"Progressive" climate change is "oscillatingly impossible" say Deniers & Skeptics

ICE AGE but a 'blip in time'

Deniers and skeptics haven't really really said that the climate never changes and can't change (you've just been trusting journalists again , that's all).
They just claim it can't change in a progressive fashion (ie steadily hotter or colder) for more than a milli-pause - in geological time -  before reversing itself and oscillating back to its long term normal mean level.

Relax warmists : set against the Universe's time line, 50,000 years of a human Catastrophe is but a 'blip in time', happening in some forgotten corner of a vast playground...

An Ice Age just seems like a very long term disaster - to us mere (warmist) mortals down here at ground zero (degrees centigrade).

"But I tell ya bud, ya gotta see The Big Picture, up here high in the sky : what is a mere 50,000 years of ice set against the glorious entire 10 billion years of the Earth's existence ?"

Well , when you put it that way....

And as for humans changing the weather - deniers shout :"Yes We Can ! "

But as for humans changing the climate in a steady, in fact unstoppable - progressive fashion - then they shout : "No We Can't !"

It is always left unclear whether this is the result of physical limits on Man's ability to control Nature (say it ain't so, Joe !) or merely reflecting the comfortable fact that ,morally, we'd never ever do such a bad, bad thing....

Allan Schnaiberg's 1980 nightmare : pollution-producing SkyGods vs impacted-upon earthlings

SkyGod Machine in earthling Garden

In the1970s, the Canadian-born sociologist of environmentalism, Allan Schnaiberg , was the first to detect the emerging split in popular Science that this blog (also Canadian-born) is devoted to exploring ; so a man well worth honouring.


But as I have written in an earlier post in SVE, I didn't stumble upon Schnaiberg's seminal concept until I chanced upon the work of Myanna Lahsen --- thanks to the wonders of Google search.

She casually mentioned the concept of earlier-dominant production science versus the contested rise of today's impact science, as if all her readers would know what it meant.

But I didn't --- or rather I did.

It sounds an awful lot like my concept of earlier (pre-war) SkyGod scientists versus later (post-war) earthling scientists.

I eventually traced the meme back to Schnaiberg and a time period almost 40 years ago.

Long past overdue, then,  for the concept to be a commonplace and a cliche in the vocabulary of every warmist earthling environmentalist green.

Basically it can be seen as a variant of my beloved contrast between the fundamental second law of thermodynamics (matter and energy gets less and less useful to humanity (aka more and more of it becomes useless  particulate pollution and heat pollution) and the derivative first law of thermodynamics.

The sciences of half-truthfulness...

The first law says (as a half truth) that matter and energy can't ever be destroyed but only changed into alternative forms.

A half truth because converting the concentrated energy in the gasoline that powers your Piper Cub into ever so slightly heating the entire Universe does not destroy that energy --- but it certainly ruins for all time its further usefulness for humanity.

 In fact, if that waste heat in the air helps heat up the entire atmosphere --- en route to the frozen reaches of the universe --- it is likely to ruin all of humanity as well.

Similarly, impact science is fundamental science while production science is but a half truth science derived from it.

Production science produces a machine which makes lots of widgets, very cheaply and profitably - apparently the end of story.

Impact science visits that once-successful widget machine cum factory in the town of Anywhereville Quebec and discovers that the factory is throwing off deadly pollution that is ever so slowly poisoning the employees at the widget factory. As a result, they are producing less widgets per hour.

It is this, not unfair competition from the Japanese, that is the real cause of the factory owner's declining profits.

Production science is about The Machine, Impact Science is about The Machine in the Garden, with both garden and machine complexly interacting with each other in unpredictable ways.

(Hat tip to Leo Marx for re-applying his famous meme!)

Deniers cum skeptics who deny change in geology, biology, climate and physics  still only see science in the simplistic terms and certitudes of production science.

Warmists accept that changes happens and happens unpredictably and are much less sanguine about our ability to correct our own mistakes in time to prevent real harm.

Climate deniers - I steadfastly affirm in the face of zillions of scientist-bloogers who argue to the contrary - do believe in Science.

But it is the older, out-dated, hubristic SkyGod science - not current earthling science .....

Paulie-Ayn Rand : after Nov 6 , libertarian one heartbeat away from nuking the tired , poor, huddled , masses

Paulie loves poor me, he loves me not 

So one night two Micks, a Mormon And a Moslem walk into a TV studio and the Presidential Debates moderator says  " What the FRACK ever happened to an All-Protestant America !!!???"

