2010-09-29

促使日方釋放閔晉漁5179船長的原因探討

日本在9月24日中午突然宣布釋放閔晉漁5179船長詹其雄,這對所有觀察家來說,都是意料之外,使人大跌眼鏡的發展。

究竟是什麼原因使得日本不顧面子、而且冒著國內反彈壓力的巨大風險而突然做出這樣的決定呢?

一般評論認為這主要是溫家寶總理講話後的兩件事情有關。一件是稀土元素的對日出口傳言,另一件是石家莊的四個日本人因為間諜嫌疑被拘留。不過,這都是不可能是主要原因,“不靠譜”。因為,第一,中國當天立即否認了對稀土元素元素出口的限制的傳言。所以,即使中國容許甚至鼓勵其國營企業私下對日制裁,也沒有任何理由去禁止日本通過第三國間接向華購買稀土元素。更何況日本應該有一定的存貨應急。日本業界的反應也不可能這麼快傳到首相府並使其作出相應決定。因為這是涉及到上千上萬家公司的事情。第二,四個日本人被拘留的事件,無論他們是否真的有進行間諜活動,中國不可能對其作出極端的判決(網上有一人換四命的“判死刑”之說,簡直匪夷所思)。而且,假如這四人真是間諜,日本的倉促反應就更加使得中國覺得沒抓錯人了。無論如何,這兩件事情假如會給菅直人造成壓力,那壓力都不是一兩天內就能傳到首相府並引起即時反應的。

其中一個簡單的解釋是排除任何陰謀論的直接解讀。就是,沖繩的檢察官是根據事實依據而決定對詹其雄的處罰理據不足的。沖繩檢察官的唯一錯誤是不該自以為聰明地畫蛇添足加了一句”顧及日中關係” 。當然對於畫蛇添足之說,另有陰謀論的分解,有人說菅直人的黨內黨外政敵或沖繩不滿日本民主黨在普天間遷址問題違反承諾而暗地給菅直人難看。

這種解讀有很多理由可以支持
  1. 沖繩檢察官經過十天還不能作出檢控決定而要申請延期,很可能是證據不足。
  2. 日本海巡的粗暴(aggressiveness)是有跡可尋的,以前就曾撞沉過台灣和香港的漁船(見華爾街時報9月12日 The Other China Sea Flashpoint)。
  3. 閔晉漁長度只有日本海巡船的40%,噸位大概(以程度比3次方計)6%。而且船體肯定沒有為衝撞而建的日船堅固。除非船長瘋了或爛醉如泥,否則不可能以卵擊石。 而日本應該有為船長做酒精濃度測驗的。
  4. 漁船船長希望逃逸避免被扣船罰款是可以理解的,特別考慮到是中國人民對官警的普遍不信任。
  5. 漁船船首碰到日本海巡船之側,不一定就是漁船故意碰撞。更可能的是日本海巡圍堵過於激進,漁船閃避不及。
  6. 日本遲遲不願意公開錄像。
因此,日方檢視證據後認為沒有理由認為船長故意撞擊日船並獨立做出決定並非不可能的事。不過,即使事實如此,到了今天,日本已經騎虎難下,不能承認自己海巡的魯莽累事了。另一方面,中國在船員船長回國後肯定做了大量的搜證工作,若日本公開錄像必有好戲可觀。

而日本在放人後這麼急於安排高層會面,其中一個可能,就是自知理虧,不想因為海巡的魯莽而丟面子。而不一定是屈服於中方的經濟報復或石家莊事件。

從另一方面考慮,假設日本海巡操作沒有大的瑕疵,則日本真的是因為溫家寶的警告和後續行動而放人。

 日本起初的理由是司法獨立,以致於有些媒體甚至批評日方放入是罔顧司法獨立的違憲之舉。不過這裡需要澄清一點,就是檢控權不屬於三權分立裡的司法獨 立。三權分立指的是法官的判決不能受到國家元首的影響。檢控權屬於檢控官,以及檢控官的上司(在香港是律政司,而律政司是聽命於特首的,而不是終審庭法官 的)。干預法官判決,才是違憲,而詹其雄還沒走到法官那一步。所以首相府可以介入也就理所當然了。

那日本怕的不是稀土,也不是公民受到扣查,而是看到了中國不惜兩敗俱傷的決心。因為貿易本身就是一個尋求雙贏的選擇,任何中國公司,放棄了與日本做生意的既有決定和渠道,必須尋找替代客戶或供應商,成本必然增加(還沒算尋找新貿易夥伴的成本)。日本的政府與企業沒有中國政商的高度統一性,自然會做出對個體比較理性(或短期性)的息事寧人的選擇了。而更重要的是,日本不知道中國還有什麼牌沒有出。菅直人不敢拿自己要政績來賭。而中國政府則不只有控制企業的能力,還有強大的民意後盾。

