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Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland.
Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move forwards and backwards, and they can turn left and right. But they have no sense of up or down. The very idea of a tree, or a well, or a mountain makes no sense to them because they lack the concepts and experiences of height and depth. They cannot imagine, let alone describe, objects familiar to us.
In this two-dimensional world, the closest scientists can come to comprehending a third dimension are the baffling gaps in measurements that register on their most sophisticated equipment. They sense the shadows cast by a larger universe outside Flatland. The best brains infer that there must be more to the universe than can be observed but they have no way of knowing what it is they don’t know.
This sense of the the unknowable, the ineffable has been with humans since our earliest ancestors became self-conscious. They inhabited a world of immediate, cataclysmic events – storms, droughts, volcanoes and earthquakes – caused by forces they could not explain. But they also lived with a larger, permanent wonder at the mysteries of nature itself: the change from day to night, and the cycle of the seasons; the pin-pricks of light in the night sky, and their continual movement; the rising and falling of the seas; and the inevitability of life and death.
Perhaps not surprisingly, our ancestors tended to attribute common cause to these mysterious events, whether of the catastrophic or the cyclical variety, whether of chaos or order. They ascribed them to another world or dimension – to the spiritual realm, to the divine.
Paradox and mystery
Science has sought to shrink the realm of the inexplicable. We now understand – at least approximately – the laws of nature that govern the weather and catastrophic events like an earthquake. Telescopes and rocket-ships have also allowed us to probe deeper into the heavens to make a little more sense of the universe outside our tiny corner of it.
But the more we investigate the universe the more rigid appear the limits to our knowledge. Like the shape-people of Flatland, our ability to understand is constrained by the dimensions we can observe and experience: in our case, the three dimensions of space and the additional one of time. Influential “string theory” posits another six dimensions, though we would be unlikely to ever sense them in any more detail than the shadows almost-detected by the scientists of Flatland.
The deeper we peer into the big universe of the night sky and our cosmic past, and the deeper we peer into the small universe inside the atom and our personal past, the greater the sense of mystery and wonder.
At the sub-atomic level, the normal laws of physics break down. Quantum mechanics is a best-guess attempt to explain the mysteries of movement of the tiniest particles we can observe, which appear to be operating, at least in part, in a dimension we cannot observe directly.
And most cosmologists, looking outwards rather inwards, have long known that there are questions we are unlikely ever to answer: not least what exists outside our universe – or expressed another way, what existed before the Big Bang. For some time, dark matter and black holes have baffled the best minds. This month scientists conceded to the New York Times that there are forms of matter and energy unknown to science but which can be inferred because they disrupt the known laws of physics.
Inside and outside the atom, our world is full of paradox and mystery.
Breaking News: Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle is being influenced by forms of matter and energy that are not yet known to science but which may nevertheless affect the nature and evolution of the universe. https://t.co/8cwwhlPCOe
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 7, 2021
Conceit and humility
Despite our science-venerating culture, we have arrived at a similar moment to our forebears, who gazed at the night sky in awe. We have been forced to acknowledge the boundaries of knowledge.
There is a difference, however. Our ancestors feared the unknowable, and therefore preferred to show caution and humility in the face of what could not be understood. They treated the ineffable with respect and reverence. Our culture encourages precisely the opposite approach. We show only conceit and arrogance. We seek to defeat, ignore or trivialise that which we cannot explain or understand.
The greatest scientists do not make this mistake. As an avid viewer of science programmes like the BBC’s Horizon, I am always struck by the number of cosmologists who openly speak of their religious belief. Carl Sagan, the most famous cosmologist, never lost his sense of awestruck wonder as he examined the universe. Outside the lab, his was not the language of hard, cold, calculating science. He described the universe in the language of poetry. He understood the necessary limits of science. Rather than being threatened by the universe’s mysteries and paradoxes, he celebrated them.
When in 1990, for example, space probe Voyager 1 showed us for the first time our planet from 6 billion km away, Sagan did not mistake himself or his fellow NASA scientists for gods. He saw “a pale blue dot” and marvelled at a planet reduced to a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. Humility was his response to the vast scale of the universe, our fleeting place within it, and our struggle to grapple with “the great enveloping cosmic dark”.
Mind and matter
Sadly, Sagan’s approach is not the one that dominates the western tradition. All too often, we behave as if we are gods. Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily appropriated by the corrupt, by the vain, by those who seek power over others, by those who worship money.
Until relatively recently, science, philosophy and theology sought to investigate the same mysteries and answer the same existential questions. Through much of history, they were seen as complementary, not in competition. Abbott, remember, was a mathematician and theologian, and Flatland was his attempt to explain the nature of faith. Similarly, the man who has perhaps most shaped the paradigm within which much western science still operates was a French philosopher using the scientific methods of the time to prove the existence of God.
Today, Rene Descartes is best remembered for his famous – if rarely understood – dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Four hundred years ago, he believed he could prove God’s existence through his argument that mind and matter are separate. Just as human bodies were distinct from souls, so God was separate and distinct from humans. Descartes believed knowledge was innate, and therefore our idea of a perfect being, of God, could only derive from something that was perfect and objectively real outside us.
Weak and self-serving as many of his arguments sound today, Descartes’ lasting ideological influence on western science was profound. Not least so-called Cartesian dualism – the treatment of mind and matter as separate realms – has encouraged and perpetuated a mechanistic view of the world around us.
We can briefly grasp how strong the continuing grip of his thinking is on us when we are confronted with more ancient cultures that have resisted the west’s extreme rationalist discourse – in part, we should note, because they were exposed to it in hostile, oppressive ways that served only to alienate them from the western canon.
Hearing a Native American or an Australian Aboriginal speak of the sacred significance of a river or a rock – or about their ancestors – is to become suddenly aware of how alien their thinking sounds to our “modern” ears. It is the moment when we are likely to respond in one of two ways: either to smirk internally at their childish ignorance, or to gulp at a wisdom that seems to fill a yawning emptiness in our own lives.
Science and power
Descartes’ legacy – a dualism that assumes separation between soul and body, mind and matter – has in many ways proved a poisonous one for western societies. An impoverished, mechanistic worldview treats both the planet and our bodies primarily as material objects: one a plaything for our greed, the other a canvas for our insecurities.
The British scientist James Lovelock who helped model conditions on Mars for NASA so it would have a better idea how to build the first probes to land there, is still ridiculed for the Gaia hypothesis he developed in the 1970s. He understood that our planet was best not viewed as a very large lump of rock with life-forms living on it, though distinct from it. Rather Earth was as a complete, endlessly complex, delicately balanced living entity. Over billions of years, life had grown more sophisticated, but each species, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was vital to the whole, maintaining a harmony that sustained the diversity.