Okay, okay,so maybe the President really was born in America and so maybe he is a church-attending member of the Trinity United Church of Christ denomination, but don't think that tongues aren't wagging in the back rooms of the Irreligious Right.

Their Chosen Party, the GOP (God's Only Party), has a Mormon and a Catholic as its ticket --- definitely a first.

But far more important is that the GOP Mick - Paulie-Ayn Rand - claims his number one influence isn't Christ but pro-atheist, pro-abortion, pro-greed, pro-selfishness AYN RAND.

Rand was about as "SkyGoddish" as one one could get.

Libertarians honor their own Trinity, just like Obama : but their Trinity consists of three American women.

Paul Ryan worships atheist pro-abortion home-wrecker Ayn Rand ,not Jesus, but GOP evangelicals don't care Diddley about Jesus : it is all about getting juicy tax breaks...

(Albeit two were foreign born - one in Russia (Ayn) and one in Canada (Isobel Patterson). The third woman, Rose Ingalls Wilder, ironically  got rich and selfish co-writing her mother's sentimental "Little House on the Prairie."

Mr Ryan, with his selfish Ayn-inspired philosophy, could be the closest a hard-core libertarian has ever got to world power.

Ryan is only a heartbeat away from the Red Button, only a heartbeat away from nuking America's tired, poor, huddled masses of wretched refuse with his harsh, selfish policies.

Like Mrs Thatcher , Ryan is death on the poor and a denier to the manor born on climate change : a wet is a warmist and a warmist is a wet , is his motto.

Earthlings are dirt, worms - not his fellow beings.

Past time then, to bring back 1964's  little Daisy Girl ad from out of the DDB vaults ....*

"Ten, nine, eight, seven......."

The real Daisy Girl was two year old Monique M Corzilius ---- and she was a redhead ---- only the effects of the very bright sunshine on the day of shooting and black and white film made her seem the iconic blond-headed kid !

Popular science is the 99.99% of us who DON'T read the journal NATURE

unread by 99.99% !

The world's most important science journal is read by.... almost nobody.

 The British weekly publication NATURE , the most influential science journal by far in the world, sells only about 50,000 copies but its publisher says around 400,000 read it one way or another. So by its own count, less than .01% of the world reads it.

But NATURE is considered required weekly browsing for all professional scientists, in part to to maintain a credible claim that they are professional scientists.

So indirectly, via NATURE's readership, we have some gauge of just how few professional scientists there are in the world.

About the widest possible definition of a scientist says they regularly do scientific research that gets published in credible peer-reviewed journals in their field of endeavour.

It doesn't say they must be paid for doing so, and it does allow for those who could successfully publish their research, if military or commercial powers didn't prevent it, if only temporarily.

It admits that those who write about, administer or teach science may have once been active research scientists and could be so again, so that while not currently professional research scientists, they are at least highly credible critics of published research.

They must number in the range of millions.

Next are those science-trained professionals who only do "hands on" production science or impact science in government or industry but who can read and evaluate articles in their own area of expertise : again they must number in the range of millions, even tens of millions.

Then there are the students in university level science courses   who are able to usefully assess a published journal article in their own field of interest : they number in the tens of millions.

All together, perhaps 70 million out of a total world population of 7 billion can make some sense of some of the back page articles in the journal NATURE : the scientific "1% " .

But for the rest of us, the 99 % of us , we need the raw data of those dense and turgid articles filtered and translated by science populariziers.

The editors of NATURE, in the front pages of the journal, do a pretty good job of rendering their back page articles into lay language and assessing why these highly specialized reports of research in obscure areas of science nevertheless matter for the 7 billion "rest of us".

Other science journalists and science book writers also try to render - second hand - what NATURE's articles really mean for the non-professional 99% of humanity.

Among the "us" in the 99% or the 99.99% are the most powerful people in the world : presidents of countries or of corporations, generals, publishers of newspapers , activist movie and rock stars .

We , by our power, our money or (for most of us) by our votes and buying dollars will decide most of the big science issues : not NATURE.

This is hard - in fact impossible - for most lifers in professional science to believe.

"Let us bring forth the real-world facts, as predicted by a successful lab-theory, and what more needs be done ?" they cry.

Maybe, once. Maybe once, most of the science-besotted middle and upper classes in the world would have automatically accepted anything NATURE reported at face value (the religious and the peasantry might have scoffed, but who cares about their opinions ?)

But that was before 1945, and 1965, and 1995 . The popular image of Science has undergone two - opposing - and profound changes.

For about one half of the world, the old, pre-1945 image of the scientist remains the same - only today's real-life scientists don't live up to that image.

