Clean Coal and Sparkling Water

This is the title of a News & Views article of mine that just appeared in Nature. I had the opportunity to comment on a paper by colleagues from the noble gas and isotope community on the long-term fate of CO2 in natural gas fields. This is a hot topic because it relates to carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that may become important in fighting climate change.

Actually I don't think that the paper will or should have any great consequences with regard to CCS applications, but the media seem interested. I got several calls yesterday and for example the German magazine SPIEGEL has an article in its online issue today.

US Congress Follows My Recommendation

Incredible: It seems that some US lawmakers have read my blog! Or did they develop the idea of using tax law to re-claim undeserved bonuses all on their own? Anyway, they House of Representatives passed a bill that imposes a 90 % tax on bonuses paid by government backed companies such as AIG. Revolutionary indeed.

This move is in line with the ideas I have proposed before in this blog (here and here). However, in my opinion it should be expanded dramatically to inlcude all kinds of excessive salaries all over the world. This would be a real step forward, but I doubt it will ever be achieved...

Money, Money, Money

15 years ago, when I was a postdoc in the US, I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about the earnings of chief executives. As I remember it was entitled "What they earn and why they deserve it". I found it outrageous that they could seriously say that earnings of many millions a year would be "deserved", because of good performance of the company at the stock markets and so on.

Now, the New York Times has an article about reclaiming some of the money that executives of failed banks have received over the past years. Apparently they have come to the conclusion that these guys really did not "deserve" all that money. This is a step forward, but I still wait for someone to argue that excessive pay should not be allowed even if companies make good profits. The point is that such salaries favor a wrong mentality. Take this citation from the above mentioned article:
“This is really in our view a giant fraudulent conveyance, where money was paid out to executives at firms that were fatally undercapitalized,” said Daniel Pedrotty, director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. office of investment. “We are arguing for a recovery of money that was used by people who treated these companies as a giant A.T.M. machine.”

So what can we do to change the thinking of executives that they can use their companies as giant A.T.M. machines? I have been arguing that a political approach could be to charge excessive taxes on excessive earnings. Would be quite simple if there were no "tax oases", i.e. countries that invite rich people to hide their money from taxes.

Unfortunately, one of the countries that happily accept the money that should be paid to other states is my homecountry Switzerland. The Swiss idea (and law) that "tax evasion" is not a crime, only "tax fraud", coupled with the bank secret, opens the door for such behaviour. And my favorite Swiss bank UBS has championed in it. The US has now turned up the heat on UBS and they agreed to hand over "secret" data on some clients whom they helped to evade US taxes. Furthermore, "the bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities."

Obviously, this breach of the Swiss' sacred bank secret instilled a heated debate in Switzerland. Most blame the US, although it now transpires that the top executives of UBS knew very well that they engaged in a risky and illegal business. What motivated them to do this? Did they just aim to increase the shareholder value of their bank, or could it be that they calculated how much their own personal share would be diminished if they stopped the raid on the US?

So, what's the bottom line? The leaders of UBS not only invested heavily in "toxic" US loans, which cost them many tens of billions, they also engaged in criminal activities to cheat the US government. The fine of $780 million is peanuts, much less than what they still pay out as bonuses to their employees. And the losses are covered by the Swiss government, to avoid a crash of this crucial company. Will they get away with that?

The irony is that these bankers happily accept to be helped with taxmoney, while they help rich people (like themselves) to avoid paying taxes wherever possible. Not only do they think they deserve the millions they earn, they also blame the state for claiming something back via taxes. Even as they themselves are saved by taxmoney, they don't appreciate the value of taxes.

Here is what I would do if I were in charge in Switzerland:
- nationalize UBS
- fire all top executives (they should be happy not to go to jail)
- claim back bonuses of the past 5 years (at least)
- abolish the bank secret and abusive tax laws
- introduce a 99% tax on all income above say 0.5 million Francs
- start the Swiss financial sector all over from scratch

The Bankers haven't hit Reality yet

While my homecountry Switzerland is in turmoil over more than 2 billion Francs of bonuses being paid by the government-backed bank UBS (formerly a national pride, now essentially bankrupt), with heated discussions even at the world economic forum in Davos, things are even worse in the center of the entire mess, my former second home New York.

The New York Times had an interesting article about Wall Street paying the sixth highest amount of bonuses ever after a year that hardly can be said to have been one of the best. Yes, I know, they HAVE to do this, otherwise they might lose their best people (e.g., those who just wrecked the world economy). But, where will these people go if most banks are down? The argument was bad even before the crash, now it is just outrageous.

The best comes at the end of the article: "A poll of 900 financial industry employees [...] found that while nearly eight out of 10 got bonuses, 46 percent thought they deserved more." They haven't hit reality yet. They still live in their dream world where money comes from nothing. It either has to get much worse or someone has to tell them that it's over.

Or are we really going to accept that this kind of unrestrained capitalism continues?

P.S. I am glad to learn that Obama seems to share my opinion and tells the bankers what's up. It may be populist, but at least he's not alone.

Deep fusion, deep oil, deep nonsense

The incredible paper about evidence for nuclear fusion in the deep Earth coming from some of my old papers spurred my curiosity about its background. The theory of geo-fusion seems to go back to a certain Steven Jones. He even published a Nature paper about it in 1989, in the heydays of the cold-fusion mania. But it has not been confirmed, as the search for magmatic tritium was not successful. The new paper by Jiang et al. seems to change that, but it does not convince even a tiny little bit.