Few listened to Lovelock. Our god-complex got the better of us. And now, as the bees and other insects disappear, everything he warned of decades ago seems far more urgent. Through our arrogance, we are destroying the conditions for advanced life. If we don’t stop soon, the planet will dispose of us and return to an earlier stage of its evolution. It will begin again, without us, as simple flora and microbes once again begin recreating gradually – measured in aeons – the conditions favourable to higher life forms.
But the abusive, mechanistic relationship we have with our planet is mirrored by the one we have with our bodies and our health. Dualism has encouraged us to think of our bodies as fleshy vehicles, which like the metal ones need regular outside intervention, from a service to a respray or an upgrade. The pandemic has only served to underscore these unwholesome tendencies.
In part, the medical establishment, like all establishments, has been corrupted by the desire for power and enrichment. Science is not some pristine discipline, free from real-world pressures. Scientists need funding for research, they have mortgages to pay, and they crave status and career advancement like everyone else.
Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”
He added: “The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”
Things like this raise an obvious question we have been ignoring at our peril:
How do we trust an entirely commercially driven world in which a small group of people who constantly enrich themselves also control the information universe the rest of us inhabit?
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 8, 2021
Doctors and clerics
But in some ways Abbasi is too generous. Scientists haven’t only corrupted science by prioritising their personal, political and commercial interests. Science itself is shaped and swayed by the ideological assumptions of scientists and the wider societies to which they belong. For centuries, Descartes’ dualism has provided the lens through which scientists have often developed and justified medical treatments and procedures. Medicine has its fashions too, even if they tend to be longer-lived – and more dangerous – than the ones of the clothing industry.
In fact, there were self-interested reasons why Descartes’s dualism was so appealing to the scientific and medical community four centuries ago. His mind-matter division carved out a space for science free from clerical interference. Doctors could now claim an authority over our bodies separate from that claimed by the Church over our souls.
But the mechanistic view of health has been hard to shake off, even as scientific understanding – and exposure to non-western medical traditions – should have made it seem ever less credible. Cartesian dualism reigns to this day, seen in the supposedly strict separation of physical and mental health. To treat the mind and body as indivisible, as two sides of the same coin, is to risk being accused of quackery. “Holistic” medicine still struggles to be taken seriously.
Faced with a fear-inducing pandemic, the medical establishment has inevitably reverted even more strongly to type. The virus has been viewed through a single lens: as an invader seeking to overwhelm our defences, while we are seen as vulnerable patients in desperate need of an extra battalion of soldiers who can help us to fight it off. With this as the dominant framework, it has fallen to Big Pharma – the medical corporations with the greatest firepower – to ride to our rescue.
Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course. They will help save lives among the most vulnerable. But the reliance on vaccines, to the exclusion of everything else, is a sign that once again we are being lured back to viewing our bodies as machines. We are being told by the medical establishment we can ride out this war with some armour-plating from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. We can all be Robocop in the battle against Covid-19.
Pfizer claims people will likely need a third dose of its Covid-19 vaccine within six to 12 months of receiving the first two doses.
CEO Albert Bourla says, from then on, it is also possible that people may require annual booster shots. pic.twitter.com/Ki9nVLVg7v
— BFM News (@NewsBFM) April 17, 2021
But there are others ways to view health than as an expensive, resource-depleting technological battle against virus-warriors. Where is the focus on improving the ever-more nutrient-deficient, processed, pesticide-laden, and sugar and chemical-rich diets most of us consume? How do we address the plague of stress and anxiety we all endure in a competitive, digitally connected, no-rest world stripped of all spiritual meaning? What do we do about the cosseted lifestyles we prefer, where exertion is a lifestyle choice renamed as exercise rather than integral to our working day, and where regular exposure to sunshine, outside of a beach vacation, is all but impossible in our office-bound schedules?
Fear and quick-fixes
For much of human history, our chief concern was the fight for survival – against animals and other humans, against the elements, against natural disasters. Technological developments proved invaluable in making our lives safer and easier, whether it was flint axes and domesticated animals, wheels and combustion engines, medicines and mass communications. Our brains now seem hardwired to look to technological innovation to address even the smallest inconvenience, to allay even our wildest fears.
So, of course, we have invested our hopes, and sacrificed our economies, in finding a technological fix to the pandemic. But does this exclusive fixation on technology to solve the current health crisis not have a parallel with the similar, quick-fix technological remedies we keep seeking for the many ecological crises we have created?
Whitest-ever paint could help cool heating Earth, study shows https://t.co/3EjU6feKh6
— The Guardian (@guardian) April 15, 2021
Global warming? We can create an even whiter paint to reflect back the sun’s heat. Plastics in every corner of our oceans? We can build giant vacuum-cleaners that will suck it all out. Vanishing bee populations? We can invent pollinator drones to take their place. A dying planet? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will fly millions of us to space colonies.
Were we not so technology obsessed, were we not so greedy, were we not so terrified of insecurity and death, if we did not see our bodies and minds as separate, and humans as separate from everything else, we might pause to ponder whether our approach is not a little misguided.
Science and technology can be wonderful things. They can advance our knowledge of ourselves and the world we inhabit. But they need to be conducted with a sense of humility we increasingly seem incapable of. We are not conquerors of our bodies, or the planet, or the universe – and if we imagine we are, we will soon find out that the battle we are waging is one we can never hope to win.
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I would like to see humanity use gene drives to liquidate mosquitos in toto.
Crikey! Looks like some of the cosmopolitan set are coming out of the fog! Can they also be cured of the puerile mob protest rituals?
Big Pharma may adopt some metaphysical pose in their media relations, but their intentions are very simple. It’s routine market extension, Coke for Breakfast applied to their biologic snake oil. If KO bribed their regulators more, they could have government agencies colluding to force you to drink it.
Descartes got it backwards. I AM therefore I think.
Re our lack of religious awe in our society: Read Moby Dick.
There is no evolution of Universe. Every process in universe is cyclical.
Black holes are Universe Garbage collection system. They have a volume limit and when that is achieved the big bang occurs.
And human brain will never understand concept of infinity.
That is why humans have only one explanation GOD.
There is only one force in Universe and that is gravity.
By force of gravity the mass in black hole grows. When gravity inside the mass reaches certain level part of matter inside mass changes into energy and Black hole explodes. the energy is heat energy.
When heat energy reaches the outskirt of universe where temperature is kelvin zero it changes back into mater. This makes cosmic dust which is pulled back to the center of universe.
Are mosquitos food for creatures we do like?
Scientists, for the most part, abandoned dualism a long time ago. Most of our officially approved state scientists are now materialists, with no belief in the soul, only the brain. Atheism is strictly enforced and those who have a strong Faith are often ridiculed and even forced out of programs for not acting against their conscious. My understanding is that many medical schools in the US require students to perform abortions. Refusal based on religious beliefs is not permitted.