For the other one half of the world, the old style scientist has been rejected completely and they rather like the new post-war style of scientist.

All this matters, because both sides do not accept or reject new scientific articles based on their own internal scientific evidence, but rather more based on how they feel about the sort of person who delivers them.

In other words, "if they don't like the messenger, they shoot down the message".

The three filters of Science

This blog is concerned about how science evidence is thrice-filtered, rather like Gaul or Saint Peter's Rooster.

First by the multi-person filter of the scientist, his or her employer-superiors and the journal editor cum referees.

Successfully passing through this filter, private science is now public ( published) science.

Next up on the filter machine are the popular Science gatekeepers : the editors and journalists who decide whether this new research gets splashed, downplayed or even ignored in popular science periodicals and in newspapers and on TV.

Finally past this second filter, how do we, the remaining 98% of humanity, assess it ?

If it is first only widely reported in the UK Guardian newspaper that Tasmania is now seeing tropical fish thanks to human climate change, and then this news item is re-published in a hacked up and mocking manner by the Wall Street Journal , the readers of that latter newspaper are likely to deny its truthfulness as mere "warmist claptrap science".

We are the third and final filter ---the biggest one of them all.

How, and why, do we assess this particular - specialized - bit of new scientific research the way we do ?

We don't - we have a few vivid, semi-permanent, images of "Science" in each of our heads and we simply run every new bit of data against those few rigid memes : and then we award a simple pass or fail.

Fundamentally, whether we prefer our scientists to be pre-war SkyGods or post-war earthlings is the only filter we have to assess all the immense amount of science-related news items that hits us weekly.

This is why, in science as in economics , this blog is focussed on the 99%  , not the 1% .....

On Sunday ,climate skeptics worship Sir Charles Lyell : the "Deity of Denial"

DEITY of the DENIERS

Dr Pangloss is really more your average climate denying punter's cuppa, but he is a fictional character. Not that the denier cum skeptic doesn't love a lot of fiction, mind : he just calls it "science".

 No, better that the skeptics worship a real person like SIR Charles Lyell, almost a lord - sorta like Viscount Batty -  but only more dead.

Most older geologists now firmly deny that they ever believed in the Arbeit macht frei  of Lyell's  Uniformitarianism , they were all just "following orders" .

Victorian era is over for physics but not economics

However, news of their "warmist" apostasy hasn't yet reached the softer sciences, so Uniformitarianism is still the wind beneath the wings of orthodox economists and political scientists.

And denier skeptics are always much more motivated by economics and politics than by basic physical science issues.

That is because Uniformitarianism teaches that Man and Mind is all and Nature and the Physical is nothing : a mere passive, eternally-unchanging, back cloth.

The climate hasn't fundamentally changed, because it can't change, only oscillate within narrow, safe, bounds.

But whenever two or more people gather, they are planning a conspiracy and that IS a catastrophe.

Physical science can never truly animate a person who firmly believes that a major invasion by the Chinese is truly a catastrophe but a major Chinese earthquake can never be.

For your true climate deniers , the phrase "natural catastrophe" is always spelt : H u m a n  C o n s p i r a c y .

 It is always something done by humans to other humans ; never something done by Nature to humans......

Climate skeptics unmoved by apostasy of Muller and Koch : its all a JEWISH bankster conspiracy

Fate of DENIER apostates

With apologies to First Corinthians 13:4 , 21st century climate denial's optimism is "never battered and never bruised" : a fresh application of "conspiracy" antiseptic neatly covers every gapping would.


Stalwart climate skeptic,Richard Muller, massively funded by  "The Deities of Denial" (the Koch Bros),  now says climate change is real ?

Warmist apostates ?

No prob, man !

Galileo Movement head mouthpiece , former mining exec Malcolm Roberts, has it all neatly spun away, like the PR flack he is : it was all a trick , all done by Jewish mirrors.

Banking families, a tightly knit cabal of them control the climate change scam for fun and profit.

The same old whine , in new bottles....

Muller and Koch got turned, like spies did all the time, back in the good old days of Reds under every bed.

Reds are still here -still inside the radio, still behind  the plots of vaccination and fluoride in the water : but now they're also inside the watermelons at the bottom of the garden.

 Run, run for your lives : They're here ! They're here !

The Panglossian NAIVETY of the climate denier cum skeptic

NAIVE denier cum skeptics

The Early-Victorian era may have ended over 150 years ago, but living fossils of its optimism, exuberance and naivety still beat on, inside the hearts of today's climate denier cum "skeptic" .Think of  today's deniers as  perfect clones of Voltaire's Doctor Pangloss (albeit as updated by Sir Charles Lyell).


