, graduated summa cum laude and first in his physics class from Harvard University. Now, Dr. Kaku strives to continue Einstein’s search for a “theory of everything,” seeking to popularize science and unify the four fundamental forces of the universe—the strong force, the weak force, gravity and electromagnetism. Join us as Michio Kaku talks about physics pioneers looking to understand the complexity of the universe. SPEAKERS Dr. Michio Kaku Professor of Theoretical Physics, City College of New York; Author The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything; Twitter @michiokaku Kara Platoni Science Editor, Science, Wired.com—Moderator In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on April 16th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Engadget Podcast
Physicist Michio Kaku on The God Equation, LG gives up on phones

The Engadget Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 9, 2021 65:39


This week on the Engadget Podcast, renowned physicist Dr. Michio Kaku joins Cherlynn and Devindra to chat about his new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything. He dives into the trouble with the Standard Model of physics, this week's surprising news around muons and why believes we'll eventually unite with superintelligent robots and roam the cosmos as beings of pure energy. (Hey, it could happen.) Also, Chris Velazco joins to get up in his feelings about LG abandoning the mobile market. Michio Kaku on his new book “The God Equation” – 0:59 LG Mobile, in memoriam (with Chris Velazco) – 24:51 Other News: Facebook leaked data on 500M users – 38:42 Other News: Google IO, E3, and Microsoft Build conference dates – 38:42 Other News: Google v. Oracle is finally settled – 46:31 Other News: the Sonos Roam got a great review – 50:26 Working on – 53:34 Pop Culture Picks – 55:12

Sci-Fi Talk Byte
Byte Living And Branding Mars

Sci-Fi Talk Byte

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 13, 2021 5:52


Dr Stephen Petranek, Astromer Lucianne Walkowicz and Physicist Michio Kaku give their views.

mars branding bytes physicist michio kaku stephen petranek
ExoNews Bulletin
E107 9-27-19 A ‘Turning Point' on UFOs: Physicist Michio Kaku Tells Ufology Conference the Truth is Out There

ExoNews Bulletin

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2019 9:48


t used to be that believers had to prove that these objects were from an intelligent race in outer space. Now the burden of proof is on the government to prove they're not from intelligent beings in outer space

Access Utah
Revisiting 'The Future Of Humanity' With Physicist Michio Kaku On Tuesday's Access Utah

Access Utah

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2018 53:58


Physicist and futurist Michio Kaku says that moving human civilization to the stars, formerly the domain of fiction, is increasingly becoming a scientific possibility–and a necessity. Whether in the near future due to climate change and the depletion of finite resources, or in the distant future due to catastrophic cosmological events, we must face the reality that humans will one day need to leave planet Earth to survive as a species.

National Book Festival 2014 Webcasts
Michio Kaku: 2014 National Book Festival

National Book Festival 2014 Webcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2014 40:21


Aug. 30, 2014. Physicist Michio Kaku appears at the 2014 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Speaker Biography: Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, an acclaimed public speaker, a renowned futurist and a popularizer of science with regular radio, television and film appearances. As co-founder of the String Field Theory, Kaku continues Einstein's search for a "Theory of Everything," seeking to unify the four fundamental forces of the universe-the strong force, the weak force, gravity and electromagnetism. A notable figure in academia, Kaku has written several books, including New York Times best-seller "The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind." This book gives readers an inside look into the budding new developments in neuroscience and physics, explaining how the brain functions and beyond. Investigating a range of ideas such as recording memories and dreams, telepathy, consciousness and mind control, Kaku provides an authoritative look at what the future might hold thanks to remarkable advances in technology. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6390

Singularity.FM
Physicist Michio Kaku: Science is the Engine of Prosperity!

Singularity.FM

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2014 82:17


Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, bestselling author, acclaimed public speaker, renowned futurist, and popularizer of science. As co-founder of String Field Theory, Dr. Kaku carries on Einstein’s quest to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into a single grand unified theory of everything. You will not be surprised to hear that Michio […]