Here is a way out of science religion:
https://tinyurl.com/4kcx3d86
This article is a very thoughtful and cogent procession of logic. I wasn’t sure where it was going and it seemed to shift directions as it was read, but it’s conclusions are undeniable.
This pandemic has seen the hard test of materialistic western medicine that many thought would take a lot more time to reach.
It always seemed to me that the big test would be when governments were forced to waste all their resources with their promises of free health care. The average citizen unconsciously assumes that the promise implies living forever through “free health”.
Instead, by the grace of God, governments decided to waste several years of the economic functions of their subjects in this headlong effort to save a few vulnerable people temporarily from this rather mild novel flu virus.
Either way, it was doomed to failure and it has failed. Like all religious scientism, the medical experts are treading water and shifting gears as their lockdowns and vaccines backfire on them.
Gilbert Ryle, lecturer in philosophy at Oxford, referred in his essay, Descartes’ Myth, to mind-body dualism as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine,” and explained it as being a logical category mistake in that it assumed mind and body are both of one, compatible logical type. The material and the mental are in two different realms, yet inseparable in the context of the being.
The arrogance of science evidenced by the official reaction to COVID is a near total absence of working with the body’s natural immune response; rather than telling people to eat healthier and take more exercise outdoors, and do things that bolster mental well being (like being with family and friends), the official response has been to tell people hunker down, mostly indoors, stay physically away from others, and pray to the gods of science for a magical vaccine that will defeat this scourge virus.
Seriously, are we progressed much beyond the old medical practise of bleeding patients to restore the balance of the humours in the circulatory system? Well, in some ways we are; we’ve figured out how to seriously monetise quackery on a mass scale.
Why work with peoples’ natural immune response at a far lower social and monetary cost, or use inexpensive off-the-shelf therapeutics for active cases, when we can instead wring billions out of them by reordering every aspect of their physical lives while preying on their fragile mental state to pump them full of expensive experimental therapeutics and making them dependent on those for the balance of their lives?
Umm.. it began slightly earlier – in both your homeland and mine.
Governments, notably, are largely inconsequential things in otherwise generally just societies, such as those established by organic populations sharing historic common cause and purpose.
They run themselves, with little to gain and little to take from the common good, excepting the enhanced ego of a provincial burgermeister, proudly wrapped in his sash of nominal office.
I think that as schemes to assemble duplicitous, byzantine systems of supposed checks and balances became normalized, generally under the direction of those who well intend, in advance, to take advantage of their own creation, we have entirely lost awareness of the fact that there is actually no ‘system’ that offers just governance to an unjust or fractious people.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/13/what-would-happen-if-we-eliminated-the-worlds-mosquitoes/
While I agree with Cook, the problem is deeper than reactions from medical ‘experts’ and the failure of their policies. There is a deliberate deception behind the whole COVID affair and an intentional evil that drives it. Most people cannot conceive of the depth of evil that would drive such a deception. The following link to an essay by Ed Curtin expresses this very well.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/denying-demonic/5742916
We are being deliberately and intentionally killed and enslaved. It remains to be seen what will survive.
How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp. – Thomas Huxley
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. – J. B. S. Haldane
The idea of painting roofs white to increase urban albedo has been around for decades, but ALWAYS dismissed peremptorily by the ‘experts’. Nowsome of them apparently think it’s a good idea!! I often waver on the edge of believing that the powers that be MUST be alien reptiles bent on destroying the planet’s habitability for our species, because of the unceasing malignant stupidity and cupidity of global ruling elites, particularly in the West.
There are many elements of the CoViD 19 operation that are beyond belief-or would be if one had not seen similarly wicked insanity over and over again.
The villainous lying about the effectiveness of HCQ and ivermectin to stop the virus dead in its tracks before it causes disease is stupefying, as is the 100% connivance of the entire Western fakestream media cancer in the operation. The targeting of AstraZeneca vaccine, when the mRNA ‘vaccines’ have almost exactly similar coagulopathy side-effects reported, and considerably more when portal and splanchic venous thromboses are concerned (just as nassty as cerebral venous thromboses), is plainly designed to force people onto the experimental mRNA injections.
The total disappearance of ‘flu deaths, the role of PEG and TEG nanoparticle ‘adjuvants’, the bizarre lies concerning the origin of the virus, the total suppression of any mention of the vast US biowarfare establishment and its Gain of Function operations, or of the forced closure of AMRIID for several months in mid 2019 when its waste sterilization system failed, the clear earlier infections with the virus months before Wuhan, etc, etc, etc. All lies piles on half-truths, hypocrisy, fear and hate-mongering and all fomented and pushed by a fakestream media so utterly Evil in its 100% Groupthink and service to power as to make Streicher look a saint. Would that there could be Nuremberg trials after this is over-if anyone is left. We’d soon run out of stout hempen rope, I fear.
Being inside ie lockdown, is precisely where the virus thrives. Outside in the fresh air and sunlight, it hardly ever infects. You’d think that they want the bloody thing to spread as far and wide as possible.
Don’t listen to MEH whatsit. Probably trying to insert GMO mosquitos into The Narrative, in prepration for their “first ever release” in Florida next season. You know, like “pandemic”? Did Baal Gates not warn us plentiful times, when his press was punting this, that and the other pandemic, from measles to stubbed toes and hurt feelings? Why else insert that way-out phrase into a conversation about gods and test tubes…..oh, I see… Anyway:
Only the other day, many blamed GMO mosquitos for the Zika-encephalitis ‘epidemic’ in Brazil, remember? Personally, I think it was that “cocktail of seven” vaccines Baal Gates bestowed upon his humble guinnae servants, even at 7 months pregnant, but who am I to say?
Just like this new-fangled covidiotery, that experimental, unlicenced, unproven genetic marker masquerading as a vaccine, just like that “bioplatform” inserts into your body a shard of genetic material, there to be coded and decoded by your DNA and mytochondria, so can a mosquito inject you with foreign RNA or DNA. With one caveat:
Any and all genetic material thus carried by mosquitos, either manifest as infection, or nothing. Most of us survive all but the most serious of mosquito-borne pathogens; our species has adapted.
The RNA carried by the covidiocines, those EXPERIMENTAL vaccine-like products, use genomes “invented” in laboratories, coding for proteins we, as species, have NOT adapted to.
