Blame OSSIAN, not Obama, for why American Skeptics deny Climate Change

Ossian, godfather of CLIMATE CHANGE !

Ossian ?!  A fake bard from 250 years ago ? What on earth , heaven and the multi-varient Universe does he have to with denying Global Warming  - you're barmy !

Ossian , son of Fingal, is albeit inadvertently , the only-begetter of the hatred thrown up against the revolutionary changes he directly brought in and against the general idea (that he also brought in) that things are always changing and always changing in unpredictable ways.

In this case the hatred is against climate change, but worry not, in time this eternal fear of un-certitudes and against the greys of reality will move on to new targets.

Ossian - if you still remember anything from high school or university  -is that 1760s fake creation from the otherwise-obscure James MacPherson that is generally agreed to have sparked the reaction against 18th century Classicalism that we now call 19th Century Romanticism.

If you were only half listening to your teachers you do recall the terms but deflate them to only referring to literature and , maybe, the visual arts.

Wrong, wrong, wrong !

They were not "just" art movements or even - slightly bigger - "political ideologies".

They were the ultimate biggies : all encompassing worldviews held - in their day - by most anybody who was anybody as just common sense, pure and simple.

Hegemonic hegemonies, in other words.

But then, by the 1850s, Romanticism lost much of its short lived hegemony and a highly self-conscious opposing movement emerged (counter-romanticism/pro-classicalism) and was called - by its critics - Late Victorian Scientism.

But it had to share the stage with Romanticism which had by then lost its self-conscious 'movement' nature and merged into simple common sense.

Today most all of us hold bits and pieces of both Romanticism and its Scientism critics inside of us, all in a glorious muddle.

Where we all differ - and all 7 billion of us do differ - is in the proportions of these two we hold inside us as the basis for all our other beliefs.

To Deny is to be anti-Romanticism

Deniers - it is fair to say - are highly un-Romantic , highly pro-Scientism , not withstanding their attacks on today's living, practising, scientists.

The rapid and rabid popularity of MacPherson's "beautiful poetic forgery" across all of Europe, alarming the powers-to-be everywhere.

Hard to imagine poetry doing that today - but think of alarms over Rap lyrics or the reaction against Pussy Riot, to see we scribblers still have the potential to alarm our barely-literate superiors every time we put pen to paper.

Ossian's poetry emerged in the extreme North West of Europe - as far away as possible from Europe's civilized roots in the extreme South East of the continent - Greece and Italy.

Add to this geographic affront to good taste and breeding , was the fact that this was the work not of Greek aristocrats with education and breeding , but of untutored peasants, living in dire poverty under harsh - not azure blue - skies.

Worst of all, the young everywhere - particularly those with the most education and breeding - loved the stuff , tossing aside their millennium old classic texts with disdain.

This Ossian stuff - they said - was the work of pure genius - pure untutored genius !

Genius - then being using for the first time in our modern day sense of the word, was bad enough.

But its association with untutoredness - no,  more than that - its association only with untutoredness, was literally Revolutionary, in the widest sense of that over used term.

For this poetry literally revolved - flipped - all previous values on their heads : day was now night, black was now white.

Rude, untutored, uneducated, genius (aka street smarts or native intelligence) was now set ahead of highly (highly expensively) educated people from old families of good breeding and manners.

Think of the same situation today - for very little has changed , at least on the untutored side.

When almost everybody today has to have a certificate of some sort to make a living (even ditch diggers need their heavy equipment operating papers ), some people still get fabulously rich, important and admired, without any sort of certificate.

They even make a point of flaunting their relative lack of professional education or institutional accreditation to account for their success.

They are the same people that arose to threat classicalism and the aristocracy in Ossian's day: entrepreneurs, inventors, writers and entertainers/artists.

Who hasn't seen one's friends, people with too much money and not enough self-honesty, sending their lazy dolts of children off to get highly expensive education to obtain a MBA,PhD, MA in creative writing, BJ or MFA because the kid - when pushed - pretends to a faint interest in 'doing' that sort of thing for a living.

From expensive pre-school, to expensive post doc living expenses subsidies, with expensive educational toys,summer camps, tutors and educational trips to Europe in between, modern parents spent a million 2012 dollars to give their kid 25 years of the best possible education of the old breeding and Grand Tours sort.

The only change is that starting in the 1850s, the need to know the classics to be considered a highly educated part of the natural aristocracy was gradually replaced by a need to know some form of science - say hard like chemistry or soft like economics.

Their kids now know everything that is already known about the past and present of their chosen field: and is not the past and present, a la Charles Lyell , a reliable guide to the future ?

(In reality, all this is really just a way to avoid heavy inheritance taxes on your death, by spending as much of it as possible - now - on your kids' education. You are hoping to ensure the family's wealth and influence moves forward in time via education rather than by inheritances.)

Today's professionals are yesterday's classical aristocracy in a new guise

These are the "heavily-tutored competent". Aka the professionals.

(For I think you could fairly abstract the whole point of this post as me claiming that yesterday's aristocracy: classicalism: professionalism: today's aristocracy.)

But then some uneducated immigrant with chutzpah and drive blasts well past your precious kid's MBA or a tiny garage and an lone inventor discovers what a university full of PhDs like your son could not, or a street kid's painting, writings or comic turn makes her a famous personality while your daughter puts her MFA to work teaching uncaring high school kids in some small city in the Mid West.

Those fracking, fracking, damn untutored geniuses - it just isn't fair !

These guys know nothing of the present or the past - thus leaving them open to make lots of mistakes - and to discover the future.

Bruce Springsteen, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson : all have recently blasted well past kids with 25 expensive years of good education.

They represent as much unplanned, unpredicted, uncertain, mercurial change as Ossian did yesterday or the Climate will for tomorrow - and they are all equally hated by well educated professional deniers cum competent nobodies * of every generation.....

* Our think tanks are just filled with the well breed well educated second rates of this world : little wonder they envy the sudden rises of those superstars of academia the climate scientist.

Irish Catholic Republican from Wisconsin plays JOE MCCARTHY to the hilt !

PAUL RYAN 

My personal introduction to the FIRST Irish Catholic Republican from Wisconsin who never meet a fact he couldn't twist was in the mid 1950s - after reading a 1954 book about Pogo set in the swamps of Ogopogo and asking my mother about the character Simple J Malarkey.

McCarthyism Lives !

Mom explained as best she could to a six year old about often-charming, always devious Senator Joe McCarthy.

Cut to present day America and Joe is back - from the dead ! - cloned in the persona of Paulie-Ayn Rand , the GOP VP pick, the kid with the face of a catholic choirboy and the heart (-lessness) of a man on his way to the top, regardless of who gets in his way.

I don't know what kind of Kool-Aid Republicans drink out there in Wisconsin but avoid it like the plague - and don't drop the Acid they offer up, along with heavy metal tunes, to show they are "hep" with the 2010s......