Spectrum
Elizabeth Muller

Spectrum

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2012 29:59


The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study is doing a new analysis of the surface temperature record in a rigorous manner that addresses the criticism of previous analysis done by other groups.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program, bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is with Elizabeth Mueller, Co founder and executive director of Berkeley Earth surface temperature. The Berkeley Earth surface temperature project is redoing the analysis of the earth surface temperature record in a rigorous manner that addresses the criticisms of previous analysis. [00:01:00] All their work to date is available free at their website, Berkeley earth.org I want to briefly explain two terms that are used in the interview. Creaking is the Geo statistic method devised by Daniel Craig, a mining engineer in 19:51 AM o is the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. The Oscillation is principally the change of sea surface temperature over time in the North Atlantic Ocean. Onto [00:01:30] the interview. Welcome Elizabeth Mueller to spectrum. Thank you. How did Berkeley Earth come into being? Is that how you'd like to refer to it as at Berkeley? Yes, that's right. I did Berkeley Earth come into being. Speaker 4: Um, rich and I had been working together for a couple of years and we kept being asked about climate issues which had been involved in climate for a long time. He taught his class physics for future presidents and what she goes into global warming and he and I were working together doing consulting on energy and environment issues, but people kept asking [00:02:00] about global warming and we had been uncomfortable with some of the elements of of global warming for some time. There was the station quality issue which had been raised by Anthony Watts, which both of us uncomfortable but we weren't quite sure what to do about it. There were other issues as well. There was the data selection issue. Why did the major groups only use 20% of the data 10% in recent years, but it was also in part the climate gates scandal that really [00:02:30] made us think somebody else needs to come in and have a fresh look at this. We really wanted to be able to lower the barriers to entry. The data was inaccessible, people couldn't get it. It was impossible for any group to come in and easily do an analysis of global warming and this is such an important area of policy work, of economics, of so many elements of the world today that we felt everybody should be able to go in and look at the data themselves, look at the analysis [00:03:00] and really understand what the issues were. So that's why we decided to create the Berkeley Earth project and do exactly that. Speaker 3: For our audience sake, we should identify rich. Speaker 4: Yes. Richard Muller is a long time physicist. He's a MacArthur winner. He's been involved in climate issues for a long time. He wrote a technical book on Ice Ages and astronomical causes. He's been teaching physics for future presidents here at Berkeley for I think about 10 years now. He also wrote the textbook and a popular book called Physics [00:03:30] for future presidents. He's also my dad. He and I started working together about, I guess about four years ago now, and I had been doing consulting mostly in Europe and kept getting asked about energy issues and so I wanted to bring him in to my consulting firm, but instead the two of us ended up creating a business together, which has been great fun. His, he's a lot of fun to work with. Speaker 3: Besides wanting to clarify things or level of playing field, if you will, [00:04:00] and make it more accessible, was there a sense that you were the right group to do it? Speaker 4: Well, we weren't a group. We didn't exist as a group at the time and so it was a question of pulling together the right people from the right backgrounds to create a right group. We did think that we wanted a fresh perspective so that it wasn't necessarily a problem that we were new to this specific area of work. Many of our people had had deep experience with climate change in the past, but we also wanted to combine physics and [00:04:30] statistics. Modern statistics. Bringing in David Berliner early on was an important choice that we wanted to take a fresh look at the problem using modern statistics, which we believed would allow us to use much more of the data than the previous groups had been able to do. Speaker 3: Would you describe the research and planning that you did to form the group and get things started? Sure. Speaker 4: We needed a nonprofit. We discovered pretty quickly that in order to do a study like this and raise funding, we needed to be [00:05:00] a nonprofit. We didn't have a nonprofit and nonprofits take quite some time to create and we weren't quite sure what we were going to do about that. When rich had a call from Michael Ditmore in Santa Barbara with a group called Novem and Michael did more wanted rich to lead a study on geoengineering, and rich said, well, you know, I'm not really that interested in doing a study on geoengineering, but if you really want to do a study that's going to have big impact and be very important, you should consider helping us with a study on global warming. [00:05:30] And a Michael said, hmm, that sounds interesting. Tell me more. So we started talking to him and it seemed like an ideal group for us to work with and so Novem came on to house the Berkeley Earth efforts. Speaker 4: We also started looking into what the other groups had done. We wanted to look at why they hadn't used more than 20% of the data. What were the issues surrounding the station quality issue raised by Anthony Watts? What were the concerns around the urban heat island [00:06:00] that many people had been talking about? This is where people had been saying, yes, there's global warming, but cities, everyone knows cities are warmer than rural areas and the world is getting more urban. So is it possible that the world is getting warmer not because of carbon dioxide, but because it's getting more urbanized? This is something that we wanted to look at as well. We tried to look very carefully at what some of the other groups had done and we discovered that many of the adjustments that they had made to [00:06:30] the data they had done manually and they hadn't really kept very careful track of what exactly they had done. Speaker 4: So even they couldn't go back and duplicate it and this was a concern as well, we we, this is such an important topic. You want to be able to Redo it and make sure you get the same results every time you do. And so that was another thing we looked at carefully trying to pick the brain of the people who had been dealing with the data. Was that extremely helpful and crucial to the project? It was helpful. I mean it was very useful to speak [00:07:00] to them, to meet with them to try and understand what they were doing. But at the same time we knew from pretty early on that we wanted to do something totally different. So we weren't trying to duplicate what they had done. We wanted to take a totally new approach, something that had never been done before use all of the data are pretty close to all of the data and we had to develop a modern statistical technique in order to do this and that was done by Robert Roddy, our lead scientist in conjunction with David Brillinger, a professor of statistics [00:07:30] here at Berkeley and what that meant was that we weren't adding on to the previous research. Speaker 4: We were really starting it totally new from a totally different approach. We didn't know what we were going to find. We didn't know if we were going to find that there was more global warming or if we're going to find that there was less global warming. We only knew or we thought, we knew that we weren't going to find the same results as everybody had found before us, which is why it was such a surprise in the end that even using a totally different technique, we ended up [00:08:00] with results that were so close to what the previous groups had found. I think that's a really strong statement in terms of what they are and what they mean is that even though you're using completely different approaches, you get results that are so, so similar. I think that really strengthens our confidence in the work that we did. Speaker 4: Talk a little bit about the gathering of the team. We wanted people on the team who were comfortable looking through huge quantities of data and had actually in the past made [00:08:30] discoveries by doing so, so it wasn't enough that they were able to pick apart other people's work. We wanted people who were able to dive in, get their hands dirty, and yet make an unexpected and surprising discovery and some of the people we chose, Jonathan wordly, Bob Jacobson had done this before, but also saw promoter who had done this and is working in cosmology and won the Nobel Prize this past year. So those were the people we wanted. People who had experience doing exactly that. Speaker 5: [00:09:00] You're listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's guest is Elizabeth Mueller, Co founder and executive director of Berkeley legal earth's surface. Speaker 3: That is really one of the big challenges of all this is the data set size. Speaker 4: It is, it's huge. It's huge. And merging that from the different sources [00:09:30] was really one of the biggest challenges we had to face. I should say Robert had to face, he was the one who really did most of the work, but he had 15 different data sources and almost as many different formats, all kinds of mess that really had to be sorted through. And that in many ways was one of the biggest challenges of the project was just getting through that. And we figured if we did nothing else but sifting through this data and putting together a clean data set, that would already be a huge contribution. Speaker 3: [00:10:00] So given that task, what other sort of methodology had you tried to impose on this data? [inaudible] Speaker 4: well, the other important elements, there's collecting the data, cleaning the data, um, merging the data. But the other part was of course analyzing the data. Um, and the other groups had only been able to use 20% of the data because they had a constraint. They needed to have long continuous records. Well Robert Roady, I'm together with David Berliner developed a new technique [00:10:30] based on creaking in which they're able to, to analyze all of the data, are virtually all of the data and the result was that we were able to use so much more and yet get very good, very carefully calculated error estimates and go much farther back in time than the previous groups had been able to. Speaker 3: And were you satisfied with the data sets that were available or did you look for other data sets? Speaker 4: Robert looked for everything. He really wanted to find all of the data that was out there and he, [00:11:00] he did a very complete job I believe in doing so. Speaker 3: Is that an ongoing process for him or the ongoing process? Speaker 4: The process is going to be updating it. We have now the 15 databases that this comes from and they are going to be updated on a regular basis since we want to be able to update our database on a regular basis and have it all automated so that that will just happen every few months or however often we decided Speaker 3: it needs to be. And so are these data sets pretty broadly accepted as the best available? Yes they are. And the source of them is government, [00:11:30] weather stations, Speaker 4: government, weather station. There's a lot of volunteer weather stations. There's a complete list of the 15 sources, many of which come through Noah Speaker 3: and I guess no is consolidating a lot of data sets from around the world. Speaker 4: Uh, yes. If you look at the data set, it really is around w from all around the world. Um, in the modern day. If you go back in time, it becomes less global. If you look at our earliest measurements, you may see data really only in the u s and Europe, [00:12:00] few places in India, but by the 19 hundreds you're really getting fairly good coverage of the globe accepting Antarctica, which doesn't really come into play until the 1950s Speaker 3: were there any other big challenges Speaker 4: under the cleaning of the data and developing the analysis framework? Where were really the biggest challenges? There were a couple of surprises though. The things that we didn't expect. One of the things that we discovered once we had access to the data, we were able to start playing with and looking [00:12:30] for other things that maybe people hadn't noticed before. One of the biggest surprises was the discovery that the oscillations in the data, which everybody had previously said, oh, those are El Nino are everybody's data goes up and down together and, and that's El Nino. We only looked at it very carefully. We discovered that, yes, it is highly correlated to to El Nino, but in fact it's even more correlated to the Gulf stream and that was a big surprise. We didn't expect that, but because we had access to the data, it [00:13:00] enabled us to look at these sorts of things and we're really very hopeful that now that the world has access to the data, there'll be many other important discoveries of the sort. Speaker 3: I know that you're doing land surface first, then ocean surface. Is that a natural two phase project? Are there more phases? Is there more? Speaker 4: Well, we wanted to start with the land because in large part that's where much of the controversy was, so we figured we wanted to start with a bite sized piece though. [00:13:30] Actually I think it was a much bigger bite than we thought it would be. But by analyzing the land, it looks at the issue of the temperature stations, the station quality issue. Anthony wants the urban heat island effect and this data selection issue was their data selection bias because they only used previous groups that only use 20% of the data. The oceans are going to be interesting in the next phase because of some of the discoveries we've made such as the Gulf stream. So we're really looking forward now to doing that [00:14:00] as a next phase of work because we want to look at this in more detail and see what we can find in terms of the relationship between the Gulf stream and temperature. Speaker 4: The Gulf stream, we found a 60 year cycle in the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which for the past 30 years has been going up. So the temperature has been going up and the temperature of the world has been going out temperature of both the Amo and and of the land surface temperature, which was unexpected. But it also [00:14:30] shows that the 60 year cycles is at a peak right now and it's going to start going down. The temperature is going to start going down. What is the impact of this going to be on global warming? Uh, is it possible that we haven't seen any global warming in the past 13 years in part because of this amo cycle and what's going to happen as the amo cycle starts, starts going down? We don't know it will, but we think it's a fascinating issue to look at. That fits in very naturally with our study of the oceans [00:15:00] and as the ocean data set, as extensive as the land, it's very different. Speaker 4: So instead of looking at a single locations, you're looking at mainly boats, so they're moving, there's different problems, different issues, but we think now that we have our framework developed, it shouldn't be as difficult as initially looking at the land was, but the analysis framework does have to change somewhat to accommodate for it. It does have to change some different collection process. Nothing's really out there. Stationary, taking [00:15:30] a reading every they are now in modern times they're boys and there's some fixed locations, but as you get back in time, as you go back in time, more and more of it come from boats. Your methodology for analyzing the data has less reliance on that longevity of sample. That's right. Our statistical techniques mean that we can work with fragments, we can work with little pieces, which has also been an advantage for dealing with some of these issues of station changes. Speaker 4: So you might have a station [00:16:00] that that goes along and it's reading a certain temperature within a certain range, um, fairly regularly for a number of years. And then all of a sudden the pattern is similar, but it's three degrees warmer than it was before. And you say, well, what's that? Um, what happened here? And previous groups would take them to say, okay, well this is probably a station move and this probably not exactly the same location as it was before. Something happened here. Maybe the time of day changed the time of the day that they were taking the, the, the readings. And so they corrected it and then they manually move [00:16:30] those, either they moved one down or they moved the other one up so that it would be a long continuous record. Well, with our statistical technique, we just cut it in into, and we say, okay, well we'll just assume that these are two different locations, two different records and handle it as such. And that means that we don't have to worry about adjusting the data. We just cut it and makes it much more easy to duplicate. And, um, that there's no manual adjustments that analyze why you that's right. And adjustment. [00:17:00] That's right. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 4: tune to k a l s Speaker 5: Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Elizabeth Moore, Co founder and executive director of the [inaudible] surface temperature project. Speaker 4: In the peer review process that you've now entered into, yes. Is there a process for integrating the feedback or at least analyzing [00:17:30] what people are saying to you or is it too soon now? We've been getting a lot of feedback so we have the official feedback that comes through the official peer review journals and we've been working with the reviewers and the editors to incorporate that feedback. Um, we discuss it as a group. We had one of the lead authors go through it in bring any issues to the crew, talk about any additional analysis that's required and go in and actually make some of the changes to the papers. But perhaps even more interestingly is the [00:18:00] feedback that we've gotten from the peer review process outside of the official journals. Because we've posted our papers online. We've been contacted by a number of scientists from around the world who have gone through our papers in extraordinary detail and looked at some of the things, raised some important questions, um, raised some issues, some concerns and that's been extremely helpful. I think our papers will be better in the end because of the peer review that we've gotten through the open process, the global [00:18:30] process of putting our papers online. Speaker 3: In terms of longevity of the, the project and the data set, how long do you envision staying with the project? Is there a point at which you just, you're, you're done? Speaker 4: Well I think we're not sure. I think we would love to stay involved. I think there's a need to keep updating the data data set take to keep it live. We would love to do that. I think can we, we have somebody in charge of maintaining the data center, [00:19:00] but we're not a long term project for now. We're based on, on fundraising. We fundraise for the first 18 months for now looking to fundraise for the next 18 months. So we have not yet been able to establish that type of permanent longevity that would be necessary to keep doing this on an ongoing basis. But it's certainly something that we're thinking about. Speaker 3: I went to your website and was looking around and went into the a frequently asked questions and it noted [00:19:30] that none of the scientists involved has taken a public political stand on global warming. And I wondered if that was still the case or if as a result of your first release of data that there was a revision of that or not. Speaker 4: I think that's still true. And our scientists believe that the