那到底中國還有什麼牌呢?
  • 其他的經濟牌:包括進一步的阻礙貿易運作,不惜兩敗俱傷。在日本,不是政府控制企業,而是企業控制政府,很難進行有效反擊。對於這種不對稱的戰略,日本只能指靠親西方媒體嚷嚷“不可靠經貿夥伴”,就如前幾年俄羅斯與烏克蘭的天然氣價格紛爭裡,西媒只批評俄羅斯是“不可靠經貿夥伴”,卻對烏克蘭盜氣視若無睹一樣。
  • 外交牌:最近的例子就是暗示在北方四島上倒戈一擊,與俄羅斯聯合對付日本。日本讀賣新聞9月29日已有相關揣測 (China, Russia team up on territorial claims)。從60年代開始,中國一直毫不含糊地支持日本向蘇聯對於北方四島的申索。假如兩個二戰戰勝國兼聯合國安理會常任理事國聯手對因為二戰而來的北方四島問題表態,對於日本是極其不利的。
  • 漁政船只是巡弋釣魚列島海域。這幾天已經開始。以後中國漁政船會一步一步的縮小其繞道巡弋半徑。
  • (有控制地)逐步開放民間示威
  • 放民間漁船出海 (為什麼竭力阻止保釣船出海,可能是為了留住這張牌)
以上種種,都沒有觸及美日安保條約的範圍。因為,即使漁政船的巡弋,也不是武裝挑釁。
    日本對中國可以出的牌應該有一定了解,加上一些未知牌的不確定效應,使得日本不得不考慮息事寧人。可惜現在日本的底牌已露,中國將會開始對釣魚島海域巡弋並形成事實。以後,中國將不再處於下風。中日東海的爭議,最終結果很可能是爭議地區共同開發或者對分,包括釣魚島本身。


        2010-09-28

        Time machine found in HK

        What a trading floor!

        I thought this is from the 1970s, but the date was September 2, 2010!!!

        Tell me where you can find those antique machines. No wonder HK lags Singapore by so much.

        I can understand why the traders want long lunch breaks, but I cannot understand what the trader can do which computers cannot,  with better accuracy and efficiency.

        reading list September 2010

        Map of the (Old) World 946 BC until 1000 AD

        Map of the (Old) World 946 BC until 1000 AD
        (the China portion has some mistakes, especially for Tang dynasty. see my previous maps and animation posts below)

        via Cominganarchy



        Related:

        2010-09-22

        The 1783/1785 Ryukyu Map by Japanese cartographer Hayashi

        Nicolas Kristof's blog regarding Diaoyu (Pinnacles Islands aka Senkaku as translated by Japanese) has attracted a letter from the Japanese government. He maintained his view, but also published the letter from Japan to provide the other side of the argument.

        This (三国通覧図説 / 林子平 図並説)should be the 1783 map mentioned in Kristof's blog. It was  mentioned byJapanese version and the source of the map below)Japanese scholar by Kiyoshi Inoue , Professor of History department, Kyoto University
        • Ryukyu territroy began from the Kume Island and the area east of it, whereas Chihwei Yu and the Huangwei Yu and Tiaoyu Yu (Diaoyutai) to the west were Chinese territory. Obviously, this was defined in clear terms after the middle of the 16th century at the latest. There are no records or documents whatsoever by the Ryukyu side or the Japanese expressing disagreement or doubt. Moreover, there are not even legends, not to say documents about contacts of the Ryukyu people with the Tiaoyu Island (Diaoyutai) and Huangwei Yu in ancient times. Sailing from Ryukyu to the Tiaoyu Island (Diaoyutai) was particularly difficult because it was against the wind and the tide. In the middle of the 19th century, that is, the closing years of Japan's feudal period, the Ryukyu people knew the Tiaoyu Island (Diaoyutai) as Yokon (or Yokun), the Huangwei Yu as "Kubashima", and the Chihwei Yu as "Kumesekishima". This was confirmed by the records of the last Chinese imperial envoy. These in no way affect the title to these territories. The map and explanations about Ryukyu Kingdom in the book General Illustrations of Three Countries by Shihei Hayashi were completely based on the Chungshan Mission Records. The Chungshan Mission Records had found their way to Japan long ago and there was even a Japanese edition. This document was the most comprehensive and authoritative source of knowledge about Ryukyu for the Japanese people in the late Edo period.
        The map labeled the islands in the same color as China's (Qing Empire), most likely because of the recording of shipping route China used to reach Ryukyu.(source: Hokkaido University)

        Full Map and Japan Map (日本図 + 三國圖)
        三國=琉球、蝦夷、朝鮮,當時皆不屬日本。當時還特別有列明為無主島的,是今天的小笠原群島。(The 3 Country maps means Japan and its 3 neighbors, Ryukyu, Korea and Hokkaido, not part of Japan back then. It also included a section of "uninhabited/un-owned island groups", which are today's Ogasawara Islands)