Will a GMO mosquito, which (by definition) contain genomes invented in labs, inject us with those modified and alien genes? Maybe not, but there is precedent:
A foundational premise upon which Monsanto was granted permission to grow their corn in open air, was the assurance that genes cannot transfer accros species, thus the modified genes in the corn will remain out of Nature. This has been proven disastrously wrong, cross-species transfer of genetics happen, and the Bt-gene, for example, has been found in weeds growing next to Monsanto’s GMO Frankencorn. Also, traditional, “heritage” cultivars have all but been eradicated by crosspolination from the vast GMO fields. Now imagine that mosquito’s “infertility gene”, which does survive in small numbers, spreading through your favourite butterflies, ants, termites, bees!
So, as much as I hate mosquitos, I distrust GMO solutions to such simple problems.
And while mosquitos might not be a “keystone” part of anyone’s diet, many frogs and bats appreciate the protein-glucose boost of a mosquito bloated with fresh blood, what with breeding season and all…
The delicious irony of the current covidiocy is that folks who are die-hard “Never GMO” types who would never let GMO corn or beef pass their lips are clamoring to get their mRNA vaccines.
From a book I wrote some years ago.
“Do you know the greatest disaster to befall the pharmaceutical industry?
Smallpox. By eradicating Smallpox, from the population, they wiped out a huge potential market and profit.
In Sri Lanka, in 1948, there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths. They introduced widespread DDT use. Malaria fell to just 17 cases and zero deaths in 1963. From 2.8 million down to 17. After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases returned to 2.5 million in 1968 and in 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today.
Now there are many arguments and theories why DDT was discontinued and is not sprayed widely, but it is clearly a matter of fact that spending on anti-malarial drugs for 17 people is far, far less than spending on the anti-malarial drugs for 2.5 million people. Extrapolate those numbers world wide and you would go from 40 million sufferers per year down to about 300 cases, hardly enough to base an industry on the manufacture of anti-malarial medicines.
The only major anti-DDT campaign was based on the story that the eggshells of wild birds in North America were getting thinner because of the toxicity of DDT. As the Americans say ‘You are shitting me.’ The Brits are more polite, ‘You are kidding, right?’
Thirty nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, seven hundred people suffering each year because some bloody bird has a thin egg shell.
So even if the capability is there to completely eradicate the malarial parasite, the will is unlikely to be forthcoming, across all the countries involved. ”
Just like this idiot Gates idea to spill million tonnes of reflective dust into the atmosphere.
If they really thought about it one could paint say three square miles in the Sahara, the Mojave, and the Australian outback and achieve the same effect for far less cost and with no great side effects.
I have not done the math but I would estimate that one could easily offset all the heat generated by fossil fuel (a silly name but you know what I mean) by reflecting the heat from areas in the deserts.
Of course this would affect the heating and air flows, but it would not be significant in my estimation.
Similarly the government’s insistence on electrical cars and energy, merely increases the total heat generated for not only do you have the heat generated in the creation of current you also have the losses in transmission and the heat is then finally dissipated in the motors to create movement.
Two minutes thought about the “Greenhouse Effect” makes it clear that it is total nonsense.
If even one honest scientist was allowed to stand up and give a ten minute presentation to the populace, they would hang the rest of the “scientists” from lamp-posts.
Amazing and believable theory and so well explained.
So now the greenhouse effect doesn’t even exist right? Good luck on finding any scientist on either side of the climate debate who will agree with you on that, a challenge for you, find one.
I’m in my early 60’s but even we oldies can teach the young some new stuff. I went to the Forbes website and within a minute I was blocked as I use Opera with an AD blocker, and the site wanted me to disable the AD blocker.
To begin, I clicked on “switch off AD blocker” on their web page a few times and it brought back the text. But having to do this got tedious.
I then went to the address bar and stopped the page from refreshing automatically and read the whole article without any problem.
Now no need to prostrate or bow, just a simple thanks will do.
Thank you very much. I do have a true earth shaking theory about Global warming that you will enjoy. I am waiting for article about Global warming where I can publish it as a comment.
I do believe that everybody reading it will be shocked.
I appreciate him linking the article. Read it, and generally disagree with it. It also had more caveats than the snippet might indicate. Don’t like irreversible miracles from glib hasty types (article author) who strike me as far too sure of themselves. Bad salesman vibe.
Then there’s Willy Gates the Antichrist.
An excellent article. Here in Britain, the mechanistic view of the body has reached lunatic levels. During the 90s, the brain was deemed a defenceless lump of jelly, totally at risk from aggressive hormones randomly attacking it. Few suggested that the brain controls many of these hormones.
Now, poor mental health can be provoked by just about anything. A Facebook post. An image. A stranger smiling at you. Covid lunacy reigns, but hey, it’s big money.
“Conservation” is unnecessary micro management and empty gestures in the name of making money. It’s madness.
If you truly subscribe to Lovelock’s thesis you would oppose the unsustainable importation of around 700,000 mostly third world people each year into the UK which is destroying the English countryside because of housing construction.
You already have an estimated 10 million (nearly two Scotlands) Kamran Abbasis from slums and villages in Jamaica, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
The UK can’t even feed itself since half the food is imported. For fruits and vegetables this is over 80%. The country would turn Mad Max if supply chains completely broke down or were placed under third world managers.
Equally if Attenborough was sincere he would talk about how population growth control in Africa can help save the planet despite his shows being commissioned by bleeding heart, “diversity built Britain”, and gender hypersensitive BBC editors.
You never hear the name Francis Bacon, he’s been written out of history but he invented scientific method and binary code. He is much more important than Descartes, but you’d never know. The Jews are terrified of him to this day. Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper both plagiarized him liberally while pretending to reject him (Urbach 1987, Desroches 2006).
Actually the idea that the planet will ‘dispose of us’ or that we will become extinct is part of the arrogance and hubris of modern society, though a negative scenario, still product of (negative?) hubris of the Western world. And in whatever form, it is part of the scare mongering tactics of the power hungry. It is kind of a strange not so humble speculative duck in the article, one which the writer apparently hasn’t shot yet.
PJ, I just find it impossible to believe that the entire edifice of climate science physics and chemistry is wrong, and that hundreds of thousands of scientists.over many generations, are fools or liars, on some sort of bizarre crusade. The paleo-climate evidence for previous greenhouse warmings and consequent climate destabilisation isprodigous, too. More mistakes and fraud? It’s quite a stretch.
Well Johan, when the average global temperature is four degrees C or more above present, just how many humans do you think the would will carry? When most rainforests are gone, along with higher animals, AND insects, when groundwater and topsoil are depleted, when chemical pollute every inch of the planet, when the ozone layer is destroyed or attenuated, and when climate disastersravaged food production, will the survivors be happy to be alive. And, if you chuck in thermo-nuclear war, nuclear power-plants melting down and a nuclear winter, well, we will be lucky to survive at all.
You have of course examined the evidence of these “hundreds of thousands” of scientists and found them honest and reliable.