statement which you might be referring to saying that global warming is real, is now a scientific statement there. There is the data to support that. There's the evidence to support that. There's error bars, uh, to support that. So when we need to make a statement like that, we believe [00:20:00] that it's a scientific statement, not a political statement. We haven't looked into other issues such as how much of it is human caused. And so we haven't taken, I would call political statements on those sorts of issues. We don't want to get into the politics because it muddies the science and we want people to be able to look at our numbers to look at our analysis and say, okay, we know that this is 100% pure scientific analysis, but on the other hand there is a need for [00:20:30] scientific evaluation of policy to see which policies that are on the table would actually make sense according to science, which ones would actually not really help very much. Speaker 4: We don't know how much of this we might get involved and we haven't done any of it so far. It might be a question of only saying is as much as we feel can be stated, that's really grounded in the science. So as far as the group trying to get drawn into choosing a prescription [00:21:00] for affecting or impacting global warming, that's not really something the group is interested in at all, right? I don't, I don't think so. I mean there's certain elements that it does keep coming up as an issue and there are a lot of people asking us to to get more involved in this, but we really want to make sure that anything we did say would be very grounded in the science. There might be some limited statements we could make that would be grounded in the science, but we haven't taken a decision on on that yet. Speaker 5: [00:21:30] You were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're speaking with Elizabeth Miller, Co founder and executive director of the Berkeley Earth surface temperature project. Speaker 4: And from your experience and personal opinion, is there a prescription that you feel is the best available? Well, I think we need a lot of different things. We need energy efficiency. There's a lot that can be done for low cost, no cost even making [00:22:00] money by increasing our energy efficiency. But we also need other things like low cost, solar, low cost, wind, nuclear. There are many things that are all helpful, but it needs to be something that can be affordable, that can be adopted and the developing world, China, India, the rest of the developing world, it needs to be cheap and unless it's cheap enough for them to be able to afford, it's not going to happen there. There are other priorities, so so China, their emissions are growing so fast that anything we do [00:22:30] has live in an impact and less we can set an example that is able to be followed by China. Speaker 4: That means it needs to be cheap if it needs to ideally be profitable so that people in China and India and the rest of the developing world can afford to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I don't see this being addressed in the international debate right now at the UN and it's really an important problem that I wish had more visibility. Is [00:23:00] there anything about the group that I haven't asked you that you'd, you'd want to bring up? Well, everything that I've mentioned today is available on our website, so it's Berkeley earth.org we have all of our papers there. We have our data set and both text format. And in Matlab we have our programs. We also have a lovely video. I don't know if you've seen the video. It shows a map of the world that is getting warmer and colder and you see weather going across the, the different regions [00:23:30] of the world. Speaker 4: And it takes us from 18 hundreds through to the present. So data visualization. Absolutely. Is that something that you've embraced it? It is. It is. And we've actually gotten some requests from some museums who have big globes. I guess they have one up at the Lawrence Hall of science and, and wanting to project our global warming movie onto such a globe, which I think would be a fascinating way of looking at it. There's a couple of other, um, interesting images [00:24:00] on our, on our website. For example, if you look at the u s many people are surprised to learn that out. One third of locations in the U s have cooled. They haven't warmed two-thirds have warmed. But what it means is if you look up your hometown and you might say, Oh, I've never felt any global warming. Well, that's probably true. You probably haven't felt any global warming because the amount of global warming that we've seen is so small that it's absolutely overwhelmed by local weather phenomenon and there's one [00:24:30] third chance that you've been living in a, in a location that's actually seen cooling over the past 50 years. Speaker 3: Yeah. The personal relationship with global warming seems to be where a lot of people stumble and feel that it should be something visceral in their daily lives for it to be real and don't take the intellectual leap to regard the data on a worldwide basis because that's really sort of what your group has tried to do. Speaker 4: Yeah, that's absolutely right. One of the difficulties with global warming is that there's been less than one degree global [00:25:00] warming in the past 50 years. This is not something that you are going to be able to feel. You might think you have. You might say, Oh yes, if weather feel so different today than it did 10 years ago, that must be global warming. And people do that all the time. They say, oh, it's cold today, global warming, or it's warm today, global warming. But the truth is you can't detect it to be, you need hundreds, preferably thousands of records of locations from around the world in order to detect global warming. It's not something that you're going to go out and [00:25:30] feel on your own. Speaker 3: Do you know of any organizations that have embraced your data and are, are going off in some area of research that validates what you started this project to achieve? Speaker 4: Um, there are many organizations who have expressed interest in using our data. I think it's still fresh out there, so we're not quite sure who's going to be adopting it on a permanent basis. But we've gotten a lot of feedback. We've gotten a lot of emails, we've got a lot of people saying thank you for this. I've really been interested in getting into the stat and I was never [00:26:00] able to do it before. So I suspect that as time goes on and as our papers start to be published, there'll be more and more people using our data. Speaker 3: Elizabeth Miller, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Well, thank you. It's been my pleasure. It's been enjoyed being here. Speaker 6: [inaudible]Speaker 3: Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar and the news. Okay. Speaker 6: Oh, Speaker 7: the mycological society of San Francisco will present flavorful [00:26:30] foul and Far-flung guy on Tuesday the 21st at 7:00 PM in San Francisco's Randall Museum, one 99 museum way. Daniel Winkler, the author of a field guy to edible mushrooms of the will share his experiences collecting and eating wild mushrooms and in his travel agency mushrooming LLC that annually organizes and leads echo tours to Tibet and South America. For more info on this free event, visit www dot m s s f. Dot. [00:27:00] O. R. G. Speaker 3: The science had cow lecture for February. We'll be on Saturday, February 18th at 11:00 AM in Stanley Hall. Room One oh five the talk will be given by Professor Buford price and is entitled single celled microbes in polar ice, a proxy for evolution over 100 million generations. The presence of Pico Sino bacteria in ice at all. Depths in both Greenland and Antarctica provides an opportunity to study [00:27:30] microbial evolution over about 100 million generations. Professor Price, we'll discuss how this vast study is now possible. Speaker 7: Physicist Michio Kaku will appear at the first Congregational Church of Berkeley at two three four five Channing way on Thursday the 23rd from seven 30 to 9:30 PM advanced tickets are $12 or get in at the door for $15 Sunni professor Kaku who cofounded string field theory on popularity's his physics [00:28:00] on his science channel show and on two radio programs. He recently released physics of the future, which gives a vision of the coming century based on interviews with over 300 scientists that discuss cutting edge medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production, and astronautics. Visit kpfa.org for more information. Behavioral neuroscientist, Karen Ersh of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues have an article in the February 3rd [00:28:30] issue of science that studies the genetics of addiction. The team tested 50 pairs of siblings. One in each pair was addicted to cocaine or amphetamines while the other had no history of drug abuse. Participants pressed a left or right Arrow key when seeing a similar arrow on a computer screen unless they heard a tone in which case they were to do nothing. People with poor self control including most drug addicts find it difficult to refrain from pressing the key. Surprisingly, the siblings who are not addicted to drugs perform just as badly as their siblings who were [00:29:00] indeed brain scan showed the pairs had very similar brain irregularities in commentary on the article imaging specialist Nora Volkow of the National Institute of Drug Abuse in Bethesda. Notes that even in children as young as four to 12 traits such as self control and flexibility can be improved by targeted interventions including exercise, train, martial arts, Yoga and computer games designed to enhance working memory. Speaker 5: [inaudible] occurred during the show was by list [00:29:30] on a David from his album folk and acoustic made available under creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have Speaker 1: comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: I like that one. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spectrum
Elizabeth Muller

