Science's uncivil War : Part XXXCCCVIII
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| OCEANS of GOLD ! |
Showing posts with label charles lyell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label charles lyell. Show all posts
Saturday, August 25, 2012
MATTHEW 7:3 to Josh Floyd & Frank L. Lambert : Lighten up !
Sunday, August 19, 2012
On Sunday ,climate skeptics worship Sir Charles Lyell : the "Deity of Denial"
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| DEITY of the DENIERS |
The Panglossian NAIVETY of the climate denier cum skeptic
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| NAIVE denier cum skeptics |
Sunday, August 12, 2012
"PETER C GLOVER" to receive NOBEL for 5th law of thermodynamics ?
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| GLOVER takes the Fifth |
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 ?
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.
That strange belief logically follows from their continuing belief in the equally strange - and scientifically disproven - axioms of Victorian Era science.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Commensality is NATURE's globalization...
Usually we think of Globalization as a 'hands up' affair.
"Hands up, are we more opposed or more in favour of further globalization?"
In this light, globalization is seen strictly as a man-made affair, a choice we decide to make.
But the really important globalization, the globalization ancient beyond all time, Nature's globalization, isn't a human choice --- it is simply something we are stuck in: Suck it up. Reality Bites. Deal with it.
Think of it as Global Commensality.
As all life dining at the only table, on the only lifeboat we have.
Sure, we humans like to think we are responsible for the fallout from that nuclear test in the South Pacific than ended up falling on the grass the cow ate before we feed its milk to our kids in Northern Norway.
But actually it was Nature's air currents sweeping around the world that deposited that radioactivity, just as it turns one nation's pollution into acid rain for another country.
Nature's breezes are the ones that spread the ash and smoke from a southern Asian volcano's explosion's up into the atmosphere around the Northern hemisphere, giving its residents a year without summer---- or good enough harvests to prevent famine.
Nature's breezes also transport ,willy-nilly, tough hardy tiny bacteria and fungus spores across oceans and continents.
Birds and insects use those breezeways, to fly as far as from the south pole to the north pole.
Both sometimes also carry unwanted microbes or chemicals from continent to continent, blithely bypassing any sort of Borders & Customs restrictions that humanity might impose.
Ocean currents are equally successful at sending not just small creatures and microbes on floating matts of vegetation across vast oceans to new lands - they now send us other nation's plastic wastes
from 4000 miles away.
Those currents don't just move horizontally across the oceans - we learn in school that they rise and fall vertically from the surface to the deepest depths and vice versa --- creating the great food chain of the ocean by exchanging ocean floor mineral nutrients for surface biological waste nutrients.
El Nino and El Nina, those regular alternations in ocean surface water temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific (a place where far less than 1% of us have ever even passed through, let alone visited) have the most amazing consequences around the world.
For some it half a world away, it means dire droughts (or floods) and the real threat of famine.
As for the rest of us, it means higher or lower rain and snow fall and our local storms rise and fall in intensity and number.
Every inter-regional wind system from hurricanes to Trade Winds to Jet Stream are twisted askew.
To all of us, it means a rise and fall in the price of fish all over the globe as the upwelling of nutrients that feeds fish growth rises or falls --- a clear example of climate globalization affecting economic globalization.
Tectonic Plate Movements aren't usually thought of as part of globalization - but they are. That volcano in Indonesia that dusted the skies over England was part of the clash and crash of tectonic plates of course.
More importantly, those massive plates are anything but equal in shape and size and location.
They are constantly moving - moving closer to the
warm equator or closer the cold poles - and since land and ocean deal with incoming sunshine differently, that incessant movement constantly , slowly, changes the climate that feeds us all -----in an unequal and unpredictable fashion.
Fertile Crescents can become un-fertile deserts in a few thousand years - that is very much Time on a human scale.
In addition, when those plates move closer to or further from each other, they change the shape of the passages between oceans and part of oceans (seas and bays) and this changes the direction and strengths of the big ocean currents - such as the well known Gulf Stream.
We can imagine what that might mean !
But we haven't even got into the biggest globalization processes of them - those great cycling backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, of Life's key nutrients : ,water, oxygen, carbon, useable nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, iron.
The human crisis caused by our carbon polluting the atmosphere shows us that this one action can affect all life : commensal globalization.
By way of closing, let us contrast this with one of the central tenets of that great counter-romantic ideology, Modernity.
