It’s always been so: All societies have been characterized by bizarre people acting bizarrely. But we seem to be especially adept at doing whatever seems to be bizarre. And nowhere is this more evident than on the Web, where almost every human action is recorded and where people often purposefully display the bizarre for both fame and fortune.


The word bizarre seems to have come to English through French and, before that, Italian. Its original meaning “angry” has morphed in modern English to become “strange” or “fantastical” or some combination of both those words, maybe “strangetastical.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “odd, extravagant, or eccentric in style or mode.” But I suppose each of us applies the word to any human feature or action that we would not personally do in public. Underlying everything bizarre is “difference.”


I would not, for example, have my entire or part of my face permanently tattooed black and gold even though I am a Steelers fan, and I would personally call any such permanent face painting “bizarre.” Nor would I have artificial devil’s horns implanted in my forehead. And as far as human behaviors range, I view certain diets as bizarre. Is it just me, or would you relish a dish of Chinese century eggs, fried Cambodian tarantulas, and Sardinian casu marzu? Obviously, there are people who do eat these dishes and who might find my diet to be bizarre by comparison.


With close to eight billion members on the planet, each with a brain complex enough to seek variations in common experiences, humans add the one element from which bizarre actions arise: The search for or confusion about identity. Yes, that’s my take on the issue. But of course, there are professionals nowadays in every human endeavor, even in bizarre thinking. So, here are the words of M. Cermolacce, L. Sass, and J. Parnas, authors of “What is Bizarre in Bizarre Delusions? A Critical Review.”


    “It seems clear, in any case, that the notion of bizarreness extends well beyond the field of delusion alone. Bizarreness was, in some sense, considered by all classical authors to be the hallmark of schizophrenia.” *

​Yep, bizarreness has a diagnosis, and its been codified in psychological officialdom, that is, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), where it is labeled in a discussion of BD—bizarre delusions. Obviously, the mental issue is different from what I was describing at the outset. BD associated with schizophrenia is different from BB, bizarre behavior derived from some search for or confusion about identity.

​Excuse my lay assessment, but I am defining bizarreness as a phenomenon belonging to people who could be normal if they chose to be normal, people that are, in my lay terminology, “non-schizophrenic.” My examples of bizarreness (i.e., implanted horns) aside, all bizarre activity isn’t perceived by everyone as equally bizarre, just as Cambodians would not think fried tarantulas are beyond reason. There are so many subcultures in any society that, for example, implanted devil’s horns might be “normal” for some, just as artificial cranial deformation found from Croatia to Central America to South Pacific islanders appears to have been not only normal but cherished. For those of us still alive, YouTube contains a number of examples of “bizarre body deformations,” demonstrating that in some inner sense, most people recognize those features and actions that lie “outside the ordinary.” Otherwise, the videos would not bear a term like “bizarre” for extreme cases of plastic surgery deformation or for two families recently fighting outside a Disney World ride—Walt would probably call the fighting bizarre in “the happiest place on Earth.” Generally, we recognize levels of bizarreness. There are actions that we might hold to be slightly bizarre, such as a President in a Zoom meeting wearing a mask, for example, as though COVID-19 could be transmitted through cyberspace.

Among the many meanings and interpretations of “bizarre” lie that original concept: That bizarre means “angry” or “irascible.” It is in this original meaning that we find its best expression in our contemporary world. Maybe among the best examples of bizarre in its original meaning occurred not in some cranial deformation or plastic surgery “gone wrong,” but rather during the fight in Disney World. Our world is bizarre because it is angry.

​*Cermolacce M, Sass L, Parnas J. What is bizarre in bizarre delusions? A critical review. Schizophr Bull. 2010 Jul;36(4):667-79. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbq001. Epub 2010 Feb 8. PMID: 20142381; PMCID: PMC2894592. Available online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894592/ Accessed July 31, 2022.
**https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/329987/misshapen-alien-like-skulls-found-in-croatia  among other articles: See artificial cranial deformation in Croatia, Iraq, Vanuatu, and in Mayan, Incan, and Aztec culture. The practice is ancient and surprisingly worldwide, even among cultures that could never have interacted—thus, cranial deformation was not a matter of cultural exchange, especially when one considers the vast distances between the cultures that practiced it. Bizarre, huh?

Preface: I tried to stop myself from writing yet another comment on the politicization of climate change and global warming, but the keyboard took control.


Apparently—at least to me—the argument on anthropogenic climate change is moot at least in the opinion of alarmists. Generally, most alarmists will not discuss the possibility their arguments might be a little flawed because they rely 1) on computer models that have as yet to prove their predictive worth and 2) on the widespread acceptance of “warming” propagandized into their psyches; as a result, the alarmists are steeped intractably in their belief. They hold their position regardless that past projections that have not become reality. They fail to see any questionability in climate modeling though they do have a legitimate contention that carbon dioxide will force the atmosphere to retain more heat. The problem isn’t the thermodynamic process of warming by carbon dioxide; the problem lies in prediction and acting on questionable prediction.


Just what will a warmer atmosphere richer in carbon dioxide do? Should we panic? Will seas that are now thermally expanding by a millimeter or so per year rise by a meter in a century or in eight centuries that a 1.3 mm rise produces? Would eustasy actually be a problem if people had not built on the seas’ edges as they have since the end of the Younger Dryas 12 millennia ago? I suppose one could ask President Obama who now owns two homes on shores he once said would be inundated. Surely, that’s a sign of hope, a sign that the future is not as dire as he once said it was. And surely, his declaration in June, 2008, that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal …" has come to fruition. Why otherwise send millions on two expensive homes by the sea?


Nevertheless, I sense panic in the air—or should I say “in the atmosphere,” mostly by those on the Left side of the political aisles in western-style democracies?


When they are not derisively and smugly dismissing deniers’ skepticism based on those failed predictions, they argue that previous climate models are under constant refinement. In this latter argument, which I believe we can take seriously, they are right to so argue. Both super computers and additional data should enhance all climate modeling and predictability. However, there are many data, many feed-back loops, and many unknowns among climate drivers. And with regard to the promise of super computers, note that “bad data in, bad info out” still applies: Regardless of the computing power, someone has to chose the algorithms; someone has to choose how to weight the stats, regardless of statements to the contrary.


In the context of this climate talk, both sides are eager to cite anecdotal “evidence” derived from weather events, such as the summer of 2022’s European heat wave that alarmists and the winter of 2021-22’s stratospheric polar vortex noted by alarmists and deniers respectively.   


Over the past 25 years alarmists have been convinced of global warming by a highly vocal group of influencers and by the IPCC, a group of scientists who I believe are bent on “proving their premise” and not on examining, in Karl Popper’s terms, its falsifiability. In many instances the focus of the science is not objectively examining the possibility of a negative hypothesis, but rather on proving by induction the overall idea of climate warming. What do I mean?


People involved in the “climate business” range from entomologists ((What happened to the bees?) to marine biologists (What happened to the corals?) and to epidemiologists (Why are Zika, Dengue, West Nile, and malaria spreading?), all who, in studying very specific ecologies and diseases, extrapolate any geographic change as an indicator of warming. * The result is that in the annals of the IPCC, many research papers focus on local, cyclic, or temporary phenomena that could have causes other than an ineluctable global pattern. In this context my best advice to alarmists is to avoid relying too much on extrapolation. When they do rely on inductive approaches to climate, alarmists lose my empathy. But they have my undivided attention when they argue deductively, say from thermodynamic data and processes. There’s no denying that carbon dioxide can absorb and reradiate certain wavelengths in the infrared spectrum—most in the same frequencies that water molecules absorb; that’s both a theoretical and an experimental “fact.” But is the warming a predictable “existential threat”?


Have humans altered the planet? Of course we have. One need only to look at the denuded landscape of farmlands from New Jersey to Iowa or at the desolate hills of Skyros, a Greek island whose ecology has been under attack by humans for millennia (by overgrazing, replacing endemic vegetation with olive groves, forestry, trampling by grazers, urbanizing, and paving). But are we the exclusive driver of “heat (radiative) forcing” in the atmosphere? That, I believe, is somewhat debatable, but I see not debate but lectures given by both sides.


Once carbon enters the atmosphere, a large percentage of it will remain for centuries. That means, of course, that what we do today will have a potential effect centuries from now. We could say that those many generations of land-clearing farmers and herders from Greece to North America have us as witnesses to their actions. And since many countries continue to add carbon, today’s 400+ ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will likely increase.


But most concerning to me is the politicization of climate discussions because it has negative economic ramifications today for countries like the US, Germany, Britain, Canada, and Australia, all of which are nations that have decreased their reliance on the very energy sources that made them affluent. At the same time China and India continue to spew carbon in seemingly ever greater amounts. In 2022 China announced an increase in coal production by some 300,000,000 tons. That doesn’t sound like a restriction in compliance with the Paris Agreement. Are the western democracies being played? Are we fools and tools?