It rather seems to me that this geo-fusion theory is of about the same quality as the theory of deep, abiogenic oil, of which I have already written. Alas, no deep oil or deep fusion will save us from what appears to be a serious energy crisis. Would be nice, but these theories are nonsense.

Interestingly, Steven Jones seems to like nonsensical theories. As his Wikipedia entry reveals, he is a strong proponent of the theory that the the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition during the September 11 attacks, rather than by the airplanes crashing into it. I don't have a high opinion of such conspiracy theories, as I mentioned before. It seems that Prof. Jones, as great a physicist as he may be, is due for a reality check.

Physicists (I am one!) tend to think that they are very intelligent. Sometimes, this leads them to venture into areas of which they do not know very much. I also do this, but I try to be careful. Others are sometimes overly self-confident. Such as the German physicists who tried to reject the greenhouse warming theory as contradicting basic physics. Somewhere along the way they lost track and started to produce deep nonsense. Too bad.

Natural Nuclear Fusion in the Earth’s Interior?

Here comes the promised funny story about real junk science. Recently, the following article was published in the Journal of Fusion Energy:
Jiang et al., 2008. Tritium Released from Mantle Source: Implications for Natural Nuclear Fusion in the Earth’s Interior. J. Fusion Energ. 27:346–354. DOI 10.1007/s10894-008-9149-y.
As usual, the entire article is not freely available, but you can get at least a free preview of the first page here.

What's so funny about this article? Well, first of all, the hypothesis that nuclear fusion takes place in the deep Earth (geo-fusion) is quite unusual, but more on that later. The point that raised my interest (after being tipped-off by a colleague, thanks Rainer!) is that this article cites no less than 5 papers which I have (co-)authored. Ok, on three occasions my name is misspelled in the citation, but still they must mean those papers. Up to now, I did not know I was into fusion research. How come I get cited in the Journal of Fusion Energy?

I have been involved in some research on tritium and He isotopes in volcanic lakes, together with my former Swiss colleagues from Eawag. The authors of the current article heavily rely on our papers dealing with Lake Nemrut (Turkey) and Laacher See (Germany). There we found clear evidence for the presence of gases (He) from the Earth's mantle, which is not too surprising in volcanic areas. The lake water also contains some tritium (3H, radioactive hydrogen). Tritium is a product of fusion reactions, but other sources are prominent in the environment. The proponents of geo-fusion now look for evidence of tritium fluxes from the deep Earth to support their idea. And Jiang and co-authors think they found it in our old papers! Gee, if these guys win the Nobel Prize with this discovery, they owe me something!

Have we been stupid not to see the signs of geo-fusion in our data? I don't think so. I rather think that the claims made by Jiang et al. are pure fantasy. They interpret small increases of tritium concentrations with depth in these lakes as evidence for a flux of tritium from the lake bottom. But there are much simpler explanations, most importantly that the surface water is being diluted by the recent input of low-tritium water. The data are from the 1990s, when tritium in precipitation was clearly decreasing with time, so many lakes would show such "reversed" tritium profiles. And the one volcanic crater lake where there is an isolated deep water that shows the signature of the subsurface input, Lac Pavin in France, actually shows very low tritium in that deep water. Jiang et al. even cite one of our papers on Lac Pavin, but they do not mention the low tritium there, as it does not fit their theory.

I do not want to write a review of the Jiang paper here. It would be devastating. I wonder, however, how such a controversial paper can be published apparently without proper review. The entire argument is based on data of our papers. It would be natural to invite one of us as a reviewer. I am quite sure this did not happen, as none of us would have accepted this manuscript. Obviously the authors have no expertise on lake physics and tritium in the environment. Otherwise, it would be clear that the presented evidence is extremely spurious, at best.

So, once again, my confidence in the quality of the scientific literature is shattered. This case is probably less severe (and certainly of lesser political importance) than that of the papers by Chilingar and colleagues, but is shows the same failure of the review system. So, yes, there is enough junk science out there to be debunked. But unfortunately, the one website that claims to do this in reality attacks serious science and only produces more junk.

I do my best to uncover some of the junk that falls along my way. But its a gigantic Sisyphus task. If this is the state of confusion humanity is into, then good night...

Finally: News on Twin Papers

I started this blog after Eli Rabett had pointed out to me that the reply to my rebuttal of a climate-sceptic paper had been published in duplicate in two journals. This highly unusual and suspicious event triggered me to blog about strange things going on at the fringe of science.

As a more direct response, I asked the editors of the involved journals (Environmental Geology and Energy Sources) if they were aware of the twin papers and what they intended to do about it. After a long wait, I finally got an answer.

The editorial office of Environmental Geology explained that their Editor in Chief had been informed about the second publication and had approved it. So there is no plagiarism, everything was officially sanctioned. The core of the explanation in detail:

"Due to the backlog of manuscripts, printing of the paper copy of Chilingar's comments was delayed for several months. In the interim, Dr. Chilingar contacted Dr. LaMoreaux and asked permission to "reprint" parts of his comments in the journal Energy Sources, where he serves on the editorial board. Dr. LaMoreaux gave Dr. Chilinger permission to quote from his comments to your rebuttal originally published in Environmental Geology."

Great. I am relieved. I will not stop this blog, though, as there are still enough questionable things going on within and around the scientific literature. A really funny example will follow soon...