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| heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes |
"The climate can't be changing - it just can't," all the blue rinsed ladies cry. "Its not fair - everything in life is changing -
and now the climate - it just isn't fair !"
After living a long life safe inside the
nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.
Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.
Money was stable, based on the solid
gold standard.
Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.
Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.
Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.
In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE
Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the
climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist :
there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.
Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.
And modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.
Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science :
the new young whippersnappers.Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.
Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the
First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the
Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.
Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.
The Second Law's
Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.
The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean
less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.The deniers' Victorian credo
(Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.
Shat happens : suck it up....