        Ryukyu Map (琉球島図)

        Diaoyu and Taiwan portion enlarged (Diaoyu colored same as Qing's, instead of classified as "uninhabited" like Ogasawara. As Professor Inoue indicated, the map is probably created based on his reading of the Chinese travelogue)


        Japan was first interested in Ryukyu in 1885 but waited till January of 1895 to formally set claim on the islands, by then the Japanese army had already completely smashed Qing' navy and army, and have taken Lushunkou near today's Dalian in November 1894. The Shimonoseki Treaty was signed in April but the war was almost finished by January. Some used the difference in dates (January vs April) to claim that the Diaoyu was not part of the spoil of the war, but the fact is the Pescadores Islands (Penghu) was taken by the Japanese in March 1895, also before the signing of the Treaty.

        However, I am not as confident as Kristof about how ICJ would decide, for reasons outlined by Alexander Peterson.

        ===
        The first (full) map above, to the east (actually, between E and ESE) of Ulrungdo (鬱林島), seems to be an island marked as Korean held (朝鮮ノ持ニ), seem to fit the relative position of Dokdo (Takeshima) very nicely, and was labelled Takeshima in the enlarged map below.

        Enlarged portion shows Takeshima held by Chosen


        Below is the Korea map from Hayashi's book, where Ulengdo (鬱林島)is shown as the island very close to the Korean mainland.

        Korea Map (朝鮮八道図)


        Hokkaido Map (蝦夷国全図)





        2010-09-17

        中秋燈謎

        聽回來的。

        謎面:  色狼不搞同性戀

        打一政治人物(諧音格)

        2010-09-16

        緣木求魚:再論回扣旅遊

        續前文 (香港的集體失焦:背道而馳 與 刻舟求劍 (之一)

        今天香港無線電視台新聞透視提供了很好的實驗數據,證明了強迫購物跟團費的零關聯。

        該節目跟踪一個團,每人付了1800-2000不等的人民幣,結果還是一樣被強迫購物。還有一個旅客額外交了2500元的“年輕人低購物附加費”,另一個付了三百元的“非上海居民低消費力附加費”。結果來到香港還不是一視同仁,一個宰法。

        人的本性是貪得無厭的。把問題推在 “零團費”上,使得遊客以為團費跟服務有關聯,其實等同旅遊黑店的同謀。結果是遊客付了高額團費,受到的還是零團費的服務,還是被迫在指定的店花一整天購物。

        因為,強迫購物的問題,不是團費多少,而是商戶與旅行社還有導遊的回扣問題。 必須取締,或至少限制回扣百分比的上限,才能杜絕強迫購物的問題。政府立法慢,TIC旅遊業協會樹準則,給標籤總可以吧?

        標籤不該跟團費有關。簡單一點,所有團都有標籤,就是(1)零回扣,(2)低回扣(<5%),(3)高回扣(>5%)。然後看那第三類的怎麼做生意。然後,必須發給每個旅客一份協會說明,列出什麼是允許的,什麼是不允許的,被強迫購物該打那個電話,還有旅客錄音錄像的權利。

        拜託各媒體,以後不要再說什麼“零團費”,“低團費”了。這樣只會誤導遊客消費者,你們也不知不覺中變成了黑店的同謀。 要叫,就叫“強迫購物團”,或“購物回扣團”

        那10%市佔率辦“ 優質旅遊”的旅行社,也請你們改一改稱呼。叫“零回扣團”,這樣你們才能在市場銷售上DIFFERENTIATE。必須要有一個可以客觀描述不是模棱兩可的指標,才可以把你們從那些害群之馬區別開來。否則,你收4000元一位,人家收3800元照樣強迫購物!

        2010-09-14

        A solution for the Diaoyu deadlock

        China found a good "dodge" by suspending the East Sea talk as a response to the recent Diaoyu incident. However, even after the release of the boat and the 14 crew members the captain is still detained. It looks very unlikely either side could find itself a good reason to back off.

        Still, there is one way for a face-saving solution for both China and Japan. But the window of opportunity is very narrow. They need to make such discussion and decision within the next 12 hours or so.

        Japan needs an excuse to release the captain of the Chinese fishing boat. The excuse will be a humanitarian reason. The captain wants to attend the funeral of his grandmother tomorrow, September 15th. Japan should release him on a bail -- with a small amount commensurate to the income of a Chinese fisherman. Provided the amount of the bail is reasonably low, Japan will be in a position to shift the blame to the Chinese side if this is refused.

        If the captain does not report back and forfeit the bail, Japan can continue to keep the file open and save face. This would provide China of what it wants, and Japan would also avoid escalating the dispute by having to proceed with the prosecution after the 10 day detention.

