Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Should a state university add "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" to its curriculum?
This is an undoubtedly interesting time to be alive. How could anyone be bored?
Should I rename my Academia category, Academentia?
Demented POTUS, demented polity. Madness spreads and the fish stinks from the head.
Update (3:39 pm): More academentia at UCLA medical school. Unbelievable, but you'd better believe it.
When a policy is not a policy.
I had an odd schedule in those days. I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight. I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station. Got off, hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass. Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my old friend and apartment mate, Quentin Smith, and was in bed by four again. That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78, every single day holidays included.
That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential. I told one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense." She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation." Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours." True enough. And I still do. I don't get up at midnight any more. I get up between 1 and 2 AM. I've become a slacker.
One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night. The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog. A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it difficult to get the door open. But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged. I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.
Listen, then propagate. Do your bit. More at triggernometry.
Crisis or hoax? How much of which? At the top of the Stack.
……………..
Ed Buckner writes,
I can help with your first three questions.
1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?
2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own? And if irreversible, how would you know that?
3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity, and what are the human causes?
To the first, undeniably yes. The science is that as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a physical effect that causes temperature to rise, all other things being equal. Note the rider: things are generally not equal, as there are other (well known) effects on climate. This also answers your third question. Yes, the warming caused by CO2 is man-made.
BV: You did not answer my third question. I asked to what extent is GW man-made. A priori, from the armchair, we know that if there is GW — if the Earth's atmosphere, land masses and oceans are in the aggregate getting warmer and warmer over time – then GW cannot be wholly anthropogenic and also that human activity cannot have zero effect on it. The empirical question for the climatologists is: how much of the GW is due to human activity? The answer to this question has serious repercussions for policy decisions. I suspect, though I do not claim to know, that the percentage of GW due to human activity — carbon emissions and what all else — is not high enough to justify the draconian "Green New Deal " measures of the GW alarmists. The onus probandi, I should think, is on them to prove otherwise.
Is the science settled with respect to the empirical question I have posed? Has consensus been reached among competent climatologists? That is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know,
You write, "Yes, the warming caused by CO2 is man-made." I didn't ask that question. I didn't ask what causes the warming. I asked, given that GW is occurring, about the extent to which the causes — whatever they are — are man-made. Not that I deny that CO2 plays a role. But as you know, CO2 is also produced naturally, and some of the warming produced by naturally occurrent CO2 is precisely not man-made.
So here is another empirical question: How much of the CO2 in the atmosphere originates naturally and how much from human activity? Has scientific consensus been reached on this question?
However, there is other stuff you must know. First, the known physics does not explain the predicted rises in temperature. The predicted rises are based on speculation to do with water vapour ‘positive feedback’.
Second, ‘global warming’ is ambiguous between cause and effect. We know a bit about the forcing, less about the water vapour possible cause. Regarding effect, we only have temperature measurement to go by, and the records are not long term enough. I have looked at Antarctic data and there is no evidence of any change, except at the limb of the Antarctic peninsula, which is coastal and affected by the sea. Also, the peninsula is some way from the Pole, and is naturally quite warm.
BV: Very interesting. So you are saying that the water vapor caused by GW causes more GW?
Third, and this addresses your question about reversibility: for every amount of CO2 in the atmosphere there corresponds an equilibrium temperature. Were all CO2 emission to halt, the atmosphere would take a while to establish that equilibrium, then remain there, so long as the CO2 concentration remained constant (which it won’t, as it will tend to fall).
Fourth, and global warmists tend to avoid this fact like the plague, the rise in temperature is logarithmic to the CO2 concentration. If the concentration doubles, equilibrium temperature goes up x degrees. If it doubles again, another x degrees. And so on. So a lot of the scare stories show linear charts of concentration, not logarithmic, which is somewhat misleading.
Fifth, and here I agree somewhat with the warmists, while the effect of warming can be continuous with no step changes, there is a well-known step change that occurs when ice melts. With an average of 1/10 degree below freezing point, the ice will not tend to melt. With the same amount above, it will eventually melt. So Antarctica would melt if its average temperature were a tiny amount above freezing point. But that won’t happen because Antarctica is huge and most of it close enough to the Pole that temperatures are way way below freezing.
Hope that helps.
BV: It does indeed, and thanks very much. The fourth and fifth points add to my understanding of the topic. The fifth is particularly interesting since it raises the logico-philosophical question of the metabasis eis allo genos, the shift into another genus, the somersault from a quantitative change into a qualitative one.
By the way Ed, since you are an historian of logic, do you have a list of sources on the metabasis eis allo genos? I first encountered a reference to it in Kierkegaard. Does Trendelenburg say anything about it? Must go back to Aristotle. Medievals had to have addressed it.
