GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY
By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
Polar Vortex
Children ask the truly radical, deep, but unsophisticated
questions. They don’t resist the unfolding of life. They ask
“why” about many things, but why grows far beyond what or how.
Adults inhabit different worlds than children do. They see reality from a
different perspective. Adults take for granted that they know the answers,
but that blinds them. It all depends on how you look at things, if and
when you look at things.
The 2012 Sundance Film Festival winner, Beasts of the Southern Wild, is a
kaleidoscope tapestry of fantasy bayou culture where a community lives in an impoverished
utopia, called the Bathtub. Divorced from profit and all the trappings of
modern society, but living off of nature, they care for each other. It is
about life in a busted universe, one with monster storms that derive their
energy from heat.
In reality, global warming now thaws the polar ice. In
the movie it liberates extinct beasts, called Aurochs, which come to threaten
the Bathtub. Hushpuppy, the child star of the movie, understands that
endings are surprisingly sensitive to their beginnings, and that we are
interdependent in complex ways that can never be understood, but that
ultimately manifest themselves dramatically. We are led to recognize that
she shares something undefined, even a friendship with the beasts.
Thermal Impedance
The polar vortex brought record cold to the Northeast,
suggesting that there is no global warming, but in the Southwest we are
experiencing unusually warm dry winter weather, water shortages, and fires.
How can we determine whether the world’s temperature is changing given
such variation?
Heat is a vibration, a flow of energy in transit. It is
what makes the winds and ocean currents, what makes weather wetter and dryer,
what makes a transistor work, but not the perpetual motion machine. It
increases extremes, both hot and cold, expansion and contraction, and it is
much more than the temperature in our backyards or any single storm. Data
in motion, in space and time, is its representation. Sometimes the rate
of temperature change or its acceleration is more revealing than the amount of
change. This is what testifies to man-caused climate change. It is
sudden changes that make adaptation difficult, driving evolution and the
extinction of species.
Ancient changes, driven by ocean currents,
volcanism, and the sun, were massively slow requiring thousands to millions of
years. Man and his use of energy is the only new, recent, and sudden
development.
Gamblers should know that the average temperature in their
backyard is the most probable value, but the temperature at any time can be
above or below that value. If a curve is drawn through the actual
temperatures, the areas above and below the average curve will be equal.
Storms and weather are deviations. Climate is never in equilibrium and
heat causes increasing disorder.
It was Lord Kelvin who explained, “When you can measure
what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something
about it. When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a
meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have
scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”
Though Lord Kelvin’s comment still rings true, computer
data analysis did not exist in his time. Modern techniques help to select
significant variables. They provide equations describing observed behaviors,
but this is only the first step toward models that attempt to predict the
future. In the last fifty years, entire university departments formed
that use numerical methods and statistics to model and simulate behaviors whose
confidence is a number that is calculated, not a social construction, local
norm, or politics that manufactures facts. Equations are stronger than a
number. They express the relationship between numbers and can be graphed
as curves and surfaces. Emotion rules when the math is threatening, but numbers
only measure, they don’t regulate.
Mythical
Climate science focuses on fundamental research, not weather
forecasting. Its explanation of climate should not be expected to show
that any particular event had to happen or will take place. Intractable
complexity is the domain of uncertainty. In a world where certainty is
demanded, but does not in truth exist, it is better to be uncertain than
certainly wrong.
Science has not felt motivated to aggressively respond to the
propaganda of extremists. Backed by special interest big money, fueled by
progressive imperfection, and reinforced by popular party-line news, they have
been successful in dividing, controlling the public, and getting people elected.
Bernard Lewis documented the fall of the Ottoman
Empire in his books, What Went
Wrong and The Crisis of Islam.
It was more than a reluctance to adapt to Western ways. Science had
become heathen. When Americans believe in an evil Darwin, unnecessary sustainability, and no
global warming they follow those footsteps.
Conspiracy theorists ask journalists to join in climate
change denial, but they don’t have the time, funding, and education to present
an informed discourse. It is difficult to concisely explain while not
distorting or oversimplifying. Innumeracy, jargon, and a fundamental
inability to speak a language that requires years of difficult study to
understand are the problems.
The U-tube, oil company geologist, who cherry picks a small
sample of data and uses his Excel program to deny climate change, does
not compare with teams of doctoral students, working for years, armed with
super computers. Politicians, preachers, and motivational speakers have
combined patriotism and divine revelation to invoke ultimate hierarchy and moral
authority in their demonization of experts. We should consider that
celebrities are people who are well known for their fame, not their scientific expertise.
Any critique of global warming must embody a principle of
symmetry. The same criteria for judgment should apply to all explanations for
climate change including its denial. Our questions come from our fears.
