The idea that certain natural disasters could totally overwhelm Humanity and the Earth (catastrophism) was not yet back in popular and scientific fashion in 1954 and hadn't been in fashion for a hundred and thirty years.
Proof can be found in virtually all accounts of WWII.
The leaders of the six biggest imperial powers in the war (Churchill, Hitler,FDR,Stalin,Mussolini,Tojo) were indeed larger than life figures, stagey and theatrical in manner in their every public appearance.
The type of actors who would even eat the (supposedly bland) (supposedly inert) scenery to steal a scene.
So writers played WWII as a human drama exclusively and wrote natural forces out of their accounts of the war's progress.
But one could argue (as some historians belatedly do today, seventy five years too late) that there was plenty visible evidence at the time that natural forces - the climate above all - moved this particular global human drama all over the map.
And the humans (even these six extremely strong willed men) meekly went alone.
In perhaps the first important example, before the actual firing war, in the 1930s, the state of the crucial annual German harvest (regardless whether inputs of labour,machinery and fertilizer were increased or decreased) still mostly hung on the state of the weather.
And Hitler was always more likely to take desperate and violent action after a bad harvest, fearful that a hungry German population would turf him like they did the Kaiser.
Yes, even Hitler meekly danced the rythmn of the rain and the sun and the wind.
It turns out the scenery ended up eating the actors, not the other way around....
Showing posts with label uniformitarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label uniformitarianism. Show all posts
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Monday, September 7, 2015
Dawson's "small penicillin", a cure for a disease forty years in search of a name
Until the very end of WWII, Sir Charles Lyell ruled the intellectuals' world unchallenged.
The 19th century victory of his claim about the uniformity of the past, present and future geological worlds, over other scientists who said the world had faced past global catastrophes, laid the groundwork for Modern Science's hubristic confidence about a predictable future much like the present and the past.
But the technological development of unstoppable V2 rockets and of atomic bombs, together with evidence from Auschwitz of no limits to human evil, led a small number of people to begin to doubt the impossibility of planet wide catastrophes.
Because, rather like the Spanish Flu at the end of WWI and just as many earlier pandemics had done, it was clear that death could now reach quickly into even the most remote parts of the world.
That, at least, had to be counted as some sort of global - rather than national or continental - catastrophe.
There are no "above the fray" Neutrals and Isolationist nations during global pandemics.
But it was not until ten years later, when drifting "fallout" from a remote Pacific island's nuclear testing killed a distant Japanese fisherman and then drifted all over the world, putting poison in the milk of children worldwide, that the general population begin to believe in the possibilities of globe-wide total catastrophes.
I was only a tiny milk-drinking child back then and believe me, I instantly believed ------- and kept right on believing.
Adult scientists back then - 99% of them anyway, did not.
(Not to say they didn't fear the human urban impact of all-out nuclear war, but they felt its rural and biological impact would be relatively small and short term.)
But it was not until the mid 1980s, forty years after WWII's end, that adult scientists developed the wisdom of children.
(But only because most adult scientists of the mid Eighties were themselves the small children of the earlier poison-milk baby boom era.)
Suddenly, any number of credible possible global catastrophes arrived in the scientific mind, seemingly all at once.
The possibility of a nuclear war caused global Winter. The disaster of imminent man-made runaway global warming.
Our current inability to detect or stop the arrival of another massive asteroid, just like the one that was now believed to have caused one of our biggest ever mass extinctions.
A credible scientific explanation (Dawson's HGT) for why microbe resistance to brand new antibiotics happened so fast around the world and why it wasn't ever going to stop, meaning that the possibility of global pandemics was back - and in an age of widespread jet travel, likely to spread very fast indeed.
Evidence we were drawing down essential reserves of underwater water far far faster than Nature was replacing them and that we were exploiting most species and bio-habitats well beyond the breaking point.
And from the world of geology, Lyell's speciality, much acceptance - finally - that the past was filled with as many catastrophes as the future now promised to deliver us.
The new phrase "biodiversity" filled the airwaves.
A little late - because the fight for human diversity - civil rights for all kinds of non-white peoples, for women and for gays - had been going on for years.
Finally now some talk of civil rights for animals, plants, rocks and sky.
People frantically began to seek to maintain and to diversify our portfolio of human and biological choices, rather than always trying to drain the gene pool of all but the 'right' choices for a 'predictable' future.
