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.....
Showing posts with label charles lyell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label charles lyell. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Saturday, August 25, 2012
MATTHEW 7:3 to Josh Floyd & Frank L. Lambert : Lighten up !
Science's uncivil War : Part XXXCCCVIII
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| OCEANS of GOLD ! |
By way of complete contrast, not an Eternity goes by without all the world's hard scientists all ignoring the far more egregious (mis)use of the First Law of Thermodynamics in areas like geology (shout out to Sir Charles Lyell) or in economics (shout out to almost everyone with tenure).
Ignoring beams to focus on moles usually signifies a much deeper mental issue, as my old shrink Dr Jesus would say .
I would suggest this is because the First Law of Thermodynamics paints quite a rosy picture of Man's ability - particularly Scientific Man - to profitably manipulate the Universe, while the Second Law of Thermodynamics is much less hopeful in this respect.
The Constant - conscious - touting of the First Law of Thermodynamics, by scientists, as the fundamental law of all human activity is what convinced gullible lay people all those years back to pay basic scientists to just sit about and think, rather than to put themselves out to work as traditional ,Non-U, hands-on inventors.
Replacing the First with the Second threatens paycheques, pensions and (above all) prestige and this why I believe the Second Law is always attacked when used as a metaphor while the first law's foundational use in, of all things, the science of human behavior cum economics is ignored .
Here is how I describe entropy to friends and foes alike : in the form of a joke.
In fact, a classic good news / bad news joke.
See, a feller walks into the bar and tells all the patrons that "There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea".
That's the good news, he says.
The patrons ask - in one voice : well what then is the bad news ?
But the silly feller just repeats what he told them.
"There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea."
Yes indeed. There is lots of gold in the sea but unlike in a miner's mother lode, it is so finely and widely dispersed over such immense distances and depths that it effectively worthless --- actually worth far less than zero .
This is because it will cost more ( money=energy) to collect it than it is worth (gold=money=energy), when it is sold to pay back the energy used to collect it.
Now entropy as useless because dispersed energy versus concentrated and hence useful energy is not strictly a case of "order versus disorder", at least to the 70,000 or so hard scientists who object strongly every time lay people use this metaphor to describe entropy to other lay people.
But unfortunately the 7 billion rest of us find it works - as a metaphor - just fine.
Why ? I blame Mom.
A Iraqi college inside a brick building is nice and orderly, till a big smart bomb enters and blows all those bricks into a fine powder and the desert winds scatter that dust all over the Middle East.
Dispersed and useless and messy and dirty : disorderly, as my Mom would say.
Hard scientists - like Floyd and Lambert - apparently never had a Mom - or at least not one like mine.
My Mom had a acute sense of "disorder" being defined as me scattering (dispersing as people with PhDs say) all my clothes all over the floor, instead of hanging them up neatly and "orderly" in one corner of my closet.
My advice to Josh Floyd and Frank Lambert ?
Get some Metamucil , loosen up, have a beer, watch some TV and think back again to whatever metaphors that their Moms did use whenever little Frankie and Joshie's rooms were messy .....
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 Panglossian NAIVETY of the climate denier cum skeptic
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| NAIVE denier cum skeptics |
In the 1830s, Lyell chose to modify Pangloss's famously naive philosophy.
It now read - in the light of Lyell's own even more optimistic theory of Uniformitarianism : "We live in the most average, the most normal, the most typical and representative of ages : our charmingly tasteful present is a roadmap back into the mists of the past and forward into those sunlit uplands of our future."
In the Lyellian cum deniers' minds , Man is endlessly progressing : ever upward, ever forward.
But the Universe ? The Universe, by way of total contrast, with all its inanimate but varying objects and all its animate, varying, beings, is in their minds but a passive backdrop.
A crudely painted canvas drop , with only one actor allowed on stage : Man.
Reality, to a denier, is literally, "all about me". Selfish self-centeredness deified into a scientific philosophy and political ideology.
Libertarianism is the political wing of Uniformitarianism
Libertarianism is Uniformitarianism is Libertarianism : a perfect circle, round and around a static, mildly oscillating , Universe.