In the great 'dance of the dialectic', Modernity never the less took up one of the streams of Romanticism that it sought to oppose: the one that insisted that nation's character emerged in part from the very molecules of the nation's soil incorporated into the nation's food and ultimately the nation's citizens.
"Blood and Soil" .
Admittably it was usually coached a little less blatantly than that, but in fact that was its essence.
Global Commensality insists ,by contrast, that very little of the local topsoil stays actually stays local for very long - always it is on the way to somewhere else , on its way to becoming something else.
Credit to Charles Lyell : Reality on Earth is a constant, steady, rapid low grade flux, integrated on top of great extremely slow cycles, ever circling back on themselves.
Discredit to Lyell as well : each iteration of the great cycles is actually also different from the one before it and after it.
Complexity on top of complexity on top of complexity.
Compared to Nature's globalization , human globalization is beginning to look like a piece of cake....
"Hands up, are we more opposed or more in favour of further globalization?"
In this light, globalization is seen strictly as a man-made affair, a choice we decide to make.
But the really important globalization, the globalization ancient beyond all time, Nature's globalization, isn't a human choice --- it is simply something we are stuck in: Suck it up. Reality Bites. Deal with it.
Think of it as Global Commensality.
As all life dining at the only table, on the only lifeboat we have.
Sure, we humans like to think we are responsible for the fallout from that nuclear test in the South Pacific than ended up falling on the grass the cow ate before we feed its milk to our kids in Northern Norway.
But actually it was Nature's air currents sweeping around the world that deposited that radioactivity, just as it turns one nation's pollution into acid rain for another country.
Nature's breezes are the ones that spread the ash and smoke from a southern Asian volcano's explosion's up into the atmosphere around the Northern hemisphere, giving its residents a year without summer---- or good enough harvests to prevent famine.
Nature's breezes also transport ,willy-nilly, tough hardy tiny bacteria and fungus spores across oceans and continents.
Birds and insects use those breezeways, to fly as far as from the south pole to the north pole.
Both sometimes also carry unwanted microbes or chemicals from continent to continent, blithely bypassing any sort of Borders & Customs restrictions that humanity might impose.
Ocean currents are equally successful at sending not just small creatures and microbes on floating matts of vegetation across vast oceans to new lands - they now send us other nation's plastic wastes
from 4000 miles away.
Those currents don't just move horizontally across the oceans - we learn in school that they rise and fall vertically from the surface to the deepest depths and vice versa --- creating the great food chain of the ocean by exchanging ocean floor mineral nutrients for surface biological waste nutrients.
El Nino and El Nina, those regular alternations in ocean surface water temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific (a place where far less than 1% of us have ever even passed through, let alone visited) have the most amazing consequences around the world.
For some it half a world away, it means dire droughts (or floods) and the real threat of famine.
As for the rest of us, it means higher or lower rain and snow fall and our local storms rise and fall in intensity and number.
Every inter-regional wind system from hurricanes to Trade Winds to Jet Stream are twisted askew.
To all of us, it means a rise and fall in the price of fish all over the globe as the upwelling of nutrients that feeds fish growth rises or falls --- a clear example of climate globalization affecting economic globalization.
Tectonic Plate Movements aren't usually thought of as part of globalization - but they are. That volcano in Indonesia that dusted the skies over England was part of the clash and crash of tectonic plates of course.
More importantly, those massive plates are anything but equal in shape and size and location.
They are constantly moving - moving closer to the
warm equator or closer the cold poles - and since land and ocean deal with incoming sunshine differently, that incessant movement constantly , slowly, changes the climate that feeds us all -----in an unequal and unpredictable fashion.
Fertile Crescents can become un-fertile deserts in a few thousand years - that is very much Time on a human scale.
In addition, when those plates move closer to or further from each other, they change the shape of the passages between oceans and part of oceans (seas and bays) and this changes the direction and strengths of the big ocean currents - such as the well known Gulf Stream.
We can imagine what that might mean !
But we haven't even got into the biggest globalization processes of them - those great cycling backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, of Life's key nutrients : ,water, oxygen, carbon, useable nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, iron.
The human crisis caused by our carbon polluting the atmosphere shows us that this one action can affect all life : commensal globalization.
By way of closing, let us contrast this with one of the central tenets of that great counter-romantic ideology, Modernity.
In the great 'dance of the dialectic', Modernity never the less took up one of the streams of Romanticism that it sought to oppose: the one that insisted that nation's character emerged in part from the very molecules of the nation's soil incorporated into the nation's food and ultimately the nation's citizens.
"Blood and Soil" .