You and I Discuss Climate Change, but First, a Few Lines from a Movie:


One of Rock Hudson’s comedies was Send Me No Flowers, co-starring Doris Day. In the film Hudson plays George Kimball, a hypochondriac, Day plays his wife, and Ed Andrews plays Kimball’s doctor, named Morrissey. Here’s an exchange between doctor and patient:


Dr. Morrissey: is it a sharp pain, is it a dull pain, or does it grip like a vice.
George Kimball: Yes, yes!
Dr. Morrissey: No-no-no! Pick one!
George Kimball: I guess it’s a sharp pain, hurts like the dickens when I press it.
Dr. Morrissey: Then don’t press it!
George Kimball: What kind of pills are they?
Dr. Morrissey: You wouldn’t know if I told you. Just take them. Take the pills.
George Kimball: Well, aren’t you doing an awful lot of writing [of diagnosis or prescription] for just indigestion?
Dr. Morrissey: The more I write, the more money I charge.


Do you see any parallel between their conversation and that between the current American Administration and its people?


Acting on what we believe to be true also means acting on what we believe to be sensible. The problem for each of us is that distinguishing between sense and nonsense in the climate debate is difficult because we are inundated with “facts” or “information” from both reliable and unreliable sources and because, like our ancestors, we are gullible and impetuous with regard to widespread and repeated rumors, especially those we hear a barrage of stories by a compliant media that accepts the concept that climate change can only mean bad things lie in the near future. (Recall that the popularized “We have only 12 years left” like the previous warnings of the late nineties and early two thousands, derived from the IPCC’s use of ten-year increments in its predictions. Wait! Aren’t we down to just eight years—or fewer in 2022?)   


Sense and nonsense: We live in a world that constantly befuddles us in every aspect of our lives. Online and published advice on diet, for example, varies enough that I ask myself whether I should avoid eggs, eat one, eat just the white, eat two or three, or even eat five per day as one online person advises. And what about those fats and carbs over which people argue, and—don’t get me started—what about red meat? Should I subsist on a diet of Brussel sprouts and carrots? Those little green veggies do have protein—I saw that on a podcast, in a “health food magazine,” or on a YouTube video—I don’t remember which. Fish? Too much tuna and I might suffer from methyl mercury poisoning—Minamata disease. Save the tuna! Save the oceans! Save me! Sense and nonsense. Remember the adage about moderation? Is that the answer in both diet and climate arguments?


I believe I remember Dr. Morrissey telling George Kimball in that 1964 movie, “You’re eating too much roughage.” Was “roughage” considered to be a dietary problem in the 1960s? Or was the line written in jest? Did such a statement make sense in that decade? Maybe sense in diet lies in all things moderate: I could eat some eggs, some fats and carbs (including roughage), some fish, and, on occasion some red meat. Is that sensible enough? Possibly—but how do I truly know. What do I do with the centenarian who says, “I ate bacon and had a shot of whiskey every day”? What should I think about my father who died at 97 after having eaten processed meats like salami, had a whiskey and coffee in the morning with his buddies after they played a round of golf, and ate pasta and breads? Was that apple he ate every evening truly what kept the doctor away until his bride of 75 years died six months earlier?


Moderation helps because it might limit the harmful nonsense, but, of course, it might also limit the helpful sense. The expression “apple-a-day” also means “Daminozide-a-day,” doesn’t it? How did Dad avoid getting cancer when he consumed Daminozide (Alar) daily in addition to smoking unfiltered cigarettes from his teen years until he turned 62? He seems to have beaten the statistics—even surviving the battle on Okinawa. Maybe that is what the atmosphere is going to do, also. Maybe the statistics aren’t the wherewithal of either diet or climate. Some who have eaten and smoked as my dad did, did not survive into their late nineties. Some regions of the planet might gain rather than suffer from increased temperatures. Would a tropical planet be unlivable? Such a scenario has occurred before just as a frozen world has occurred, and yet life has both survived and flourished. Palm trees in western Pennsylvania? Corals along the coast of New Jersey? I could handle that. Would grow my own bananas!    


There is the additional problem of defining moderation. Who’s to say where the limits lie? And with regard to climate change, who’s to say where and when the change is “extreme” or “moderate”? Burn just a little coal or increase during by 300,000,000 million tons like the Chinese? Drive a hybrid or a full-out EV powered by wind and solar? Turn the thermostat down in winter and up in summer? Will global warming be moderate if we are moderate? The carbon we have already put in the air will hang around for centuries, as I said above.


Will we reverse the supposed temperature trend if we go to the extreme and eliminate all use of fossil fuels? Is closing an American pipeline while allowing a Russian pipeline an appropriate balance? Was that an act of moderation or mere political expediency? Is shutting down American coal-fired power plants while allowing Chinese coal-fired power plants to operate the moderate and prudent course? Will such actions in one or a several countries make a difference between extreme and moderate global warming? What if the result of warming is good for people who want to grow orange trees in southern New York and grapes in Calgary?


Remember that before the Little Ice Age grapes grew well in England. And note that cold temperatures limit plant growth. Think the Year without a Summer, 1816, when a “volcanic winter” followed the 1914 eruption of Mayon and the 1815 eruption of Tambora, causing widespread famine. Truth be told, plants don’t do well in cold. They thrive in warmer conditions unless they can’t tap into a water supply as in arid areas. Look at the abundant diversity of plant species in the tropics as opposed to the limited diversity of species in an Aspen forest. Of course, a mantle of warmth does not come with a complete silver lining; the tropics foster some nasty bugs like Ebola.    


In daily life just about every reasonable adult can discern sense from nonsense—that is, just about every reasonable adult who lived before the rise of news outlets, including newspapers a couple of centuries ago. Nowadays, discerning between sense and nonsense is more difficult that ever, even for those who claim to be “educated.” Why? Three reasons. First, there are those “out there” who have sadistic intent and lack compunction, their motives to mislead masked by a manipulative personality, a pathology, and the ease of reaching a wide audience. Second, there are those “out there” whose knowledge is questionable though their intentions might be “good”; they pass on information derived from the first group, and in doing so are themselves unknowing victims. Third, there are those “out there” who, believing that what they “know” is sensible, have an agenda and hubris that exaggerates the significance of their knowledge: That seems to be especially true of politicians and alarmists like Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and John Kerry, but it is also true of people on the opposite side of the ideological aisle.


When I read headlines, such as “Global warming blamed for heat wave in Europe,” written by Jonathan Powell and posted online at ChinaDaily.co.cn, I wonder about the state of the modern intellect and its ability to discern sense from nonsense because of those three reasons. As an American, I’m inclined to distrust any news associated with China because I recognize that country’s adversarial relationship with the U.S. and other economic powers. But please read the following from Powell’s posted article, and then we’ll have a chat.


    “Spain's state meteorological office Aemet said the latest episode was the third-earliest on record and the first to arrive this early since 1981, reported The Guardian. ‘We are facing unusually high temperatures for June,’ an Aemet spokesperson said. Ruben del Campo, a spokesman for Aemet, said the extreme heat in June follows the country's hottest May in at least 100 years.”

Me: What occurs to you?

You: Well, when I see that, I think, “If this is an ‘early heat wave,’ then maybe there’s something to this climate stuff.” What do you want me to see?

Me: I want you to see four terms: “third earliest on record,” “since 1981,” “reported in The Guardian,” and “in at least 100 years.”

You: Meaning?

Me: First, “third earliest on record” means there were two earlier heat waves.
Second, 1981 takes us back to a time when the world Press, if not the overall scientific community, was just beginning to accept warming as a trend. A widespread nine-paragraph article by Peter Gwynne in Newsweek some five or six years earlier had mentioned the possibility of a cooling trend that the public latched onto in the late seventies; the notion of cooling spread like wildfire. The fire of “global warming” had to await the nineties. By the mid-1990s the US EPA was delving into greenhouse gas emissions—I know because I took one of the earliest inventories of greenhouse gases that the EPA funded through the Pennsylvania Energy Office (and as I have mentioned elsewhere, the EPA wrote me a letter saying it would use my GHG inventory as a model for the other states to follow). I suppose I should thank Al Gore who pushed the EPA to study greenhouse gas emissions and who fostered predictions of the dire consequences of climate change that became the centerpiece of his career and wealth.  “Thanks, Al. You were largely responsible for my graduate students’ much needed work.”
Third, that recent article on the heat wave in Europe was derived from information “reported in The Guardian.” As in so many climate reports, the information is, as so much climate talk is, secondhand and extrapolated. Powell doesn’t seem to have looked the horse in the mouth. He read that someone else--The Guardian—checked the teeth.
And fourth, that such a heat wave occurred 100 years ago as the article mentions, means that the current heat wave is not without precedent. In fact, there are on record many heat waves, and we can reasonably assume that there have been many unrecorded heat waves through which humans have suffered.

You: But you seem to indicate that the scientific community was not aligned with that cooling assessment when you say “if not the overall scientific community.” Does that mean there were people who thought Earth was warming even in the 1970s?