        Now that the DPJ election is over and Kan emerged with a clean victory. He is in a position to act. As a good will, China should reciprocate by resuming the East Sea talk.

        Let's watch if the 2 nations are mature enough to make such moves. Again, the window of opportunity is narrow. The funeral will be over by tomorrow though I believe the exact hour could be moved to the afternoon or even late evening. If, instead, Japan will release the captain on 17th (10 day detention) without a resolution from the court, she would need some rationale which is probably hard to find. On the other hand, it is not practical to keep on holding to the captain.

        September 18th will be a sensitive date, it marks the anniversary of Mukden Incident in 1931, when Japan annexed Inner Manchuria. No one wants to see what happened in 2005 repeat. Japan is not applying for the permanent seat of UNSC this time, Kan is a much more China-friendly leader than Koizumi, and there is much more to lose economically for both than it was five years ago.

        This is also my view regarding the "global warming" issue

        Finally, there is some real physics. Professor Laughlin said all what I wanted to say.

        A few years ago, I was amused at reading a report that the hundreds of thousands of cattles in the Antelopes Valley in Central California were blames of emitting too much methane via farting, and contributing to the warming of the earth (see, for example this). I was like, what about the six millions of residents in California? Do they fart at all? Do a million people fart less than a hundred thousand cattles? If the grass is not digested by cattles, will they be digested by sheeps, or insects? Do these creature fart? Or will they find another way to manufacture methane? Do they breathe out more CO2 than the effective dosage of methane? This sounds scary, maybe we should remove the grass and turn the area back to desert again, like the Death Valley? But then grass does perform photosynthesis which converts CO2 back to O2 and retain solar energy into chemical format such as sugar and starch, and I know energy is required to restore entropy......

        "Common sense tells us that damaging a thing this old is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish—like invading Russia." 

        yes, it is common sense physics, nothing as sophisticated as Hawkings physics.

        My personal answer to conservation is simply, I try not to create more entropy unless necessary, which means, keep the non-biodegrable wastes in order, do not waste energy unless needed, etc.

        ===

        What the Earth Knows

        Any serious conversation about the planet’s climate and our energy future must begin, paradoxically, with a backward look at geologic time. The reason for this is that the way forward is fogged by misunderstandings about the earth. Experts are little help in the constant struggle in this conversation to separate myth from reality, because they have the same difficulty, and routinely demonstrate it by talking past each other. Respected scientists warn of imminent energy shortages as geologic fuel supplies run out. Wall Street executives dismiss their predictions as myths and call for more drilling. Environmentalists describe the destruction to the earth from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. Economists ignore them and describe the danger to the earth of failing to burn coal, oil, and natural gas. Geology researchers report fresh findings about what the earth was like millions of years ago. Creationist researchers report fresh findings that the earth didn’t exist millions of years ago. The only way not to get lost in this awful swamp is to review the basics and decide for yourself what you believe and what you don’t.

        Geologic time is such a vast concept that it’s helpful to convert it to something more pedestrian just to get oriented. I like rainfall.
        • The total precipitation that falls on the world in one year is about one meter of rain, the height of a golden retriever.
        • The total amount of rain that has fallen on the world since the industrial revolution began is about 200 meters, the height of Hoover Dam.
        • The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since the time of Moses is enough to fill up all the oceans.
        • The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since the Ice Age ended is enough to fill up all the oceans four times.
        • The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since the dinosaurs died is enough to fill up all the oceans 20,000 times—or the entire volume of the earth three times.
        • The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since coal formed is enough to fill up the earth 15 times.
        • The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since oxygen formed is enough to fill the earth 100 times.
        Common sense tells us that damaging a thing this old is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish—like invading Russia. The earth has suffered mass volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation, and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict, and it’s still here. It’s a survivor. We don’t know exactly how the earth recovered from these devastations, because the rocks don’t say very much about that, but we do know that it did recover—the proof of it being that we are here.