Spectrum

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2012 29:59


The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study is doing a new analysis of the surface temperature record in a rigorous manner that addresses the criticism of previous analysis done by other groups.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program, bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is with Elizabeth Mueller, Co founder and executive director of Berkeley Earth surface temperature. The Berkeley Earth surface temperature project is redoing the analysis of the earth surface temperature record in a rigorous manner that addresses the criticisms of previous analysis. [00:01:00] All their work to date is available free at their website, Berkeley earth.org I want to briefly explain two terms that are used in the interview. Creaking is the Geo statistic method devised by Daniel Craig, a mining engineer in 19:51 AM o is the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. The Oscillation is principally the change of sea surface temperature over time in the North Atlantic Ocean. Onto [00:01:30] the interview. Welcome Elizabeth Mueller to spectrum. Thank you. How did Berkeley Earth come into being? Is that how you'd like to refer to it as at Berkeley? Yes, that's right. I did Berkeley Earth come into being. Speaker 4: Um, rich and I had been working together for a couple of years and we kept being asked about climate issues which had been involved in climate for a long time. He taught his class physics for future presidents and what she goes into global warming and he and I were working together doing consulting on energy and environment issues, but people kept asking [00:02:00] about global warming and we had been uncomfortable with some of the elements of of global warming for some time. There was the station quality issue which had been raised by Anthony Watts, which both of us uncomfortable but we weren't quite sure what to do about it. There were other issues as well. There was the data selection issue. Why did the major groups only use 20% of the data 10% in recent years, but it was also in part the climate gates scandal that really [00:02:30] made us think somebody else needs to come in and have a fresh look at this. We really wanted to be able to lower the barriers to entry. The data was inaccessible, people couldn't get it. It was impossible for any group to come in and easily do an analysis of global warming and this is such an important area of policy work, of economics, of so many elements of the world today that we felt everybody should be able to go in and look at the data themselves, look at the analysis [00:03:00] and really understand what the issues were. So that's why we decided to create the Berkeley Earth project and do exactly that. Speaker 3: For our audience sake, we should identify rich. Speaker 4: Yes. Richard Muller is a long time physicist. He's a MacArthur winner. He's been involved in climate issues for a long time. He wrote a technical book on Ice Ages and astronomical causes. He's been teaching physics for future presidents here at Berkeley for I think about 10 years now. He also wrote the textbook and a popular book called Physics [00:03:30] for future presidents. He's also my dad. He and I started working together about, I guess about four years ago now, and I had been doing consulting mostly in Europe and kept getting asked about energy issues and so I wanted to bring him in to my consulting firm, but instead the two of us ended up creating a business together, which has been great fun. His, he's a lot of fun to work with. Speaker 3: Besides wanting to clarify things or level of playing field, if you will, [00:04:00] and make it more accessible, was there a sense that you were the right group to do it? Speaker 4: Well, we weren't a group. We didn't exist as a group at the time and so it was a question of pulling together the right people from the right backgrounds to create a right group. We did think that we wanted a fresh perspective so that it wasn't necessarily a problem that we were new to this specific area of work. Many of our people had had deep experience with climate change in the past, but we also wanted to combine physics and [00:04:30] statistics. Modern statistics. Bringing in David Berliner early on was an important choice that we wanted to take a fresh look at the problem using modern statistics, which we believed would allow us to use much more of the data than the previous groups had been able to do. Speaker 3: Would you describe the research and planning that you did to form the group and get things started? Sure. Speaker 4: We needed a nonprofit. We discovered pretty quickly that in order to do a study like this and raise funding, we needed to be [00:05:00] a nonprofit. We didn't have a nonprofit and nonprofits take quite some time to create and we weren't quite sure what we were going to do about that. When rich had a call from Michael Ditmore in Santa Barbara with a group called Novem and Michael did more wanted rich to lead a study on geoengineering, and rich said, well, you know, I'm not really that interested in doing a study on geoengineering, but if you really want to do a study that's going to have big impact and be very important, you should consider helping us with a study on global warming. [00:05:30] And a Michael said, hmm, that sounds interesting. Tell me more. So we started talking to him and it seemed like an ideal group for us to work with and so Novem came on to house the Berkeley Earth efforts. Speaker 4: We also started looking into what the other groups had done. We wanted to look at why they hadn't used more than 20% of the data. What were the issues surrounding the station quality issue raised by Anthony Watts? What were the concerns around the urban heat island [00:06:00] that many people had been talking about? This is where people had been saying, yes, there's global warming, but cities, everyone knows cities are warmer than rural areas and the world is getting more urban. So is it possible that the world is getting warmer not because of carbon dioxide, but because it's getting more urbanized? This is something that we wanted to look at as well. We tried to look very carefully at what some of the other groups had done and we discovered that many of the adjustments that they had made to [00:06:30] the data they had done manually and they hadn't really kept very careful track of what exactly they had done. Speaker 4: So even they couldn't go back and duplicate it and this was a concern as well, we we, this is such an important topic. You want to be able to Redo it and make sure you get the same results every time you do. And so that was another thing we looked at carefully trying to pick the brain of the people who had been dealing with the data. Was that extremely helpful and crucial to the project? It was helpful. I mean it was very useful to speak [00:07:00] to them, to meet with them to try and understand what they were doing. But at the same time we knew from pretty early on that we wanted to do something totally different. So we weren't trying to duplicate what they had done. We wanted to take a totally new approach, something that had never been done before use all of the data are pretty close to all of the data and we had to develop a modern statistical technique in order to do this and that was done by Robert Roddy, our lead scientist in conjunction with David Brillinger, a professor of statistics [00:07:30] here at Berkeley and what that meant was that we weren't adding on to the previous research. Speaker 4: We were really starting it totally new from a totally different approach. We didn't know what we were going to find. We didn't know if we were going to find that there was more global warming or if we're going to find that there was less global warming. We only knew or we thought, we