In the 1830s, Lyell chose to modify Pangloss's famously naive philosophy.

It now read - in the light of Lyell's own even more optimistic theory of Uniformitarianism : "We live in the most average, the most normal, the most typical and representative of ages : our charmingly tasteful present is a roadmap back into the mists of the past and forward into those sunlit uplands of our future."

In the Lyellian cum deniers' minds , Man is endlessly progressing : ever upward, ever forward.

But the Universe ? The Universe, by way of total contrast, with all its inanimate but varying objects and all its animate, varying, beings, is in their minds but a passive backdrop.

 A crudely painted canvas drop , with only one actor allowed on stage : Man.

Reality, to a denier, is literally, "all about me". Selfish self-centeredness deified into a scientific philosophy and political ideology.

Libertarianism is the political wing of Uniformitarianism 

Libertarianism is Uniformitarianism is Libertarianism : a perfect circle, round and around a static, mildly oscillating , Universe.

Oh yes, the Universe, and our Earth : to the Lyellian denier, they do not progress  forward and upwards or backwards and downwards - in fact, do not radically move any which way.

Instead they merely oscillate, over a very narrow range, back on forth over a normal, typical, average, representative, mean : the mean of  present day values.

Local, temporary volcano up, local, temporary earthquake down neatly balancing each other : the perfect proof of the First law of Thermodynamics.

That Law, crudely and incorrectly stated, holds that Matter and Energy can not be created or destroyed but merely (and usefully for Man) changed into different forms of themselves, back and forth ; forever and ever Amen.

The early Victorian optimists and their 21st century kinfolk  viewed this law - erroneously - as the fundamental law of the universe.

But don't blame them too much ; instead blame our High School science teachers from the 19th , 20th and 21st century  for teaching that to them.

The true fundamental law of the universe, the one from which the First law of Thermodynamics is derived , is the Second law of Thermodynamics.

(First and Second refers to the time of their formulations : the First was formulated and popularized before the Second was realized to be the truly important one.)

The Second (in simple english) states that , statistically, all energy and matter becomes less and less useful to humanity with each use and eventually all energy and matter and life will be frozen dead at a temperature very near Absolute Zero.

So, in fact, the Universe and Life does have a direction and is constantly changing and that direction is more or less steadily downhill, albeit very slowly.

So, some of the heat from every time we burn even a small lump of coal eventually escapes the world's atmosphere and winds up heating, ever so ineffectually, some distant corner of the frozen Universe.

Probe a climate change denier skeptic or climate change believer warmist and you will find the concept of a steadily changing universe is their dividing line : both are people of either the First or the Second law.....

Tony Abbott would deny his OWN EYESIGHT --- if it made him Prime Minister

Denying will bite, Tony !

On the assumption that Australian Libertarian Party leader Tony Abbott can and does read, today's Australian newspapers couldn't have been pleasant reading. (Cue the inside story.)

"Naked ambition versus scientific facts, part XXCLV"

AUDIO : sound of newspapers being thrown angrily away...

VOICE IN HIS HEAD : Best soldier on ,Tony, just ignore your  eyesight, got to focus on that prize in your mind's eye : that dream of a lifetime.

TONY : Becoming Prime Minister !!!
(Not really quite sure what I'll do when I get there, but "the joy is in the dreaming" , as my priest always says.)

VOICE : Bad, bad newspapers ; spoiling the Nasty Abbott's day like that . (Cue : Aussie sharks washing up on English Channel beaches ; tropical fishes ending up off Tassie.)

VOICE : And blaming it all on global warming : the cheek !

TONY : Rupert - bloody -Murdoch and his warmist claptrap !
Must-remember-mummie : the prize-the prize.

FADE TO BLACK.....

Hubris vs Science : tired of denying the Holocaust and Climate Change - why not deny DNA , ego-prone Republican DAs do it all the time

DNA-DENYING DAs

Whenever hard facts hit the swollen egos of non-endowed males, guess what always loses ?


Yep, the truth . But when swollen ego denies DNA and innocent men fry, its way beyond a laughing matter about "Truth is from Venus and Egos are from Mars."

The Chair is warmism going too far.

Why can't some men just can never admit they are wrong and say they are sorry ? Poor toilet training ? Dropped on their head while a mere child ? Forced to eat all their peas - or spinach ? Whatever.

No surprise to find that some of the worst offenders are Republicans, who spend their off hours away from denying DNA t denying climate science.

