Merkel world's first "Post-Victorian Science" leader ?

Merkel gets it !

Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel has a PhD in Quantum Chemistry* and worked as a  quantum researcher, publishing several peer-reviewed articles in that science.This means that she knows almost nothing ----- and accepts that she knows almost nothing ---- about the fundamental nature of Reality.

She radiates humility.

By contrast, almost all of the rest of the world's leaders (and not just in politics either) have a few snoozed-through classes in Victorian (aka anti-quantum) science at their High School under their scientific belt.

As a result they honestly believe that they have a firm handle on who controls Reality and that the name of that "who" is Man.

Unlike Merkel, most world leaders think they already know everything about anything : a happy by-product of a high school education in Victorian Science

They ooze hubris into the atmosphere --- guised as CO2.

No wonder then that Merkel  (aka "the traitor-warmist" to most on the Right)  understands that our climate is changing into an enormous disaster zone and that we need Post-Victorian Science employed full bore, to save us from our Victorian-Scientific selves.....

* Investigation of the mechanism of decay reactions with single bond breaking and calculation of their velocity constants on the basis of quantum chemical and statistical methods

Margaret Thatcher was also famous as a chemist cum political leader. But she got only a second class honors BSc and that during WWII ----she then worked briefly - and fittingly - in plastics, by far the most MODERNISTIC of industries.

By education and inclination , Thatcher's science was of a Victorian nature.

Perhaps the most useful thing a scientific biographer could do to help save this planet is to prepare a joint  scientific  biography of Thatcher and Merkel, contrasting how their differing science educations influenced their very different politics, though both are conservative and women.

Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable

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....