Because with the future suddenly so catastrophically unpredictable, humanity decided it did need a Plan B - even a Plan C,D,E,F,G.
Dawson himself had died in 1945, forty years before his project was successful.
I know on one level this is impossible to accept - because his secondary claim that wartime microbe made penicillin should be made available to all in need was widely accepted before his death.
But I don't believe that was really what Dawson was trying to prove when he jumped his own team's protocol and suddenly started his quixotic manhattan project in October 1940.
A bit ironically, Dawson actually had a closer connection to Lyell than most scientists for Nova Scotia was important in the development of Lyell's work and Dawson's childhood next door neighbour had actually met (and very notably impressed) Lyell.
But the "show-me" Dawson was always more about concrete action than abstract theory and so he didn't use terms like biological diversity and gene pool though they were in (extremely limited) use in advanced circles in the early 1940s.
But the concepts of not putting all your eggs in one basket was ageless, as was the dictate to hold a diversified portfolio of investments.
Dawson merely thought the mainstream 1940s scientific emphasis on picking a few winners and binning the rest as losers was unfair to the losers who had a right to live as much as others and in any case, they had as many, albeit different, talents as the current winners.
His day job was getting more and better care for the truly forgotten small people among medicine's patients, the chronically ill poor, and his personal scientific interests were focused on the incredible but ignored abilities of life's smallest beings, the microbes.
In October 1940, Dawson combined his day job and his personal scientific interests, when he advanced two (much contested) claims that I encapsulate in the single phrase "small penicillin".
One was that the small microbes could make penicillin at least as good as the big human chemists might - and a heck of a lot faster in a war crisis and so they should be allowed to mass produce, now !
The other was that wartime penicillin should go to everybody, the small people as well as the big people, IE not just to the Allies's lightly wounded front line troops.
Because (a) it was the right thing to do and (b) the Allies must be morally, not merely militarily, superior to the Nazis if they are truly win over the world and we mustn't use 'war' as an excuse to abandon the powerless who are ill , as the Nazis did when they went to war.
Small-made penicillin for small as well as big patients, hence "small penicillin".
In effect, Dawson said Humanity's global portfolio of life-worthy-of-life must make room for small microbes and small people, making a case for human and biological diversity long before it became fashionable.
In practise, when the Allies did give wartime microbe penicillin to 'the least of of us', they tacitly accepted Dawson's case for human and biological diversity, even if they couldn't make the leap to say so intellectually for another forty years ...
The 19th century victory of his claim about the uniformity of the past, present and future geological worlds, over other scientists who said the world had faced past global catastrophes, laid the groundwork for Modern Science's hubristic confidence about a predictable future much like the present and the past.
But the technological development of unstoppable V2 rockets and of atomic bombs, together with evidence from Auschwitz of no limits to human evil, led a small number of people to begin to doubt the impossibility of planet wide catastrophes.
Because, rather like the Spanish Flu at the end of WWI and just as many earlier pandemics had done, it was clear that death could now reach quickly into even the most remote parts of the world.
That, at least, had to be counted as some sort of global - rather than national or continental - catastrophe.
There are no "above the fray" Neutrals and Isolationist nations during global pandemics.
Fallout
But it was not until ten years later, when drifting "fallout" from a remote Pacific island's nuclear testing killed a distant Japanese fisherman and then drifted all over the world, putting poison in the milk of children worldwide, that the general population begin to believe in the possibilities of globe-wide total catastrophes.
I was only a tiny milk-drinking child back then and believe me, I instantly believed ------- and kept right on believing.
Adult scientists back then - 99% of them anyway, did not.
(Not to say they didn't fear the human urban impact of all-out nuclear war, but they felt its rural and biological impact would be relatively small and short term.)
But it was not until the mid 1980s, forty years after WWII's end, that adult scientists developed the wisdom of children.
(But only because most adult scientists of the mid Eighties were themselves the small children of the earlier poison-milk baby boom era.)
Global Catastrophe
Suddenly, any number of credible possible global catastrophes arrived in the scientific mind, seemingly all at once.
The possibility of a nuclear war caused global Winter. The disaster of imminent man-made runaway global warming.
Our current inability to detect or stop the arrival of another massive asteroid, just like the one that was now believed to have caused one of our biggest ever mass extinctions.