        Nonetheless, damaging the earth is precisely what’s concerning a lot of responsible people at the moment. Carbon dioxide from the human burning of fossil fuel is building up in the atmosphere at a frightening pace, enough to double the present concentration in a century. This buildup has the potential to raise average temperatures on the earth several degrees centigrade, enough to modify the weather and accelerate melting of the polar ice sheets. Governments around the world have become so alarmed at this prospect that they’ve taken significant, although ineffective, steps to slow the warming. These actions include legislating carbon caps, funding carbon sequestration research, subsidizing alternate energy technologies, and initiating at least one serious international treaty process to balance the necessary economic sacrifices across borders.
        Unfortunately, this concern isn’t reciprocated. On the scales of time relevant to itself, the earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation. It doesn’t care whether you turn off your air conditioner, refrigerator, and television set. It doesn’t notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car. These actions simply spread the pain over a few centuries, the bat of an eyelash as far as the earth is concerned, and leave the end result exactly the same: all the fossil fuel that used to be in the ground is now in the air, and none is left to burn. The earth plans to dissolve the bulk of this carbon dioxide into its oceans in about a millennium, leaving the concentration in the atmosphere slightly higher than today’s. Over tens of millennia after that, or perhaps hundreds, it will then slowly transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene. The process will take an eternity from the human perspective, but it will be only a brief instant of geologic time.
        Some details of this particular carbon dioxide scenario are controversial, of course, since all forecasts are partly subjective, including those made by computer. You have to extrapolate from present-day facts and principles, and there are varying opinions about these. The time scale for man-made carbon dioxide to be absorbed by the ocean is set by the mixing rate of surface water with deep water in the sea, which is known only indirectly and might conceivably change during the thousand-year hot spell. The amount of carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere after equilibration varies from tolerable to alarming depending on how much industrial burning the model assumes. No one knows for sure how long it will take the excess carbon dioxide to turn into limestone and disappear into the rocks, or even the specific chemistry involved. The main reason for thinking it will disappear is that something, presumably a geologic regulatory process, fixed the world’s carbon dioxide levels before humans arrived on the scene. Some people argue that carbon dioxide has been locked to these values for millions of years, the grounds of the argument being that the photosynthetic machinery of plants seems optimized to them. But the overall picture of a thousand-year carbon dioxide pulse followed by glacially slow decay back to the precivilization situation is common to most models, even very pessimistic ones.

        Global warming forecasts have the further difficulty that you can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. In principle, changes in climate should show up in rainfall statistics, hurricane frequency, temperature records, and so forth. As a practical matter they don’t, because weather patterns are dominated by large multi-year events in the oceans, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation, which have nothing to do with climate change. In order to test the predictions, you’d have to separate these big effects from subtle, inexorable changes on scales of centuries, and nobody knows how to do that yet.

        Humans can unquestionably do damage persisting for geologic time if you count their contribution to biodiversity loss. A considerable amount of evidence shows that humans are causing what biologists call the “sixth mass extinction,” an allusion to the five previous cases in the fossil record where huge numbers of species died out mysteriously in a flash of geologic time. A popular, and plausible, explanation for the last of these events, the one when the dinosaurs disappeared, is that an asteroid 10 kilometers in diameter, traveling 15 kilometers per second, struck the earth  and exploded with the power of a million 100-megaton hydrogen warheads. The damage that human activity presently inflicts, many say, is comparable to this. Extinctions, unlike carbon dioxide excesses, are permanent. The earth didn’t replace the dinosaurs after they died, notwithstanding the improved weather conditions and 20,000 ages of Moses to make repairs. It just moved on and became something different than it had been before.
        However, carbon dioxide, per se, is not responsible for most of this extinction stress. There are a handful of counterexamples, notably corals, which may be especially sensitive to acidification of the ocean surface, and amphibians, which are declining noticeably for unknown reasons. But, except in these few isolated cases, keeping carbon-based fuels in the ground a while longer won’t make much difference in mitigating the loss of biodiversity. The real problem is human population pressure generally—overharvesting, habitat destruction, pesticide abuse, species invasion, and so forth. Slowing man-made extinctions in a meaningful way would require drastically reducing the world’s human population. That is unlikely to happen.
        It’s a mistake to suspend judgment on questions of population, climate, and carbon use just because they’re sensitive. If you do, you’ll become incapacitated by confusion. Earth scientists tend to be ultraconservative when it comes to the future, presumably because the scientific ethic forbids mixing speculation with fact, and go to extraordinary lengths to prove by means of measurement that the globe is warming now, the ocean is acidifying now, fossil fuel is being exhausted now, and so forth, even though these things are self-evident in geologic time. The unhappy result is more and more data but less and less understanding—a common problem in science but an especially acute problem in climatology. In such situations it’s essential to weigh facts more strongly if they are simple, and use this practice to sweep away confusion whenever you can.
        The sea’s immense capacity to store carbon dioxide is one of the simple things with which you can reliably orient yourself. It’s a junior-high-school science-fair project. Leave a glass of distilled water on the counter overnight, and by the next morning it will have become slightly acid, due to the absorption of carbon dioxide from the air. It hasn’t absorbed much—about the amount stored in an equal volume of air—so this effect alone will not sequester much carbon. But drop a piece of limestone in the water, thereby emulating the presence of carbonate rocks at the bottom of the sea, and you will find the next morning that the water becomes slightly alkaline, and the amount of carbon dissolved in the water is now 60 times greater than it was before. After tinkering a bit to figure out where this carbon came from, you eventually discover that half came from the limestone and half came from the air. It all has to do with the marvelous (and elementary) chemistry of bicarbonate salts. You also find that the alkalinity of the water matches that of seawater, as does the carbon dioxide carrying capacity. Thus we learn that the oceans have dissolved in them, in the form of bicarbonate ion, 40 times more carbon than the atmosphere contains, a total of 30 trillion tons, or 30 times the world’s coal reserves.

