Climate Change

A reader has asked me to take on climate change.  I've been ruminating on how to approach the topic.  I'm not a climatologist in any sense, so there's not much that I can speak on about the science.  Not that I've let a lack of academic credentials bother me before.

But I think the primary issue I have is that I don't care.  Despite being an avowed leftist who attempts to think in terms of global systems, I don't care about global climate change.  There's not much I know about it.

Here's what I do know:

The Caspian Sea is shrinking.  This isn't purely academic, either.  The Soviet Union stored radioactive materials on an island there, where they'd be safely out of the way.  That island is now a peninsula.  It's not just now accessible from the mainland, it is the mainland.

Lake Chad is roughly half the size it was when it was first charted by Europeans.  The lake anchors the freshwater cycle of a great deal of West Africa.

The Sahara and Gobi deserts are growing.  The American West is getting drier.  Ranchers, farmers, and cities are squabbling over water levels in the Colorado River that drop year after year.  It's entirely possible that the West is coming out of a wetness peak unmatched for the last 40,000 years.

The Tigris and Euphrates valleys used to be a framing area so rich that it anchored the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent.  It's now largely desert and salt marsh.  North Africa was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.  It's now losing ground to an ever-growing desert.

The storied snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro are nearly gone.  Glacier National Park is losing its glaciers.  Continent long cracks are appearing in Antarctic ice shelves.  The Arctic summer is increasingly ice free.

Mean sea levels in Bangladesh and Micronesia keep rising.  By the 22nd century, both of those nations may perish from the face of the Earth.

All of this is local climate change.  Some is the result of warming, others the result of desertification. Is any relevant to the debate on "global warming"?  Maybe not.

But when you add up a lot of local climate change, don't you get a global climate change?

,,,
Let's talk a little bit about the carbon cycle.  No, not this one,  This one.  Here are the basics:

Plants grow.  Through a little miracle chemical called chlorophyll, they're able to absorb solar radiation and use that power to convert CO2 and H2O into various sugars.  This process releases O2 into the atmosphere.  Animals come along and eat plants and inhale O2, converting the starches in the plants back into CO2 and H2O and producing metabolic energy.


When everything is working properly, the two processes are more or less in balance.  Carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, carbon dioxide leaves the atmosphere.  Life, literally, goes on.


The problem is, that oxygen really doesn't care for being alone.  It's a little kinky that way.  Sure, those two oxygen atoms don't mind being in a relationship together, but if they can grab a carbon atom and pull it on in, they'd be much happier that way.  Many current theories of planetary evolution suggest that terrestrial planets like the Earth tend to have atmospheres comprised largely of carbon dioxide and nitrogen.  It's a popular choice, just look at Venus and Mars.  

Earth is special.  Earth gets to have free oxygen.  By all rights, we should have a bunch of carbon in our air, much like our sister-planet, Venus.  But we don't.  That carbon is squirreled away somewhere.  Where'd it go?  Thank the plants (and their tiny friends, the cyano-bacteria).


It's true, animals eat plants, and so liberate carbon back into the atmosphere.  But not nearly as much as could be there, because a great deal of carbon is fixed into plant matter.  It's in the trees.  It's in the soil.  It's in the limestone.  And since trees enjoyed a several million year long success story on the planet, a lot of the carbon that was formerly trees is in the ground: coal.


Animals have been helping, to be sure.  Sometimes they die without giving up all of their carbons.  Sometimes, when animals and other non-tree sludge dies, it gets trapped underground.  It becomes oil.


Picture the Earth 100,000 years ago.  Tons of formerly atmospheric carbon is underground as coal and oil.  Tons more is built into wood and other plant matter on the surface.  Other carbon is moving through the ecosystem: air to plant to animal to air.  Everything is, to quote a recent decade, groovy.  There's a sense of balance.  Sure the pendulum swings from one extreme to another, from too much carbon in the air to too little.  But there are plans in place, too much free oxygen and you get more animals and more active animals.  Forest fires release carbon into the air.  Too much carbon, and plants grow faster.  Animals become lethargic and die off.  The pendulum swings back.