knew that we weren't going to find the same results as everybody had found before us, which is why it was such a surprise in the end that even using a totally different technique, we ended up [00:08:00] with results that were so close to what the previous groups had found. I think that's a really strong statement in terms of what they are and what they mean is that even though you're using completely different approaches, you get results that are so, so similar. I think that really strengthens our confidence in the work that we did. Speaker 4: Talk a little bit about the gathering of the team. We wanted people on the team who were comfortable looking through huge quantities of data and had actually in the past made [00:08:30] discoveries by doing so, so it wasn't enough that they were able to pick apart other people's work. We wanted people who were able to dive in, get their hands dirty, and yet make an unexpected and surprising discovery and some of the people we chose, Jonathan wordly, Bob Jacobson had done this before, but also saw promoter who had done this and is working in cosmology and won the Nobel Prize this past year. So those were the people we wanted. People who had experience doing exactly that. Speaker 5: [00:09:00] You're listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's guest is Elizabeth Mueller, Co founder and executive director of Berkeley legal earth's surface. Speaker 3: That is really one of the big challenges of all this is the data set size. Speaker 4: It is, it's huge. It's huge. And merging that from the different sources [00:09:30] was really one of the biggest challenges we had to face. I should say Robert had to face, he was the one who really did most of the work, but he had 15 different data sources and almost as many different formats, all kinds of mess that really had to be sorted through. And that in many ways was one of the biggest challenges of the project was just getting through that. And we figured if we did nothing else but sifting through this data and putting together a clean data set, that would already be a huge contribution. Speaker 3: [00:10:00] So given that task, what other sort of methodology had you tried to impose on this data? [inaudible] Speaker 4: well, the other important elements, there's collecting the data, cleaning the data, um, merging the data. But the other part was of course analyzing the data. Um, and the other groups had only been able to use 20% of the data because they had a constraint. They needed to have long continuous records. Well Robert Roady, I'm together with David Berliner developed a new technique [00:10:30] based on creaking in which they're able to, to analyze all of the data, are virtually all of the data and the result was that we were able to use so much more and yet get very good, very carefully calculated error estimates and go much farther back in time than the previous groups had been able to. Speaker 3: And were you satisfied with the data sets that were available or did you look for other data sets? Speaker 4: Robert looked for everything. He really wanted to find all of the data that was out there and he, [00:11:00] he did a very complete job I believe in doing so. Speaker 3: Is that an ongoing process for him or the ongoing process? Speaker 4: The process is going to be updating it. We have now the 15 databases that this comes from and they are going to be updated on a regular basis since we want to be able to update our database on a regular basis and have it all automated so that that will just happen every few months or however often we decided Speaker 3: it needs to be. And so are these data sets pretty broadly accepted as the best available? Yes they are. And the source of them is government, [00:11:30] weather stations, Speaker 4: government, weather station. There's a lot of volunteer weather stations. There's a complete list of the 15 sources, many of which come through Noah Speaker 3: and I guess no is consolidating a lot of data sets from around the world. Speaker 4: Uh, yes. If you look at the data set, it really is around w from all around the world. Um, in the modern day. If you go back in time, it becomes less global. If you look at our earliest measurements, you may see data really only in the u s and Europe, [00:12:00] few places in India, but by the 19 hundreds you're really getting fairly good coverage of the globe accepting Antarctica, which doesn't really come into play until the 1950s Speaker 3: were there any other big challenges Speaker 4: under the cleaning of the data and developing the analysis framework? Where were really the biggest challenges? There were a couple of surprises though. The things that we didn't expect. One of the things that we discovered once we had access to the data, we were able to start playing with and looking [00:12:30] for other things that maybe people hadn't noticed before. One of the biggest surprises was the discovery that the oscillations in the data, which everybody had previously said, oh, those are El Nino are everybody's data goes up and down together and, and that's El Nino. We only looked at it very carefully. We discovered that, yes, it is highly correlated to to El Nino, but in fact it's even more correlated to the Gulf stream and that was a big surprise. We didn't expect that, but because we had access to the data, it [00:13:00] enabled us to look at these sorts of things and we're really very hopeful that now that the world has access to the data, there'll be many other important discoveries of the sort. Speaker 3: I know that you're doing land surface first, then ocean surface. Is that a natural two phase project? Are there more phases? Is there more? Speaker 4: Well, we wanted to start with the land because in large part that's where much of the controversy was, so we figured we wanted to start with a bite sized piece though. [00:13:30] Actually I think it was a much bigger bite than we thought it would be. But by analyzing the land, it looks at the issue of the temperature stations, the station quality issue. Anthony wants the urban heat island effect and this data selection issue was their data selection bias because they only used previous groups that only use 20% of the data. The oceans are going to be interesting in the next phase because of some of the discoveries we've made such as the Gulf stream. So we're really looking forward now to doing that [00:14:00] as a next phase of work because we want to look at this in more detail and see what we can find in terms of the relationship between the Gulf stream and temperature. Speaker 4: The Gulf stream, we found a 60 year cycle in the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which for the past 30 years has been going up. So the temperature has been going up and the temperature of the world has been going out temperature of both the Amo and and of the land surface temperature, which was unexpected. But it also [00:14:30] shows that the 60 year cycles is at a peak right now and it's going to start going down. The temperature is going to start going down. What is the impact of this going to be on global warming? Uh, is it possible that we haven't seen any global warming in the past 13 years in part because of this amo cycle and what's going to happen as the amo cycle starts, starts going down? We don't know it will, but we think it's a fascinating issue to look at. That fits in very naturally with our study of the oceans [00:15:00] and as the ocean data set, as extensive as the land, it's very different. Speaker 4: So instead of looking at a single locations, you're looking at mainly boats, so they're moving, there's different problems, different issues, but we think now that we have our framework developed, it shouldn't be as difficult as initially looking at the land was, but the analysis framework does have to change somewhat to accommodate for it. It