Me: Yes. Not everyone boarded that Polar Express found in the Newsweek article. And that is understandable since, after all, the 1970s were a relatively nascent period of weather instrumentation, but every scientists knew that Earth warmed enough to cause the last glacial advance to halt and reverse by the end of the Younger Dryas. While some proclaimed “global cooling” in the seventies, others were saying Earth was warming, and they had good reason when they looked at the physical evidence such as recessional moraines, kettles like Walden Pond, and polished rock surfaces in Central Park, all features left behind by once thick and extensive glaciers. And sea level? Well, it has risen by as much as 120 meters since the big ice sheets melted. Standing along the East Coast today would have meant standing farther inland during the sea’s last “low stand.” Much of the continental shelves were above water. How else to explain the Javan rhinos? The Northern Hemisphere has been warming for at least 12 millennia with interrupting periods of cooling. And strangely, that warming has occurred under a lower quantity of carbon in the atmosphere.
Those who addressed climate issues in the seventies did so without extensive satellite data, without ubiquitous ground and sea sensors, and with very little information about 1) the vertical stratification of temperatures, 2) the effects of El Niño and La Niña, 3) meridional and zonal flows, 4) shifting vertical and horizontal ocean currents that might or might not have been occurring, and 5) the global warming effects of CFCs, whose effect on ozone was discovered by Molina in 1973 and whose effect on temperature was postulated by Lu in 2013. ** Scientists of the time were hard pressed when asked for solid data sets on either side of the temperature issue. And certainly, as is still the case today, scientists of the time could not see all the interacting features and processes. We do know more now about interactions and feed-back loops than we knew in the 1960s and 1970s, and we have computers to mash all that information into models that analyze recorded and proxy temperatures and predict trends, but we still have knowledge gaps and humans deciding what weight to give to any particular set of data.

You: Aren’t you worried that you’re like that proverbial frog sitting in ever hotter water because you won’t acknowledge the trend of warming? Even the seeming skeptical climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry acknowledges some warming has occurred. What if the trend in temperatures is really spiraling upward as the alarmists claim? Isn’t it better to act on the potential than to sit idly by like that frog?

Me: Frankly, no, I’m not concerned. I do acknowledge some warming. Since the 1990s I’ve acknowledged that some warming seems to have occurred. Like Curry, I know that some numbers have been fudged to fit the narrative, however. Like Curry, I question the claim that a rapid rise in temperature is inevitable. In my relatively short existence I’ve lived through some very hot summers and some very cold winters both of which I would have ascribed to large cycles, decadal cycles for example. If I remember correctly, there was very little talk first of El Niño and subsequently of La Niña until the seventies. Now even the general public is aware of both phenomena through news stories.
But let me refer to that online article I asked you to read because this summer of 2022’s heat wave is driving the Europeans to panic and cry “climate change.” Do you think the only cause of a heat wave is climate change?
Sure, I can understand a reason for the panic. Higher absolute temperatures and their associated heat indexes pose a real danger. But they also pose inconveniences in an age that imposes few hardships on affluent Europeans and Americans. Shouldn’t we consider the human factor before we panic: We Northern Hemispherians have grown accustomed to physical and psychological comfort, the latter largely because short memory neurons don’t hold the heat waves of the twentieth century like that of the mid-1990s and mid-1930s. Because people can’t remember, they say, “There’s never been weather like this.” In fact, a warmer Earth is more common than a cooler Earth as the geochemical record shows. But discomfort tends to make the point of global warming alarmists. Yet, if we are, in fact, living during an Interglacial Period like all those previous interglacials, then we should expect a rise in temperature overall punctuated by some hot days.

You: But isn’t an earlier budding out of trees a natural and indisputable testimony for warming? Aren’t the crocuses coming out earlier? Isn’t spring arriving a week earlier? Don’t you see the real effects of climate change? It just makes sense to be concerned. And now we have a devastating heat wave in Europe and an extended drought in the American Southwest. Look at the water level in Lake Mead, for gosh sake, it’s almost as low as it was when the lake first began to fill. And it certainly won’t recover under temperatures that this July have exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit and that will likely continue through August and early September.

Me: Sure—all you are saying seems to make sense, seems to support global warming. I’ll still ask whether this change in spring is an anomaly or a trend? If I see a change today, should I panic and extrapolate to a hot future. I remember the cold in the mid-to-late-seventies when wintertime temperatures in my area hit record lows, and wind chills hit -40 Fahrenheit. I remember watching a spring college baseball game in the mid nineties in Boca Raton when the wind chill must have been near freezing. If I had to look at the winters of the late seventies, during one of which it snowed in Miami, I would predict a downward temperature trend. I can’t use one season or two or three as an indicator. Climate has traditionally been defined on a thirty-year plot of temperatures AND precipitation. You also can throw evapotranspiration into that mix if you want. And with regard to climate designations, you should know that the boundaries between tropical, subtropical, temperate, and boreal climates fluctuate.
Is this 2022 heat wave a “trend”? Or is it part of a decadal pattern, part of a cycle? What of the “Pause” in rising temperatures of the last seven or eight years, a period with demonstrably no increase in temperature from 2014 till now? Is that a trend? Probably not, also. The warming could resume at any time—and it could possibly reverse regardless of the alarmists’ claims. One has to live a relatively long time and have very accurate data to be able to determine a “climate” trend. Even the proxy temperatures uncovered by researchers studying everything from corals to tree rings to oxygen isotopes might be incomplete or flawed or questionable data.

Are temperatures of the past couple decades increasingly higher? Seems so, but in order for me to make sense of climate, I have to have irrefutable evidence that there is a direct and proportional relationship between the advertised culprits of global warming and global temperatures. And certainly, I can’t use isolated phenomena as a guide. Hurricanes were supposed to increase in number and intensity, but they have not done so. What am I supposed to think of the very long droughty periods that affected the Mayans or the Anasazi? Both those devastating droughty periods occurred long before the Industrial Revolution.
What I’m saying is that separating sense from nonsense is not easy, especially since climate has become politicized and, to tell the truth, “weaponized” against individuals who merely question the veracity and sense of climate proclamations. For example, why wouldn’t a Chinese news outlet like the one I quoted above want to frighten Europeans and Americans off fossil fuels while the Chinese burn their coal, oil, and natural gas in support of their booming economy? Why wouldn’t the people who are in the business of “carbon credits,” windmills, lithium batteries, and solar panels want to scare us off fossil fuels? I have little doubt the Chinese see a looming profit in potential sales of solar panels and rare earths for electric car batteries.

You: I’ll grant that the Chinese have their selfish motives, but surely all those European and American scientists can’t be wrong about climate.

Me: What do you mean by “all those scientists”? You’re not talking about that debunked 97%, are you? Ordinarily, I would agree that those scientists who have evidence of warming are worth listening to, but many of them are on a lucrative roll of grant after grant after grant—the funding for climate research seems to be unending, especially since most of it comes from taxes and the rest from wealthy alarmist disciples. Many climate scientists attend conferences in places where I could never afford to go—and they could not afford to go if they were not on some grant. Paid-for meals, rooms, and travel…Well, you get my point. Why spoil such a good life by going out of the way to disprove what the world has been convinced of and is willing to pay for? Can’t have that money stop rolling in. It’s a livelihood with few controls on spending under government agencies committed to retooling the energy sector by fiat.   
I’m skeptical because I see the potential for corruption just as I see a potential for Chinese propaganda, and I’m skeptical because I have seen the caveats in agreements and doctored info.

You: Okay, I understand, but just because there is corruption isn’t a reason to doubt some of their findings. By the way, what do you mean by caveats?

Me: The footnotes beneath the signatures on that Paris Agreement: India, for example, says that it will comply as a signatory as long as it gets financial help from other countries and as long as the switch to “green” tech doesn’t interfere with its burgeoning economy. And other countries, Russia and China, have similar caveats and exceptions. Seems that just the Europeans, Americans, Canadians, and Australians have bought wholesale into the—for want of a better term—climate scheme. Does it make sense that the chief emitter of carbon dioxide is permitted to spew that gas in the atmosphere whereas other countries must decrease their emissions? A good example of climate policy turned to nonsense lies in how the Dutch government has harmed its own farming economy by imposing controls on nitrogen during the same heat-wave summer that stresses crops. (See my blog of 7/18/2022) Aren’t the Irish in the process of limiting their farmers, also. Doesn’t any Irish politician remember his history lessons on the Potato Famine? If you suppress farming artificially, you mimic natural disasters like that famine.

You: But you can’t deny that it is hot today. Climate change could be the cause.

Me: Have you ever been this hot?

You: Yes.