        The experiments that assign specific numbers of years to geologic layers are almost as simple as this science-fair project, although not quite, and they are just as reliable. Not everyone agrees with this assessment, of course. Geologic time does contravene certain religious beliefs, a notorious difficulty with the subject that is very regrettable, since it doesn’t contravene the religious beliefs that count. But it’s probably more significant that the experiments, simple though they may be, involve obscure facts about rocks, a knowledge of physical law, and the assumption that this law was the same in the ancient past as it is now. None of this is obvious, much less interesting, to the average person. If you go to the supermarket and engage the checkout clerk in a conversation about the Paleozoic Era, radioactivity, or the disappearance of the megafauna, you’ll be met with a smile, whereupon you’ll probably be escorted from the building as a lunatic. However, the time scales do come from something concrete that can be explained simply.
        You get a long way toward understanding geologic time by just disciplining yourself to use your common sense. A local beach a short drive from my home is backed by cliffs about 100 feet high that expose alternating layers of sandstone, mudstone, and aggregate, perhaps seven layers in all. You can tell without having attended a single geology class that these layers were formed by the action of water, the most likely candidate being the nearby ocean, especially in light of the fossilized clamshells entombed in some of the layers. Yet there they are high and dry, integrated into the rolling hills beyond, as though they were the sliced edge of a huge layer cake. The layers are also tilted, sometimes up and sometimes down, as though giants had sat down upon them in some places but not others. The tilt is large enough that some cliff-top planes continue downward to the beach and disappear into the ground. The cliffs are eroding. The rocks are noticeably crumbly in places, and you can see little landslides high up on the cliff face, and shelves and caves at the bottom where waves wash at high tide.

        Once you begin noticing oddities in the rocks, you can’t help but think about their implications. Layers of rocks with fossilized clams in them can only be above water now if the land rose, the sea sank, or both. Sea level has been quite constant throughout recorded history, say 5,000 years, and there are no documented cases of hundred-foot rises in the land either, except those resulting from volcanoes. So the cliffs are considerably older than recorded history. The tilting tells you that the land moved, regardless of what the sea did. The material forming the layers had to come from somewhere. Erosion from the cliffs themselves is really the only possibility, because there just isn’t enough mud coming down local creeks and rivers to account for the sheer mass of rock, and anyway the layers are grainy and chunky, which the river mud isn’t. But cliffs can’t be made of erosion debris from themselves. The cliffs must therefore have eroded away completely and risen up again at least once, and more likely several times, judging from the layering complexity. The erosion rate of the cliffs thus sets the minimum age of the rocks. This rate appears to the eye of a regular visitor to be about one millimeter per year, perhaps less, for the rock here is relatively hard, so that it would take 100,000 years to erode a kilometer, or about a million years to erode away the shore entirely. That’s sufficiently long so that you don’t have to allow for the Ice Age. The age of the rocks is about a million years, or perhaps two million, just to be safe.

        Such crude estimates of geologic time were the best anyone could do until the 1960s, when radiometric dating of rocks became commonplace. The relative newness of this technology accounts for some of geology’s credibility problems, for geologic time itself was invented 100 years earlier and thus had plenty of time to develop a reputation for flakiness. While radiodating is technically difficult, indeed impossible without sophisticated equipment, it is straightforward conceptually. The method appropriate to this situation involves placing a piece of rock about the size of a golf ball in a vacuum chamber, melting the rock, collecting all the gases driven off, and measuring the total mass of the element argon that these gases contain. Then you dissolve the same rock in acid, do a bit of conventional wet chemistry with the solution, and measure the total mass of the element potassium that it contains. The ratio of these two masses, multiplied by a certain number, is the age of the rock. The physics underlying this procedure is that potassium, which is plentiful in nearly all rocks, is slightly radioactive and decays to argon, a chemically inert element. Argon likes to escape out of rocks when they are very hot, in particular when they are melted into volcanic lava, but is otherwise trapped. A conventional volcanic rock contains no argon right after it solidifies. The amount of argon it contains right now therefore counts the number of potassium atoms that decayed since it solidified, and thus the amount of time that elapsed.

        Radiometric dating has to be used cautiously, however, because it’s notoriously easy to do it wrong. The argon levels can be artificially high, for example, because of atmospheric contamination in air pockets and grain boundaries in the rock, or they can be artificially low because the rock got overheated sometime after it formed, or because the rock re-crystallized or acquired inclusions of younger rock through geologic processes underground. Sedimentary rock always gives nonsense readings because it doesn’t get hot when it forms, and because weathering, aggregation, and metamorphism cause crystal structure changes, which corrupt the argon record.