Instead of nodding your head, why not ask ; “How does a greenhouse work? Why is a green house warmer than the surrounding air? Why would a minuscule gas like carbon dioxide which forms a tiny part of the atmosphere cause a major change, when water vapour, methane and other gasses, far more heat retentive and far more common do not cause the temperature to increase far more?
Why and how does sunlight get reflected or heat get reflected by a gas at the edge of the atmosphere?”
Then more importantly ask yourself: “Who is making a shed load of money from this operation? Where is the money coming from? What happens to scientists who have an alternate viewpoint, backed by sound science and empirical evidence?” Finally ask: “If the scheme goes through what is the outcome? Who gains? Where and when did the scheme start, and with whom?”
When you have answered those questions finally read the Club of Rome forecasts and the climate ‘experts’ forecasts on which the whole scam is based and ; “What of these forecasts have come true? We have had definite time predictions for years with results predicted for 1990 to 2021 how many of these predictions of the weather and climate have actually been seen?”
When you get those answers ask ; “As NONE of the predictions have happened, why in hell would I believe any further of their predictions?”
It is not science, it is not even pseudo science, it is propaganda to create enormous wealth for a few individuals by stealing from every person on the planet. (with crumbs thrown to those who go along with the lies and destruction of lives and careers for any who dissent.)
“What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings; warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes by growing thicker coats [sic].”
Margaret Mead 1974
Global temperatures will go up more than 20 degrees Celsia.
Thermo-nuclear war is the only way in which humans are capable of destroying the environment in terms of affecting major parts of the Earth drastically, for the rest it is all the tendentious babble of arrogant ignorant foolishness. The babble of modern man, Faustian man, a conceited control freak.
This article gives too much credit to Descartes for mind/body dualism. In the West, it preceded Descartes by many centuries, and was shaped and popularized by Christianity with its dogmas of the existence of a “soul” separate from the body and of free will. However, it even predates Christianity, and indeed, is such an integral part of man’s way of conceiving his own existence in the world that it’s hard to imagine any other way of viewing the issue. It’s a clue that this way of thinking is hard-wired into humans by evolution. Even to a materialist and atheist such as myself, who realizes it’s not true, subjectively my mind appears separate from my body, and I seem to have free will. But then, the role of science has been to propose alternative, better explanations of things. For example, science has told us it’s not the sun that rises and goes around the Earth, but rather the spinning of the Earth that makes it appear so. Likewise, we’ve learned that all the other planets don’t revolve around Earth, but all planets including Earth revolve around the sun. In the same way, we can understand there is no separate existence of the mind or “soul”, even though it seems to have one from a subjective point of view. We are our bodies, every bit as much as any other animal on the planet. That is the simpler, better hypothesis.
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
– Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth
I agree with Jonathan’s analysis, but his call for a greater sense of humility, a well-deserved attack on our hubris, is as futile as Kaczynski’s efforts to stop the progress of tech by setting off a few bombs.
Our situation reminds me of the old Tower of Babel story: God looked down and saw that the humans were about to build a tower up into heaven, and so he mixed up their languages to thwart their efforts to become like God. Of course, the desire to become like God was also what got Adam and Even evicted from Eden to begin with. Ahh, it seems that when God made us in his image, that must have included wanting to be like Him…guess God didn’t think that through very well…par for the course for that old Hebrew God.
So, really the only thing that’s going to stop us in our ongoing quest to become God is for the Real God (Physics) to put us back in our place. The mechanisms for that are numerous: modern economic collapse due to exhaustion of resources and/or overfilling of sinks (waste and pollution) and failure to make a transition to a next tech&resource paradigm with higher power potential to allow us to sustain our modern path, warfare with modern technologies…nuclear, bio, chemical, genetic; accidents, like Vonneguts’ “Ice Nine”, that have an increasingly high probability to occur as our scientific curiosity and power drive will continue along, our species’ destruction by the very technologies, the Frankensteins we’ve created, our borgification by technocratic “progress” (the process outlined by Kaczynski) or even a scenario like the Terminator movies portrayed, a large enough asteroid strike, a massive solar anomaly, a back hole roving past, a nearby supernova…
Meanwhile, just calling for some humility is like shaking your fist at the wind. Humans are lifeforms and life is the will to power, to become like the God we envision…omnipotent and omniscient. Physics will have to put us in our place.
I would like to see humanity use any means that comes to hand to liquidate the political/bureaucratic classes in toto. (e.g., machetes, lengths of wire, IEDs etc).
I have some sympathy for your view though: mosquitoes are the only animal I will actively attempt to kill without trying to get them to leave first. And of course they are a major vector for malaria, which kills millions (to be fair, malaria mostly kills people too stupid to do simple things…. like sleeping under nets and getting rid of standing water).
However as Mao’s “Four Pests” program shows quite clearly, there can be unintended consequences – the attempt to eradicate sparrows caused an increase in insects that ruined crops, which in turn led to crop losses far greater than the obvious damage caused by the sparrows themselves.
The massive loss of life in China’s Great Famine of 1959-61 was a direct result. That was simply not foreseen by planners and other political parasites.
Bastiat’s TWINS (That Which Is Not Seen) must always be a guidestone for any sensible policy analyst: ‘unknown unknowns’ in the Rumsfeld taxonomy.
The extirpation of the political class – in its entirety, to a man, then salting the ground in which they’re interred – is one policy where the TWINS are unambiguously positive.
Not so, for mosquitoes.
And yet you swallow all the pseudoscience vomited up by the Cult of Thermageddon.
Takes all types, I guess.
My PhD thesis was about uncertainty quantification in large-scale dynamic numerical models; I know how numerical modelling works, from soup to nuts. And I can say without reservation that the modelling done in climate ‘science’ is several orders of magnitude worse than the COVID modelling performed by Neil Ferguson and his cronies and ICL… and that was absolute garbage that would have failed if submitted as an assignment in a 2nd year undergrad Applied Econometrics subject in the 1990s.
The hilarious thing is that I spent the 1990s defending the modelling paradigm in Economics, from intense, almost pathological calumny from the Left… precisely the same people who are insisting that we accept without question the lamentable drivel produced by the cimate cult, and now also that we may not question ‘the science’ of the COVID cult.
PJ, answering your queries is simplicity itself. First the implied proposition that all climate scientists (bar a tiny, shrinking, denialist claque, down to single figures) are not honest and/or reliable is pure paranoid fantasy. The process whereby a minuscule gas like CO2 has such a heat-trapping effect is basic science, and the only people I see asserting its irrelevance compared to water vapour, with its short residency in the atmosphere, are Rightwing shock-jocks and Murdochite psychopaths. Poor company you’re keeping there.