Me: To use the term “climate change” to cover any particular weather event isn’t necessarily—let me amend that to “just plain isn’t”— “good science.” Individual weather events are part of every atmosphere on every planet with an atmosphere. If the heat of 2022 is, in fact, a phenomenon caused by climate change, to what extent does any “climate factor” play in a particular heat event—or in any cold event? If one just says, “Well, it’s the trend,” I’m not convinced, especially in light of the last eight years of a “temperature pause” that researchers at the University of Alabama, Huntsville identified this year.
But I understand the psychology: When it comes to comfort and convenience, most humans live in the present and not in some past condition. That’s one reason that the current heat wave panics the public.
Remember “We Are the World,” that song written and performed to save the drought stricken people of Ethiopia? The 1983-1985 drought exacerbated by war led to a horrendous famine that elicited charity from around the world—and the singing of that song to raise money. Ordinarily a rather semiarid region, Ethiopia needs only the slightest shift in weather patterns to plunge it into drought. Now think of the Colorado River Valley today, also lying in a semiarid region. Are you surprised that Lake Mead is at an historic low? I’m not, especially since droughts have long been a part of the American Southwest. Add the stress on water resources that of all those city dwellers and visitors to Las Vegas, and walls! Droughty conditions become more noticeable and Press-worthy. And speaking of Press-worthy I’ll add that had I been alive in the nineteenth century and living in Oregon, I would not have been aware of the heat both of the battle and in the atmosphere as the Union and Confederacy fought in July, 1863, at Gettysburg.

You: What?

Me: The point being that I know about Lake Mead’s low stand, about drought in the Southwest, about heat in Europe because reporters find it Press-worthy, and because they are not only numerous and ubiquitous, but they are also hungry for stories to broadcast over radio, on TV, on the Web, and over social media. Have you seen the reporters on TV during any weather event: Standing on streets as kids play under an open hydrant during a heat wave, standing on the beach as people flock to the ocean on a hot day, standing—or trying to stand—during a hurricane? They make their living by making any story they tell seem to be relevant to everyone and highly significant to the locals.
Because the regions of East Africa and Southwest USA have been the sites of droughts for many millennia and Europe has been the site of some very hot summers and very cold winters, does it make sense to ascribe any current short term conditions to a global pattern driven by carbon dioxide? Can anyone really say to what extent global carbon dioxide at 400 ppm causes a drought or a heat wave in a specific region? If that person can so ascribe, then the question becomes historical: Why were the Anasazi and the Mayans afflicted by decades-long drought—much longer than the current Southwest drought—when the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere was below 280 ppm? Why did the suspected long term drought that coincided with the Jamestown colony occur in and around 1607? It seems to me that whatever weather event occurs, the alarmists will see an immediate connection to climate change or global warming. Dare I ask such questions? Dare I even think to ask them? What if someone committed to eliminating fossil fuels finds out?

You: (Quizzical look) What?

Me: Not to worry—I think. I do like asking questions. I have done research for a major coal company, but I have also performed research for the PA DEP and the US EPA. So, I’ve paid my dues on environmental issues. Heck, until it got too expensive, I even subscribed to windmill electricity. And I understand that the alarmists would tell us that the rise in carbon dioxide is ubiquitous, so if heat gathers some place, it can migrate to another place. But one might ask why its effects aren’t both ubiquitous and proportional according to latitude, land-water distribution, elevation, and insolation. I cannot ascribe a specific event to a supposed general warming trend just I can’t ascribe the current eight-year pause in temperature to a cooling or steady state trend.
Or, one might argue that the rise in temperature during the past century or so, maybe 3/4 to 1.5 degrees C over that period actually indicates a rather steady state for a volatile atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere has been warmer and carbon dioxide content has generally declined during the course of the past 65 million years until it reached that 280 ppm. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere even at today’s 400 ppm is a very low quantity by comparison with foregone eras. Although the refinement is a bit blurry for million-plus year periods, there are some data that indicate an increase in quantity of carbon dioxide has trailed rather than preceded a rise in temperatures.

Again, in any assessment of temperatures vs. carbon dioxide content, everyone should ask about the refinement and inclusiveness of the data. By that I mean that on most graphs we see great detail for the past thirty years but less detail for millennia or multiple millennia. And when we consider million-year-long or longer periods, such as the Pleistocene, the data become less refined. Was there a very warm summer during one of the glacials? Was there a very cold summer during one of the interglacials? Of course.

So, if the Biden Administration, the English, Germans, and Australians choose to quash fossil fuel use on the basis of a supposed warming trend, I’ll continue to ask how they can guarantee the soundness of their decisions. What if current policies simply impose hardships on people used to cheap energy and physical comfort? On what data does the Administration act? Does it have evidence that quashing fossil fuel use in the United States will affect world temperatures? If so, to what extent will the policies affect temperatures? If it’s science, then there should be a scientifically determined quantity. And if the Administration cannot cite specifics, but speaks rather in generalities while laying claim to the science of climate, then it has, in fact, no objectivity, but rather, as so many contrarians point out, a climate religion.

A Bit of an Epilogue

​As I wrote at the outset, I didn’t want to write this. I have not advanced your knowledge if you’ve been paying attention to IPCC reports, skeptics’ arguments, the physics of greenhouse gases, or actual data. I hate to admit that I have not covered the precise way in which any greenhouse molecule absorbs and reflects various frequencies. But that would require a very lengthy essay replete with tables and graphs.
As always, I write to inspire others to think.


*Thanks go, largely, to Rachel Carson, who effectively got DDT banned with her book Silent Spring, leading to “‘No scientific peer reviewed study has ever replicated any case of negative human health impacts from DDT,” said Dr Roger Bate, media and development director for the International Policy Network and joint author of the study with Richard Tren, director of economic policy at the non-governmental organisation Africa Fighting Malaria.’” —reported in, of all places, the online outlet for the NIH.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1173321/   Accessed July 27, 2022.
** In 1995, Mario Molina, F. Sherwood Rowland, and Paul Crutzen received the Nobel Prize for their work on CFCs and their effects on ozone.
Q.-B. Lu. Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change. International Journal of Modern Physics B, 2013; 1350073 DOI: 10.1142/S0217979213500732 and University of Waterloo. "Global warming caused by CFCs, not carbon dioxide, researcher claims in controversial study." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 30 May 2013. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130530132443.htm

It seems that the Dutch have the impression that the best place to live is the birthplace of Impressionism, the village of Oosterbeek. Known as the “Barbizon of the North,” the town was near the center of the Battle of Arnheim in World War II, whose death toll leant a touch of reality to the area’s artistic tradition of Impressionism. The devastation and death of a world war aside, Dutch leaders, in compliance with policies advocated by the World Economic Fund, currently hold a curious position: They have the impression that they can significantly contribute to a cessation of rising temperatures by shutting down the country’s agriculture. Because they believe that climate change is an existential threat, they have placed restrictions on agricultural emissions of nitrogen compounds to change the course a planet. They see an Earth that is doomed to an exponential rise in temperatures—when, as I have written elsewhere, the rise, if it occurs, would most likely be logarithmic  (Details, Details, Details: A New Intelligence Quotient 7/7/2022).


These newest versions of Dutch Impressionists—aka Dutch politicians and bureaucrats—are getting a different touch of reality this year in the form of a massive agricultural movement as farmers fight back with convoys of road-blocking tractors and trucks. Without evidence that their policies would truly affect world climate to any significant degree while countries like China and India, they have adopted the opinion that their rather small—but, truthfully, important agricultural—country can by austerity save the entire planet. Dutch farmers are of a different opinion as those roadblocks reveal and are of the opinion that seems to be more aligned with the realities—not the impressions—they face. So, they are using those tractors and trucks to block traffic and trucking routes because they have no truck with new restrictions on nitrogen emissions. Yes, the Dutch government seems to have bought into the idea that shutting down farms in one of the largest exporters of agricultural products. And what about their cows?—gone under the new rules. Can’t have all that manure that fertilized the farms and that supplants shortages, such as the fertilizer shortage in 2022.


So, what do the Dutch politicians think they are accomplishing by the restrictions? They believe they will decrease nitrogen emissions by up to 75%. Why? Well, nitrogen compounds are fourth most important in the list of top greenhouse gases: Water vapor (the prime), carbon dioxide (the second), methane (the third). And nitrogen compounds are over the course of a couple centuries actually more efficient as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. But nitrogen, the dominant gas in our atmosphere (as N2) and one of the six elements shared by life (H-O-C-N-S-P), is important to agriculture—and to every Dutch human and you personally.


Let’s do some numbers to get some perspective. The yearly emissions of nitrogen compounds in the United States in “carbon dioxide equivalents” is 434.5 million metric tons of which 338.2 MMT are from agricultural soil management, and 28.4 MMT are from manure management. The rest of the NOx emissions derive from a variety of sources, such a “mobile combustion.” So, how much do the Dutch emit?

​Before I mention the absolute numbers, I’ll note a statement from the Dutch themselves: The total of all greenhouse gases anthropogenically emitted by the Dutch decreased in 2018 “approximately 15.1 percent below the emissions in the base year 1990.” The Dutch want to reduce even more the amount they have already reduced. Fifteen percent means they have brought down their emissions from 221.7 Tg CO2 eq. to 188.2 Tg CO2 eq. * The Dutch want to reduce even more the amount they have already reduced. And—wait for it—nitrous oxide, the specific greenhouse gas in question here, had decreased by more than 50% in that period! To reach the projected or hoped for 75% reduction, the Dutch would have to emit no more than 47 Tg CO2 eq.