"Progressive" climate change is "oscillatingly impossible" say Deniers & Skeptics

ICE AGE but a 'blip in time'

Deniers and skeptics haven't really really said that the climate never changes and can't change (you've just been trusting journalists again , that's all).
They just claim it can't change in a progressive fashion (ie steadily hotter or colder) for more than a milli-pause - in geological time -  before reversing itself and oscillating back to its long term normal mean level.

Relax warmists : set against the Universe's time line, 50,000 years of a human Catastrophe is but a 'blip in time', happening in some forgotten corner of a vast playground...

An Ice Age just seems like a very long term disaster - to us mere (warmist) mortals down here at ground zero (degrees centigrade).

"But I tell ya bud, ya gotta see The Big Picture, up here high in the sky : what is a mere 50,000 years of ice set against the glorious entire 10 billion years of the Earth's existence ?"

Well , when you put it that way....

And as for humans changing the weather - deniers shout :"Yes We Can ! "

But as for humans changing the climate in a steady, in fact unstoppable - progressive fashion - then they shout : "No We Can't !"

It is always left unclear whether this is the result of physical limits on Man's ability to control Nature (say it ain't so, Joe !) or merely reflecting the comfortable fact that ,morally, we'd never ever do such a bad, bad thing....

1939 & 2039 : does the first world CATASTROPE hold useful lessons for the second ?

WWII : first global man-made Catastrophe

God it feels so good to be able to use the words catastrophe and science in the same sentence and not get immediately strung up from the nearest tree by a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth raving atheists.

That is one of the inalienable freedoms we gained as we moved into today's post-hegemonic age.

We can now call WWII for what it truly was : a global - man-made - catastrophe.

And if current educated guesstimates are at all accurate, 100 years after this first global catastrophe caused by Man, we'll be well stuck in the next man-made catastrophe : runaway global warming meltdown.

It looks to be far far worse than even 1939-1945 was at its very worst .

The catastrophe of Modernity's very own war

So if there are any scraps of lessons we can salvage from the wreck that was Modernity's very own war, let us by all means find them and apply them, while there still is time.

A scientific cum political ideology can be spectacularly successful rhetorically if it chooses to never test its theories in the real world.

But if its Utopian scientific illusions are not in tune with the physicality and the restraints and limits of the real natural world,  it will fail catastrophically when fully challenged.

That is what Modernity discovered in early 1943,  on the steppes of Russia, in the waters of the Pacific and the organic chemistry labs of Oxford University.

In 1939-1945 ,The Rhetoric of Modernity hit The Physicality of Reality (and just guess who won ?)

Are there any limits to human efforts to control Nature ? Blue Sky scientists don't see any...

think tank "boiler room"

But today's Grounded scientist disagrees strongly. Perhaps they are simply tired of seeing this "there are no limits" line pushed endlessly by politicians, think tanks and retired scientists like some old fashioned high pressure "boiler room" scam.

I deliberately chose the metaphors of Skygods vs earthlings (rather than entitle my book and blog something like "Blue Sky Science vs Grounded Science") because I dreaded how few people would choose to read a book with an academic snoozer of a title.

Blue Skys and Sky Gods

But Skygods would indeed tend to be "high" up in the blue sky as much as earth-lings would tend to indeed be ground-ed individuals, so I hope no one is misled by my title as to my serious objectives in researching and writing the book and blog.

My wish is that you find the book a real page turner, a character-driven "narrative non fiction"  and an all around barn burner of a good read.....

200 yrs old (and I do mean OLD) : today's politics & 1st law of thermodynamics that spawned them

200 years DEAD !

Let us Honor the Dead , before we bury them. Because today's most popular political ideologies (Manchester Liberalism, Benthamite Libertarianism and Owenite Socialism) are all two hundred years old .

As is the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law of science that actually unites all them as emerging from the same frozen moment in time, despite seemingly profound surface differences.

Science has moved forward two centuries - our political ideologies haven't

Throw in a handful of less popular political ideologies ( Nazi, Fascist and Stalinism among them) and it is clear that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the idea that the Universe is one great big perpetual motion machine of mass and energy, set up for the eternal use of Man) has had a overwhelming powerful impact on human politics.

Unfortunately Science has long moved on from the attractive-to-human-Hubris derivative First Law  to the human-Humility-inducing truly fundamental Second Law of Thermodynamics , without most of humanity noticing.

Certainly the politicians and the political chattering classes have not noticed.

(A little knowledge of High School Science from 40 years before is truly a dangerous thing.)

Ideologies that are in defiance of physical realities are almost bound to be seductive politically (a sophisticated form of whistling past a graveyard) but then fail miserably, when as an elected government, it tries to anything physical out in the real world.

I do not suppose that the brain cell lesions that produce the optimist small "l" liberal and the cautious small "c" conservative are ever likely to mutate out.

But inside the big tent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we might expect all of us (global commensalists by necessity) would at least fight out our political differences within a world view that is at  sync with the universe's physical realities.

Maybe most of us still can't re-program our VCRs (remember them ?) but isn't it time we learned to re-program our political views in tune with physical reality ?

We can't continue to go through life drinking socialist Kool-Aid and dropping capitalist Acid ....

Does "Boots on the ground" Exclusivity come at cost of being a lap-dog ?

FRANKLIN-bound !

While I and David Common are both Canadian citizens and journalists, only David will be on the Canadian Coast Guard vessel  Laurier as it searches the high Arctic for the remains of the long lost Franklin expedition.

So if you want a near-exclusive look at the Franklin search, from someone is actually there, please rush to view or listen or read David's reports on the various media of the CBC , David's employer.

His near-exclusive will do wonders for his employer's ratings (and ad rates and executive bonuses).

I do not know who is paying David's way - in this particular case that is well beyond the point.

Mere bags of money alone won't get me or anyone else on a small ship already well loaded with scientists and equipment.

The government-sponsered effort clearly picked who it did want on the Laurier ---- and who it did not.

It didn't want a political blogger like Warren Kinsella to be on board, denouncing the whole exercise as an empty Conservative attempt to pretend to care about the Arctic while failing to deliver real money, once the annual tour of TV cameras was gone.

Exclusives and "actuality" sell newspapers and people who spin the news know this.

So creating pseudo-events so far away and so lacking in public access that only a chosen few can be there to act as journalistic eyewitnesses ensures you can pick friendly media ---AND --- expect them not to bite the hand that feeds them.

We, the public, feed into this cosy little sham every time we buy into big media's cant talk about "shoe leather" and "boots on the ground"  of traditional journalism versus the sitting-by-a-computer-and-phone working blogger.

But, by contrast to David Commons's on-site reporting, the CBC's Laura Payton has created a much more probing look at the politics of the search for the Franklin remains, that probably was all done by phone and email and yet, arguably, is far better journalism.

Embedded science reporters...

This "insider lap dogs" vs "outsider questioners" is how popular Science works as well.