Why do Republicans hate Science so ? Do your think Chris Mooney is on the money about the reason for their animus against logic, reason and rationality ?

I cam across this story off of BYLINER and Conor Friedersdoff's list of "The Top 101 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories of the Year" .

Deep digging keeps some papers alive...

A deep,deep story on "DNA-Denying-DAs" by the NY TIMES's Andrew Martin .

Read it and weep. And rage.

With deep-digging stories like these, newspapers aren't dead yet - even if the Halifax METRO is......

The only DEAD newspaper is a FEXLESS newspaper : the Halifax Metro ignores Merkel's Halifax visit !

LAMEST daily ever ?

How lame must a daily newspaper be to ignore a well-publicized  major news story in its own backyard ? After all aren't the news-o-saurs always reminding us bloggers that we only comment on the hard news that their fearless reporters dig up ?

But there it was , for all the world to see , the Halifax METRO exposing its inner failings as shamelessly as any ex-porn star seeking air time for their bio-pic.

Chancellor Merkel - de facto leader of the Euro currency group currently undergoing a meltdown of global depression proportions : by any definition, her every doings are eminently a top news subject.

Making probably her only ever visit to your medium sized backwater city.

So, on your front page the next day, a big splash story on Merkel and a nice photograph.

Great !  Well done !

Except : both were pulled off the wire from the Canadian Press agency, ie filed by somebody else.

In your own home town --- your rare chance within the world-wide METRO news organization to see a Halifax story go worldwide - handed over to strangers, on a platter.

Shameful ! Disgusting ! Lazy ! Slack-assed !

I have said it before : 97% of "news" originates when someone wants reportage on an event, for their own purposes, and details the story to all the press.

The only "digging up" usually done consists in finding one or two unique tidbits, to make your story stand out from the rest of your competitors.

Like the Halifax METRO staffers, I too live in Halifax.

I offer up my "blogged" articles about Merkel's education versus Harper's education here, here, here and here.

They, I think, help explain these fellow conservatives wildly varying stances on on climate change :  top warmist vs arch denier.

I think they provided a lot more "hard news" on Merkel's  freelance visit to a climate change project in Halifax, than whatever this sad-assed sorry excuse of a daily newspaper did.

Here's a  real hard news fact : the local alternative newspaper THE COAST generates more words of local reporting in a once a week publication than the Halifax METRO does in a week of daily reporting. How lame is that ?

"The only GOOD newspaper, is a DEAD newspaper...." 

Well ,that is not my saying or my belief - but at times like this, I am sorely tempted to subscribe to it .....

"You're an absolute disgrace (A. "Nasty") Abbott", says indie MP in blistering attack video

Tony -arsing about

Watching the Deniers has the link to the story and video and it is priceless !

Enjoy watching Indie MP for New England, Australia (Tony Windsor)  let go a blast at Tony Abbott, leader of the Libertarian-Liberals and leader of Australia's Official Opposition.

Warning : the un-parliamentary term ," arse ", was used in reference to the Honourable Abbott.

Windsor claimed that during the long drawn-out negotiations after the last election produced a hung parliament, Abbott promised that his carbon-reducing policies would have different mechanisms but would be no different in effect than those of the now-ruling Labour-Green government.

Abbott willing to go "warmist" even, if only it would make him PM....

That Abbott always said he would say and do anything warmist, just as long as he could be PM, please, please, please.

But his ambition was sooo very naked , none of the Indies in the Canberra House trusted Abbott's claim that he really would bring in some form of carbon reducing measure, if made PM.....

David Solway's Sha-Sha Poezie : if we don't talk too loud about the global climate holocaust , maybe it won't harm us here in North America

Poetic Screed

Review of GLOBAL WARNING. David Solway, the well known Canadian poet and polemicist, was born in 1941 and was much too young to sha-sha his way past smuggled-in reports of the first Holocaust as so many - too many - adult Jews did in the free world.

Now the entire world population - Jews among it - is facing a another potential holocaust.

One response, now as back during 1939-1945, is too low-ball the concerns and see them as undocumented and hysterical or exaggerated.

The other response - at the extreme - is to throw yourself under the Kings' horses, like a suffragette , or commit the then legal and moral crime of suicide, like Artur Zygielbojm : the most extreme forms of civil disobedience and public protest possible.

Sha-Sha Politik :  Sha , Shtil 

Zygielbojm's story is very well known because he was the rare exception during WWII's slow long agony for free world Jewry :
he gave up on "working through proper channels", and in practising "sha-sha politik" , to become the proverbial "Loud Jew" that Jewish leaders always warned fellow Jews not to become.