Who knows? Maybe even that kind of reduction isn’t enough for the impressionable Dutch. And that reminds me of a story one of my former students told. After he had graduated, he went to work for an environmental company that had a contract with a community to normalize the high pH of their city water. At a community meeting, representatives of the company reported that the pH had been brought from its alkaline state to near 7. One of the councilmen stood up, banged on the table, and said, “We won’t rest until it’s brought down to zero.” Sound like today’s Dutch? Anyone for a glass of vinegar right now?


But the tradeoff has consequences. The world’s second leading exporter of agricultural products has decided to shut down agriculture. Go figure. We’re not talking tulips here, gents. We’re talking AGRICULTURE THAT FEEDS PEOPLE. It appears that the bureaucrats have determined it’s better to starve and kill an economy than to await the one meter rise in sea level that is projected to occur over the next millennium with its accompanying rise of less than a degree Celsius. The Dutch bureaucrats are willing to sacrifice their people and those who depend on their farmers on the basis of models that have as yet to align temperature realities to temperature models.


Ah! Impressionism. It gave us Manet and Monet, and among the Dutch, Gerard Bilders, Paul Gabriël, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, Jacob Maris, Matthijs Maris, Willem Maris, Anton Mauve, Hendrik Mesdag, Willem Roelofs, Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, and Van Gogh (Vincent has been called a post-Impressionist, to be accurate—“What’s that,” you say, “speak into my good ear”). Evidence seems to be piling up during the past ten years that there’s been no net global warming in spite of what the models predicted, and none of the dire consequences predicted in 2001 for 2020 have yet to materialize. But what does one say about the heat wave that is roasting Europe in the summer of 2022? Come now, in the short history that humans have kept records--records that, by the way, were not initially worldwide or reliable--do you believe that there haven’t been periods of heat waves like the Chicago heat wave of 1995? What of the heat waves in Europe in 1540 and 1757? Surely, you’re not going to anecdote your way through an argument. Remember, there were no worldwide records for heat waves during most of human history. But no doubt the Dutch politicians in 2022 will point to the scorching temperatures of the moment and say, “Kijk, dat hebben we je toch gezegd” (“See, we told you so”).


Now, it’s easy to understand the panic that arises after people have been primed to look for anecdotal evidence of global warming in a heat wave. The Dutch bureaucrats will see the heat wave as confirmation of their opinion. Quick, someone put a finger in the hole in the dike to save the Netherlands from the current annual 1.3 millimeter sea level rise that will raise sea level by a meter over the next eight hundred years. Maybe the Dutch should raise the dikes now with money from exporting agricultural products rather than shutting down nitrogen emissions from farms to lose revenue. Or the Dutch might consider that while other countries like India and China produce more greenhouse emissions by orders of magnitude than the Netherlands, their small contribution to saving the planet will be in the long run insignificant.


Speaking of the Dutch, what would Desiderius Erasmus Roterdamus think if he were alive? Erasmus is the author of The Praise of Folly, * which contains the line: “Anyway, man’s mind is much more taken with appearances than with reality.” For most people, according to Erasmus, “Happiness resides in opinion.” Ah! Or should I exclaim, “Meten is weten”? ***


In Erasmus’ work, Folly is an allegorical character. Essentially, Folly says, “The happiest man is the one who is the most thoroughly deluded.” No doubt the Dutch authorities who decided to shut down a major portion of their economy didn’t see the full ramifications of their nitrogen restrictions. They did not “measure” before they enacted rules to which many of their citizen-farmers objected.


But maybe I shouldn’t criticize the Dutch. Aren’t all of us at times happy in our delusions? Folly says that no one builds a shrine to her as they built shrines to gods like Diana and Apollo or to those we worship today. She says, “Why should I desire a temple, when the whole world, if I am not mistaken, is a handsome shrine to me. Nor are priests lacking—except where men are lacking…One might say that there are as many statues to me as there are people who look foolish, even unintentionally so.”****


Are the protesting Dutch farmers worshipping Folly because they object to losing their livelihoods? Are they fools because they will suffer the effects of global warming as those bureaucrats’ descendants 800 years hence say derisively, “Kijk, dat hebben we je toch gezegd”? Or are the current bureaucrats fools because they have shut down part of their economy while other nations take practical steps to feed their people in spite of the results of scary computer models?


Or are the few billions of people who have been convinced that they are destined to suffer ever-increasing numbers of heat waves and higher temperatures on average, worshipping at the feet of Folly? According to a study at the University of Alabama, Huntsville and a report in Iowa Climate Science Education, there has been a “pause” in global warming that has as of this writing persisted for going on nigh eight years.*****


So, no global warming for eight years. But not in the minds of the Dutch bureaucrats. If the Impressionists from Oosterbeek were painting today, what color would they use to paint clouds? I guess it really doesn’t matter. It isn’t the real sky that is the point of the painting just as it isn’t the actual data that count. It’s the models that count and the impression they give even though no model has yet proved itself to be prophetic. it’s the impression one gets from seeing the sky that matters. And when many people are convinced that an impression like van Gogh’s Starry Night has more value than a Hubble or JWST image of the sky, then people are willing to throw a great deal of money at it—for Starry Night, maybe 100 million dollars. And for the warming sky in the opinion of bureaucrats almost everywhere, maybe trillions of dollars on top of giving up productive farming and a booming agricultural economy.


*National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sport. 15 April 2020. Greenhouse gas emission in the Netherlands 1990-2018: National Inventory Report.


**Or In Praise of Folly (Stultitiae Laus or Moriae Encomium), 1509.


***”Measuring brings knowledge.” Basically, “reason is better than opinion.”


****Translation by Leonard F. Dean. 1946. Hendricks House Farrar Straus.


*****Monckton, Christopher. The New Pause lengthens by a hefty three months. Online at https://iowaclimate.org/2021/12/03/the-new-pause-lengthens-by-a-hefty-three-months/

Wintertime conversation between two nameless primates huddled over a fire in in 2122.


Unnamed 1: What were Europeans and Americans thinking a hundred years ago when they stopped using fossil fuels?


Unnamed 2: Something about the climate. And, by the way, it is offensive to use designations like European and American today, so whisper because the sound carries into the next cave chamber. Ostracism for using names isn’t a good outcome. The accepted terms are “primates living on the northern landmasses on either side of the north-south, S-shaped ocean that once bore the name of a mythical Titan who carried the world.”


Unnamed 1: Conversations were faster when names were used instead of lengthy descriptions. People, sorry, primates are freezing now, because there is no way to get coal, oil, or natural gas in quantities that would meet heating needs on those landmasses during winter. The wood is mostly gone. What are billions of primates to do?


Unnamed 2: Seems that a century ago, primates on those landmasses rid themselves not only of fossil fuels but also of personal references and all designations. If two primates held this conversation back then, both would have a lively conversation. One would self-refer as “I” while the other would self-refer the same way, and both would other-refer as “you.” As primates understand the past today, one in a conversation might say, “I wonder what Europeans and Americans were thinking a century ago?” The other person in the conversation might answer, “Your guess is as good as my guess. I think you know, however. One hundred years ago, people decided to eliminate convenience. People were probably tired of “civilization” and the affluence fossil fuels provided. And people were tired of all designations because such words were “offensive.”


Unnamed 1: Keep the sound down. No need to shout. Okay, then this might seem to be offensive, but “I” want to self-refer. “I” want to be warm this winter. And “I” would like to have a name to which “I” might refer and “you” might use.


Unnamed 2: Careful. Primates might be listening in the next chamber. Such offensive language is punishable. But the point is clear to me. Conversations today are probably more convoluted and boring than conversations were a century ago when people were allowed to use pronouns and names. And heating in the winter was obviously easier, also, with natural gas, coal, and oil.


Unnamed 1: Now that this conversation has begun, “I” don’t care anymore. “I” am tired of this. Call “me” by my self-designation. “I” want to be called “Aurora.”


Unnamed 2: Risky, but if “you” want, then “I” will call you that in secret. “I” might even self-designate, but “I” don’t know what name “I” would choose. “I” guess “I” am more concerned about finding a cheap and abundant source of fuel to keep this cave warm.


Aurora: “I” want to start a family.


Unnamed 2: Which one of “us” should carry the organism that grows inside and that suddenly upon birth becomes a primate?


Aurora: Look what primates have become after 250,000 years of evolution. “I” seem to have the body parts sufficient for the task. If “you” carry the organism, in what body part will you gestate it and from what body part will it emerge? Can “you” conceive and carry?

​Unnamed 2: Shhhh! Asking such questions indicates a forbidden phobia.

If you look at news stories online, you’ll find numerous comments, many advocating for one political position over another. Depending on the nature of the online site, the comments made by the site’s regular readers will generally be in agreement on the subject of the day. Some dissenters, however, will engender vitriol. At times, you’ll come across some “rough” language that emphasizes the writer’s feelings on a subject—language once shunned in public forums governed by propriety.