A credible scientific explanation (Dawson's HGT) for why microbe resistance to brand new antibiotics happened so fast around the world and why it wasn't ever going to stop, meaning that the possibility of global pandemics was back - and in an age of widespread jet travel, likely to spread very fast indeed.
Evidence we were drawing down essential reserves of underwater water far far faster than Nature was replacing them and that we were exploiting most species and bio-habitats well beyond the breaking point.
And from the world of geology, Lyell's speciality, much acceptance - finally - that the past was filled with as many catastrophes as the future now promised to deliver us.
Biodiversity
The new phrase "biodiversity" filled the airwaves.
A little late - because the fight for human diversity - civil rights for all kinds of non-white peoples, for women and for gays - had been going on for years.
Finally now some talk of civil rights for animals, plants, rocks and sky.
People frantically began to seek to maintain and to diversify our portfolio of human and biological choices, rather than always trying to drain the gene pool of all but the 'right' choices for a 'predictable' future.
Because with the future suddenly so catastrophically unpredictable, humanity decided it did need a Plan B - even a Plan C,D,E,F,G.
Dawson's project wasn't successful in '45 ?!
Dawson himself had died in 1945, forty years before his project was successful.
I know on one level this is impossible to accept - because his secondary claim that wartime microbe made penicillin should be made available to all in need was widely accepted before his death.
But I don't believe that was really what Dawson was trying to prove when he jumped his own team's protocol and suddenly started his quixotic manhattan project in October 1940.
A bit ironically, Dawson actually had a closer connection to Lyell than most scientists for Nova Scotia was important in the development of Lyell's work and Dawson's childhood next door neighbour had actually met (and very notably impressed) Lyell.
But the "show-me" Dawson was always more about concrete action than abstract theory and so he didn't use terms like biological diversity and gene pool though they were in (extremely limited) use in advanced circles in the early 1940s.
But the concepts of not putting all your eggs in one basket was ageless, as was the dictate to hold a diversified portfolio of investments.
Dawson merely thought the mainstream 1940s scientific emphasis on picking a few winners and binning the rest as losers was unfair to the losers who had a right to live as much as others and in any case, they had as many, albeit different, talents as the current winners.
His day job was getting more and better care for the truly forgotten small people among medicine's patients, the chronically ill poor, and his personal scientific interests were focused on the incredible but ignored abilities of life's smallest beings, the microbes.
In October 1940, Dawson combined his day job and his personal scientific interests, when he advanced two (much contested) claims that I encapsulate in the single phrase "small penicillin".
One was that the small microbes could make penicillin at least as good as the big human chemists might - and a heck of a lot faster in a war crisis and so they should be allowed to mass produce, now !
The other was that wartime penicillin should go to everybody, the small people as well as the big people, IE not just to the Allies's lightly wounded front line troops.
Because (a) it was the right thing to do and (b) the Allies must be morally, not merely militarily, superior to the Nazis if they are truly win over the world and we mustn't use 'war' as an excuse to abandon the powerless who are ill , as the Nazis did when they went to war.
"Small Penicillin" & Biodiversity
Small-made penicillin for small as well as big patients, hence "small penicillin".
In effect, Dawson said Humanity's global portfolio of life-worthy-of-life must make room for small microbes and small people, making a case for human and biological diversity long before it became fashionable.
In practise, when the Allies did give wartime microbe penicillin to 'the least of of us', they tacitly accepted Dawson's case for human and biological diversity, even if they couldn't make the leap to say so intellectually for another forty years ...
Monday, July 7, 2014
Uniformitarian Authoritarianism : yep ! , they're closely related
So there it is then : Sir Charles Lyell and Adolf Hitler joined at the intellectual hip.
Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.
Their personal responses certainly differed, but both their ill-ease and their solution shared much in common.
Their plentiphobia was eased by greatly reducing and ordering the apparent plenitude of objects and actions flying about 'out there' in the new freedom that the Victorian Age - pace Charles Darwin - seemed to have thrown up (God is Dead).
Ironically, Lyell by metaphorically removing Nature and Nature's catastrophes as a potent sort of explanation for human failures only increased the freedom-from that Hitler and his followers found so mentally threatening.
Disbelieve in God means disbelieving in the Devil - and disbelief in natural disasters simply removed yet another scapegoat for human failings.
That pretty well only leaves the Jews, the Romas, the Slavs and the Handicapped to carry the can to the gas chamber ....
Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.
Their personal responses certainly differed, but both their ill-ease and their solution shared much in common.
Their plentiphobia was eased by greatly reducing and ordering the apparent plenitude of objects and actions flying about 'out there' in the new freedom that the Victorian Age - pace Charles Darwin - seemed to have thrown up (God is Dead).
Ironically, Lyell by metaphorically removing Nature and Nature's catastrophes as a potent sort of explanation for human failures only increased the freedom-from that Hitler and his followers found so mentally threatening.
Disbelieve in God means disbelieving in the Devil - and disbelief in natural disasters simply removed yet another scapegoat for human failings.
That pretty well only leaves the Jews, the Romas, the Slavs and the Handicapped to carry the can to the gas chamber ....
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Modernity's fear : not the Wrath of God or Nature, but the Wrath of Neighbours
The claim that the 19th century saw the "Death of God" is so well known that it is easy to overlook that the Victorian Age also came to accept the claim of the "Death of Nature" as well.
Sir Charles Lyell came up with this particular claim, though he was always quick to say that he still believed in God, despite most of his friends in Science no longer doing so.
Lyell was always a very superior person whenever dealing with 'lesser' beings, so it is little wonder he also took a distant Olympian view of the workings of earthly geological processes.
He dismissed the idea of geological or cosmic catastrophes, not just in the past ( his best known claim) , but happening ever.
He did this by claiming that if you took a distant enough view of them, even earthquakes and volcanoes are but tiny wiggles in time, in the unending building up and wearing down of the Earth's surface.
Tiny wiggles up and down around a surface central axis that actually varied very little, in measurements of the overall diameter of the entire Earth, if viewed over the long periods of geological time.
Eventually, he said, every volcano exploding above a city was matched by an earthquake sinking a city below the ground.
Any supposed 'catastrophe' , quote unquote, was thus reduced to being only local, small and short term, geologically speaking.
Humans actually living in the earthquake and volcano zone might dispute the minor-ness of his august "Uniformitarianism" claims, but Lyell's real audience was those people living in the earthquake/volcano free zones of the Protestant north.
Indirectly, removing the possibility of global natural catastrophes also reduced the possibility of a wrathful God having a physical means of punishing or rewarding humans, at least in the minds of 19th century Protestants who dismissed the idea of current Miracles but still believed in the workings of Providence.
So in effect, accepting the Death of Nature also eased one to accept the Death of any God capable of intervening in the physical , as opposed to the spiritual, world.
This is because Lyell's catastrophe-denying claim had wide metaphorical power, and moved quickly into many other areas of Science and civilized thought.
So it was that Lyell, the professional scientific expert and Christian, who worked most successfully to remove the power of God's surrogates, the priests and preachers.
But I wish to argue that he also removed the independent power of those former DIYers, the bog-ordinary parishioners.
For Lyell's other main plank was his claim that all geological change happened exceedingly slowly : 'Gradualism'.
He claimed that while ,yes, earthquakes and volcanic explosions were over in seconds, the forces leading up to that moment developed over millions of years.
So generations of professional, expert, scientists could rest assured they had lifetimes to find modest, gradual, limited area solutions to modest, gradual, limited area problems.
Nice, steady work with a good pension at the end.
Helping humanity could become a career, a sinecure, a new form of intellectual aristocracy, even !
Catastrophes were no longer massively global and sudden and thus beyond the power of anyone to ameliorate.
By contrast, Lyell's new micro-catastrophes ( local, small and short term and above all, slow developing) could be managed, given 'adequate' funding for long term scientific research : life-long work done by professionals like himself and his friends.
Earthquakes, cosmic collisions and great glacial floods being dismissed from the realms of possibilities , scientists quickly found new micro catastrophes in the ordinary vicissitudes of life, once handled more or less adequately by all of ordinary us, all on our own.
So it came about that today ordinary people (parishioners) are judged incapable, un-aided, of doing much of anything right.
Even grieving the loss of their own family members. (Universities in the US now offer PhDs in professional grieve-counselling.)
Perhaps one half of us still does physical work ; the other half are professionals,experts, inspectors: those who neither weave nor spin, but merely second guess the work of others.
And guess who gets better paid, works in better conditions and has higher social prestige ?
Catastrophes are the ultimate in sublimity : a liner dashed on the rocks by an ocean storm being so much more sublime than viewing just the storm itself.