Embargoing an exclusive look at all the background material and access to the primary authors of a major study for only for a select group of journalists is almost sure to guarantee that at least some of their editors will feature the story on the front pages.

Why not - a sure exclusive to show against all their lame competitors , who must cobble a story somehow together, hours later, and based only upon the bare article on the journal website.

Will the lucky few that get the exclusive interviews with the principles in the story be hard on those scientists' new claims ?

Not if the sponsoring University and publishing Journal's PR departments has done their homework : knowing exactly which journalists do (or do not) like claims to be able to clone human life, for example.

Boots on the ground actuality and exclusivity in science, as in Iraq , often comes at the cost of being little more than becoming the "embedded" semi-official spokesperson for the organization that granted that boon of exclusivity.

I F Stone did far better journalism by avoiding all exclusivity, even of secret brown paper envelopes, and developed his articles based exclusively on close readings of the open public record.

He simply remembered what was claimed yesterday versus the reality of today's claims and by comparing the two, blew holes the size of the Viet Nam War into the credibility of then President of the United States, LBJ....

Journal Atherosclerosis may be more dangerous than atherosclerosis itself - to your science career

STATINs vs EGGs

If you are a friend of the statin industry, enduring a successfully peer-review in Elsevier's journal Atherosclerosis must be like being beaten by marshmallows : the true peer-review, much more savage, only happens when your article emerges in the real world and in blogs.

A Dr David Spence, a friend of the statin industry and a foe of all things egg-like, is certainly finding this out in the most brutal fashion --- as are the PR flacks and flakettes at his and their employer, the University of Western Ontario, once upon a time a well regarded research centre.

Are eggs as (almost as) dangerous as cigarettes as the headlines scream (and as the PR spinners at U of Western Ont more subtly, (nudge, nudge, wink,wink) hinted ?

Most experts who looked at the study don't think so.

And these experts are not all shills for the egg industry, not be a long shot.

The scientific value in (or danger of) eating eggs is a highly contested popular science issue --- as SVE believes all scientific issues to be.

Science statements are not just peer-reviewed by six science reviewers cloaked in secrecy and then accepted by an ever grateful public, as if delivered carved on tablets of stone.

Instead the meaning of all such statements are initially constructed by the originating scientists and their friends (including the rarely-critical science cheerleaders in the science journalism trade).

Then these meanings are critiqued by ordinary members of the non-scientific public in organized groups (perhaps as patients' groups and industry groups) as well as by citizens acting alone based on their individual opinions.

The Dance of the Dialectic , revisited 

A sort of dialectic, back and forth, process follows.

Over time a temporary truce is called and a widely-accepted  meaning of that science statement is declared the temporary winner, but new conflict can and does break out at any time.

Science's uncivil War is, in fact, endless. It runs on far longer than any Cold War Warrior could ever imagine...

(FULL DISCLOSURE : I have high blood pressure, believe in the worth of statins and take them. I love eggs but frequently do not get enough exercise and endure far too much stress. I do not smoke or drink....)

MATTHEW 7:3 to Josh Floyd & Frank L. Lambert : Lighten up !

Science's uncivil War : Part XXXCCCVIII

OCEANS of GOLD !

Not a second goes by, but without some hard scientist bristling at the (mis)use of the term of entropy by someone without a PhD in , and a career, in the hard sciences. The usual depressing "science turf war while the world burns"  poop -- or so it must seem.

By way of complete contrast, not an Eternity goes by without all the world's hard scientists all ignoring the far more egregious (mis)use of the First Law of Thermodynamics in areas like geology (shout out to Sir Charles Lyell) or in economics (shout out to almost everyone with tenure).

Ignoring beams to focus on moles usually signifies a much deeper mental issue, as my old shrink Dr Jesus would say .

I would suggest this is because the First Law of Thermodynamics paints quite a rosy picture of Man's ability - particularly Scientific Man - to profitably manipulate the Universe, while the Second Law of Thermodynamics  is much less hopeful in this respect.

The Constant - conscious - touting of the First Law of Thermodynamics, by scientists, as the fundamental law of all human activity is what convinced gullible lay people all those years back to pay basic scientists to just sit about and think,  rather than to put themselves out to work as traditional ,Non-U, hands-on inventors.

Replacing the First with the Second threatens paycheques, pensions and (above all)  prestige and this why I believe the Second Law is always attacked when used as a metaphor while the first law's foundational use in, of all things, the science of human behavior cum economics is ignored .

Here is how I describe entropy to friends and foes alike : in the form of a joke.

In fact, a classic good news / bad news joke.

See, a feller walks into the bar and tells all the patrons that "There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea".

That's the good news, he says.

The patrons ask - in one voice : well what then is the bad news ?

But the silly feller just repeats what he told them.

"There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea."

Yes indeed. There is lots of gold in the sea but unlike in a miner's mother lode, it is so finely and widely dispersed over such immense distances and depths that it effectively worthless --- actually worth far less than zero .

This is because it will cost more ( money=energy) to collect it than it is worth (gold=money=energy),  when it is sold to pay back the energy used to collect it.

Now entropy as useless because dispersed energy versus concentrated and hence useful energy is not strictly a case of "order versus disorder", at least to the 70,000 or so hard scientists who object strongly every time lay people use this metaphor to describe entropy to other lay people.

But unfortunately the 7 billion rest of us find it works - as a metaphor - just fine.

Why ? I blame Mom.

A Iraqi college inside a brick building is nice and orderly, till a big smart bomb enters and blows all those bricks into a fine powder and the desert winds scatter that dust all over the Middle East.

Dispersed and useless and messy and dirty : disorderly, as my Mom would say.

Hard scientists  - like Floyd and Lambert - apparently never had a Mom - or at least not one like mine.

 My Mom had a acute sense of "disorder" being defined as me scattering (dispersing as people with PhDs say) all my clothes all over the floor,  instead of hanging them up neatly and "orderly" in one corner of my closet.

My advice to Josh Floyd and Frank Lambert ?

Get some Metamucil , loosen up, have a beer, watch some TV and think back again to whatever metaphors that their Moms did use whenever little Frankie and Joshie's rooms were messy .....

Why visiting today's Washington DC could harm evoking its atmosphere of 75 years ago

pre-war WASHINGTON

Seventy five years ago (on the eve of WWII), sleepy Washington DC, particularly during the summer legislative recess, was a small part of the greater Baltimore Maryland metropolitan area.

Today, of course, (post WWII) the reverse is true.

Even the DC climate is changed and for once I do not mean thanks to global warming - I mean via the widespread advent of air conditioning. 

DC's skies are a different - dirtier - shade of blue, thanks to millions of local cars.

I attended and still visit Martin Henry Dawson's old university of Dalhousie almost daily - but I am under no illusion that the Dalhousie of 2013 is the Dalhousie of 1913 that Dawson first attended one hundred years ago.