        The cliffs on my beach can be dated by a layer of volcanic ash that occurs fairly high up. The team that last surveyed the site chose not to date the ash directly, presumably because they didn’t trust the argon levels, but instead identified it chemically with ash deposited hundreds of miles away and overlain by a layer of volcanic basalt. The basalt yielded a clean argon age of two and a half million years. Basaltic rocks higher up in the mountains behind this beach, which are older, yield an age of 20 million years. The rocks on the beach are thus somewhere between two million and 20 million years old. Cross-correlation of the fossils they contain narrows this date to about six million years, give or take a million. Thus, there were no human beings on the earth when the lowermost of these layers first sedimented out of the sea. Between then and now enough rain fell on the earth to fill up the oceans 2,000 times.

        It would be very surprising if rocks conveniently near my home had especially large geologic ages, but naturally this isn’t the case. When you go through the same kinds of analysis with rocks in other parts of the world, you typically get ages that are 10 to 100 times greater than these. A particularly famous example is in the first edition of On the Origin of Species, where Charles Darwin used erosion arguments to estimate the age of the Weald, a region southeast of London curiously deficient in chalk. He came up with 300 million years. It was impossible to refine this estimate radiometrically at the time, so it’s probably not surprising that he reduced his estimate by half in the second edition and eliminated all mention of the subject in the third. But his reasoning was conceptually right, and the estimate itself was close to correct. The Weald is about 120 million years old, give or take 10 million. It’s an interesting part of England, the place where the Battle of Hastings was fought, cricket was invented, and dinosaur fossils were first discovered.

        The Weald is just the beginning, however, for Great Britain is extremely old. By a stroke of fortune, the entire country is a complete stack of the world’s sedimentary layers tipped gently downward to the northwest and then planed level at the top. The plentiful fossils in the ground, which are different in different layers, thus form narrow tracks that run roughly parallel to the coast of France. When people first discovered these tracks, they had no way to date the rocks in question, so they just assigned names. The easternmost track became Cretaceous, after the Greek word creta for chalk. The next one became Jurassic, after the Jura mountains in Switzerland. The next one became Triassic after a characteristic three-level sedimentation pattern (the Tria) found commonly in Germany. The next one became Permian, after the region of Perm in Russia. And so on and so forth. But the subsequent invention of radiodating later enabled actual ages to be assigned to these names, albeit with the precision difficulties encountered on my beach. The white cliffs of Dover are 70 million years old. The clay under Oxford is 150 million years old. The rocks under Stratford-upon-Avon are 200 million years old. The coal under Stoke-on-Trent is 300 million years old. The Lake District is 400 million years old. The Isle of Man is 500 million years old. The Highlands of Scotland are 600 million years old—and more.
        The oldest rocks in the world are not in Great Britain but in places exposed to extremes of Ice Age glaciation, such as Greenland, northern Canada, and northern Finland. Here the glaciers ground off all the upper sedimentary layers to expose the primordial rocks below. Radiometric ages of these rocks begin where the geological record in Britain ends and run back an additional four billion years. The oldest ages coincide with those of meteorites and moon rocks, implying that they date the birth of the earth. The age of the earth isn’t important for energy discussions except in establishing that cosmic events, not value judgments, set the overall scale of geologic time.

        The continents have moved up and down over the course of geologic time a greater distance than the sea is deep. We know this because the total thickness of sedimentary rock in some places exceeds four kilometers. After dating the Weald, Darwin also observed that the total thickness of all the sedimentary strata in England would total 22 kilometers if piled on top of one another. It wasn’t clear at the time how literally to interpret this fact, because nobody had mined straight down through all the layers; nor did anyone know for sure how deep the ocean was. But now the oceans have been thoroughly surveyed, and oil technologies such as echo stratigraphy and deep drilling routinely find sedimentary rock layers 10 to 15 kilometers thick. The most sensational example of such thicknesses is the Grand Canyon, which required a three-kilometer uplift from sea level to be cut by the Colorado River, and which forms, together with Utah’s Escalante Staircase, a total sedimentary mass 10 kilometers thick. The Grand Canyon also demonstrates that uplift and subsidence alternated, since it contains plant fossil layers sandwiched between marine fossil layers. Less famous but no less relevant to the vastness of geologic time is the nearby Animas River canyon, which cuts through sedimentary rock five kilometers thick. Around the world, sedimentary deposits over one kilometer thick are commonplace.
        Sea level has not, however, moved up and down over the course of geologic time an amount greater than the mountains are tall. We know this because marine sediments have accumulated continuously for the last 600 million years, which they would not have done if continental erosion had stopped or the seabed had emptied. Moreover, you can work backward from clues left in the rocks to reckon what the sea level was in the geologic past. This process has methodological uncertainties, because it involves judgments about how layer sequences in different parts of the world line up, what constitutes evidence for shorelines, and how the earth’s crust yielded and rebounded as masses of rock came and went. However, it’s accurate enough to tell you that the amount of water on the earth hasn’t changed significantly over geologic time, and that the rise and fall of the oceans is adequately accounted for by the waxing and waning of the polar ice sheets and slow changes in ocean basin volumes. The sea level has had a complex and interesting history, but it has never deviated more than 200 meters from its present value.