But while God and Nature was no longer capable of supplying sublimity, that didn't reduce humanity's craving for the drug.
So catastrophe and sublimity crept back into life, no longer the work of God or Nature but of other humans.
The wrath of neighbours converted them into the sublime enemies of humanity : no more unearthly cries from jungle beasts, now it was the sound of our neighbour's Panther and Tiger tank treads that made our blood run cold.
It is no coincidence that Lyell's claims pre-heralded the mid 19th century rise of nationalism, with its single-minded group love and multiple group hates.
Even outside of nationalist warfare, catastrophes have had to always have a human cause.
No liner is ever sunk in a One Hundred Year storm as a result of an Act of God.
Now an official inquiry was sure to ask, given radio and radar, just what was the captain doing out on the seas at that time ?
Catastrophe, supposedly banished by Lyell, was back - smaller than ever , but also much more plentiful than ever.....
Sir Charles Lyell came up with this particular claim, though he was always quick to say that he still believed in God, despite most of his friends in Science no longer doing so.
Lyell was always a very superior person whenever dealing with 'lesser' beings, so it is little wonder he also took a distant Olympian view of the workings of earthly geological processes.
He dismissed the idea of geological or cosmic catastrophes, not just in the past ( his best known claim) , but happening ever.
He did this by claiming that if you took a distant enough view of them, even earthquakes and volcanoes are but tiny wiggles in time, in the unending building up and wearing down of the Earth's surface.
Tiny wiggles up and down around a surface central axis that actually varied very little, in measurements of the overall diameter of the entire Earth, if viewed over the long periods of geological time.
Eventually, he said, every volcano exploding above a city was matched by an earthquake sinking a city below the ground.
Any supposed 'catastrophe' , quote unquote, was thus reduced to being only local, small and short term, geologically speaking.
Humans actually living in the earthquake and volcano zone might dispute the minor-ness of his august "Uniformitarianism" claims, but Lyell's real audience was those people living in the earthquake/volcano free zones of the Protestant north.
Indirectly, removing the possibility of global natural catastrophes also reduced the possibility of a wrathful God having a physical means of punishing or rewarding humans, at least in the minds of 19th century Protestants who dismissed the idea of current Miracles but still believed in the workings of Providence.
So in effect, accepting the Death of Nature also eased one to accept the Death of any God capable of intervening in the physical , as opposed to the spiritual, world.
This is because Lyell's catastrophe-denying claim had wide metaphorical power, and moved quickly into many other areas of Science and civilized thought.
So it was that Lyell, the professional scientific expert and Christian, who worked most successfully to remove the power of God's surrogates, the priests and preachers.
But I wish to argue that he also removed the independent power of those former DIYers, the bog-ordinary parishioners.
For Lyell's other main plank was his claim that all geological change happened exceedingly slowly : 'Gradualism'.
He claimed that while ,yes, earthquakes and volcanic explosions were over in seconds, the forces leading up to that moment developed over millions of years.
So generations of professional, expert, scientists could rest assured they had lifetimes to find modest, gradual, limited area solutions to modest, gradual, limited area problems.
Nice, steady work with a good pension at the end.
Helping humanity could become a career, a sinecure, a new form of intellectual aristocracy, even !
Catastrophes were no longer massively global and sudden and thus beyond the power of anyone to ameliorate.
By contrast, Lyell's new micro-catastrophes ( local, small and short term and above all, slow developing) could be managed, given 'adequate' funding for long term scientific research : life-long work done by professionals like himself and his friends.
Earthquakes, cosmic collisions and great glacial floods being dismissed from the realms of possibilities , scientists quickly found new micro catastrophes in the ordinary vicissitudes of life, once handled more or less adequately by all of ordinary us, all on our own.
So it came about that today ordinary people (parishioners) are judged incapable, un-aided, of doing much of anything right.
Even grieving the loss of their own family members. (Universities in the US now offer PhDs in professional grieve-counselling.)
Perhaps one half of us still does physical work ; the other half are professionals,experts, inspectors: those who neither weave nor spin, but merely second guess the work of others.
And guess who gets better paid, works in better conditions and has higher social prestige ?
Catastrophes are the ultimate in sublimity : a liner dashed on the rocks by an ocean storm being so much more sublime than viewing just the storm itself.