As for methane, well it is far more heat retentive, but hardly more common than CO2 in the atmosphere. Latest CO2 readings are c.410 ppMILLION, and methane c.190 ppBILLION, very, very, much less. Nitrous oxide is c.335 ppBILLION.
The answer as to who is making a shed-load of money is easy, too. Your denialist comrades in the fossil fuel industry, with ‘assets’ valued at tens of trillions, and hundreds of billions in annual profits and subsidies. It certainly isn’t climate scientists. Your ‘arguments’ have a sort of hara-kiri type of function, I’m afraid. As for the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth report, it has stood up remarkably well given its age. The pollution crisis predicted is definitely here, and the resource depletion is slowly taking effect. And your Margaret Mead quote (she died 43 years ago, so didn’t live to see the current climate cataclysm unfolding)describes the IPCC Reports well- conservative. So conservative that even their most dire and pessimistic predictions have been shown to be bizarrely optimistic, time after time.
Well, I’ll take your word regarding your qualifications, but your assertions re. climate modeling are pure bunkum. ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’ goes the saying, and climate models have grown increasingly more accurate as knowledge has grown and the quantity of information relevant has increased by real orders of magnitude. The rest of your diatribe is typical contentless Rightwing ideological raving. There’s the real cult-The Anti-Life on Earth League of Rightthinkers.
Your pseudonym is very apt.
Your nonsense and misrepresentation is stunningly similar to the propaganda that has been propagated for the last 30 years.
Please provide ANY of the bizarre predictions of your hundreds of thousands of scientists regarding the climate that have been shown to be true.
Otherwise, please confine your comments to provable facts.
Even the CO2 hypothesis is not provable.
I notice you did not address ANY of the questions that I posed merely parroting and hiding in “appeal to authority”.
Naturally, as you clearly have no thoughts of your own.
“The Fallacy:
The so-called “Greenhouse effect” is one of the most persistent fallacies in popular science. It is a flawed speculation left over from the late 19th century, when it was first entertained by such scientific luminaries as Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, and Svante Arrhenius.
In fact, however, the so-called “greenhouse gases” do not “trap” infrared energy radiated from the surface of the Earth, as proposed; they merely slow its inevitable return to outer space.”
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The Greenhouse Effect Fallacy
By Frank Schnell | February 5th 2016 05:56 AM | Print | E-mail
“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” – George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. Mark Twain (1835-1910)
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https://www.science20.com/frank_schnell/blog/the_greenhouse_effect_fallacy-165119
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“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
According to petitionproject.org, the official website of the effort, the petition bore 31,487 signatures as of October 2016:
The current list of petition signers includes 9,029 PhD; 7,157 MS; 2,586 MD and DVM; and 12,715 BS or equivalent academic degrees. Most of the MD and DVM signers also have underlying degrees in basic science.
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No-one working in climate science is going to admit it, it is like a teacher saying Blacks on average have a lower IQ than Whites” or a doctor saying “Vaccines cause autism” or a politician saying “Jewish money rules the USA”. All of which is true but the pack of jackals (of which you seem to be a member) will hunt you down and destroy you.
The Emperor is naked and no amount of shouting or threatening will get me to say he is clothed.
What you say is true, but science does not have an answer to what is ‘mind’?
It is not possible to locate where an ‘idea’ comes from. Where a dream goes to.
There is no explanation for ‘new ideas’.
I do not have an answer but then as far as I can tell, nobody does.
We have explored the brain and found that memory resides in specific areas but have no idea what it is.
The famous neurosurgeon Edward de Bono gave up surgery because no-one had any idea what they were actually doing. After a life time of study and brilliant insights into what a brain does, he has no more idea than I do.
Where does Conscience come from? Altruism? Why are some Greedy and some not? Not only humans but animals too.
We have no working hypothesis and therefore resort to “God”.
We all have some recognition of justice and when no justice is to be found in our society, it is a comforting thought that something or someone is going to punish those bastards even if it is only after they are dead.
There’s no mystery here. Bee decline began when greedy farmers started trucking bees around the country – and work them to death.
However, the one thing a paid scientist can’t say is “I don’t know”. Instead they add additional layers of useless complexity and complication onto simple problems.
I do think the Spanish there are right. They claim that culprit is the diminishing variety of Bees diet.
reminded me of this short prescient essay by Jung . .
https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/jung-the-undiscovered-self-1957.pdf
Contents :
1 The Plight of the Individual in Modern Society
2 Religion as the Counterbalance to Mass-Mindedness
3 The Position of the West on the Question of Religion
4 The Individual’s Understanding of Himself
5 The Philosophical and the Psychological Approach to Life
6 Self-Knowledge
7 The Meaning of Self-Knowledge
Sounds like that would call for more funding! As a mystery, farmers can still make insurance claims and science can get its cut. As long as everybody keeps ignoring the obvious.
PJ London: “What you say is true, but science does not have an answer to what is ‘mind’?”
Sure it does. The mind is what we call our subjective experience of the brain’s operation. No brain = no mind.
PJ London: “It is not possible to locate where an ‘idea’ comes from. Where a dream goes to.”
Yes it is. See, inter alia, Pennfield’s experiments in stimulating the temporal lobes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilder_Penfield#Neural_stimulation
PJ London: “Where does Conscience come from? Altruism? Why are some Greedy and some not? Not only humans but animals too. We have no working hypothesis …”
The working hypothesis is evolution.
There is no one, single, culprit. Diminishing diet, diminishing variety, massive toxic chemical pollution, particularly the Satanic neonicotinoids, and micro-wave radiation pollution, loss of habitat, invasive pests like Varroa etc. Like EVERYTHING else, we have effed the poor old bees over. We’re next.
PJ, the Petition Project is a very dumb, fossil fuel industry financed, furphy. If you actually believe it relevant, your Dunning-Krugerism is confirmed. I see that ‘Frank Schnell’ is an all-purpose denialist, denying the effects of toxic chemicals too, and no doubt well rewarded for his work. Having to choose between a professional denialist and ALL the Academies of Science, ALL the learned scientific societies and 99% of active climate scientists is hard-not. Scientists might be jackals, but what are creatures who lie, dissemble and misinform for malignant pathopsychological reasons, in order to prevent human beings averting the greatest cataclysm in history. One needs to leave the world of living creatures and search among the diabolical beasts from the subterranean regions of the mind, the golems, the daemons, the dark fiends, the Life-haters and destroyers, to find the right descriptor.
Yadda yadda yadda, you have still not answered a single query.
Please show a single ‘Climate Prediction” from 1990 to 2021 that has been shown to be true.
You can’t, be quiet, go away and play with your childish fantasists.
Adults look at facts not rants.