At a glance, Solway's book seems to fit more in the Loud Jew than in the sha-sha Jew category but is this really so ?

Saying things that the rich and powerful of our society approve of, no matter how stridently you say them, is still being Paul Ryan-ish.

Ryan, the VP for presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, was voted by his High School as "The Biggest Brown-noser of 1988".

And I am afraid that is what Mr Solway is too .

 What he says offends many of the world's poor and powerless and a few of its rich and powerful ; just as a few of the world's poor and powerless will approve of his message - along with most of the rich and powerful.

He has taken a highly public moral stance on the question of climate change - and this is all to the good.

But Jews have a special moral credibility whenever they say "something is happening that looks a lot like yesterday's holocaust" ; equally they have a special moral authority when they declaim any sight of a crisis on the horizon.

God will judge them all the harder,  if they abuse that special credibility......

Stephen said he'd pull out, Tony stayed in , Kyoto2 had a baby : that's hardly a sin

Greg Hunt "Warmist"?

With apologizes for ruining Bruce Springsteen's wonderful song about Spare Parts with the likes of Stephen Harper and A. "Nasty" Abbott, but there really is some startling and unsettling news for Prime Minister Harper, the world's biggest climate denier.

First his fellow conservative Angela Merkel went all "warmist" on him by daring to dis him on his own home turf and visit a Dalhousie University climate change project.

Next, Eric Loughead, the co-founder of The Friends of Science, from his own home town of Calgary, for God's Sake ! - again mocked De Capo's authority by calling people who deny climate change  stupid  ,while responding to a poll that says only 2% ( yep - 2 percent!) of Canadians deny climate change.

I mean that is a fair description of Harper - but should we really mock him that brazenly in public ?

Aussie Liberal Party, like Merkel and Loughead going "WARMIST" ?

Now Harper's equivalent party Down Under, the Australian  Libertarians Liberals say, via spokesperson Greg Hunt, they are up for signing onto Kyoto 2 ; while Canada, under Harper's vigorous thrusting, has moaned "no go" on Kyoto.

It seems as if Harper's allies, his erstwhile partners in global mass destruction , like ships abandoning a sinking rat, are deserting him...

Big Oil Astroturfer Eric Loughead says people who deny climate change are "stupid"

TarSand or BullShit ?

Extremely well known astroturfer Eric Loughead , co-founder of Calgary's "Friends of Big Oil Science", startled the Canadian Press agency's Jennifer Graham by calling people who DENY climate change "stupid" .

Loughead was responding to an online polling survey of 1550 Canadians that found that only 2% of those who responded denied that climate change is happening.

Eric Loughead a "warmist" ; say it ain't so !

Is denier - cum - skeptic Loughead actually going all "warmist" on us, like Angela Merkel ?

Well, not exactly : but do read it all and see if you detect a slight shifting in position among the "deny,deny,delay,delay" crowd.....

With sterling rhetoric, Sterling T Perkins calls for an END to rhetoric on Climate Change ...

Bombast Central

With friends like Mr Perkins, the case for Climate Change need hardly fear enemies.

We do need more action to reduce disastrous climate changes, but which actions to choose out of a cornucopia of choices ?

 Is it precisely here where more , not less  - and sharper, not softer - rhetoric is needed : to make the differences between those various choices more apparent for all of us to better decide.

Truly nothing is windier, nothing more cliched,  than newspaper opinion pages and opinion page writers getting up on their tiny hind legs to decry rhetoric --- in highly rhetorical language.

Rhetoric is the lifeblood of social, co-operating, beings

I am one who holds that even truly private diaries intended only for the eyes of the writer are filled with rhetoric (a subtle form of whistling your way past a graveyard ?) - as are most business accounting records.

Most students of rhetoric feel the same way - to judge by current research articles.

Humans are highly rhetorical beings - social, co-operating, beings -and it is time that both The Montreal Gazette and my fellow political science enthusiast Sterling Perkins accepted that fact.....

When WARMIST Merkel meets SKEPTIC Harper global temp goes up one degree !

Harper's only LIFESKILL

Half remembered high school science (of the outdated Victorian era variety) goes up against a recent PhD in 21st century level Quantum Science, when fellow conservatives Stephen Harper and Angela Merkel meet this week in Ottawa.

Despite being fellow conservatives, the two are better known for their differences than for their similarities.

Harper is the world's best known climate denying leader --- a man willing to slash and burn his way through Canada's scientific community to get his way.