does have to change some different collection process. Nothing's really out there. Stationary, taking [00:15:30] a reading every they are now in modern times they're boys and there's some fixed locations, but as you get back in time, as you go back in time, more and more of it come from boats. Your methodology for analyzing the data has less reliance on that longevity of sample. That's right. Our statistical techniques mean that we can work with fragments, we can work with little pieces, which has also been an advantage for dealing with some of these issues of station changes. Speaker 4: So you might have a station [00:16:00] that that goes along and it's reading a certain temperature within a certain range, um, fairly regularly for a number of years. And then all of a sudden the pattern is similar, but it's three degrees warmer than it was before. And you say, well, what's that? Um, what happened here? And previous groups would take them to say, okay, well this is probably a station move and this probably not exactly the same location as it was before. Something happened here. Maybe the time of day changed the time of the day that they were taking the, the, the readings. And so they corrected it and then they manually move [00:16:30] those, either they moved one down or they moved the other one up so that it would be a long continuous record. Well, with our statistical technique, we just cut it in into, and we say, okay, well we'll just assume that these are two different locations, two different records and handle it as such. And that means that we don't have to worry about adjusting the data. We just cut it and makes it much more easy to duplicate. And, um, that there's no manual adjustments that analyze why you that's right. And adjustment. [00:17:00] That's right. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 4: tune to k a l s Speaker 5: Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Elizabeth Moore, Co founder and executive director of the [inaudible] surface temperature project. Speaker 4: In the peer review process that you've now entered into, yes. Is there a process for integrating the feedback or at least analyzing [00:17:30] what people are saying to you or is it too soon now? We've been getting a lot of feedback so we have the official feedback that comes through the official peer review journals and we've been working with the reviewers and the editors to incorporate that feedback. Um, we discuss it as a group. We had one of the lead authors go through it in bring any issues to the crew, talk about any additional analysis that's required and go in and actually make some of the changes to the papers. But perhaps even more interestingly is the [00:18:00] feedback that we've gotten from the peer review process outside of the official journals. Because we've posted our papers online. We've been contacted by a number of scientists from around the world who have gone through our papers in extraordinary detail and looked at some of the things, raised some important questions, um, raised some issues, some concerns and that's been extremely helpful. I think our papers will be better in the end because of the peer review that we've gotten through the open process, the global [00:18:30] process of putting our papers online. Speaker 3: In terms of longevity of the, the project and the data set, how long do you envision staying with the project? Is there a point at which you just, you're, you're done? Speaker 4: Well I think we're not sure. I think we would love to stay involved. I think there's a need to keep updating the data data set take to keep it live. We would love to do that. I think can we, we have somebody in charge of maintaining the data center, [00:19:00] but we're not a long term project for now. We're based on, on fundraising. We fundraise for the first 18 months for now looking to fundraise for the next 18 months. So we have not yet been able to establish that type of permanent longevity that would be necessary to keep doing this on an ongoing basis. But it's certainly something that we're thinking about. Speaker 3: I went to your website and was looking around and went into the a frequently asked questions and it noted [00:19:30] that none of the scientists involved has taken a public political stand on global warming. And I wondered if that was still the case or if as a result of your first release of data that there was a revision of that or not. Speaker 4: I think that's still true. And our scientists believe that the statement which you might be referring to saying that global warming is real, is now a scientific statement there. There is the data to support that. There's the evidence to support that. There's error bars, uh, to support that. So when we need to make a statement like that, we believe [00:20:00] that it's a scientific statement, not a political statement. We haven't looked into other issues such as how much of it is human caused. And so we haven't taken, I would call political statements on those sorts of issues. We don't want to get into the politics because it muddies the science and we want people to be able to look at our numbers to look at our analysis and say, okay, we know that this is 100% pure scientific analysis, but on the other hand there is a need for [00:20:30] scientific evaluation of policy to see which policies that are on the table would actually make sense according to science, which ones would actually not really help very much. Speaker 4: We don't know how much of this we might get involved and we haven't done any of it so far. It might be a question of only saying is as much as we feel can be stated, that's really grounded in the science. So as far as the group trying to get drawn into choosing a prescription [00:21:00] for affecting or impacting global warming, that's not really something the group is interested in at all, right? I don't, I don't think so. I mean there's certain elements that it does keep coming up as an issue and there are a lot of people asking us to to get more involved in this, but we really want to make sure that anything we did say would be very grounded in the science. There might be some limited statements we could make that would be grounded in the science, but we haven't taken a decision on on that yet. Speaker 5: [00:21:30] You were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're speaking with Elizabeth Miller, Co founder and executive director of the Berkeley Earth surface temperature project. Speaker 4: And from your experience and personal opinion, is there a prescription that you feel is the best available? Well, I think we need a lot of different things. We need energy efficiency. There's a lot that can be done for low cost, no cost even making [00:22:00] money by increasing our energy efficiency. But we also need other things like low cost, solar, low cost, wind, nuclear. There are many things that are all helpful, but it needs to be something that can be affordable, that can be adopted and the developing world, China, India, the rest of the developing world, it needs to be cheap and unless it's cheap enough for them to be able to afford, it's not going to happen there. There are other priorities, so so China, their emissions are growing so fast that anything we do [00:22:30] has live in an impact and less we can set an example that is able to be followed by China. Speaker 4: That means it needs to be cheap if it needs to ideally be profitable so that people in China and India and the rest of the developing world can afford to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I don't see this being addressed in the international debate right now at the UN and it's really an important problem that I wish had more visibility. Is [00:23:00] there anything about the group that I haven't asked you that you'd, you'd want to bring up? Well, everything that I've mentioned