The overwhelming evil of humanity is drive for comfort. From the point of evolution the choice that was selected was always based on comfort even if that choice had negative consequences.
I answered all your gibberish, but a standard Dunning-Kruger denialist attack is to claim not to have been corrected. A certain pathetic narcissism is at work, I suppose. As for ‘climate predictions’, most from the IPCC Reports have erred, indeed, by being hopelessly optimistic. Disasters predicted for 2100 are here and now, or imminent. I do hope you don’t get caught in a megafire, Biblical flood, landslide or super-typhoon, but, then again, when it happens to others, your type just don’t give a stuff, do you.
A lesser person than myself would say that you are a lying POS. I will merely say that you neither know or recognise the truth.
You have not answered any of the queries but immediately run to smearing, ad hominem and pretend to authority.
What happened to ALL the predictions for 1990 to 2021?
Go away I am done with you and your kind.
As I said (are you illiterate?) the IPCC predictions for 1990-2021 were all exceeded in reality. As for ‘being done with’, what do you think will be the reaction of the plebs when they finally realise that they are about to be destroyed by a climate destabilisation cataclysm? How do you think they’ll treat known denialist saboteurs and fanatics, who made the disaster inevitable? Food for thought.
With all due respect, it is far from clear to me just how humble and religious Carl Sagan was in the face of the unknown. If anything there always seemed to me a certain conceit about him. He was smugly assured of the validity of his belief — yes, it is a BELIEF — that all of life and of humanity arose from so many hydrogen atoms through so many billions of years of evolution. And he was also dismissive of anything related to what we term today the paranormal — despite the large amounts of serious scientific work others have done in exploring this aspect of reality. Doesn’t seem to me like what I’d expect from a humble man questing for the truth.
I believe the West’s hostile attitude towards Nature — not to mention the whole mass of economic, ecological and geopolitical woes brought about by the West today (often with the help of a certain ethnocultural group, be it said) — all began with a bunch of thinkers in Europe during the 16th/17th centuries known collectively as the Voluntarists. They believed and argued that God has complete and absolute freedom to do whatever He wants. This belief had far-reaching consequences: it would mean nothing can be taken as proof that God exists, because to take anything as definite proof that God exists would amount to saying that God cannot choose not to let that thing constitute proof of His existence, which would contradict the claim that He can always choose whatever He likes.
The Church initially embraced this idea happily as a means of putting down the heretical claims of those who sought God outside the Church — specifically, the Hermeticists/Neoplatonists, who entertained beautiful visions integrating God, humanity and the Universe. The trouble was that the same arguments for disarming the heretics could just as well be directed against all the claims made by the Church itself regarding God. This could well have been a major factor in the eventual decline of Christianity in the West. After all, if nothing can be legitimately taken as proof of God’s existence, then how the heck are you supposed to know if there’s a God?
Descartes — who was one of the Voluntarists — saw the danger and tried to sneak his way around it in his Meditations. Later Hume saw through the attempt and demolished it. Still later Kant came along and made everything even worse by arguing that we can never view the world but through a filter of a priori concepts and ideas, so we’ll never be able to access the truth regarding things in themselves.
From this point on it was downhill all the way for the West; the foundations of the one great narrative that sustained it for centuries were virtually all undone, leaving everything being cast adrift. You can now come up with whatever crazy narrative you like and make it your compass (as Nietzsche advocated); anything goes. And Nature, the totality of all that’s ‘outside of our skin’, now became something utterly unknown and unknowable — and hence something threatening. And without any overriding narrative to restrain us or impose limits on what we can and cannot do, the sociopaths among us would naturally have a field day. Hence the sorry state of affairs we’ve been in ever since the beginning of the 20th century.
Whither, humanity?
Look, don’t waste your time and energy talking to those who won’t listen. We’re already doomed (by a small bunch of callous, fanatical sociopaths in positions of power); nothing we say or do is going to make any difference anymore. The sheer momentum at which the whole Juggernaut of Madness we’re in is charging towards the Limits to Growth means it’s now simply no longer possible to change course. If climate change doesn’t destroy us, resource depletion (or nuclear war) will. No need to worry. 🙂
For those who won’t listen, just leave them alone. Why get so worked up over what they think? The only difference it will make (at this point) is that you’ll shorten your own life expectancy by getting worked up. No, think more instead about how you can enable yourself and your loved ones to survive the whole bloody mess now about to engulf us all. Do some prepping.
Just a bit of sincere advice from a sympathizer.
The sole validity of a model is its ability to predict outcomes. That’s what science is – nothing else counts. Personally, I have other topics I find more interesting and put my time into. All I say about global warming is this: anyone who considers global warming a catastrophic and imminent threat and isn’t advocating immediate and massive global depopulation is either a liar or a complete idiot.
If what the global warming crowd is saying is correct then immediate and massive global depopulation is the only plausible solution.
ibid
Sri Lanka no longer has a malaria problem after resuming the fight. You are both a kook and a liar.
Asher, your proposal is genocidal. Very Talmudic. I do advocate a human population of no more than two or three billion, but it must be achieved humanely, through a demographic transition to lower family size. That could be achieved in a few decades, given poverty elimination, female emancipation and freely available contraception, including abortion. But the better the contraception, the fewer terminations there will be. And there must be massive reforestation and rewilding, more healthy diets and meat raised by regenerative grazing methods for the intractable carnivores. No more capitalist neoplasia, either. I know that the ruling parasite elites plan a radical, swift, depopulation of the ‘useless classes’, and this virus might very well be the vector. If not, then probably the next.
“After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases returned to 2.5 million in 1968 and in 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today.”
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The statement was in quotes, it was a quote from a book of fiction.
What date was the ‘fictitious’ statement made?
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Sri Lanka antimalaria .gov;
“However, during the subsequent “Consolidation Phase” a major setback was experienced which culminated in a massive malaria epidemic in1967–1969.”
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The fact that you are ignorant and rather stupid does not make me a liar.
Thus spake Zarathustra. Must be fun to just declare something to be so without the bother of evidence, logic, or even grammar.
Could you elaborate on what you mean here?
Are you saying it’s arrogant to think the humans can so destroy/pollute their world that they destroy their own existence?
What would be more reasonable and less arrogant to believe?
No, just unmitigated garbage as jamie b. points-out above. No facts, no logic, just assertion. Worthless; unless its heavy sarcasm, which admittedly does fit better.
No @RicoTorpe is neither ignorant nor stupid. You introduced fiction into a scientific discussion and presented it, the fiction, as fact. That is disgracefully dishonest, a lie, in plain language.
Welcome to ignore.
Methane is not “…hardly more common than CO2 in the atmosphere.” it is but a tiny fraction of the amount of CO2; less than, well less than, one hundredth ppm by volume. Almost none in other words, and also methane is oxidised to CO2 such that the average time a CH4 molecule lasts in the atmosphere is about 10 years.