But then a buncha' monkeys come to a startling conclusion: "fire good."  Homo erectus tames fire, becomes adept at using it, lighting it, carrying it around.  Trees start to fall; carbon fixed in wood is liberated back to the air.  The monkeys start to have other bright ideas.  Trees are felled to build things.  Forests are cleared to create cropland.  Logs are feed to the flames.  Sure, a lot of the wood stays intact, keeping carbon out of the air, but with the loss of each tree is a loss of carrying capacity.  That tree will no longer scrub carbon from the air.  Whole continents are cleared of forests.  Easter is deforested to roll old statues around.  Minorca builds the Spanish treasure fleets.  The Black Forest feeds German industry.  Haiti kills its trees and wrecks its whole ecology and thus its economy.


Sure, a lot of trees give way to other plants.  But crops don't fix carbon: they grow and then are eaten.  Crops are essentially carbon neutral.  Grasses and grains aren't the carbon sinks the old forests were.


Then the monkeys get another bright idea: dig the carbon out of the ground.  Light it on fire.  Release it back into the air.  "What inspires in us this madness, that our existence should be defined / by a light that we can't see."   The plants do their best, but by now they're outnumbered.  The trees are dying.  Their maritime allies, the algae and cyanobacteria and other oceanic plant has been poisoned; many by the carbon drilled from the ground and allowed to spill across the sea by clumsy monkeys.  "We torch the Earth until it bleeds, rain ashes from the skies, just to make a light no one can see."


So the carbon climbs again into the sky...

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PSGD

To be added to the neo-logisms page:

Public school girls' disease (PSGD): The sad pathology of our culture wherein young women are trained to hide their intelligence, creativity, and critical thinking skills for the illusion that boys will like them that way.  While many cases can be cured by exposure to higher education, too many bright minds are lost each year.  We need to act now to stop the spread of this disease.

And any young men reading this?  Smart girls are sexy.  Learn this now.

(and smart girls in lab coats?  Very sexy.)

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The Philosophical Journey pt.1

"A ship in the harbor is safe.  But that's not what ships were built for."

Religious faith, political ideology, artistic school, all these are safe harbors.  They protect from the elements: error, uncertainty, and a hurricane of questions.  Food is plentiful, there are warm drinks and warmer company.  But ships are not built to stay in harbor.  Ships are vehicles of exploration, of trade, and if necessary, of war.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

The ship of our philosophy was meant to leave port.  To brave the stormy and restless seas.  It's not easy: the food is short, the work long, the rum is always gone.  At any moment we could founder and be lost without a trace.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

So our ship of philosophy sets forth on the wine dark sea.  We jorney from port to port, dropping anchor.  We trade our goods: thoughts and ideas, questions and concepts.  Some ports become centers of trade, the destination of hundereds of ships.  Goods flow in and out.  Other ports are samll, but vital sources of rare jewels and precious stuffs.  But no matter how rich the port, how safe the harbor, the ship sails on.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

From time to time, we are buffeted by storms, great gales that blow us from our course.  From time to time, we find ourselves in uncharted waters, espying new headlands.  Sometimes we even set out for these unknown quarters of the Earth, seeking new vistas and hoping to uncover new territory and perhaps even a wealth of new ideas.  But even here we do not tarry.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

"Tonight we light the fires, we call our ships to port.  Tonight we walk on water, and tomorrow we'll be gone."

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On the Religious Faith and the Free Spirit

Uzzah spake, saying: "A ship in the harbour is safe from the storm.  But that is not what ships were built for."

'God'? What do you Mean by 'God?

The Christian says, “God exists, and he loves me.” The atheist says, “God does not exist.” The pantheist says, “all that is, is God.”

The philosopher says, “What do you mean by 'god'?” and “what do you mean by 'exists'?”

So what is 'God'?

I believe in unicorns.  They are magical, horse-like creatures possessing a single horn in the middle of their foreheads.  Their touch heals all disease, and they can only be tamed by the virtuous and the virginal.  The term 'unicorn' exists, it is well defined.  Presented with a phenomenon, I can instantly make the choice and say, “this is not a unicorn,” although I have never seen one.  Unicorns exist; they are conspicuous by their absence.

Professor von Meeces.

Sitting next to me right now is Professor von Meeces.   He loves meeces to pieces.   Professor von Meeces is a cat.   He is a phenomenon, a signifier as the semioticians say, that corresponds to the sign 'cat'.  He has pointy ears, a fuzzy tail, and dainty cat feet.  He enjoys wandering the neighborhood at night, ear scritchies, and taking extended tongue baths (which is his current activity, as my hands are otherwise engaged in typing).  He is white with grey splotches on his head, body, and tail.