Admittably it was usually coached a little less blatantly than that, but in fact that was its essence.
Global Commensality insists ,by contrast, that very little of the local topsoil stays actually stays local for very long - always it is on the way to somewhere else , on its way to becoming something else.
Credit to Charles Lyell : Reality on Earth is a constant, steady, rapid low grade flux, integrated on top of great extremely slow cycles, ever circling back on themselves.
Discredit to Lyell as well : each iteration of the great cycles is actually also different from the one before it and after it.
Complexity on top of complexity on top of complexity.
Compared to Nature's globalization , human globalization is beginning to look like a piece of cake....
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
"Triumph of the Wild: World War Two"
World War Two is usually described as the triumph of one kind of human will over another kind of human will .
Victory is said to have come to the Allies because the minds/rationality/willpower of the free scientists of the democracies were much smarter than the fanatically-willed minds of the soldiers and scientists of Germany and Japan.
This despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that the Axis were the far tougher soldiers: scientific willpower trumped military willpower.
But the military staff of all the combatant nations found that their war plans rarely worked anywhere near as well as they were expected ----the fog of war had never seemed thicker.
Unexpectedly, their plans' biggest failings were usually against the forces of nature rather than against the forces of man:
The constant ability of unexpected bad weather to delay offensives and the power of national harvest failures to push leaders into new, ever more foolish, invasions schemes.
The overwhelming consequences of rugged geography ,and vast distances in general, on logistical efforts.
The perpetual shortages of natural materials and energy (including- unexpectedly for modernists - shortages in human energy !)
The failures of man-made/synthetic substitutes to remedy Nature's shortfalls.
The inaccuracy of workmanlike Newtonian mechanics ,at distances longer than a Nelson broadside , the list goes on and on.
The world's biggest and most modern nations went into World War Two knowing it would be a very tough war - but were united, at least, in believing their only really tough opponents would be groups of other humans.
This is to say, they were all Modernists to the core and hence all students - perhaps unknowingly - of Sir Charles Lyell.
Nature was supposed to have been tamed within reasonable limits and only humans could hold up other humans in their goals.
But few Germans today are willing to rate Stalin's army as being a greater enemy than Russian winter and Russian mud and the sheer Russian expanse.
Even fewer of today's airforce staff officers still believe that German fighters and ack-ack
guns were the prime reason why massive numbers of Allied bombers failed to permanently knock out any German power plants or oil refineries.
In a world war that ended up being as much being 'against the world' as being 'conducted all over the world', Modernity took a blow it never fully recovered from: "Wild Trumps Will, every time".
Nature bats last... but it bats long and it bats hard....
Victory is said to have come to the Allies because the minds/rationality/willpower of the free scientists of the democracies were much smarter than the fanatically-willed minds of the soldiers and scientists of Germany and Japan.
This despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that the Axis were the far tougher soldiers: scientific willpower trumped military willpower.
But the military staff of all the combatant nations found that their war plans rarely worked anywhere near as well as they were expected ----the fog of war had never seemed thicker.
Unexpectedly, their plans' biggest failings were usually against the forces of nature rather than against the forces of man:
The constant ability of unexpected bad weather to delay offensives and the power of national harvest failures to push leaders into new, ever more foolish, invasions schemes.
The overwhelming consequences of rugged geography ,and vast distances in general, on logistical efforts.
The perpetual shortages of natural materials and energy (including- unexpectedly for modernists - shortages in human energy !)
The failures of man-made/synthetic substitutes to remedy Nature's shortfalls.
The inaccuracy of workmanlike Newtonian mechanics ,at distances longer than a Nelson broadside , the list goes on and on.
The world's biggest and most modern nations went into World War Two knowing it would be a very tough war - but were united, at least, in believing their only really tough opponents would be groups of other humans.
This is to say, they were all Modernists to the core and hence all students - perhaps unknowingly - of Sir Charles Lyell.
Nature was supposed to have been tamed within reasonable limits and only humans could hold up other humans in their goals.
But few Germans today are willing to rate Stalin's army as being a greater enemy than Russian winter and Russian mud and the sheer Russian expanse.
Even fewer of today's airforce staff officers still believe that German fighters and ack-ack
guns were the prime reason why massive numbers of Allied bombers failed to permanently knock out any German power plants or oil refineries.
In a world war that ended up being as much being 'against the world' as being 'conducted all over the world', Modernity took a blow it never fully recovered from: "Wild Trumps Will, every time".
Nature bats last... but it bats long and it bats hard....
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