I see from your comments that you are a troll, however :
The only controversial word was the use of “today”.
Whether the quote was from fiction or documented fact, the information regarding Malaria was correct as per the Sri Lankan government itself.
Ricotorpe was insinuating that the data on Malaria was incorrect, he did not admit that the figures quoted were correct, (1968) only that “today” it was no longer a problem.
You are welcome to take this comment however you like.
Why spake?
I have never considered you to be a moron. At least up to now!
Now that is complete stupidity what you have written.
Methane locates itself in upper atmosphere and it stays there forever. Oxygen stays in lover atmosphere. Methane molecule can be broken only by burning process. CO2 and H. also do stay in lover atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra
Sorry cement, I rather thought that my words and the figures concerning CO2 being measured in ppMILLION, and methane in ppBILLION, made it plain that CO2 was much more common than methane. Silly me. Methane is very much more powerful as a greenhouse gas however, however brief its existence, before, as you observe, being oxidised to CO2.
Oh my God!
All of you here are analphabets who do not have even a basic education. You would not be capable to add 7+8 because it would be for you high mathematics.
All you are capable is to copy something from Wikipedia and glue it here.
You do not understand the meaning of it so it does not stay in your brain.
My cats have more ability for comprehension than all of you.
You are so pathetic that you makes me puke.
The arrogance lies in the fact that a modern human has an unprecedented high assessment of his knowledge, and his foundational theories are absurd and full of large gaps.
You can hear people talking about getting extinct all around, up to the plumber who does your plumbing, aside of whole armies of parrots.
“can so destroy/pollute their world that they destroy their own existence”
“destroy their own existence”
You can kill yourself, then you have killed your own existence, as far as you can tell that is. If we then take the fashionable creed that humans are at risk to become extinct, meaning final collective suicide at its own hands by destruction of its environment. The only method for that destruction of environment, as far as we reasonably can foresee currently is thermo-nuclear war. But we should differentiate between destruction of environment, and the human species going finally extinct.
That the human species can go finally extinct through our own hands is based upon the idea that reality as we know it, organic life and its multitude of forms has come about by accident. This theory of accident is based upon thin air, there is a huge, huge gap of knowledge, but the theory is aggressively maintained. You can also wonder, if the emergence of the human on the stage is an accident, why does it matter that this ‘accident’ accidentally does away with that accident. If the human species has come about accidentally, can there wrong and right purpose for him, can there even be grounds for morality and reason?
If it is an accident without design and purpose, no intelligent reasonable man would consider that a worthy and workable situation. A man who knows for sure that his life is an accident without design and purpose should best kill himself. From the point of view of accident theory, the extinction of humans makes and end to their suffering and all the purposeless tedious striving. Even from this theory itself it follows that one day the existence as a species must come to an end. Why prolong its existence?
But as said, this theory of accident has no basis of reasonable grounds.
Polemos,
To compress my former reaction:
If you are an adherent to the accident theory (an assumption for the sake of argument), that life on Earth came about accidentally, when you argue that man should reasonably prevent it’s own extinction, according to what follows from your own theory you are merely trying to delay extinction, which according to that theory will happen eventually, and which can also happen accidentally at some unexpected moment, at any moment. And you will have a lot to worry about and to find ways of temporary protection, the whole time, until…
“What would be more reasonable and less arrogant to believe? ”
So you consider yourself and others to be ‘reasonable’ men.
Only according to accident theory, which like said is based on no solid ground permanent finite extinction becomes a reasonable possibility. If the accident theory is dropped you must end up agnostic about the possibility, or a mere believer, yes or no.
You could then argue that it is reasonable for humanity, that even in the light of accident theory based future inevitable extinction, it desires to maintain itself as long as possible. But according to accident theory, the drive of self preservation is a mere accidental drive, nobody knows to what degree it is functional, how long does the accidental need to preserve itself, how long should one accidental species maintain itself? Perhaps the presence of the human species is accidentally long functionally overdue in the accident? Along the lines of accident theory you can arrive nowhere and everywhere ‘reasonably’.
Thanks. Not least for the autobiographical point, you revealed to us here.
German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who is a bit of a math guy (The Number Devil) had been watching the 68-movement from within (the was married to a Soviet woman, lived for a year in Kuba, founded and edited the very influential 68er periodical Kursbuch).
And he made an almost complete U-turn in the seventies (is now supporting the right-wing resistance against the EU as a necessary evil) and – one of the reasons he gave are two essays: One he wrote in ’78 in which he laid bare the left’s tendency to fall for the Apocalypse (“A few Remarks about the World’s Collapse”).
And the other is another essay he wrote in 1997 about the methodical shortcomings of our ability to make predictions.
This essay’s title isAbout the Pastry of Time and was left out in the essay collection, which was translated into English under the title Zigzag. The framework of this essay rests upon St. Augustine’s remarks about time, on Montaigne’s according thoughts and – on Enzensberger’s reflections about the Bäcker-transformation and the traces it left in some books on mathematics by Ivar Ekland (Le Calcul imprévu, Paris 1984) and Illya Prigogine and Isabel Stenger’s book In Dialogue with Nature, which refers to: V. Arno’d and V. Alvez’ Ergodic Problems of Classical Mechanics, New York 1968.
So – there are thought-parallels between your post and Enzensberger’s intellectual biography (=way – or train of – – -thought/thinking).
Yes you are correct, they do. However I didn’t get that far. It appeared to me(and still does) that the words that I quoted claimed that methane is, but only just, more common than CO2. Clearly I was wrong. When I find a gross error in a piece of writing I tend to stop reading at that point. Not always but obviously did this time.
I have pretty much an identity of views with you except on the Climate Fraud. I am staggered that you correctly recognise that governments lie about everything else but tell the truth on climate.
Can’t agree more. What puzzles me is why this theory (or belief as I prefer to call it) is aggressively maintained despite the huge gap of knowledge. Makes you wonder if those who maintain it are intellectual masochists of some sort who harbor some kind of death wish for all.
Power is the main reason I think. The accident model makes our lives an ‘accident’, you just happen to be born somewhere, for no greater reason and purpose. So the powers that be, they can argue that they have the right to do this and that in order to protect all those ‘accidents’, they can also come up with multiple alleged threats (climate change, viruses.. and what more). It also allows them to put the collective over the individual, to subjugated the individual to the collective. The non accident has a greater purpose and reason behind his life, greater authorities so to speak. The accident is subjugated to ‘accident’ management authorities.
I think it is fear, lack of faith, and motives of power, even religious people who should have an idea of ‘greater authority’ bow to the ‘accident management authorities’.