        The sea has risen and fallen particularly vigorously over the past million years as a result of Ice Age glaciation. We know this because oxygen isotope ratios in the ocean sediments vary violently with depth. These ratios indirectly measure the amount of water locked up in glacial ice sheets at the time of sedimentation. The sediments record nine major glacial episodes, each of which lowered the sea level by more than 50 meters and then returned it abruptly to its present value. At least four of these episodes lowered the sea by more than 100 meters. This includes the most recent one, which lowered it 120 meters. The amount of lowering is corroborated by uplifted coral reefs, which show growth in places that would otherwise have been impossible because they require shallow water. It’s also consistent with estimates of the ice mass required to leave behind such industrial-strength mischief as Long Island, Nantucket, and the Great Lakes—about 50 million cubic kilometers in all, or five million billion tons.
        The major glacial episodes are spectacular examples of the natural climate change that has occurred in geologic time. They took place at regular intervals of 100,000 years and always followed the same strange pattern of slow, steady cooling followed by abrupt warming back to conditions similar to today’s. We know this because chemical records in polar ice, the patterns of which match those of the sediments, contain a signal that strongly tracks the earth’s precessional wobble, the 24,000-year cyclic drift of the earth’s spin axis caused by the gravitational tugging of the moon and sun. The precession is a clock-like astronomical quantity, so its appearance in the ice data enables a precise dating of the ice. That, in turn, enables a precise dating of the sediments. The last glacial melting, cross-dated at 15,000 years ago by the radiocarbon age of wood debris left by the glaciers as they retreated, occurred rapidly. The sea rose more than one centimeter per year for 10,000 years, then stopped. The extra heat required for this melting was 10 times the present energy consumption of civilization. The total melt­­water flow was the equivalent of two Amazons, or half the discharge of all the rivers in all the world.

        The great ice episodes were not the only cases of natural climate change, however. Six million years ago the Mediterranean Sea dried up. Ninety million years ago alligators and turtles cavorted in the Arctic. One hundred fifty million years ago the oceans flooded the middle of North America and preserved dinosaur bones. Three hundred million years ago, northern Europe burned to a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. The great ice episodes themselves were preceded by approximately 30 smaller ones between one and two million years ago, and perhaps twice that many before that.


        Nobody knows why these dramatic climate changes occurred in the ancient past. Ideas that commonly surface include perturbations to the earth’s orbit by other planets, disruptions of ocean currents, the rise and fall of greenhouse gases, heat reflection by snow, continental drift, comet impacts, Genesis floods, volcanoes, and slow changes in the irradiance of the sun. No scientifically solid support has been found for any of these suggestions. One thing we know for sure is that people weren’t involved. There weren’t enough people around during the ice episodes to matter, and there weren’t any people around before the ice episodes.
        The geologic record as we know it thus suggests that climate is a profoundly grander thing than energy. Energy procurement is a matter of engineering and keeping the lights on under circumstances that are likely to get more difficult as time progresses. Climate change, by contrast, is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself. The earth doesn’t include the potentially catastrophic effects on civilization in its planning. Far from being responsible for damaging the earth’s climate, civilization might not be able to forestall any of these terrible changes once the earth has decided to make them. Were the earth determined to freeze Canada again, for example, it’s difficult to imagine doing anything except selling your real estate in Canada. If it decides to melt Greenland, it might be best to unload your property in Bangladesh. The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s beyond our power to control.

        Robert B. Laughlin is a professor of physics at Stanford University and a co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Physics. This essay is adapted from his new book on the future of fossil fuels, which will appear next year.

        2010-09-04

        An example of Chinese Innovation

        After (or before?) the Apple Peel that turns an iPod Touch into a 3G iPhones, here comes another Chinese innovation -- the most professional subtitle for a movie, any movie indeed.

        "Das Leben der Anderen” (Lives of the Others) is a great great movie. The Chinese DVD is most likely pirated. But there are a few "translation groups" (字幕组)working more for interests than money. Some did this because of their pure disgust of the low quality of the existing subtitles provided by pirated DVDs (like the one that taught some Hong Kong writer wrong English). And there is competition even in the piracy industry.

        Appreciate the photoshop work for the Chinese translation of Karl Marx Bookstore. For more please see Chinasmack. I had watched some Russian version (probably "Wanted") with written languages on the movies turned from (replacing) English into Russian (again from Chinese DVD), but I thought those were from the official version, and not done as well as this.