Londonderry Nova Scotia still shows the slag mounds of 125 years ago but last year I couldn't see the extended town site, the huge steel mill and the dense smoke that Dawson's aunt and uncle daily saw 125 years ago, no matter how hard I tried.

This year, I re-visited the same Pictou town where Dawson's father got his only schooling,  but I was under few illusions the visit would really help me get a handle on what the education of 150 years ago was like - though I am convinced it was formative in influencing Martin Henry Dawson 50 years later.

Dawson , via his parents and his older brothers, was also influenced by whatever education his Gaelic grandmother got in the high north of the Scottish Highlands.

 However I doubt even an extended stay in her tiny home village (now a tourist haven) would help me understand the relationship Highlanders felt between nature and man 175 years ago, as important as it might be in forming Dawson's own unique view of that relationship 100 years later.

History writing is not at all like journalism

History writing is not travel writing or investigative journalism : it may even be seriously harmed by attempting to do either, in the vain hopes of making your writing "more real" and "more vivid" .

Instead a historical writer must do much archival hands-on research through many different accounts contemporary to the time in question.

This, together with deep readings of the best secondary accounts written by people with a lifetime feel for that distant place and era, is the only sure way to convey the long gone atmosphere of an unique time, place, person and event of even so called "recent" history....

Todd Akins spear-carrier for fellow FULL MOON REPUBLICAN Ryan on Legitimate Rape

RYAN loves AKINS !

Please don't call Todd Akins a  FULL MOON REPUBLICAN  lunar nut case and then vote for fresh-faced Paul Ryan on Nov 6 : both support the idea of legitimate rape versus illegitimate rape when it comes to abortions ---- their record in Congress proves it.

Visuals aside, both believe in legitimate rape vs illegitimate rape

If one is a nut bar, so is the other : yes Todd Akins looks like Chuck Berry's famous caricature of a typical silver haired, inane, Southern Senator and Ryan looks like the average Catholic choir boy who has a taste for death metal and Ayn Rand but intellectually and politically they think, talk and act exactly alike.....

TEA PARTY + RED BUTTON = BOOM ! amber alert on FULL MOON Republicans

FULL MOON = Armegeddon !

After Nov 6,  Paulie-Ayn Rand, VP choice of the FULL MOON REPUBLICANS , will be only one heartbeat away from having his finger on that all-important RED BUTTON, and that is giving a lot of life-long moderate Republicans serious pause.

Enough for many to start thinking of re-registering themselves as Independents and to start thinking of sitting out this Fall's Presidential election.

LUNAR forces take over GOP

Their Grand Old Party, once the home of Lincoln and Taft, seems to have been taken over by a lot of trailer-trashing ,Tea Party boozing,  lunar-based conspiracy freaks.

Lubbock fermenting civil war ; Missouri legitimizing rape --- what on Earth ( or on the Moon ?) has happened to their GOP .........

Lubbock's FULL MOON Republican forments civil war if TEA PARTY doesn't get finger on the RED BUTTON

TEA PARTY + RED BUTTON = BOOM !

Foaming at the moon and barking at the mouth (pretty normal stuff for guests on crazy FOX TV),  Lubbock County Texas sheriff  Tom "FULL MOON" Head tried to stir up hopes of a full out civil war if his party, the TEA PARTY, doesn't win the White House and that all important RED BUTTON : ten, nine, eight, seven , six (little girl count your daisies good-bye) , five , four , three...

Tampa fears FULL MOON Republicans more than hurricane

Akins' FULL MOON Republicanism

Forget the hurricane threatening to wreck the GOP convention in Tampa ---- worry more ,America, about whether there will be a FULL MOON up in the sky whenever the Tea Party (hello Todd Akins!) wing takes over the microphone.


"Vipers inside our Nest" is how many long time Republican members are feeling about the Tea Party's takeover of the grand old party, because they put their own personal hubris and self interest against the hubris and self interest of the entire party.

The Tea Party cum Full Mooners hope the GOP's Tampa platform will formalize the distinction between "Legitimate Rapes" and "Illegitimate Rapes".

(Apparently, the feeling is that legitimate rapes are those performed against white or colored women by white, protestant , native born Americans while illegitimate rapes are all those performed by darkies and foreigners against white women.)

Todd Akins is typical of the new sort of FULL MOON Republican - one never quite knows what his synapses and neurons will lead his tongue muscles to say when the moon is full and shines across his optical nerve.

Australian PM Julia Gillard has taken to calling the conspiracy-prone right "The Lunar Right" and while I prefer "Full Mooners", we are sort of united in agreeing that conspiracy theories and being conservative-minded seem to go together.

Sort of, because I hold that all of today's conservatives are united only in defending yesterday's Modernity ----- which intellectually almost forces its adherents to blame every change and catastrophe on humans,  not Nature.

Conspiracy-prone ? Don't blame Moon , blame Modernity.

And since under the tenets of Modernity, Nature can't change, when millions of decent people sincerely believe that it is changing, the only possible explanation is that they have been deluded by secretive evil conspirators.

When the rational part of your brain sets you up to expect conspiracies under every bed and inside every watermelon, it only takes the brief flicker of faint moonlight to set the psychic  storm in motion : Tampa be afraid, very afraid....

1943 : Schindler's list versus America's non-list

wartime HOLOCAUST reports ignored by public

1993 : Fifty years after adult America first learned about the killing of millions of  European Jews - and did nothing about it - a new adult America was ready to turn a film about efforts to save some of those Jews into a massive movie hit.

Why not ?

 After all the vast bulk of those millions of film goers were under the age of 55* in 1993. In 1943, they were either tiny children or not even alive when their parents and grandparents first knew about the mass killing ---- but did nothing.

Their conscience, unlike those of their parents and grandparents, was perfectly clear and they felt free to watch the movie without severe attacks of regret and guilt.

If you were ten or older in June 1942, Schindler's List probably made you at least a bit uneasy....

But few Americans ( or Canadians or Britons, etc ) over the age of 55 in 1993 were so lucky.

They were old enough to remember the promises of Modernity before the events of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Katyn Forest brought all those certitudes into question.

Modernity suffered a mortal body blow during WWII , in 1945 in particular.

But with most people over the age of 15 in 1945 in some way implicated in supporting the values of Modernity that had led to these events, only time and the deaths it produced, were likely to see Modernity seriously challenged .

The youngest people of Modernity were just starting to leave the workforce in 1993 and so Modernity's people were finally losing their hold on the reins of power.

Reduced it but did not eliminate it : as owners, authors, columnists, scholars, voters, they still did have a considerable but ever diminishing ability to impede a new hegemony, if no longer able to direct the old hegemony.

Today in late 2012, almost 20 years after the release of the movie, anyone under 75 is likely to watch Schindler's List without the twinge of personal conscience.

Pre-war Modernity still has its billions of fans - but they are not  there at the time, so they can only admire from second hand and I believe its hold on their emotions is thus correspondingly far less strong......

