Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(09-27-2019, 09:25 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 27-Sep-2019 World View: Climate science

(09-26-2019, 10:35 AM)David Horn Wrote: >   John, you may have a strong foreign policy background, but your
>   knowledge of basic science is almost zero. Apparently, Greta is
>   far more versed than you, so simple insults seem more than a
>   little foolish, if you ask me.

>   If we stop adding more CO2 to the atmosphere starting today, the
>   temperature will continue to rise for the next two
>   centuries. That's the effect of hysteresis. So yes, she has every
>   right to be pissed-off, and not because someone told her to
>   be. The last time the levels got this high, the temperature was
>   about 3.6-5.4 degrees warmer and the seas 50-80 feet
>   higher. Preventing that involves decades of CO2 extraction. Adding
>   more just makes the task more daunting.

>   When virtually everyone in the know agrees with her, maybe you
>   need to reconsider your POV.

So here are some things that I know:

• Anyone whose strongest argument is that 14 year old teenage girl
  aspiring actress knows more about science than I do is completely full
  of crap and knows that he's completely full of crap.  Furthermore, if
  you ever watched anything but the crazy nutcases on CNN and MSNBC,
  you would know that there are a lot of people "in the know" who don't
  agree with the teenage girl.
  
  
• Anyone who denies the climate change religion is shunned by the
  mainstream media, or is called a racist or misogynist or white
  supremist.
  
  
• There are many scientists and web sites that deny the climate
  change religion.  Here's one that presents plenty of evidence that
  climate change claims are wrong:
  
  (https://realclimatescience.com/)
  
  I particularly like the article entitled "Another Wildly Fraudulent
  Data Set From NOAA":
  
  (https://realclimatescience.com/2019/09/a...from-noaa/)
  
  
  
• Even if you assume that climate scientists have always been
  correct about the past, it turns out they've almost always been
  wrong about predicting the future.  Here are a couple of sites
  to look at:
  
  (https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-year...redictions)
  
  (http://www.aei.org/publication/18-specta...is-year-3/)
  
  These are subjects that MUST NOT be uttered.  It's forbidden to
  mention these things in the mainstream media, and it may even be
  punishable by death by people from the loony left.
  
  
• Climate scientists assume a static, unchanging world, with one and
  only one thing changing in the next century, carbon emissions.
  Climate scientists run scared when you talk about a dynamic world.
  
  
• Particular issue that makes climate scientists run scared: The
  certainty of one or two world wars in this century, plus massive
  regional nuclear and ground wars, killing hundreds of millions or
  billions of people when combined with disease, famine and suicide.
  The population reduction will substantially reduce carbon emissions.
  
  
• Another issue that makes climate scientists run scared: The
  Singularity, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and other technological
  advances that drive so-called scientists crazy.
  
  
• Another issue that makes climate scientists run scared: Showing
  how their predictions have been consistently disastrously wrong, which
  means that it's the climate activists are the true "climate
  deniers."
  

And so, I do believe that I know more about science that the 14 year
old teenage girl aspiring actress.  However, I doubt very much that
you do.

1. It is rare that a child in her mid-teens knows more about science than does the President and that such is abundantly clear -- but along comes the Great Ignoramus to be President of the United States.  Donald Trump is proudly wrong about many things, including science. Maybe Obama didn't show himself a fool -- but wise people know their limitations.

It is wisest to be within the scientific mainstream if one is not a scientist. To expound pretentiously about scientific matters while being ill-trained in the relevant science is to show oneself as a crank. Donald Trump is a crank. 

2. Climate change is not a religion. If anything I would ask what religion says about climate change. Mainstream religions recognize the hazards and have decided that the right course of action is to counter the menace of climate change. If you want to discuss religion and climate change, then maybe one can discuss what the Pope says of it in his encyclical Laudate si:

  http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/e...to-si.html

Pope Francis is not a scientist, but he has competent scientists to advise him. Except on reproductive rights, the Pope is about as mainstream as anyone can be. 

I am more concerned about the personality cult that has formed around President Trump as a quasi-religion. 

3. Just as there ares scientist who deny global warming and that there are historians who deny the Holocaust... pseudoscience and pseudohistory are not valid alternatives to honest, carefully-honed intellectual efforts.  The denials of global warming are dated and they come from people who sold out to the petroleum industry before it started to recognize that climate change is a problem. 

The energy companies are diversifying their energy sources.

4. Climate science is static only to the extent that the knowledge is well established. So it was for relativity a few decades ago. One can configure the climate for a time in which Australia and Antarctica were still connected and India had not yet slammed into central Asia. A hint: glaciers did not exist even at the South Pole until Australia separated from Antarctica... when Australia was about 20 degrees south of where it is now, and the powerful currents did not then separate Antarctica from warmth penetrating from middle latitudes and when cold air from the most southerly parts of Antarctica could spread into the middle latitudes and mitigate. The rise of the Himalayas thrust a huge volume of silicate rick into the atmosphere where intense rainstorms full of carbon dioxide could cause a reaction that turns darker silicate rocks into near-white carbonate rocks that reflect heat better. The Earth chilled, and Antarctica lost all characteristics of temperate climate. 