But Professor von Meeces is not 'cat'.  He is a four-dimensional representation of the symbolic archetype 'cat'.  'Cat' is the intensional defenition; P vM is a member of the extension.  He is a member of the set of all cats: {..., Professor von Meeces, ...} whose sign is 'cat'.  'Cat' exists, because Professor von Meeces is one; he is a cat.   He is also bored, and leaving to find something fun to do.

'Justice' is a sign, and intensional definition.   As such, it must describe an exstensionally defined set.  There must be phenomena that are justice.   But as Sir Terry reminds us, we may grind the universe as finely as we may, and we will not find one particle, one molecule, one atom of justice.   So although the sign 'justice' exists, finding it is necessarily difficult.   We must decide from moment to moment if any given phenomenon is in the extensional defenition of 'justice'.

So what of God? Or perhaps, to say, what of 'God'?   God is a sign that points to phenomena, like 'unicorn', 'cat', or 'justice'.  But 'God' is tricky to define, perhaps trickier than 'justice', 'cat', or even 'unicorn'.

John of the epistles says that “God is love”.  So perhaps by the principle of transitive equality, we can sat that 'love is God'?  Upon further investigation, we find that people use 'god' to mean many different things, at different times.  So much is godlike, or perhaps indulging in an archaism, godly.  God is mercy, but also justice.  God is peace, but is also righteousness.   'God' is a semantic variable, it points not to a set of phenomena, to a set of signifiers, but to a different set of signs.  'God' means different things to different people at different times in different places.

And so the philosopher asks, “What do you mean by 'God'?”

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WEIRD people and psychology

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf


One issue that comes to mind is how does the scientific study of psychology affect the population itself? The practice of a the rigorous, ahistorical, scientific study of animal behavior (at least as modern psychology understands itself) presumes or requires the studying population to have adopted certain behaviors and attitudes: an understanding of inductive logic, the mathematics of statistics, the concept of quasi-objective study, and so on. The historical discipline of scientific research psychology has emerged from the WEIRD societies, and is practiced by non-WEIRD societies (like China, India, or Japan, perhaps) only to the extent that those societies may have adopted some features of the WEIRD societies. That is to say, for the WEIRD psychologists accept the work of non-WEIRD psychologists only to the extent that the non-WEIRD psychologists behave like WEIRD psychologists (especially with regards to concepts like rigour, validity, statistical correleation, strong vs. weak evidence, focus on quantifiable or measurable values, and so on.)

The problem extends to WEIRD psychologists examining members of non-WEIRD populations. Non-WEIRD participants must be able to understand instructions, understand the concept of participating in a psychological study, and so on. The latter here is significant; the findings of the Nuremberg tribunals (themselves a WEIRD social institution) require that all human participants in medical studies (usually considered to include psychological studies) must provide informed consent, which assumes an ability to understand what they are expected to do, what might be done to them, and what effects the study may have.

So it may be an inherent limitation of scientific psychology as it is practiced in the WEIRD societies that it can only study WEIRD individuals or individuals with WEIRD-like features.

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If Relationships Came with Miranda Warnings

(This has been sitting in drafts folder awhile)

You have been detained on suspicion of being in a relationship.  Specific charges may be pressed against you later; you are not entitled to know what they are.  You do not have the right to be silent.  Anything you say or do at any time may be held against you.  Any breath you take, facial expression, or eye movement will be used against you.  Should you elect to remain silent in order to avoid self-incrimination, you will be summarily condemned as being emotionally distant, bottling up, and not communicating.

You do not have the right to an attorney.  Your partner will be serving as prosecutor, judge, and executioner.  Should you attempt to mount a defense, it will be construed as evidence of your guilt.  You may elect to confess, plead guilty, and throw yourself upon the mercy of the court; doing so may increase the severity of your sentence.

The recollection and imagination of the court will be the only record kept.  Anything you might have been imagined to say or do will be entered into evidence against you.  You may attempt to indicate any mitigating factors; doing so will be used against you.  Any positive behaviors on your part, now or in the past, will be used against you.

Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?  Doesn't matter; you're guilty anyway.

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