* I think anyone born in 1937 or 1938 or late , ie under the age of about 7 or 8 in the Fall of 1945  is unlikely to have read the wartime daily papers or follow the nightly wartime radio news, with their steady if very low key presentation of reports detailing reported mass killings of Jews and others.

By way of pointed contrast, young Philip Roth born in early 1933 and later a famous novelist, does remember those reports very well.

Allan Schnaiberg's 1980 nightmare : pollution-producing SkyGods vs impacted-upon earthlings

SkyGod Machine in earthling Garden

In the1970s, the Canadian-born sociologist of environmentalism, Allan Schnaiberg , was the first to detect the emerging split in popular Science that this blog (also Canadian-born) is devoted to exploring ; so a man well worth honouring.


But as I have written in an earlier post in SVE, I didn't stumble upon Schnaiberg's seminal concept until I chanced upon the work of Myanna Lahsen --- thanks to the wonders of Google search.

She casually mentioned the concept of earlier-dominant production science versus the contested rise of today's impact science, as if all her readers would know what it meant.

But I didn't --- or rather I did.

It sounds an awful lot like my concept of earlier (pre-war) SkyGod scientists versus later (post-war) earthling scientists.

I eventually traced the meme back to Schnaiberg and a time period almost 40 years ago.

Long past overdue, then,  for the concept to be a commonplace and a cliche in the vocabulary of every warmist earthling environmentalist green.

Basically it can be seen as a variant of my beloved contrast between the fundamental second law of thermodynamics (matter and energy gets less and less useful to humanity (aka more and more of it becomes useless  particulate pollution and heat pollution) and the derivative first law of thermodynamics.

The sciences of half-truthfulness...

The first law says (as a half truth) that matter and energy can't ever be destroyed but only changed into alternative forms.

A half truth because converting the concentrated energy in the gasoline that powers your Piper Cub into ever so slightly heating the entire Universe does not destroy that energy --- but it certainly ruins for all time its further usefulness for humanity.

 In fact, if that waste heat in the air helps heat up the entire atmosphere --- en route to the frozen reaches of the universe --- it is likely to ruin all of humanity as well.

Similarly, impact science is fundamental science while production science is but a half truth science derived from it.

Production science produces a machine which makes lots of widgets, very cheaply and profitably - apparently the end of story.

Impact science visits that once-successful widget machine cum factory in the town of Anywhereville Quebec and discovers that the factory is throwing off deadly pollution that is ever so slowly poisoning the employees at the widget factory. As a result, they are producing less widgets per hour.

It is this, not unfair competition from the Japanese, that is the real cause of the factory owner's declining profits.

Production science is about The Machine, Impact Science is about The Machine in the Garden, with both garden and machine complexly interacting with each other in unpredictable ways.

(Hat tip to Leo Marx for re-applying his famous meme!)

Deniers cum skeptics who deny change in geology, biology, climate and physics  still only see science in the simplistic terms and certitudes of production science.

Warmists accept that changes happens and happens unpredictably and are much less sanguine about our ability to correct our own mistakes in time to prevent real harm.

Climate deniers - I steadfastly affirm in the face of zillions of scientist-bloogers who argue to the contrary - do believe in Science.

But it is the older, out-dated, hubristic SkyGod science - not current earthling science .....

Paulie-Ayn Rand : after Nov 6 , libertarian one heartbeat away from nuking the tired , poor, huddled , masses

Paulie loves poor me, he loves me not 

So one night two Micks, a Mormon And a Moslem walk into a TV studio and the Presidential Debates moderator says  " What the FRACK ever happened to an All-Protestant America !!!???"

Okay, okay,so maybe the President really was born in America and so maybe he is a church-attending member of the Trinity United Church of Christ denomination, but don't think that tongues aren't wagging in the back rooms of the Irreligious Right.

Their Chosen Party, the GOP (God's Only Party), has a Mormon and a Catholic as its ticket --- definitely a first.

But far more important is that the GOP Mick - Paulie-Ayn Rand - claims his number one influence isn't Christ but pro-atheist, pro-abortion, pro-greed, pro-selfishness AYN RAND.

Rand was about as "SkyGoddish" as one one could get.

Libertarians honor their own Trinity, just like Obama : but their Trinity consists of three American women.

Paul Ryan worships atheist pro-abortion home-wrecker Ayn Rand ,not Jesus, but GOP evangelicals don't care Diddley about Jesus : it is all about getting juicy tax breaks...

(Albeit two were foreign born - one in Russia (Ayn) and one in Canada (Isobel Patterson). The third woman, Rose Ingalls Wilder, ironically  got rich and selfish co-writing her mother's sentimental "Little House on the Prairie."

Mr Ryan, with his selfish Ayn-inspired philosophy, could be the closest a hard-core libertarian has ever got to world power.

Ryan is only a heartbeat away from the Red Button, only a heartbeat away from nuking America's tired, poor, huddled masses of wretched refuse with his harsh, selfish policies.

Like Mrs Thatcher , Ryan is death on the poor and a denier to the manor born on climate change : a wet is a warmist and a warmist is a wet , is his motto.

Earthlings are dirt, worms - not his fellow beings.

Past time then, to bring back 1964's  little Daisy Girl ad from out of the DDB vaults ....*

"Ten, nine, eight, seven......."

The real Daisy Girl was two year old Monique M Corzilius ---- and she was a redhead ---- only the effects of the very bright sunshine on the day of shooting and black and white film made her seem the iconic blond-headed kid !

The NEW Normal : barges stuck in mud on America's natural highway, the Mississippi

GOP denies this is a DROUGHT !

Caught this on CBC Radio's ever reliable AS IT HAPPENS show: a fascinating interview with a barge company owner lamenting what damage this year's drought has done to barge traffic on America's cheapest, most profitable super-highway : the immense Mississippi- Missouri-Ohio River system.


This river system is probably America's best economic advantage - or it was 

Forget trucks, planes or trains : this ole man river really totes them bales and moves them freight.

And during this summer,the 'warmist' on record,  it is hurtin' - bad......

* Tip of the hat to Mike at Australia's Watching the Deniers (cute name alert !) for maintaining his long running litany of climate change induced natural disasters under the smart title of "THE NEW NORMAL"

Geological-change deniers 1920s : "The unchangeability and predictability of the present is key to yesterday's pay cheque and tomorrow's pension"

Wegener ain't stealin' me PENSION !

Would we be having a debate at all,  about whether it is even possible for the climate to ever change, if 1960s science hadn't finally accepted Alfred Wegener's theory that continental positions can and do change ?

A whole lot of powerful - tired - old men have spent a profitable lifetime defending the idea that while the weather is always changing, the climate never does.  Can't change, in fact.

It is the Rock of Stability upon which they have built their profitable claim that they can predict the limits in the change in weather , against the supposedly historically stable regional climates.

If climate change exists, these tired old men would have to throw away their old textbooks and their present day prestige, to re-learn 70 years of 'weatherman science'.