But while God and Nature was no longer capable of supplying sublimity, that didn't reduce humanity's craving for the drug.
So catastrophe and sublimity crept back into life, no longer the work of God or Nature but of other humans.
The wrath of neighbours converted them into the sublime enemies of humanity : no more unearthly cries from jungle beasts, now it was the sound of our neighbour's Panther and Tiger tank treads that made our blood run cold.
It is no coincidence that Lyell's claims pre-heralded the mid 19th century rise of nationalism, with its single-minded group love and multiple group hates.
Even outside of nationalist warfare, catastrophes have had to always have a human cause.
No liner is ever sunk in a One Hundred Year storm as a result of an Act of God.
Now an official inquiry was sure to ask, given radio and radar, just what was the captain doing out on the seas at that time ?
Catastrophe, supposedly banished by Lyell, was back - smaller than ever , but also much more plentiful than ever.....
Sunday, August 19, 2012
On Sunday ,climate skeptics worship Sir Charles Lyell : the "Deity of Denial"
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| DEITY of the DENIERS |
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......
The high school teachers of WWII's leaders, got THEIR high school education back in the Early Victorian era
 |
| MY high school teachers ran WWII ! |
Most were born in the 1870s and 1880s and so got their last science education in the 1890s, from high school teachers who themselves got their last science education at a high school at the end of the Early Victorian era !
So : the Science of the late 1840s used to guide the world of the early 1940s.
The leaders of WWII , Modernists to the core, had a firm faith grounded on a distinct impression that the First Law of Thermodynamics and Lyell's Law of Uniformitarianism was the Alpha and Omega of scientific knowledge ----- for all time.
When your high school science teacher tells you the universe is eternally unchangeable, why bother to drop by to be posted on the latest updates in basic science . There aren't going to be any , there can't be any.
Just take a bit of time to keep up on the latest wonderful new technological offerings.
Now do the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalingrad seem more understandable ?
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
The intellectual "Drift" of former mining company geologist Naomi Oreskes
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| LYELL, prophet of Victorian Optimism |
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.
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) ....
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable
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| heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes |
After living a long life safe inside the nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.
Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.
Money was stable, based on the solid gold standard.
Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.
Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.
Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.
In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE
Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.
As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist : there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.
Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.
And modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.
Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science : the new young whippersnappers.
Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.
Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.
Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.
The Second Law's Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.
The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.
The deniers' Victorian credo (Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.
Shat happens : suck it up....
Friday, August 10, 2012
LYELL emerges from grave to deny climate change , as Yankee deniers crow "we knew he would!"
Actually Sir Charles Lyell is dead - long dead - with no sign his body has yet risen from the grave. But what about his intellectual spirit ?
Because, in fact, Lyell's spirit, his soul (the theory of uniformitarianism) does live on (and on and on).
Lives on and on in the minds of the climate deniers - and never more strongly than in that heartland of climate denialism : among many of the old school American geologists.
No coincidence that, because in its heyday uniformitarianism also thrived strongest in America geology.
Geological and meteorological deniers today claim that the climate hasn't changed, because it can not change but merely oscillate over a constant central value, if viewed over geological time periods.
If this sounds even vaguely familiar, it is because American deniers back in uniformitarianism's heyday said exactly the same thing to explain why in their view the geology of the earth hadn't changed and couldn't change.
The American geological elite's favourite words were the food and drink of modernity itself, so these geological deniers were then fully of the mainstream , in fact the mainstream of the mainstream.
Words and phrases like : normal,norm, average, static, unchanging, balance, equilibrium, eternal,universal, oscillating deviations of a local and temporary nature.
Nature was a passive backdrop : unchanging, eternal, universal.
Einstein, one of the clearest examples of 19th century scientific thinking, believed that the universe had always been there and always would be there : it was neither birthed nor would it die.
Against this 19th century static theatre backdrop, the minds of human actors were the active, changing elements of reality.
Peasants, by contrast, extrapolated from their miserable and uncertain lives to see the forces of nature as still all powerful and dynamically uncertain and us humans powerless to do much more than strive to survive its storms and earthquakes.
But upper middle class males, highly educated in western values , saw reality as very certain and predictable, again extrapolating from their extremely privileged lives.
(They, it can be safely assumed, never had to deal with even the minor uncertainties of life such as just when and how baby would choose to spoil her last remaining clean diaper !)