Frankly, because Harper has never held a real job - never held a job that might involve technology, so he simply doesn't get this 'science thing'.

All his jobs have required him to display his considerable skills in ideology and rhetoric.

Just don't expect him to know how to change a tire, a diaper or boil an egg : don't expect him to knowingly engage real life.

Quantum scientist versus a guy who has never held a real job

Merkel knows enough science to know she - and humanity - actually knows very little with any great certainty.

She accepts that current climate science is our best current take on complex climate changes and she is always willing to throw in more money to let the climate scientists get better takes on reality.

As a result, she is number one in credibility among the world's scientists when she speaks up publicly in favour of the reality of climate change, as she does frequently.

Harper thinks we have had all the answers since the days of Newton, Dalton and Darwin and we should have shut off the research money tap on Jan 1 1900.

So when they try and talk in private, sparks fly and heat is given off but neither bends the other's mind.

Too bad that instead of cutting the ice loss over the Arctic, all these talks will do is raise tempers and temperatures and so MELT more arctic ice.....

When Merkel visits Dalhousie climate change project, Harper gets diplomatic "flu"

Harper sees a WARMIST !

The world media rarely get to see Conservative leaders quarrelling in public and it won't happen when "Angela (Merkel) Meets Stephen (Harper)". Not in public. Nosiree Bob.

But in private ? In private, Harper is furious that warmist Merkel has chosen to 'dis' his well known hostility to climate change by actually visiting a Dalhousie University climate change project being done with researchers from Germany 's Helmholtz Institute.

Promoting climate change !!! On his own turf !!! A fellow conservative !!!

Stabbed in the back !!!   WARMIST traitor !!!

As Evergreen Nova Scotia says, I bet his nurses had to be instructed to keep him away from sharp knives until Angela was safely beyond Canadian airspace ......

The intellectual "Drift" of former mining company geologist Naomi Oreskes

LYELL, prophet of Victorian Optimism

Unlikely indeed is it to expect that the expert on the scientific debates of 100 years ago on geological Continental Drift  will turn up one day,  reborn , as the expert on present day Climate Change debates !

The head-spinning requires makes one's neck hurt to even to think about it.

Of course if continents do "drift", they do change and if they change, why not the climate as well ? One begins to see a possible connection. And both subjects do involve dissecting furious debates among scientists.

So we have some inklings of Oreskes' possible metamorphosis.

Still she IS a rarity : a former mining company geologist who stoutly defends climate change rather than climate denial.

The key may lay in a just few paragraphs on Page 199  in her first - very long - book on the debates around continental drift.

The historical geologist Charles Schuchert (1858-1942)  seems heaven-sent to make one of the "bad guys" in present day popular books about the decades-old battle over accepting the theory of tectonic plates ( with Alfred Wegener as the much-maligned "good guy").

But Oreskes doesn't fall into that trap.

Like a patient - and fair - bloodhound she goes through all information we have on Schuchert's long and troubled internal debate on the worth of Wegener's theory, rather than featuring only his few - but overheated - verbal outbursts on the subject.

To over simplify, basically in his own area of scientific expertise, Schuchert saw nothing but support for Wegener's ideas.

But like about half of all scientists, Schuchert was too overawed by strong comments of the "big guns" from other scientific disciplines, to actually put his own mind to work to consider the evidence first, through what ever he or she had learned of that discipline's methods .

The other half of scientists share the reverse flaw : believing that being an expert in say, nuclear physics, makes one an expert in every other science.

It is a quite a trick, trying to be intellectually honest, without falling down either of these slippery slopes.

Schuchert rejected his own (literally) "world-class" knowledge of the fossil record ,on the mere second-hand say so that all the "experts" in climate agreed that the climate in the past, at each latitude, was the same as it is today : climate uniformitarianism.

In 1912's intellectual "climate"  it seemed internally self evident that if climates can't change, then neither can continents.

In 2012's intellectual "climate", it is equally self evident, to what Modernists call "warmists",  that if continents can change, why not the climate as well .

Oreskes , Dawson & Daly 

I pay a lot of attention to Oreskes because I suspect that she came to see that yesterday's house wine of Modernity - the theory  of uniformitarianism - was still today's house wine of the climate deniers .

 Just as I have come to that conclusion as well - albeit coming at the subject of climate change via the distinctly odd angle of the Modernist debates over the worth and meaning of Martin Henry Dawson's  Natural Penicillin and Transformative DNA.

I think Herman Daly has also come to see the enduring strength of 1840s uniformitarianism in mainstream 21st century economics.