They are too tired, too old, to do that : but not too old to decry it all as a conspiracy to ruin their well-earned retirement , to call it "junk " science.

Yesterday's  orthodox science is today's "junk" science

Almost a century ago, "earth scientists" felt at least as threatened by new ideas as many of today's weather scientists do.

They raised a lot of false arguments against Alfred Wegener's idea of continental drift (aka Tectonic Plates) but made only one statement that told "The Truth, the Whole Truth and nothing but the Truth".

The tag team of Tom and Rollin Chamberlins , pa and junior , ganged up the hardest on Wegener ----- but then gave the whole show away:

"If we believe Wegener then we must throw away everything that has been learned for 70 years and start all over again !!!!!"

Actually not just the last 70 years of learning : the idea that geology (or any subject area of science) changes unpredictably threatens the attractive idea that scientific events are "predictable by professionals for profit".

Why fund the teaching of something called geology science - why fund its research - why hire and fund its graduates ?

Where does this tree sugar off ? Where, if not for the ultimate profit of big mining and petroleum companies ?

Wegener's ideas about a dynamically uncertain and changing geological crust threatened the ability of publicly-listed corporations to get money from skeptical investors by assuring them we have experts who can predict where the ore or oil field is.

Science professionalization was so new in the 1920s that most of the senior members of each scientific discipline were the first ever persons to be paid full time for performing that discipline.

Scientific pay, prestige, pensions were all still too new and too fragile to let mere (awkward) new scientific truths destroy it all for the old gang.

Martin Henry Dawson's changeable (transformable) bacteria, Harlen Bretz's Missoula floods or Alfred Wegener's continental drift, Paul Dirac's vacuum sea are just some of the new science of the 1920s that severely threatened a scientific world view that reality and nature were fundamentally  "simple, stable and profitably predictable".

All - and more like them - were true and rejected.

Still just as true (but finally accepted)  in the late 1960s : the science hadn't changed a bit, but society - and hence scientists - had.....

On Nov 6 ,vote the SkyGod ticket : Ayn Ryan and Paul Rand

GREED is GOD !

Richard M Salsman , the well known Gauleiter of Greed, has a long article in America's most read business publication, FORBES,  advocating the Gekko mantra that "GREED IS GOD" and welcoming the GOP ticket of Ayn Ryan and Paul Rand for espousing it.

Out with religion's Gods ; In with Man as the only true SkyGod ...

Truly a balanced ticket, the Libertarian couple consists of a devout Catholic and a devout Atheist both swearing eternal fidelity to each other and to the view that Man is Superman over all the undermen-like creatures of of Nature.

No better example could exist of  the continuing strength of  pre-war views of scientific Man in nature (Man as a SkyGod) than the widespread media support for Paul Ryan (and Ayn Rand's) entry into the 2012 contest for the leadership of the free world......

The reason climate skeptic MUST see conspiracies everywhere

Tin Hats against CLIMATE CHANGE

There is a reason why all climate skeptic wear tin foil hats.

Suppose you are a DENIER cum SKEPTIC and your honest scientific beliefs teach you that wrenching changes in the Natural World are literally *impossible* and that only moderate oscillations up and down around an eternal norm are possible .

That is, you un-skeptically believe in the sort of self-flattering-to-humanity type of science that is still taught in our High Schools.

Then you must account , if only in your own mind, for why hundreds of millions of other, decent, honest, ordinary people seem so convinced that the climate is drastically and maybe even permanently changing.

To deniers, the only possible rational reason is that these decent honest people have been conned by a conspiracy, with either profit or domination the co-consprators’ true ultimate aim.

We WARMISTS must equally ask ourselves why so many ordinary people on the other side believe so readily in conspiracy wackiness – unless their scientific beliefs have left them with no alternative explanation……

Dinosaur Sex: Big Oil & Big Media exchange bodily fluids and deny link drought and climate change

Under-reported last Holocaust too !

K Kaufmann of the Desert Sun and the Green Desert blog picked up on an under-reported report from MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA that itself was about under-reporting.

It seems that America's biggest media are under-reporting the recent spate of severe drought in the USA ( surely a very big news story to their viewers and readers) and in particular, are ignoring the evidence of its connection to human-caused climate change.

But then these are the same media that under-reported the last Holocaust as well.

Digging up fossil fuel is as dead an industry as daily print newspapers, so perhaps it is only natural both industries are getting horizontally "pumped" and exchanging bodily fluids during their terminal hours in the hospice....

On Sunday ,climate skeptics worship Sir Charles Lyell : the "Deity of Denial"

DEITY of the DENIERS

Dr Pangloss is really more your average climate denying punter's cuppa, but he is a fictional character. Not that the denier cum skeptic doesn't love a lot of fiction, mind : he just calls it "science".

 No, better that the skeptics worship a real person like SIR Charles Lyell, almost a lord - sorta like Viscount Batty -  but only more dead.

Most older geologists now firmly deny that they ever believed in the Arbeit macht frei  of Lyell's  Uniformitarianism , they were all just "following orders" .

Victorian era is over for physics but not economics

However, news of their "warmist" apostasy hasn't yet reached the softer sciences, so Uniformitarianism is still the wind beneath the wings of orthodox economists and political scientists.

And denier skeptics are always much more motivated by economics and politics than by basic physical science issues.

That is because Uniformitarianism teaches that Man and Mind is all and Nature and the Physical is nothing : a mere passive, eternally-unchanging, back cloth.

The climate hasn't fundamentally changed, because it can't change, only oscillate within narrow, safe, bounds.

But whenever two or more people gather, they are planning a conspiracy and that IS a catastrophe.

Physical science can never truly animate a person who firmly believes that a major invasion by the Chinese is truly a catastrophe but a major Chinese earthquake can never be.

For your true climate deniers , the phrase "natural catastrophe" is always spelt : H u m a n  C o n s p i r a c y .

 It is always something done by humans to other humans ; never something done by Nature to humans......

The high school teachers of WWII's leaders, got THEIR high school education back in the Early Victorian era

MY high school teachers ran WWII !

It is striking how just old the leaders of WWII were: not just politicians, but also the generals, bureaucrats, CEOs, professors and editors. Anyone who was anybody was usually far older than today's leaders is in equivalent positions.

Most were born in the 1870s and 1880s and so got their last science education in the 1890s, from high school teachers who themselves got their last science education at a high school at the end of the Early Victorian era !

So : the Science of the late 1840s used to guide the world of the early 1940s.

The leaders of WWII , Modernists to the core, had a firm faith grounded on a distinct impression that the First Law of Thermodynamics and Lyell's Law of Uniformitarianism was the Alpha and Omega of scientific knowledge ----- for all time.

When your high school science teacher tells you the universe is eternally unchangeable, why bother to drop by to be posted on the latest updates in basic science . There aren't going to be any , there can't be any.

Just take a bit of time to keep up on the latest wonderful new technological offerings.

Now do the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalingrad seem more understandable ?