One more question: if the issue is global warming, why the talk of climate change? That move involves an ascent from the species to the genus. Obviously the global climate can change by getting hotter and by getting cooler.
Can you answer me this one, Ed? (Knowing me, you know that I suspect wokeassed chicanery at work.)
COMBOX now open.
More totalitarian wokery.
I gassed up the Jeep Wrangler this morning to the tune of 62.83 semolians for 13.787 U. S. gallons of regular at $4.499 per gallon at Costco in Mesa, Arizona. The line was not bad at all a little before noon. Victor Davis Hanson comments on the big picture:
Climate-change moralists love humanity so much in the abstract that they must shut down its life-giving gas, coal, and oil in the concrete. And they value humans so little that they don’t worry in the here and now that ensuing fuel shortages and exorbitant costs cause wars, spike inflation, and threaten people’s ability to travel or keep warm.
The Biden Administration stopped all gas and oil production in the ANWR region of Alaska. It ended all new federal leases for drilling. It is cancelling major new pipelines. It is leveraging lending agencies not to finance oil and gas drilling.
It helped force the cancellation of the EastMed pipeline that would have brought needed natural gas to southern Europe. And it has in just a year managed to turn the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of the world into a pathetic global fossil-fuel beggar.
Now gas is heading to well over $5 a gallon. In overregulated blue states, it will likely hit $7.
The sentence I bolded enunciates a truth little known, one that you cannot expect Uncle Joe's publicist Jen 'Circleback' Psakis to inform you of. The mendacious little weasel claims that the oil producers are not making use of their existing leases when she knows full well that drilling has huge upfront costs and that the oil companies need loans to proceed with projects the success of which is not guaranteed.
Psakis illustrates how truth can be enlisted in the service of deception. The truth that the drillers are not drilling is used to divert attention from the truth I bolded.
He who does not know is inclined to pretend. A world of ignorance is a world of bluster. One species thereof is climate bluster. "The science is settled!" It is not. What is settled, but only among leftists, is climate ideology.
What drives the ideology is hostility to individual liberty and its sine qua non, private property. Climate alarmism is part of the Left's socialist and totalitarian agenda.
The ideological nature of the alarmism is betrayed in more than one way. One way is by the refusal of leftists to proffer an honest characterization of what they mean by 'climate change.' That there is climate change is a truism. But they are pushing either a falsehood or an extremely dubious thesis.
They mean by 'climate change' the conjunction of the following distinct claims. The Earth's climate is changing. The change is irreversibly in the direction of higher and higher temperatures of the Earth's oceans and land masses. The change is catastrophic for life on Earth. It is so catastrophic that extreme measures must be taken immediately, for example, the measures outlined in "The Green New Deal." The catastrophic change is imminent or near-immanent: such as to occur in 10-15 years. The etiology of this catastrophic change is well-understood. It is largely man-made: the anthropogenic causal factors are not minor, but major: they dwarf non-anthropogenic factors such as solar activity. The specific cause of anthropogenic climate change is also well-understood: carbon emissions.
Now ask yourself: how plausible is this conjunction of claims? Bear in mind that a conjunctive proposition is true if and only if each of its conjuncts is true.
I humbly suggest that the Left's climate bluster is a lot of hot air.
The former has the latter's 'number.'
Zwei Tendenzen, die sich nur scheinbar widersprechen, kennzeichnen die Zeit: die Anbetung der Jugend and das Absterben der Erfahrung.
Two trends, which only apparently contradict each other, epitomize this era: the worship of youth and the extinction of experience. (The Agony of Flies, Noonday, 1994, p. 168/169, emphasis in original.)
Answer here. Trigger Warning! Do not (Melissa) click on this link if you are a snowflake or otherwise p.c-whipped. Seriously politically incorrect content!
Weather is not the same as climate. We all know that. But some seem to think that any sort of weather is evidence for one sort of climate. Here. Just as all roads lead to Rome, all weathers lead to Global Warming.
It's hot and dry in these parts this time of year, the candy-assed snowbirds have all flown back to their humid nests, and we desert rats like it plenty. That's why we live here. It takes a special breed of cat to be a desert rat.
You Californians stay put in your gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing, People's Republic of Political Correctness. Give my disregards to Governor Moonbeam. And that goes double for you effete and epicene residents of such Eastern states as the Commonwealth of Taxachusetts. Isn't that where Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren spouts her nonsense?
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about in my Jeep Wrangler. The onboard thermometer reported the outside temperature as 116 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.
Malcolm Pollack inquires, "Meanwhile, how do you manage in such heat? Do you just stay indoors? I suppose it's like living in Minneapolis in the winter."