Given the wampum-like characteristics (In the Flanders & Swann sense of that word)  of this hyper-flexible meme, I almost hesitate to call "Uniformitarianism" a scientific theory : it seems - today - to be more a pseudo-scientific cover story, designed to  assure exuberant Victorians that their intuitive optimism had a  basis in scientific fact.

A dangerous truism today - just as uniformitarianism was in its heyday - is that in 1945 , Modernity fell and Post-Modernity arose.

I used to hold this position myself.

But now I believe that Modernity's hegemony fell apart and that modernity existed uneasily along side post-modernity (aka Global Commensality) in today's post-hegemonic era.

Now this  view at least lets us see the climate wars as the tippy-top of a much larger battle between modernity and commensality for hegemony (while the fate of the planet hangs in the balance) ....

Merkel world's first "Post-Victorian Science" leader ?

Merkel gets it !

Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel has a PhD in Quantum Chemistry* and worked as a  quantum researcher, publishing several peer-reviewed articles in that science.This means that she knows almost nothing ----- and accepts that she knows almost nothing ---- about the fundamental nature of Reality.

She radiates humility.

By contrast, almost all of the rest of the world's leaders (and not just in politics either) have a few snoozed-through classes in Victorian (aka anti-quantum) science at their High School under their scientific belt.

As a result they honestly believe that they have a firm handle on who controls Reality and that the name of that "who" is Man.

Unlike Merkel, most world leaders think they already know everything about anything : a happy by-product of a high school education in Victorian Science

They ooze hubris into the atmosphere --- guised as CO2.

No wonder then that Merkel  (aka "the traitor-warmist" to most on the Right)  understands that our climate is changing into an enormous disaster zone and that we need Post-Victorian Science employed full bore, to save us from our Victorian-Scientific selves.....

* Investigation of the mechanism of decay reactions with single bond breaking and calculation of their velocity constants on the basis of quantum chemical and statistical methods

Margaret Thatcher was also famous as a chemist cum political leader. But she got only a second class honors BSc and that during WWII ----she then worked briefly - and fittingly - in plastics, by far the most MODERNISTIC of industries.

By education and inclination , Thatcher's science was of a Victorian nature.

Perhaps the most useful thing a scientific biographer could do to help save this planet is to prepare a joint  scientific  biography of Thatcher and Merkel, contrasting how their differing science educations influenced their very different politics, though both are conservative and women.

Merkel "betrays" fellow conservative Harper with visit to Halifax climate change project

Harper ain't Happy !

HALIFAX - Privately, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his fellow Conservatives are said to be livid over Germany Chancellor Merkel's freelance visit to Dalhousie University to see the launch of a climate change study --- but in public it is all "sunshine and smiles".

Officially, Merkel is merely visiting Halifax's Dalhousie University to help launch a joint project on climate change between Dalhousie's Marine Research Institute and the German Helmholtz Association --- a job usually left for an official from the German Embassy in Ottawa to perform.

But Merkel has always made it clear that resource-poor and now population-poor Germany can only survive by (a) using its brains - ie science and (b) using those brains on up and coming global issues before others  see the future opportunity.

 And in practise, that means above all else, being there first on energy shortages and climate change. 

By contrast, Harper is a Calgary-based MP and has always ensured his own personal re-election by working tirelessly to see that his governing party is nothing more than mere putty in the hands of  Canada's massive Calgary-based Oil industry.

Under his watch, Canada's Conservatives have become the world's first governing "fossil energy lobby group".

He himself is one of the world's biggest and most tireless (tiresome ?) climate deniers but is not content, like most of them, to merely rant against the climate in a blog.

Harper has taken positive steps to kill the climate debate in Canada : conducting extensive witch hunts and mass firings throughout Canada's scientific community.

In fairness, Mr Harper has shown some restraint : he hasn't yet ordered any 'hits' on pesky climate change supporters.

But his trigger finger must really be twitching this week over the fact that Ms Merkel's highly public pro-climate change action is taking place in his own 'hood. De Capo is not pleased !

Harper hates warmist 'traitors' in his family of fellow conservatives.

But fortunately for the German Chancellor, Harper and Canadian Conservatives are also, and not so secretly , 'loving' the way that Merkel has slapped down those dark and swarthy Dagos from Greece and Spain over their financial deficits.

This fact has restrained Harper and his cabinet cronies from publicly launching their normal full-press character assassination on anyone who dares oppose them.

Still the anger must go somewhere -no wonder then that extra amounts of high blood pressure pills had to be delivered to this week's Cabinet meeting, as a medical precaution...