So if we threw Fred Singer out of a plane over Sub-Saharan Africa and told him to hunt and gather for himself, it would be pretty safe to assume we would find him a few years later, not just thinner and fitter, but also with a totally reversed view on whether Climates - and Nature in general - can and do change.
It is no coincidence that the Rich think reality is stable and unchanging and the Poor feel it is unstable and unpredictable....
Because, in fact, Lyell's spirit, his soul (the theory of uniformitarianism) does live on (and on and on).
Lives on and on in the minds of the climate deniers - and never more strongly than in that heartland of climate denialism : among many of the old school American geologists.
No coincidence that, because in its heyday uniformitarianism also thrived strongest in America geology.
Geological and meteorological deniers today claim that the climate hasn't changed, because it can not change but merely oscillate over a constant central value, if viewed over geological time periods.
If this sounds even vaguely familiar, it is because American deniers back in uniformitarianism's heyday said exactly the same thing to explain why in their view the geology of the earth hadn't changed and couldn't change.
The House Wine of Modernity (& Denierism) is Uniformitarianism
The American geological elite's favourite words were the food and drink of modernity itself, so these geological deniers were then fully of the mainstream , in fact the mainstream of the mainstream.
Words and phrases like : normal,norm, average, static, unchanging, balance, equilibrium, eternal,universal, oscillating deviations of a local and temporary nature.
Nature was a passive backdrop : unchanging, eternal, universal.
Einstein, one of the clearest examples of 19th century scientific thinking, believed that the universe had always been there and always would be there : it was neither birthed nor would it die.
Against this 19th century static theatre backdrop, the minds of human actors were the active, changing elements of reality.
Peasants, by contrast, extrapolated from their miserable and uncertain lives to see the forces of nature as still all powerful and dynamically uncertain and us humans powerless to do much more than strive to survive its storms and earthquakes.
But upper middle class males, highly educated in western values , saw reality as very certain and predictable, again extrapolating from their extremely privileged lives.
(They, it can be safely assumed, never had to deal with even the minor uncertainties of life such as just when and how baby would choose to spoil her last remaining clean diaper !)
So if we threw Fred Singer out of a plane over Sub-Saharan Africa and told him to hunt and gather for himself, it would be pretty safe to assume we would find him a few years later, not just thinner and fitter, but also with a totally reversed view on whether Climates - and Nature in general - can and do change.
It is no coincidence that the Rich think reality is stable and unchanging and the Poor feel it is unstable and unpredictable....
Thursday, August 9, 2012
With deniers believing in Victorian Era Science, conspiracy belief inevitably follows
There is nothing at all logically inconsistent with finding that most climate change deniers sincerely believe that talk of global warming is a scam to enable one group of people take over the world by subterfuge.
That strange belief logically follows from their continuing belief in the equally strange - and scientifically disproven - axioms of Victorian Era science.
They are, in a phrase, "People of the First Law" , when the 21st century's leading (tenured/peer-reviewed) basic scientists are all "People of the Second Law".
Thermodynamics , dear Watson : the two sides of the climate change debate are fighting over nothing more than the human consequences of assigning differing priorities to the two Laws of Thermodynamics !
Some deniers may think that conspiracy group consists of old world Jewish "banking families", but the vast majority of deniers think the actual group planning a world takeover on the backs of a bogus claim of a warming planet are the so called "watermelon conspiracy".
After "Our Side" won the Cold War in the early 1990s, deniers explain, "The Red Side" (not at all to be confused with the Red States - they are the good guys) cheated by just pretending to accept defeat.
But what it actually did was paint a new colour all over itself by expressing a sudden new "green" interest in saving the environment while still secretly planning to dominate humanity via a One World Government scheme, based on old "red" socialist-communist values.
Voila ! "The Watermelon Conspiracy" : green on the outside and red on the inside.
Hence the election of Obama-the-birther, some deniers claim ( shout out to the Viscount !), because "we all know how them there colored boys love ther watermelon".
Along with straight razor fighting and beatin' their gal : yep, its the Era of "The Coon Song Redux" .
And why not ? Because the science of the deniers is also from that long ago era of more than a century ago - might as well be consistent.
Belief in the priority of the First Law of Thermodynamics sees nature as a largely static backdrop to the dynamic activities of humanity : the climate literally can't change, can't do more than merely oscillate within a narrow range, back and forth or up and down, around a fixed, eternal, central equilibrium.