It is no problem at all. We love the desert and deserts are typically hot in the summer. But there is often a 30 degree differential between the high and the low. 'Surely' it is better to live in a place where it is dry and hot in the afternoon but cool in the mornings rather in a flat and boring Eastern or Midwestern place where it is a humid 90 around the clock. Surely. (Might there be a bit of geographical chauvinism in play here?)
Do we just stay indoors? Of course not. This morning around 5:30 I hiked down to the swimming pool where I swam and did water aerobics for about an hour, chatting up the ladies and satisfying my social needs for the day. Then I went into the hot tub (sic!) for 15 minutes where I did stretching exercises. Then back into the pool for a cool-down, followed by a shower and a walk home. Other days I ride my mountain bike to the pool, swim, then go for a good ride while wet: with the soaked bandanna around my neck I'm as cool as a cucumber.
This afternoon I will go out around 3:30 to do some pro bono chess coaching at a local library for all comers, young and old. (I'm a strong coffee-house player; highest USCF rating in the 1700s.) Getting into a locked hot car that has been in the sun for an hour or two takes some getting used to, but one finds that steering a car requires less contact with the steering wheel than you might think.
From 1991 to 2009 I drove a 1988 Jeep Cherokee out here with no A.C. I'm not lying! I'm frugal. (Bought it in Ohio at T-giving in '87.) One summer I drove in one shot from Bishop, California in the High Sierra across the Mojave and Sonoran deserts to Phoenix. Stopping for gas in Blythe, California, just shy of the Colorado River and the Arizona border the temp. was 115. You drive open-windowed with an ice-cold wet bandanna around your neck. The only other motorists with their windows down were Mexicans. I felt a certain 'solidarity' with them. Does that make me a racist? Am I guilty of 'cultural appropriation'?
Tomorrow morning I pick up a guy at 5:30 and we head East into the desert for a little target practice, arriving at my favorite spot at 6. After expending 200-300 rounds between us, we head back around 8.
So no, we don't stay indoors.
I would say that Arizona is absolutely the best place to live year-round in the U.S. for all sorts of reasons.
There's a rattlesnake-infested wilderness right outside my door. Up for a hike? We leave in the dark, commence hiking at first light, and are done around ten A. M.
Malcolm Pollack quotes extensively from Dr. Judith Curry, climatologist, about whom Scientific American published an article in 2010 entitled, "Climate Heretic Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues."
If Islam is an anti-Enlightenment political ideology masquerading as a religion, then current climatology is an anti-capitalist political ideology masquerading as an empirical science. Or am I exaggerating? By how much?
One thing is clear: talk of heresy and heretics has no place in the hard sciences. If a 'science' has heretics, then it is no hard science. Current climate 'science' is science only by analogy to a serious science such as physics. And this for two reasons. First, it is heavily infected with ideology. Second, climatology falls short of strict science if strict science must satisfy all of the following:
1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."
You need to study Malcolm's post.
And then to further clarify your thoughts, study my Global Warming: Questions that Need Distinguishing.
UPDATE
Malcolm sends this:
Thanks for all the recent linkage. This climate business, in particular, really winds my stem. One thought about your post – you wrote:
If Islam is an anti-Enlightenment political ideology masquerading as a religion, then current climatology is an anti-capitalist political ideology masquerading as an empirical science.
I'd go one level deeper: I think, in fact I am completely certain, that current climatology is a religion masquerading as an anti-capitalist ideology masquerading as an empirical science. Plenty of people have done the spadework to make a persuasive case that the modern Left is actually a secular religion that continues, in more or less a straight line, the "mission into the wilderness" that so animated the Puritans. I'm thinking, for example, of Paul Gottfried's Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy, George Kenna's outstanding The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, and pretty much all of Mencius Moldbug. (By the way, if you want to get to grips with "neoreaction", you really have to read some Moldbug, if you haven't already. A great place to start is here.)
I know we may trip on the definition of "religion", but global warmism has all the features, save one, of a good universalist religion: sin, atonement, redemption, salvation, indefinite time-frames, and unfalsifiability (if the 19-year pause, the expanding Antarctic icecaps and the consistent failure of all the models to make even moderately accurate predictions don't do it, I suspect nothing will). It also happens to coincide very satisfyingly with the "progressive" goals of centralized power and a general sort of "boffinocracy", if you'll forgive the coinage.
Related articles
The hard sciences are not only empirical but experimental. I leave it to you to work out the distinction and to pursue the question as to how 'hard' climate science is.
Here in The Chronicle of Higher Education. You know you are dealing with a lefty when he gets off the phrase, "climate-change denial." Memo to Peter Lupu: I would like to hear your opinion of this article. You might subject it to a Facebook fisking. It should turn your crank, especially the benighted comments. I read a few of them and they reinforce me in my view that, to put it with aphoristic exaggeration,
The only good combox is a closed combox.