We learn most from those we disagree with, but resistance to change results in
the same stalemate and inaction that we see in Congress that is about
domination instead of partnership. Unfortunately, the Republicans have
their foot planted firmly on the brake pedal, the Democrats own the
accelerator, and the public has the job of steering and winning the race.
Representative Gosar’s Environmental
Compliance Cost Transparency Act, H. R. 2162 would find only
increased electricity costs because that is all it is looking for. But
all of mankind’s creations, cars, homes, roads, cities, and power plants
wear out, need maintenance, and become obsolete. Just think about how
much cheaper our cars would be without seat belts, catalytic converters, air
bags, and anti-skid brakes! The public deserves to know the rest of the
story, including the costs to health and the environment, and that coal is being
replaced, not by regulation, but by natural gas.
Coal deposits in the United
States, China,
and Australia
are enough to supply the world for 600 years. The need for it is not
going away even though it is a major cause of climate change and ecological
damage. Modern techniques harvest one hundred tons of coal every two
seconds. They pulverize and dissolve mountains, pollute wells, streams,
and now in West Virginia,
a proprietary mixture of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol and polyglycol ethers, a
coal mining solvent, contaminated municipal water supplies.
Eureka!
New drilling techniques mean that we will not be running out
of oil anytime soon, destroying the incentive to develop sustainable clean
energy technologies. Our fixed assets are far too great to be abandoned,
and there are fundamental problems when the sun does not shine and the wind
does not blow. The size of the world’s energy addiction reveals
that more than fifty years will elapse, regardless of financial considerations
and Adam Smith’s unseen hand, before sustainable clean energy will
inevitably dominate the world marketplace. In the meantime, we defy
nature. Far too big to bail out at the last minute, our crisis will be something
like the Biblical End Times, not just warming. All we can do now is live
greener, more efficiently, and freed from our slavery to unnecessary materialism,
but severe conservatives think that this is asking too much.
Perspective
It took millions of years for evolution’s trial and
error to create our fragile bubble of life. Civilization, only ten
thousand years old, a mere blink of the eye in geologic time, tears man apart
from nature. It is civilization that threatens mankind’s continued
existence. We risk catastrophe by trying to make nature instead of
finding it. Using nature has made us the most successful life form, but
religion, birth control, unbending morality, politics, and a reluctance
to change our social institutions have helped to spread AIDs, explode our
population, and drive an ongoing extinction of species greater and more rapid
than any asteroid, volcanic eruption, or geological epoch. All
life shares an existential, moral, genetic, and evolutionary interdependence.
Our subconscious emotional brains are adaptations for stone-age survival.
Our self-image is medieval, but our technology is powerful and God-like.
E. O. Wilson’s book, The
Creation, is an appeal to pastors to bring religion and science, the
two most powerful social forces, together to save life on earth. If man,
created in proud divine image, is above the animals with dominion over nature,
does he then have any responsibility for it? The crow carefully lays out
pieces of melon rind for its young, and dogs exhibit remorse when they know
they have done wrong.
If you have watched the birth of your children you
may have experienced feelings of awe and the same commitment to the defense of your
young that a mother bear has for her cubs. If you have wanted to escape
from the big city to the forest or desert, or go hunting, you have answered to
instincts passed on by primeval ancestors. We have more in common with
nature than we care to realize.
Conflict exists because scientific facts disagree with a
literal Genesis. Our mutually exclusive beliefs should not prevent us
from seeing that living in harmony with nature is a win-win proposition regardless
of religious persuasion.
What better way is there to understand man’s impact on
the earth than to imagine what the world would become if he was instantly
raptured away? Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us, discusses whether our evolution was
predestined or inevitable. What would things be like if we had never been
created? What would happen if we suddenly disappeared?
Civilizations have collapsed when they outgrew their
resources, used up their environment, or the climate changed. The B.P.
oil spill’s environmental effects are not over. Our plastics last
forever, and they have contaminated our seas and soils. The radiation
from the fifties nuclear explosions still remains in the upper atmosphere
and nuclear power accidents like Three Miles Island, Chernobyl, and
Fukushima cause essentially permanent hazardous pollution. Globalization
makes it easier for influenza to find a way, as it did in 1918 when at least
fifty million people died worldwide.
We remember the past in a more positive light than it
deserves. We reminisce. Nostalgia makes it seem better, but
tomorrow’s solution cannot bring back yesterday. What is needed is
a new ethos which will embrace uncertainty as a source of creativity, helping
us to become a creating and adapting nation instead of a consuming one. The
future is not amiable to forced creativity and the funding of temporary
fads. Necessity, the mother of invention, requires investing in public
education and scientific research, but our legislators know they can easily
defund education, lower taxes, and be elected.
The force of nature is irresistible. Without us, the
earth would eventually revert to a natural state. But yet we make
short-term decisions consistent with our life spans and self-interests not
understanding that our story has not yet been told.