If you are over the age of sixty and took any geology in your science education at high school or university, you might recognize this as geology's all-ruling DOGMA, until very, very recently : Sir Charles Lyell's Uniformitarianism.
Expressed in slightly different forms, it dominated all science and in fact all human thought until well after 1945 and the uniformitarian debacle of WWII.
In mainstream Economics and in Darwinian Biology, this mid-Victorian scientific delusion still does dominate.
And of course, in the minds of the deniers. Most of them are old enough to have the genuine excuse of claiming that it was, after all, the cutting edge theory of its day at the high school where they last encountered the formal study of science.
With Nature passive and yet Reality highly active, believers in the First Law are almost forced to credit all change in the climate to just two things : a claim that these large and long term changes in our climate are in fact just temporary and local, if you view them from a long enough and distant enough perceptive, like that of say Simon-Pierre LaPlace in his executive suite high above the Universe.
Or that some group of humans, credited as a consequence of the First Law with virtually unlimited powers of will and mind power, have managed to fool all other humans into believing in a delusion : the delusion that the climate - and Mother Nature herself - can actually change.
Deniers sincerely - and consistently following from incorrect axioms - logically believe it is not they but the rest of humanity that is deluded.
As I have always claimed, all debate and all conflict is over initial axioms and nothing else......
That strange belief logically follows from their continuing belief in the equally strange - and scientifically disproven - axioms of Victorian Era science.
They are, in a phrase, "People of the First Law" , when the 21st century's leading (tenured/peer-reviewed) basic scientists are all "People of the Second Law".
Thermodynamics , dear Watson : the two sides of the climate change debate are fighting over nothing more than the human consequences of assigning differing priorities to the two Laws of Thermodynamics !
Majority of deniers think Watermelons, not Jewish families, are behind Climate Change
Some deniers may think that conspiracy group consists of old world Jewish "banking families", but the vast majority of deniers think the actual group planning a world takeover on the backs of a bogus claim of a warming planet are the so called "watermelon conspiracy".
After "Our Side" won the Cold War in the early 1990s, deniers explain, "The Red Side" (not at all to be confused with the Red States - they are the good guys) cheated by just pretending to accept defeat.
But what it actually did was paint a new colour all over itself by expressing a sudden new "green" interest in saving the environment while still secretly planning to dominate humanity via a One World Government scheme, based on old "red" socialist-communist values.
Voila ! "The Watermelon Conspiracy" : green on the outside and red on the inside.
Hence the election of Obama-the-birther, some deniers claim ( shout out to the Viscount !), because "we all know how them there colored boys love ther watermelon".
Along with straight razor fighting and beatin' their gal : yep, its the Era of "The Coon Song Redux" .
And why not ? Because the science of the deniers is also from that long ago era of more than a century ago - might as well be consistent.
Belief in the priority of the First Law of Thermodynamics sees nature as a largely static backdrop to the dynamic activities of humanity : the climate literally can't change, can't do more than merely oscillate within a narrow range, back and forth or up and down, around a fixed, eternal, central equilibrium.
If you are over the age of sixty and took any geology in your science education at high school or university, you might recognize this as geology's all-ruling DOGMA, until very, very recently : Sir Charles Lyell's Uniformitarianism.
Expressed in slightly different forms, it dominated all science and in fact all human thought until well after 1945 and the uniformitarian debacle of WWII.
In mainstream Economics and in Darwinian Biology, this mid-Victorian scientific delusion still does dominate.
And of course, in the minds of the deniers. Most of them are old enough to have the genuine excuse of claiming that it was, after all, the cutting edge theory of its day at the high school where they last encountered the formal study of science.
With Nature passive and yet Reality highly active, believers in the First Law are almost forced to credit all change in the climate to just two things : a claim that these large and long term changes in our climate are in fact just temporary and local, if you view them from a long enough and distant enough perceptive, like that of say Simon-Pierre LaPlace in his executive suite high above the Universe.
Or that some group of humans, credited as a consequence of the First Law with virtually unlimited powers of will and mind power, have managed to fool all other humans into believing in a delusion : the delusion that the climate - and Mother Nature herself - can actually change.
Deniers sincerely - and consistently following from incorrect axioms - logically believe it is not they but the rest of humanity that is deluded.
As I have always claimed, all debate and all conflict is over initial axioms and nothing else......
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