Oh yes, the Universe, and our Earth : to the Lyellian denier, they do not progress forward and upwards or backwards and downwards - in fact, do not radically move any which way.
Instead they merely oscillate, over a very narrow range, back on forth over a normal, typical, average, representative, mean : the mean of present day values.
Local, temporary volcano up, local, temporary earthquake down neatly balancing each other : the perfect proof of the First law of Thermodynamics.
That Law, crudely and incorrectly stated, holds that Matter and Energy can not be created or destroyed but merely (and usefully for Man) changed into different forms of themselves, back and forth ; forever and ever Amen.
The early Victorian optimists and their 21st century kinfolk viewed this law - erroneously - as the fundamental law of the universe.
But don't blame them too much ; instead blame our High School science teachers from the 19th , 20th and 21st century for teaching that to them.
The true fundamental law of the universe, the one from which the First law of Thermodynamics is derived , is the Second law of Thermodynamics.
(First and Second refers to the time of their formulations : the First was formulated and popularized before the Second was realized to be the truly important one.)
The Second (in simple english) states that , statistically, all energy and matter becomes less and less useful to humanity with each use and eventually all energy and matter and life will be frozen dead at a temperature very near Absolute Zero.
So, in fact, the Universe and Life does have a direction and is constantly changing and that direction is more or less steadily downhill, albeit very slowly.
So, some of the heat from every time we burn even a small lump of coal eventually escapes the world's atmosphere and winds up heating, ever so ineffectually, some distant corner of the frozen Universe.
Probe a climate change denier skeptic or climate change believer warmist and you will find the concept of a steadily changing universe is their dividing line : both are people of either the First or the Second law.....
Sunday, August 12, 2012
"PETER C GLOVER" to receive NOBEL for 5th law of thermodynamics ?
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| GLOVER takes the Fifth |
Glover , like the rather more illustrious Sir Charles Lyell , left a field he was good at (the law) to dabble at something he is terrible at (science).
Glover (not yet Sir Glover) is best known for his thesis that "Humanity can not change the Climate for good or for bad". Full stop.
Most critics of the theory of human-caused climate change at least allow change in the climate with sufficient inputs of extra or less energy : but they mathematically quantify these inputs to be at such levels that humanity as of yet simply doesn't have the means to generate them.
Prolonged shifts in the Earth's relationship, distance-wise, to the Sun, or sharp rises and falls in the energy output of the Sun are held by these critics to be big enough to cause the Earth Climate to change fundamentally.
This is a serious argument, a serious scientific argument, and the various sides argue over whether smaller changes in energy inputs (small enough for current humanity to evoke) are sufficient to evoke pronounced changes in the Earth's climate.
Glover does not make these sort of arguments - he is a lawyer by trade and so may be intellectually unequal to making logical rather than rhetorical arguments.
Fair enough.
But I do not believe that Glover's thesis rests on science at all : he does not qualify or quantify his argument with any caveats.
His law is a Law in the Mosaic sense : laid down on tablets as imperative commands.
Moses' tablet laws are different from both changeable laws of humanity in the court of law and in the court of science.
Legislatures bring criminal and civil laws in and out of existence daily.
Science Laws once judged fundamental, like the First Law of Thermodynamics which forms the intellectual underpinning (such as it is) beneath Glover's thin reed of theory, can and were demoted to mere 'derived laws' , once the truly fundamental nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics became apparent.
The Theology of Peter XXXXXIII
But Glover's Law that humanity never could, never can and never will be able to change the climate has a much more eternal ring to it.
Humanity may be the most powerful species on this rock, third from the Sun, but God in his wisdom has apparently not granted us the hubristic power to destroy the Earth.
As a Christian , don't I daily wish that it be so !
But I see no evidence that our species can't destroy our own nest and that, in fact, it is happily doing so, as I write.
Nor do I see any hand-waving and finger-pointing from Peter as to just what other species, then, caused the Ice Ages .
Perhaps it was the Lilies of the Field, who despite weaving and spinning not, are apparently a dab hand at hexing the weather patterns big time......
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......
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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