Thought Provoking by Definition
The basic purpose of science is to ask and attempt to answer questions. Seldom is the answer obvious or simple.
The Earth’s climate is the final visible result of a large number of complex nuclear, chemical, geological and astronomical forces.
It is beyond the scope of an editorial or short sound bite to describe these forces and their interactions to a scientifically illiterate public.
Science is not the only subject where there is limited public knowledge. There seems to be little understanding of human history. Throughout history, the discovery of fire has been recognized as the greatest factor in the development of civilized society. To generations connected to the earth’s real physical struggles, the benefit of fire is unquestioned. To those who have ‘evolved’ free of lives most basic demands, it is important that we remind ourselves of the necessity of combustion.
The greatest initial benefit for mankind from fire was light in the dark and warmth in the cold. This was soon followed by the cooking of food, which reduced disease transmission, improved digestibility and refined tastes. That was soon followed by fired clay pottery and sanitation of water thru boiling.
Sometimes limestone rock surrounded the fire pit, and when heated, produced cement. This led to mortar, stucco, concrete and better bricks. Fire allowed us to refine and mold metals, and to clear vast areas of existing vegetation so that humans could cultivate crops. Fire gave us the first method controlling epidemics by burning infected bodies, possessions, even villages. Fire was also man’s first weapon of mass destruction.
When harnessed to steam engines, fire freed us from the drudgery of muscle work and the uncertainty and inefficiency of sail. Fire lifted the first balloons, which gave mankind the gift of flight. When liquid fuels were developed for internal combustion engines, there was an unimaginable increase in the individual’s production capability. This ‘force multiplier’ has had a tremendous impact on everyone’s life.
Think of the countless lifetimes it would take in walking or horse riding to duplicate the travels of the average person in a modern society. Think of the countless hours of drudgery in your life if every blade of grass and board of wood was cut by hand. And yet, that has always been mankind’s duty, until the twentieth century. Then there was a weird coincidence of events.
First, tractors freed millions from the horse drawn plow to live in a post-agrarian society. As industrialization efficiency improved most physical labor could be replaced with managerial and bureauctic employment. Large portions of the population were for the first time in history freed from most daily contact with the harsh conditions previously required to exist on this planet. They were now empowered to manage and dictate the behavior of those still bound by nature.
Then in the last century two other forces developed to reinforce this absurd and detached evolution in life style. Progressivism developed at the beginning of the twentieth century to employee this newly freed population in the utopian dream that mankind’s energies could now be planned and controlled by expanding government bureaucracy.
Failure of these plans, in many places and at many times, in the last century have not deterred the still fervent belief that the perfect autocracy is soon to be achieved. Those freed from the dictates of nature were now the masters and overseers of those still bound by the forces of nature. The mid century Nihilist philosophy of ‘values are baseless and nothing is knowable’ would stem from these same detached minds.
Educators embraced both movements and indoctrinated the rapidly expanding population of detached minds. These great minds were now free from having to make any sense and from needing the correct answer. The ultimate expression of this detached and completely unrealistic movement is the current pseudo-science of the climate debate and the villianization of combustion.
Funny that it only takes a few generations of luxury brought by combustion to renounce the benefit of combustion. Carbon dioxide is a benign molecule that is essential to life molecule. The one word that describes each of us the moment when we quit producing carbon dioxide is DEAD. And now these great, detached minds are telling us that to solve a non-existent problem we must be taxed and completely controlled on our use of combustion.
No level of control by these freed minds will provide the expected outcome so the rules will be ever changing and ever increasing. The only way a bureaucrat can get a raise is to create new opportunities within the bureaucracy.
Buildings full of government cubicles are not going to solve our problems. It is time to realize that this cancer has mastastized and get prompt treatment.
Global warming, which was modified to global climate change to accommodate the current cooling cycle, is the worst ‘science’ since the world was flat. Prolonged exposure to CO2 levels fifty times higher than normal have no measurable side effects and yet the EPA has just declared that CO2 is a toxic substance.
Believing that the world was flat didn’t change the planets shape. Believing that carbon dioxide is a toxin does not make it a toxin. Believing that a change of several parts per million of a simple, naturally occurring, and three-atom molecule is going to impact the climate is delusional. The forces that will be the only beneficiary of carbon control are now controlling the only information allowed in the debate of these new laws, taxes and regulations.
The fix is in because the loyal opposition is a little too loyal to the same puppet masters. As we all know, fire can be our friend or foe. But it is not something that government can or should have complete control over. We are being offered a great restriction in our freedom in exchange for the creation of a new government revenue stream. We must resist these forces tampering with the cornerstone of civilization. We must demand genuine climate change debate.