There has always been a division between what we might term Propriety—or a fictional Dignity ascribed to “Victorians”— and its antithesis, that is the Vulgarity of Bar Talk, Street Talk, or lifestyle. No doubt the Romans, from whose language we derive the word vulgarity (“common people”), had their own crude ways of expressing raw feelings, and probably every predecessor civilization with classes (e.g., patricians and plebeians) recognized differences in expression and lifestyle. I suppose that a grey line of demarcation between the vulgar on one side and the sophisticated on the other side was never drawn in caves—but I could be wrong. Did Indo-European house vulgar expressions before it branched into all those other languages?


That vulgarity is common in online forums used by both the “the educated and the uneducated” and by “the famous and the infamous” is in part the result of years of insidiousness. Think of vulgarity’s creeping into film, for example. Rhett Butler’s last words to Scarlett in Gone with the Wind contained in 1940 maybe the most shocking public use of damn: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” By comparison, that use of damn is by today’s movie standards, quite “tame.” At its worst in the twenty-first century, the word would probably elicit only the mildest of warnings to potential viewers and a rating of PG-13. Decorum ain’t what it used to be. Many film scripts are now laced with “profanities” that seem “perfectly normal” to moviegoers who consider more offensive than crude talk the use of the “wrong pronoun” or the appropriation of a culture, such as team names like “Braves,” “Indians,” “Redskins,” or “Chiefs.” Vulgar language? In an everything-goes society of feelings, vulgarity is what you say it is, but, for sure, your own vulgarity isn’t vulgar. Older “standards of decorum” always undergo change to the chagrin of elders who perceive their societal responsibility to offspring as the handing-down of culture.


With the spread of social and agenda-driven media, we have descended into an open pit of vulgarity larger than the Escondida Copper Mine. And anything, given the preferences of the “offended,” can be vulgar. No longer does one have to hide the rawest of feelings and judgments in an ironic twist that enables the vulgar to use vulgarity to condemn what they consider to be the most vulgar expressions, that is, expressions with which they disagree. Again, however, I’ll emphasize that as long as there have been “civilized” people, there has been vulgarity. My hypothesis is that since the rise of language, most have been exposed to vulgarity of one kind or another. The formalization of language after Gutenberg is what makes the endurance of the original form of curse words stand out against the changing spelling and use of all other words. How is it that the formalized language has undergone so many changes after it became codified in print whereas the vulgar words traditionally banned from print have remained largely unchanged?


Anyone who has lived a few decades doesn’t need a linguist or philologist to say that language  changes all the time. “In-words” and common expressions arise with each generation. But there are exceptions to the trend of linguistic evolution: A vocabulary of enduring curse words permeates every culture’s native tongue and defies the tendency toward change (e.g., in the twentieth century drive-through became drive-thru). In contrast to the many changed words stands that ubiquitous “F” word. It first appeared in print in the early sixteenth century, indicating that it probably had a much earlier verbal appearance among the illiterate that probably made up the majority of people in pre-Gutenberg generations. Could it be that vulgarity is an inherent vice of human nature? Could William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, have been correct in saying that the only check on savagery is societal norms and that that check is weak at best?


I remember driving a two-lane road road through Amish country in eastern Ohio. My wife and I passed a barn-raising that would have made Norman Rockwell pause to paint. At least a dozen (counting is difficult at 50 mph) Amish men constructed, and as many Amish women set picnic tables while children played. We passed horse-drawn plows, women hanging clothes to dry just as so many Americans did before the invention of electric dryers, and a few people sitting on homemade porch furniture. She commented on the communal nature of their society and said as we passed their quaintness that it seemed like a society without the rush of modernism and vice, a community, she surmised, without crime. I disagreed. “They have vices,” I said, “and vulgarity.” Just moments later we passed a black Amish buggy headed in the opposite direction with two teenage boys, one of them holding the reins while the other leaned against the buggy’s back wall to hide from any passerby the cigarette he was smoking. I couldn’t resist, as you might guess. I said, “See! Humans have vices; Amish are humans; Amish have vices. I think I’ve completed my syllogism.”


Thomas Bowdler and Anthony Comstock aside, there’s little doubt that we humans have a vulgar side (major premise). People in chat rooms are humans (minor premise). People in chat rooms have a vulgar side (conclusion). Because chat rooms and comment sections are open to everyone, they are also open to use by the “vulgaris.” And even if there were societal restrictions against vulgarity—in fact, there are such rules, as movie and TV ratings attest—they would be no more effective at stopping vulgarity than gun laws are at stopping criminals from obtaining guns. The masses will be masses. And at the heart of all masses of humans lies a common thread, the potential to be vulgar that emerges in a billion conversations every day. About the only way to stop vulgarity and foster civility is by silence—a condition that isn’t feasible.

We are, like so many other large mammals, a rather lazy species. Not that we lie around like male lions waiting for the lady of the house to do the grocery shopping at the Wildebeest store, but many among us transpose our physical sloth into mental sloth. The laziness shows itself in our unwillingness to pursue details; would that our hunger for details were like the hunger of a lion on the prowl for fresh meat on the hoof. But, alas, committed habitually to a diet of generalities and half truths, we prefer to consume the fast food of popular beliefs. One of those beliefs is the very popular myth that climate change poses an “existential threat”—as alarmists are wont to say. What are the details of such a threat? Weren’t there predictions twenty-five years ago that the threat would already have manifested itself by this year, or last, or even the year before? Will it manifest itself next year? Give me details.


I have a feeling—just a feeling, mind you—that my own reticence to explore certain details to the nth degree is a mark of low intellectual prowess. If I’m intent on taking a stand on a topic, do I have all the details to make an intellectually sound argument? In many instances the answer is “No.” But, of course, I could say the same for almost everyone on some topic. Thus, I propose a new test of intelligence: How many verifiable details does one include in an argument. And my new IQ test produces a variable level of intelligence: “He’s ‘smart’ over here, but ‘dumb’ over there.” Or: “He simply infers a truth from details he assumes without specifically knowing.”


In almost every climate discussion, alarmists raise four “details” in support of their position: Rising carbon dioxide from anthropogenic sources, temperatures in the context of the Industrial Age, precipitation or droughts, and big storms. Other details arise at times, such as the start of spring growth, the decimation of some coral reefs, a spread of tropical diseases, and, of course—save the polar bears—a reduction of ice caps that will lead to a sea level rise. Recently, the Secretary for Homeland Security added migration—but that might be in light of the couple million migrants that have come to the border under his watch, just a ploy to, as they say, cover his and the Administration’s derrieres.


With regard to “The Debate,” we should ask about details that we can accept as true and relevant. What is the accuracy of the details we have, and what are the details the public mind might not consider that might be germane to the debate?


The planet is a complex of features and processes, each laden with details. Which of those details affect climate? Taking the lazy route here and risking the cry of hypocrisy, I’ll list major “controls on climate”as generalities you might have learned in high school. I will define climate as both an environmental category and condition that is based on average temperature and precipitation plus type and density of vegetative surface cover over a thirty-year period. A 30-year period is itself an arbitrary duration, especially since there is evidence that some climates have endured for millennia more or less statically. But the duration has to be drawn somewhere and applied everywhere. So, I’ll accept Köppen’s classification as modified by both Geiger and Trewartha based on a minimum period of observations: Three decades of temperature and precipitation readings and the type of vegetation those parameters support.


Some climate controls are planetary-wide, such as the Solar Constant and the overall composition of and stratification of the atmosphere. Another control emanates from Earth’s sphericity: the angle of incoming solar radiation that is different for different latitudes and that changes for the entire planet cyclically over the course of a year, the noon overhead sun ranging from 23.5 degrees south latitude to 23.5 degrees north latitude. I can’t not mention the Milankovich Cycles, also, because orbital shape and precession of the axis of rotation play significant roles. Major wind systems also play a role: Westerlies and Easterlies, surface air masses and high altitude jet streams. But some of the controls are more “local,” such as mountain systems that create “rain shadows,” land-water distribution, ocean currents, semipermanent Highs and Lows, and albedo. Each of these controls encompasses a plethora of details (e.g., Are the highlands near the Equator or near the poles? Is there more landmass north of the Equator than south? Does a particular location lie within a landmass far from oceans and large lakes or near a coast?)


Now, when one engages in a debate with either an alarmist or a denier, which details centered on which controls prevail? And what evidence provides the details? Does one side use different details to make a point?


What about Solar activity? Volcanic eruptions? Unpredictable changes in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)? What about the effects of clouds? Of atmospheric stratification? Of other greenhouse gases, like NOx, CH4, or even CFCs? What of fluctuating ocean horizontal and vertical currents? What of wavelength absorption and reabsorption by different molecules in their sundry stages of formation and breakup? And what of the effect of forest growth or denudation? Oh! What of the forest and tundra soils as both absorbers and emitters of greenhouse gases? And which model for or against climate change as an “existential threat” includes all the details of all the controls and ramifications? Whew! Now, I know I might have a low score on my new IQ test.