5. I can hardly imagine anything that could make a particularly dangerous time around 2100 (that is about when the next Crisis Era will occur if one takes the eighty-year cycle of the Saeculum seriously... than climate change that guts the world food supply at the very time in which people are getting intolerant, governments become increasingly dictatorial, extremist causes flourish, and nationalism reaches its peak. If World War III should be the focus of this Saecular crisis and World War IV the focus of the next Saecular crisis, then I can hardly imagine anything that makes the Crisis of 2100 so ominous than the consequences of global warming. 

I have just given you a focus of danger for the next Crisis Era with the potential for wars far worse than those that we can imagine or even experience now. 
 
There is no technological fix out of food shortages, and food shortages can topple governments. The more serious unmet needs that people have in a Crisis Era, the more severe the Crisis will be! I cannot imagine anything more likely than destructive climate change to make your Generational Dynamics particularly ominous around 2100!

6. So far one of the greatest contributors to the nastiness of this time is the disappearance of scarcity of manufactured goods. Even the poor in the industrialized world must often decide what they are to give away or discard so that they can replace an obsolete technology with another. OK, the old console TV is an obvious object to discard when one gets one of the new flat-screen TV's that even ten years ago did far more than the best console TVs did, and with lesser input of material. (A hint: you can easily carry a 32" flat-screen TV about, but you had to rely upon someone delivering a 25"-screen console TV to your home. You could not simply put it in your car and take it home with you because it was too d@mn heavy!

People are less likely to load up with cheap stuff that either ends up as clutter or goes quickly to the landfill. They now know what is going on, and most people have the stuff that they need. To get people buying more of the cr@p at "Big Box-Mart" we will need a population explosion that makes young adults 'hungry' for such cr@p. 

I can make a prediction about interior design circa 2035: even if society is generally prosperous, contents will seem comparatively austere as they did in the 1950's. We are no longer in an age of scarcity of material goods; indeed, we are in a scrape because what Marx said about the proletariat in the mid-19th century (workers have nothing to sell but their toil) remains true. When manufacturing becomes a far-lesser share of the economy, the proletariat finds its ability to prosper by selling its toil far more futile than it used to be.         

6. Although highly-advanced technology in nanotechnology and biotechnology offer miracles, and the singularity is scary... just think how thinking machines could turn a hungry, alienated proletariat against the elites of the time. I have my idea of what stops the Singularity -- that there are people who enjoy thinking and creating and are not going to devolve those delights to unfeeling machines. If you wonder how I see the future of technology, then I see it resembling a titration curve:

                                                                                     

(sodium hydroxide added to hydrochloric acid) -- note that the 'progress' in making the solution less acidic is slow until  the relevant amounts of hydrogen and hydroxide ions get close to each other, and close to the point of equivalence the pH rises rapidly as more hydroxide ions enter the solution and neutralize the hydrogen ions. Not long after the solution is neutral, adding more sodium hydroxide rapidly leads to dominance until the pH reaches a certain point -- and then the addition of more sodium hydroxide can no longer  cause the pH to rise much. 

That is how I see technology. We are limited in our intellectual ability and our talents for management of material objects (and such consequences as images and sensations) to get more out of new technologies beyond a certain point. The rewards for technological innovation will by then decline sharply OK, I do not have a time scale, and I do not know when diminishing returns start becoming obvious for increases in technology. I can't even say that we are not close by a few years from such a point, or that we have even passed the zone of maximal slope.  

OK, so we have gone as far as we probably can in the creation of entertainment. How many channels of cable TV do you need?

8. The acid test of the real or imagined dangers of AGW lies in the future -- but we cannot impose social models upon unwilling people. It would be unconscionable to bring back slavery, Nazism, or Stalinism  to establish definitively how horrible they are. It will be unconscionable to 'give' parts of the world 35F wet-bulb temperatures as which people cannot cool off by perspiration, to let the seas inundate huge tracts of rich farmland, or to turn areas that currently have excellent farming into deserts or near-deserts. Climate is an obvious barrier to growing certain crops in some places (cotton grows well around western Tennessee, but not in central Illinois), but even if a climate typical of the American wheat and potato belts (Dfb as in the eastern Dakotas) appears in southwestern Alaska, the soil nutrients might not be ready. A hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Csa, as in the northern Central Valley of California or in southwestern inland Oregon) might appeal to some in Michigan (Hooray! Put away the snowplows!) until one reasons that Michigan does not have the deep high mountain valleys to serve as reservoirs for irrigation. 

9. Climate change has happened in the past, but when it was not gradual (it takes about 75 years for the world to go from slightly glaciated to being in a full Ice Age) it did not work well.  At one point the Sahara hardly existed

 

in contrast to what we have today:



I strongly discourage anyone from playing 'climate roulette' with global warming.