Climate skeptics unmoved by apostasy of Muller and Koch : its all a JEWISH bankster conspiracy

Fate of DENIER apostates

With apologies to First Corinthians 13:4 , 21st century climate denial's optimism is "never battered and never bruised" : a fresh application of "conspiracy" antiseptic neatly covers every gapping would.


Stalwart climate skeptic,Richard Muller, massively funded by  "The Deities of Denial" (the Koch Bros),  now says climate change is real ?

Warmist apostates ?

No prob, man !

Galileo Movement head mouthpiece , former mining exec Malcolm Roberts, has it all neatly spun away, like the PR flack he is : it was all a trick , all done by Jewish mirrors.

Banking families, a tightly knit cabal of them control the climate change scam for fun and profit.

The same old whine , in new bottles....

Muller and Koch got turned, like spies did all the time, back in the good old days of Reds under every bed.

Reds are still here -still inside the radio, still behind  the plots of vaccination and fluoride in the water : but now they're also inside the watermelons at the bottom of the garden.

 Run, run for your lives : They're here ! They're here !

The Panglossian NAIVETY of the climate denier cum skeptic

NAIVE denier cum skeptics

The Early-Victorian era may have ended over 150 years ago, but living fossils of its optimism, exuberance and naivety still beat on, inside the hearts of today's climate denier cum "skeptic" .Think of  today's deniers as  perfect clones of Voltaire's Doctor Pangloss (albeit as updated by Sir Charles Lyell).


In the 1830s, Lyell chose to modify Pangloss's famously naive philosophy.

It now read - in the light of Lyell's own even more optimistic theory of Uniformitarianism : "We live in the most average, the most normal, the most typical and representative of ages : our charmingly tasteful present is a roadmap back into the mists of the past and forward into those sunlit uplands of our future."

In the Lyellian cum deniers' minds , Man is endlessly progressing : ever upward, ever forward.

But the Universe ? The Universe, by way of total contrast, with all its inanimate but varying objects and all its animate, varying, beings, is in their minds but a passive backdrop.

 A crudely painted canvas drop , with only one actor allowed on stage : Man.

Reality, to a denier, is literally, "all about me". Selfish self-centeredness deified into a scientific philosophy and political ideology.

Libertarianism is the political wing of Uniformitarianism 

Libertarianism is Uniformitarianism is Libertarianism : a perfect circle, round and around a static, mildly oscillating , Universe.

Oh yes, the Universe, and our Earth : to the Lyellian denier, they do not progress  forward and upwards or backwards and downwards - in fact, do not radically move any which way.

Instead they merely oscillate, over a very narrow range, back on forth over a normal, typical, average, representative, mean : the mean of  present day values.

Local, temporary volcano up, local, temporary earthquake down neatly balancing each other : the perfect proof of the First law of Thermodynamics.

That Law, crudely and incorrectly stated, holds that Matter and Energy can not be created or destroyed but merely (and usefully for Man) changed into different forms of themselves, back and forth ; forever and ever Amen.

The early Victorian optimists and their 21st century kinfolk  viewed this law - erroneously - as the fundamental law of the universe.

But don't blame them too much ; instead blame our High School science teachers from the 19th , 20th and 21st century  for teaching that to them.

The true fundamental law of the universe, the one from which the First law of Thermodynamics is derived , is the Second law of Thermodynamics.

(First and Second refers to the time of their formulations : the First was formulated and popularized before the Second was realized to be the truly important one.)

The Second (in simple english) states that , statistically, all energy and matter becomes less and less useful to humanity with each use and eventually all energy and matter and life will be frozen dead at a temperature very near Absolute Zero.

So, in fact, the Universe and Life does have a direction and is constantly changing and that direction is more or less steadily downhill, albeit very slowly.

So, some of the heat from every time we burn even a small lump of coal eventually escapes the world's atmosphere and winds up heating, ever so ineffectually, some distant corner of the frozen Universe.

Probe a climate change denier skeptic or climate change believer warmist and you will find the concept of a steadily changing universe is their dividing line : both are people of either the First or the Second law.....

Tony Abbott would deny his OWN EYESIGHT --- if it made him Prime Minister

Denying will bite, Tony !

On the assumption that Australian Libertarian Party leader Tony Abbott can and does read, today's Australian newspapers couldn't have been pleasant reading. (Cue the inside story.)

"Naked ambition versus scientific facts, part XXCLV"

AUDIO : sound of newspapers being thrown angrily away...

VOICE IN HIS HEAD : Best soldier on ,Tony, just ignore your  eyesight, got to focus on that prize in your mind's eye : that dream of a lifetime.

TONY : Becoming Prime Minister !!!
(Not really quite sure what I'll do when I get there, but "the joy is in the dreaming" , as my priest always says.)

VOICE : Bad, bad newspapers ; spoiling the Nasty Abbott's day like that . (Cue : Aussie sharks washing up on English Channel beaches ; tropical fishes ending up off Tassie.)

VOICE : And blaming it all on global warming : the cheek !

TONY : Rupert - bloody -Murdoch and his warmist claptrap !
Must-remember-mummie : the prize-the prize.

FADE TO BLACK.....

Hubris vs Science : tired of denying the Holocaust and Climate Change - why not deny DNA , ego-prone Republican DAs do it all the time

DNA-DENYING DAs

Whenever hard facts hit the swollen egos of non-endowed males, guess what always loses ?


Yep, the truth . But when swollen ego denies DNA and innocent men fry, its way beyond a laughing matter about "Truth is from Venus and Egos are from Mars."

The Chair is warmism going too far.

Why can't some men just can never admit they are wrong and say they are sorry ? Poor toilet training ? Dropped on their head while a mere child ? Forced to eat all their peas - or spinach ? Whatever.

No surprise to find that some of the worst offenders are Republicans, who spend their off hours away from denying DNA t denying climate science.

Why do Republicans hate Science so ? Do your think Chris Mooney is on the money about the reason for their animus against logic, reason and rationality ?

I cam across this story off of BYLINER and Conor Friedersdoff's list of "The Top 101 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories of the Year" .

Deep digging keeps some papers alive...

A deep,deep story on "DNA-Denying-DAs" by the NY TIMES's Andrew Martin .

Read it and weep. And rage.

With deep-digging stories like these, newspapers aren't dead yet - even if the Halifax METRO is......

Canadian book publishing as DEAD as Cdn newspapers and record labels : all hail Paula Todd !

Did SHE buy the e-book?

Told you so !  ("I have seen the Future and it is Paula Todd") . Now Paula  has just nailed the final silver stake into the heart of traditional Canadian book publishing.

Paula had a scoop that won't be a scoop much longer and couldn't wait until a traditional book publisher ambled their amiable way to a publication date.

So she self-published it herself, as an e-book, ( thus becoming persona non grata to Canadian publishers) and then her book ended up topping Amazon's Kindle non-fiction lists !