What’s that humans have said for 200,000 years? Climate change: Can’t live with it; can’t live without it. Ask the Anasazi, the Mayans, and the ancient Egyptians. Ask the Romans during their “warm” period or the Vikings during theirs. Take a time machine back to the Little Ice Age, or father back to the Wisconsin glacial period. Check through all the proxy records, such as tree ring analysis, oxygen isotope analysis, and ice cores. Imagine a debate, an actual debate replete with all the details. “Not going to happen,” you say. And you would be correct. No one wants to spend the time pursuing all those details, organizing them into something intelligible, and presenting them logically. We’re mostly male lions waiting for someone else to do the work. We don’t care how the female lion got the Wildebeest; we just want to devour it. Just tell me the climate is changing and support your statement with a few details. You know that I’m too lazy to look them up or to find other details. Whatever side of the debate I’m on, I’m happy with a few details from which I can make an inference. In this I’m a purely inductive thinker.


We can do a bunch of guessing in addition to inductive thinking, of course. Seems true that most of the past warming and cooling periods were not the product of human activity, but times have changed. We do have the ability to alter the environment quickly, as remnants of the Aral Sea demonstrate. And obviously, humans can add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and rainforests. But what details support the alarmist position that humans are under “existential threat” because of “climate change”? Isn’t it possible that conditions favorable to human life might arise from climate change? Aren’t the people of California, Nevada, and Arizona already facing that “existential threat”?   


Yes, you are correct to point out that the American Southwest is under an extended droughty period that politicians and alarmists shout about. The level of Lake Mead is falling like Chicken Little’s acorn. But the detail that is missing there is that humans moved into a semiarid landscape and exacerbated the aridity by drawing water for millions from a single river. Las Vegas has 150,000 hotel rooms. That means at least 150,000 showers, sinks, and toilets. Those using the facilities aren’t permanent residents; they’re in; they’re out, and in the interim they use more than half of the water allowed to the city, amounting to an average 63 gallons per tourist per day. And those hotels? The “lake” for Bellagio’s fountains yearly loses through evaporation a dozen million gallons of water. Now there’s a detail I didn’t know until I looked it up. * Want to shout “existential threat,” move to the Southwest, buy a home, and water a garden or lawn or wash your car or dog. Yet, those proxy records, those details, suggest that the American Southwest has been the site of cyclical droughty periods, some lasting a couple of centuries. Are we under existential threat from climate change, or have we put ourselves in jeopardy by moving into an area prone to drought? Can humans survive a projected two- to four-degree rise in temperatures?


In the Smithsonian’s online page entitled “What does it mean to be human,” the author(s) refer to the hypothesis proposed by Dr. Rick Potts of the Human Origins Program. Potts calls his hypothesis “variability selection.” As he argues, hominids were not limited to a single type of environment. Over the course of human evolution, human ancestors increased their ability to cope with changing habitats rather than specializing on a single type of environment.” * *


Climate change, one can rationally argue, led to advances in our ability to adapt. Climate change, one can also argue, might be the reason that we are bipedal.


For alarmists, there is no debate because they rely on “settled science” backed by a study of just 928 articles Naomi Oreskes used to arrive at her “75% consensus” that Al Gore then morphed into the “established 97% consensus” that Barack Obama repeated and masses of the population consumed. Orestes got the Wildebeest, and we were happy to have it. The details of that transition between Oreskes’ original study, a later survey, published by couple of professors, and the Al Gore movie, require as much research as climate scientists put into their favorite climate topic. Seems that the survey of 10,000 “scientists" by some college professors got 3,000 responses with 77 responders claiming the title of climate expert, and 75 of those 77 said that humans were at least partly responsible for climate change. That 75 is 97%, not of 10,000, and not of 3,000, but of SEVENTY-SEVEN. Yet, the number has stuck as a confirmed detail repeated by many.   


The alarmists say there is a link between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature, and they are correct—to an extent. The deniers say there is a possibility of a connection, but that human emissions are just part of a larger story and that no one as yet has identified the exact proportion of influence humans have on climate change. They also point out that a rise in temperature based on greenhouse gases would not be exponential or geometric, but rather logarithmic. Doubling the carbon dioxide will not double the temperature.


Alarmists point out the temperature records derived from actual measurements since the invention of thermometers and the analyses of pre-thermometer indicators like tree rings and oxygen-isotopes show that we are undergoing warming. Deniers don’t deny that warming has been occurring since the end of the last ice advance and acknowledge that we are probably in the midst of an Interglacial Period that we might enhance, preventing a return of the big ice sheets. What, they might ask, are the details that led to the end of the cool period called the Younger Dryas and the warm period called Roman Warm Period?


Earth is, as all planets are, a complex place. And even though it’s not a very big planet by Jupiter standards, it’s large with respect to its human inhabitants. And much of the planet is forbidding: Too cold for permanent survival in some places and too hot in others. Only scientific explorers and visitors venture into the heart of Antarctica, and only people with full gas tanks and good-working cars venture into Death Valley—whose name is about as indicative of its “climate” as any name could be. So, on this complex planet, gathering detailed information isn’t easy. There are just too many places to monitor, and many of them might be artificially altered the way cities produce “heat islands.”


What I find disturbing is that for those on either side of the “debate”—I put it in quotation marks because it is more like an impassable divide than debate—there is a pick-and-choose manipulation of details and actually a dearth of details I want to see. And I, being too stupid according to my New IQ testing results, don’t have the wherewithal to discern which side is correct. IQ testing has long been about problem-solving ability, but in most instances in "real life" problem-solving requires a mastery of details.


*Bruketta, Sam. 2020. A study of water use by casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada: The Transformation of a desert into an oasis. https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1180&context=glj


**https://humanorigins.si.edu/research/climate-and-human-evolution/climate-effects-human-evolution

If you ever doubt that place is central to social and personal character, simply observe the process of gentrification, the motivation for it in a neighborhood “on the decline” and the results of it. Turning an established, but down-on-its-luck neighborhood into a coffee shop and boutique district has consistently divided long-time residents though it can in touristy areas revitalize an economy—Think Williamsburg, VA. On the one hand are those who see a promise of better times in “revitalization” or profit from moving out as strangers move in. On the other hand are those who see a destruction of a way of life to which they had become accustomed. History relates, however, that no neighborhood has either a permanent physical or social character.


In the inevitable change in human neighborhoods over a few generations lies a parallel to the inevitable change in species over many generations. No species is a permanent resident because environments undergo vicissitudes that reduce or replace resources: water, for example, or food. Over the span of all life, climates and landscapes have changed. On the scale of millions of years a mountain system becomes with erosion a region of rolling hills; a shallow sea becomes a delta filled with eroded remnants of those mountains. Seas transgress and regress, but such changes rarely affect several contemporary generations. As environments change, so do the residents; lush vegetation yields to sparse vegetation dominated by xerophytes when desertification occurs. In the animal kingdom, trophic niches of one period are filled in a succeeding one by different species.


If, as David Raup estimates in Extinction, the average lifespan of a species is four million years—some, like the horseshoe crab, counterbalance the shorter lifespans of others, like the Elephant Bird—then residents of any neighborhood either natural or artificial are destined to change, and in their changing, cause a change in the character of a “neighborhood.” We are only 200 to 300 thousand years into making and filling our neighborhoods that we have since abandoned rather than “gentrified.” If it weren’t for archaeologists, we would not even know of old neighborhoods like Göbekli Tepe or Machu Picchu.


If I were to go back to the neighborhood of my childhood, I would observe the same but slightly altered homes and yards I knew as a kid. And in each of those homes I would find a different family. The original occupants are either dead or gone. Originally settled mostly by immigrants from Italy, the neighborhood now sports a diverse “nationality” background. In all the nearby cities, the same change has occurred. Buildings, like gopher holes, have to be maintained, which is work that the young and employed can do better than the old and retired. Entropy prevails in peeling paint, rotting wood, and missing roof tiles. Economic circumstances change, also. The Steel City, Pittsburgh, lost its steel mills decades ago, and with that loss came the ineluctable decline of its neighborhoods. Even before that decline, however, the city made an effort to gentrify. Three Rivers Stadium, now rubble in some other location, was built where neighborhoods of Pittsburgh’s poor once lived on the North Side (of the Allegheny and Ohio rivers). And of course, the apocalyptic rider accompanying entropy and economic downturn is death. Everyone ages; everyone dies. All neighborhoods change as mine has, as British castles have become hotels, and as new or repurposed buildings replace old buildings, a warehouse or brewery, for example, becoming an apartment building or restaurant or an old church becoming a popular bar.


As the remnants of the original population age, they sometimes seek to gentrify the “old” place. But populations change in both size and character. In trying to save an old neighborhood and revitalize a location, the rebuilders destroy what was. Three Rivers Stadium was an effort to revitalize the North Side, but its building wiped out a neighborhood, just as its successors, Heinz Field, a Science Center, and Rivers Casino wiped out Three Rivers. The gentrified has been gentrified. The process seems to be endless, and as the population changes, so the gentrified neighborhood will have to undergo further gentrification—or abandonment.