today is available on our website, so it's Berkeley earth.org we have all of our papers there. We have our data set and both text format. And in Matlab we have our programs. We also have a lovely video. I don't know if you've seen the video. It shows a map of the world that is getting warmer and colder and you see weather going across the, the different regions [00:23:30] of the world. Speaker 4: And it takes us from 18 hundreds through to the present. So data visualization. Absolutely. Is that something that you've embraced it? It is. It is. And we've actually gotten some requests from some museums who have big globes. I guess they have one up at the Lawrence Hall of science and, and wanting to project our global warming movie onto such a globe, which I think would be a fascinating way of looking at it. There's a couple of other, um, interesting images [00:24:00] on our, on our website. For example, if you look at the u s many people are surprised to learn that out. One third of locations in the U s have cooled. They haven't warmed two-thirds have warmed. But what it means is if you look up your hometown and you might say, Oh, I've never felt any global warming. Well, that's probably true. You probably haven't felt any global warming because the amount of global warming that we've seen is so small that it's absolutely overwhelmed by local weather phenomenon and there's one [00:24:30] third chance that you've been living in a, in a location that's actually seen cooling over the past 50 years. Speaker 3: Yeah. The personal relationship with global warming seems to be where a lot of people stumble and feel that it should be something visceral in their daily lives for it to be real and don't take the intellectual leap to regard the data on a worldwide basis because that's really sort of what your group has tried to do. Speaker 4: Yeah, that's absolutely right. One of the difficulties with global warming is that there's been less than one degree global [00:25:00] warming in the past 50 years. This is not something that you are going to be able to feel. You might think you have. You might say, Oh yes, if weather feel so different today than it did 10 years ago, that must be global warming. And people do that all the time. They say, oh, it's cold today, global warming, or it's warm today, global warming. But the truth is you can't detect it to be, you need hundreds, preferably thousands of records of locations from around the world in order to detect global warming. It's not something that you're going to go out and [00:25:30] feel on your own. Speaker 3: Do you know of any organizations that have embraced your data and are, are going off in some area of research that validates what you started this project to achieve? Speaker 4: Um, there are many organizations who have expressed interest in using our data. I think it's still fresh out there, so we're not quite sure who's going to be adopting it on a permanent basis. But we've gotten a lot of feedback. We've gotten a lot of emails, we've got a lot of people saying thank you for this. I've really been interested in getting into the stat and I was never [00:26:00] able to do it before. So I suspect that as time goes on and as our papers start to be published, there'll be more and more people using our data. Speaker 3: Elizabeth Miller, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Well, thank you. It's been my pleasure. It's been enjoyed being here. Speaker 6: [inaudible]Speaker 3: Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar and the news. Okay. Speaker 6: Oh, Speaker 7: the mycological society of San Francisco will present flavorful [00:26:30] foul and Far-flung guy on Tuesday the 21st at 7:00 PM in San Francisco's Randall Museum, one 99 museum way. Daniel Winkler, the author of a field guy to edible mushrooms of the will share his experiences collecting and eating wild mushrooms and in his travel agency mushrooming LLC that annually organizes and leads echo tours to Tibet and South America. For more info on this free event, visit www dot m s s f. Dot. [00:27:00] O. R. G. Speaker 3: The science had cow lecture for February. We'll be on Saturday, February 18th at 11:00 AM in Stanley Hall. Room One oh five the talk will be given by Professor Buford price and is entitled single celled microbes in polar ice, a proxy for evolution over 100 million generations. The presence of Pico Sino bacteria in ice at all. Depths in both Greenland and Antarctica provides an opportunity to study [00:27:30] microbial evolution over about 100 million generations. Professor Price, we'll discuss how this vast study is now possible. Speaker 7: Physicist Michio Kaku will appear at the first Congregational Church of Berkeley at two three four five Channing way on Thursday the 23rd from seven 30 to 9:30 PM advanced tickets are $12 or get in at the door for $15 Sunni professor Kaku who cofounded string field theory on popularity's his physics [00:28:00] on his science channel show and on two radio programs. He recently released physics of the future, which gives a vision of the coming century based on interviews with over 300 scientists that discuss cutting edge medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production, and astronautics. Visit kpfa.org for more information. Behavioral neuroscientist, Karen Ersh of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues have an article in the February 3rd [00:28:30] issue of science that studies the genetics of addiction. The team tested 50 pairs of siblings. One in each pair was addicted to cocaine or amphetamines while the other had no history of drug abuse. Participants pressed a left or right Arrow key when seeing a similar arrow on a computer screen unless they heard a tone in which case they were to do nothing. People with poor self control including most drug addicts find it difficult to refrain from pressing the key. Surprisingly, the siblings who are not addicted to drugs perform just as badly as their siblings who were [00:29:00] indeed brain scan showed the pairs had very similar brain irregularities in commentary on the article imaging specialist Nora Volkow of the National Institute of Drug Abuse in Bethesda. Notes that even in children as young as four to 12 traits such as self control and flexibility can be improved by targeted interventions including exercise, train, martial arts, Yoga and computer games designed to enhance working memory. Speaker 5: [inaudible] occurred during the show was by list [00:29:30] on a David from his album folk and acoustic made available under creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have Speaker 1: comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: I like that one. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Open Minds UFO Radio
Leslie Kean, UFOs on the Record

Open Minds UFO Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2011 91:00


Leslie Kean is the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record, a book which includes written statements from five generals, a former governor, military UFO witnesses, and a forward by John Podesta, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff. The book has also been endorsed by famous Physicist Michio Kaku and the Chief Astronomer and Planetarium Director for the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Derrick Pitts. We will talk to Leslie about the recent History Channel special focused on her book, Pitts’ recent endorsement, and controversy created by new information about a famous Belgian UFO photograph. 

MOJO's The Circuit

“Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” Physicist Michio Kaku sits down with Deepak to discuss his new book “Physics of the Impossible” and enlighten us as to how many of the things we see in the movies are actually possible — Teleportation? Time Travel? Totally. Perpetual motion machines? Not so much. [...]