I refuse to follow the Neo-Maoist leadership and their lemming like propaganda network. Typical of ‘New Think’ is the ‘New Speak’ term for those of us counterrevolutionaries who oppose the AGW indoctrination. We are labeled ‘deniers’ when in fact we are ‘deniees’….those who are denied a right to express our informed opinions in this declared settled debate. Central planning can dictate, but they have no answers.
Society would not exist without science or combustion. And yet, science has proven easy to corrupt and combustion easy to demonize. It is time for those of us with some level of residual cognitive ability to rebel against this oppressive mind control system. I chose to follow in the footsteps of Patrick Henry. I will man the barricades against the AGW fraud until my last CO2 ladened breath.
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Joseph A Olson
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This originally published at ClimateRealist, June 2009 was surprisingly posted in Japanese on FaceBook within moments. Realizing many First Principal science laws were being violated by many branches motivated further research. The Free Speech InterNet allowed instant communication world wide and Truth is self amplifing. My article, “One Pleasant Day at Runnymede” had +300 crosslinks, in six languages, in less than three hours when posted at CanadaFreePress, Oct 2009. Today the €U Article 11 & 13, along with UK Rapid Response Unit law will eviscerate Free Speech in the highest educated population on the planet, enslaving all humanity with elitist imposed ignorance.
“New Think Progress and the Ozzard of Wiz” > Multilevel Information Racketeering satire at FauxScienceSlayer(.)com
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jerry krause
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Hi Joe,
You wrote: “The basic purpose of science is to ask and attempt to answer questions.” We (you and I) totally agree. Then you wrote: “Seldom is the answer obvious or simple.” Immediately I disagree with you.
‘Things twice as heavy fall twice as fast.’ Galileo quickly put that wrong idea in the grave by an actual and simple experiment. Louis Agassiz saw erratic boulders and simply reasoned that there was only one obvious ‘thing’ that could have moved these boulders from where they were before to where he observed them now. The simple observed answer was: the glaciers he simply observed while hiking in the Alps.
You wrote: “The Earth’s climate is the final visible result of a large number of complex nuclear, chemical, geological and astronomical forces.” I write: The Earth does not have a climate. For by definition, climate is the average of many years of historical meteorological factors like temperature, precipitation, wind, etc. at a given location on a given day of the year. And it is easy to find locations only a hundred miles, or so, apart that have significantly different climates as climates are classified.
And Joe, I do not believe it wise to call anyone ‘scientifically illiterate’, unless it is myself. For somehow the people, that we commonly refer to as prehistoric, survived what might be termed very harsh climates. And I believe they did this by observing obvious things just as we scientists are expected to survive by observing obvious things with our better technologies.
Yesterday, I wrote the following (slightly edited) to a friend.
I’m going to run this by you, purely to see if you will respond and if you do, I want to learn what your response might be.
First, a fact is that near the end of Newton’s book he wrote: “And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.”
We need to focus upon “and of our sea.” We know he is referring to the sea’s observed tides, which I read (know) have a great variability from location to location and from time to time. I believe that what Newton was claiming is that he explained the gravitational mechanism by which the semi-diurnal tides are observed to occur. It did not matter to him that at some locations only diurnal tides occur and it was easy to propose a gravitational mechanism to explain these diurnal tides. [But maybe not easy to explain why semi-diurnal tides are not observed.]
I have read over and over that weather and climate is very complex and therefore nearly impossible to simply understand. Yet, I have no trouble understanding Newton’s simple gravitational mechanism which produces semi-diurnal tides.
Who would question: Weather events are random and therefore they cannot be understood (modeled) because there are so many factors involved? My point is the same seems to be true for tides. My point is that Newton claimed to explain the motions of the sea despite that observed diurnal tides did not support his semi-diurnal gravitational mechanism.
Newton is credited with this statement (which I have not commonly read): “A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the thing is false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.”
The random influence of cloud upon the solar radiation that reaches the earth’s surface is very obvious but at this time it is very commonly ignored. I have quoted and quoted R. C. Sutcliffe, who wrote, (1966): “Clouds which do not give rain, which never even threaten to give rain but which dissolve again into vapour before the precipitation stage is ever reached, have a profound effect on our climate.” I have reviewed the historical fact of the Tyndall effect, which has been observed and accepted for more than a century. I have reviewed that the Tyndall effect was claimed to have been explained (understood) by Richard Feynman about a half-century ago.
We commonly observe and understand the ‘average’ temperatures of the seasons observed at the higher latitudes. However, we also know that an exception to this common observation occurs in the general region of the west, south hemisphere, coast of South America. And we know that a principal influence of this ‘anomaly’ is an unusual variability of the ‘common’ cloud which is ‘commonly’ present. And I have read about other factors which might influence this deviation from ‘common’ behaviors.
In case you missed it, I believe that even if the occurrence of El Nino or La Nina events have no regular period, we still understand what occurs just as we do not allow the observed facts of diurnal tides to discredit Newton’s explanation of semi-diurnal tides.
Have a good day, Jerry
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