In small towns in the Rust Belt or in the Tobacco Belt, Main Streets are lined with repurposed or empty buildings, those in the county seats faring better than in most communities because of numerous law and medical offices. Gentrification works well in some neighborhoods with new condo buildings that accommodate a different population, but only for a while. The replacements there will also undergo changes in resources and will see their revitalized or new surroundings undergo the same entropy. Where a modern apartment building of strangers now exists, a neighborhood of people related by nationality or employment once stood. In the local upscale coffee shop people sit next to others with their eyes on their laptops or smart devices, their ears covered by headphones, and their focus on their isolated selves. The original draw, such as a factory, no longer serves as a centripetal force.


In some instances gentrification means an ostensible “recapturing” the character of the past without actually “living” that past as it was or as it meant to the original residents. That’s Williamsburg, VA, and any one of a number of “historic” sites. But even the coffee and the foods are different. Things aren’t what they were regardless of the efforts to preserve them in a gentrified rebuild.


So as in other lands over many generations, I hear in my own land the complaint that “things aren’t what they were.” In that contemporary complaint, there’s nothing new. Every aging generation will make it. Some will attempt to counter it with efforts to gentrify. Some will simply move away. I would invite you to examine the places you knew as a child to see what has occurred in that neighborhood. How has the place changed? If you say, “Well, my neighborhood is pretty much the same as it was,” then you fail to realize the subtle changes that inevitably occur in any neighborhood. It has changed as all things change. And whether or not you want to admit it, you have changed as it has changed—even if you are a long-tine resident. The extinction of that way of life is ineluctable, even during efforts to restore or gentrify.

Let’s begin with quotations:

1. “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” —Oscar Wilde in De Profundis
2. “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” —Harlan Ellison
3. “Your opinion is not my reality.” —Steve Maraboli
4. “The greatest deception which men incur proceeds from their opinions.” —Leonardo da Vinci

Next: What do you say to those who argue about or from opinions?


Now for some musings centered on those four quotations:


1.  There’s nothing much new in modern progressivism and nothing much new in modern conservatism. Both echo thoughts that originated at least 2,500 years ago—probably longer ago—records are scant and “philosophy” wasn’t formalized until people sat at the feet of the pre-Socratics like Pythagoras and then at the feet of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Did people advocate for Left or Right opinions prior to the rise of philosophy? It seems reasonable to assume that even the Egyptians held such opinions, but their hieroglyphs require us to infer those opinions from “pictures.” The division between the two seemingly contrary modes of understanding the Cosmos (and, because it’s part of the Cosmos, Human Nature) lies in that recognition of Nous, or Mind as either maker or observer. A mind-body dichotomy with which we still struggle, or should I say, with which progressives struggle differently from how conservatives struggle, generally leads to different definitions and interpretations of “reality” and value.


Samuel Johnson’s famous kicking a stone to refute Berkeley’s idealism characterizes the essence of the debate between conservatives and progressives. His sore foot was a physical result of the reality of matter and the existence of a reality outside the mind. Now, of course, a refutation of the Johnson’s refutation lies in other phenomena that seem difficult to ignore: Schizophrenic imaginings and psychosomatic pain are human “realities,” just as phantom limbs are for amputees. What to do? What to think? Goodness! Who would question that a phantom limb is not a “real” for the amputee? Who would doubt that schizophrenics don’t hear and see what they think they hear and see, especially after Eltiona Scana, a paranoid schizophrenic, killed little seven-year-old Emily Jones in a park in Bolton, UK? Such incidents are numerous and tragic, and they reveal that some of us live in a world of the mind. Of course, a Johnson-like refutation of “imagined” realities lies in the loss of Emily Jones suffered by her parents: That she died seems to be irrefutably something that occurred “outside the mind.” But in an infinite regression, one might ask whether all minds were connected Matrix-like prior to her imagined birth and death. And so on..


For those “Dr. Samuel Johnsons” the world of Mind-Only has manifested itself in gun laws that do not stop bad actors and in entitlement and victimhood anxieties. The world of the mind is one in which a logarithmic rise in temperature is interpreted as an exponential rise, fostering a panic that humanity will be inundated by seas and blasted by the high winds of super hurricanes regardless of data to the contrary. In that world of the mind, individuals, especially policy-makers, have adopted rather extreme measures they have imposed on the multitudes. The world of the mind has manifested itself in a Hollywood community that partly defunded its police force in the context of rising crime in favor of unarmed social workers on bicycles who will supposedly defuse domestic conflicts—even those involving gun-toting violent offenders bent on shooting rather than on talking. [Gotta do this to you: Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.”—obviously an unacceptable philosophy for those that believe Mind is All.  By the way, Emerson also wrote something apropos to the modern world of “victims” of “word crimes”: “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”]


2.  Take my understanding of place, for example. Do I believe it exists outside my mind? Sure. I’m convinced after studying both geology and human history that before I built my house, the woody land existed, just not in the form it does today. I’m pretty much locked Johnson-like into accepting  the natural and human history of the land on which I live, therefore, and am convinced that it was at one time the location of a “real” epicontinental sea and at another time a vast and thick delta. I can deduce from local rocks that because of its elevation, my land might also have stood as a small island in the middle of Lake Monongahela or have lain beneath but close to its surface. Because of nearby Meadowcroft Rock Shelter and local “Indian mounds,” I accept that neither I nor my immigrant ancestors were the first to walk my woods, that between the Rock Shelter inhabitants as much as 16,000 years ago and the arrival of Europeans just hundreds of years ago, there were also many “Native Americans” who were “real people walking over real land.” Goodness! I have evidence that in the decades before I purchased the land it was part of a farm owned by the Swan family whose descendant divided and sold “properties.” Surely, all those who preceded me also acknowledged a physical reality that I now recognize as having an existence independent of mind. [But even I can recognize that there is an element of “mind” in any place that humans inhabit. Take a look around at your own place, recognizable to you as more than an accumulation of objects. Place for each of us is personal history personified; it bears for us feelings only we know and thoughts only we have. It is, however, part of a two-way relationship between matter and mind: The objective reality of place has had, for want of a better word, the “power” to alter who we are or who we THINK we are]


But I began with progressivism and conservatism in #1, so let me take you back. What has happened to the philosophy of idealism is that modern political progressives have run to an extreme that accepts Nous over Matter as the ultimate reality. Or, rather, to an extreme that says Nous makes Matter or reality. As Jorge Luis Borges writes, “There is no other reality for idealism [idealists] than that of mental processes; adding an objective butterfly to the butterfly which is perceived seems a vain duplication; adding a self to those processes seems no less exorbitant. Idealism judges that there was a dreaming, a perceiving, but not a dreamer or even a dream; it judges that speaking of objects and subjects is pure mythology. * In the twentieth century American idealism became for many a justification for believing that opinion is fact and even irrefutable fact. These most recent versions of idealists play semantic games in which the mere naming becomes reality. I think of a YouTube on-the-street video of a young woman screaming that there were “hundreds of genders.” I suppose she is correct—depending solely on semantics. **


3.  The problem with an overemphasis on Nous is captured in Maraboli’s statement. If Nous is all there is, if opinion is all there is, then humanity will never arrive at “Truth.” There will be many “truths.” I suppose that even Dr. Samuel Johnson might agree with that. Certainly, even theoretical physicists agree because they operate that the current understanding represented by the Standard Model might alter with the discovery of a new particle or strings.


But agreement will always elude humans who make their own realities. And that leads to…


4.  how easy it is in a subjective world to self-deceive, as da Vinci writes.


When opinion reigns supreme, there is no objective, outside-the-mind reality. Go kick a stone. To an idealist, your pain is “in the mind.” To an idealist, there is no reality to any phenomenon not held by that idealist. I call your attention to a statement by Congressman Naylor of New York who said when he was asked about the summer riots in Seattle that they and their perpetrators, who self-identified as Antifa, were a myth. ***


Maybe this is just an “opinion,” maybe the machinations of my mind-gone-wrong, but the store I’ve been kicking reveals a division between progressives and conservatives that goes beyond arguments about Big and Small government and controlled and runaway entitlement spending. For one side, the progressive side, the Mind Is All, the Nous Makes All, and anyone, anywhere, at any time can accept anything without doubt as reality. The other side, derided by the progressive side as lowly stone-kickers, is willing to doubt on the basis of observing that which lies outside Mind. Of course, this reductive thinking poses its own set of problems, especially since it relies on Mind to reduce, to simplify. Yet, if you exist outside my mind, I “feel” strongly that you understand what I’m saying.     


*Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. Labyrinth: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed by Donald Yates and James E. Irby New York. New Directions Publishing Corporation. Penguin Books. Found in Sears, Sallie and Georgianna W. Lord, Eds. 1972. The Discontinuous Universe: Selected Writings in Contemporary Consciousness. New York. Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. P. 220. The books contain “A New Refutation of Time” by Borges.


**YouTube. Charlie Kirk Interview under the title: “Leftist Claims There Are Over 100 Genders!”


***YouTube: “Jerry Nadler: ‘Antifa is a myth.’” Nadler: “That’s a myth that’s been spread only in Washington, D.C.”