They thought the song would last forever ; they were wrong

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone , give the dog a juicy big bone : bring out the pine box, let's get the job done.....

The only DEAD newspaper is a FEXLESS newspaper : the Halifax Metro ignores Merkel's Halifax visit !

LAMEST daily ever ?

How lame must a daily newspaper be to ignore a well-publicized  major news story in its own backyard ? After all aren't the news-o-saurs always reminding us bloggers that we only comment on the hard news that their fearless reporters dig up ?

But there it was , for all the world to see , the Halifax METRO exposing its inner failings as shamelessly as any ex-porn star seeking air time for their bio-pic.

Chancellor Merkel - de facto leader of the Euro currency group currently undergoing a meltdown of global depression proportions : by any definition, her every doings are eminently a top news subject.

Making probably her only ever visit to your medium sized backwater city.

So, on your front page the next day, a big splash story on Merkel and a nice photograph.

Great !  Well done !

Except : both were pulled off the wire from the Canadian Press agency, ie filed by somebody else.

In your own home town --- your rare chance within the world-wide METRO news organization to see a Halifax story go worldwide - handed over to strangers, on a platter.

Shameful ! Disgusting ! Lazy ! Slack-assed !

I have said it before : 97% of "news" originates when someone wants reportage on an event, for their own purposes, and details the story to all the press.

The only "digging up" usually done consists in finding one or two unique tidbits, to make your story stand out from the rest of your competitors.

Like the Halifax METRO staffers, I too live in Halifax.

I offer up my "blogged" articles about Merkel's education versus Harper's education here, here, here and here.

They, I think, help explain these fellow conservatives wildly varying stances on on climate change :  top warmist vs arch denier.

I think they provided a lot more "hard news" on Merkel's  freelance visit to a climate change project in Halifax, than whatever this sad-assed sorry excuse of a daily newspaper did.

Here's a  real hard news fact : the local alternative newspaper THE COAST generates more words of local reporting in a once a week publication than the Halifax METRO does in a week of daily reporting. How lame is that ?

"The only GOOD newspaper, is a DEAD newspaper...." 

Well ,that is not my saying or my belief - but at times like this, I am sorely tempted to subscribe to it .....

"You're an absolute disgrace (A. "Nasty") Abbott", says indie MP in blistering attack video

Tony -arsing about

Watching the Deniers has the link to the story and video and it is priceless !

Enjoy watching Indie MP for New England, Australia (Tony Windsor)  let go a blast at Tony Abbott, leader of the Libertarian-Liberals and leader of Australia's Official Opposition.

Warning : the un-parliamentary term ," arse ", was used in reference to the Honourable Abbott.

Windsor claimed that during the long drawn-out negotiations after the last election produced a hung parliament, Abbott promised that his carbon-reducing policies would have different mechanisms but would be no different in effect than those of the now-ruling Labour-Green government.

Abbott willing to go "warmist" even, if only it would make him PM....

That Abbott always said he would say and do anything warmist, just as long as he could be PM, please, please, please.

But his ambition was sooo very naked , none of the Indies in the Canberra House trusted Abbott's claim that he really would bring in some form of carbon reducing measure, if made PM.....

Reviving "WWII Spirit" will harm, not help Climate Change Abatement -Alex Field

WWII was PLANE expensive

Review: "Impact of WWII on US Productivity Growth". Now Alexander J Field never brought up Climate Change at all in this 2008 article debunking/debating the reputed rise in American productivity thrown off by WWII military spending. But he probably won't disagree with the general drift of our headline.


Where to begin ? Well, you all know - and probably believe - the yarn:

"The Great Depression left the American industrial ship dead in the water for 12 years, but then WWII's magnificent American production boom not only revived it but also created a postwar global boom economy, that sailed on at full speed for almost 35 straight years, until the oil and inflation shock of late 1973."

This myth is so self-flattering to America that no amount of careful research among the facts is likely going to deflate it --- though God Knows, any number of economic historians have tried.

First up were the historians who pointed out that in terms of absolute production of  just about anything and everything, from oil to wheat to weapons, America was first in class.

But in terms of a relative rise in production, from start of war to end, the USA didn't do well at all - not even needing to break a sweat, to produce what it did.

By contrast, many other nations mobilized far more of their human capabilities during WWII - and under truly terrible war time conditions that most American factory owners only read about.

Now Alex Field is looking at the period of the Great Depression versus the period of the War years with a more sceptical gaze : and by pure instinct, not by anything I would call systematic study, I am already behind his thesis 110%.

As part of my research on the wartime penicillin story, I had dipped many times into other areas of supposed "wartime" scientific  breakthroughs.

WWII no scientific breakout zone...

Time and time again, I had seen that the heavy lifting had already been done, as far back as the late days of WWI in some cases, and all that WWII had provided was a "at-almost-any-price" market for a product that was (a) too expensive in peacetime to build factories around and (b) to sell profitably in any case ---  if it was made.

I was also aware - from business magazines like Fortune and any number of consumer magazines, that new technology and new products hardly stood still during the Depression : the poor was very poor indeed but lots of people sailed through the decade doing just fine, thank you.

Field's thesis is that war gives a "double shock" .

First disrupting normal activities that are slowly but steadily improving technology efficiencies. Now all resources must be re-trained, on the job, posthaste, into a few narrow military oriented activities .

Then  just as rapidly, they are all pushed back on Civvy Street again where few of these hastily half-learned wartime lessons really have much application.

In some cases, vast - and I do mean too big to be Hollywood credible vast - munitions plants were built and then closed, after only a month or two of production.

How useful is that sort of "hurry up and wait" waste going to be in peacetime ?

Yes, sewing machine factories were indeed making shell casings in six months but the managers and workers were too busy trying to learn new techniques, read and obey hundreds of new government regulations, deal with shortages and delays in raw materials to even think of improving efficiencies.

Productivity was well below what any government arsenal was capable of, but something was better than nothing in the government eyes and it paid top price for second rate productivity.

By March 1945 the sewing plant probably was making shell casings at a commendable level of efficiency - learned day by day over four long years - when - bang - no more orders : learn to make sewing machines again, and PS , you won't get any new machine tools or a bigger mild steel quota for about 12 months....

Good night - and good luck !

A crash - command - program to avert further climate warming and reverse it is better than nothing (a new variant  on "or would you prefer Hitler rather than FDR ran things ?") but it will be very expensive and make lots of big mistakes.

Better for all of us, if every government at every level in every nation encouraged pilot projects in all areas of energy use reduction and substitution and let the winners spread themselves globally, on their own.

Crash programs have their uses in absolutely dire circumstances but only when the populace is in a speed-at-any-cost mood - and that isn't happening now and can't be simply reved up by government spin-masters.

Even Germany, Britain, Japan and Russia delayed raising their output to miracle levels until their backs were literally up against
wall ,at the eleventh hour : even a 'life or death war' wasn't enough to focus their efforts until then.

And it will be the same with us , I am afraid, on the disaster of global warming....