Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable

heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes

"The climate can't be changing - it just can't," all the blue rinsed ladies cry. "Its not fair - everything in life is changing - and now the climate - it just isn't fair !"

After living a long life safe inside the nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.

Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.

Money was stable, based on the solid gold standard.

Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.

Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.

Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.

In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE

Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.

As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist : there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.

Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.

And  modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.

Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science  : the new young whippersnappers.

Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.

Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.

Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.

The Second Law's Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.

The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.

The deniers'  Victorian credo (Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.

Shat happens : suck it up....

LYELL emerges from grave to deny climate change , as Yankee deniers crow "we knew he would!"

Actually Sir Charles Lyell is dead - long dead - with no sign his body has yet risen from the grave. But what about his intellectual spirit ?

Because, in fact, Lyell's spirit, his soul (the theory of uniformitarianism) does live on (and on and on).

Lives on and on in the minds of the climate deniers - and never more strongly than in that heartland of climate denialism : among many of the old school American geologists.

No coincidence that, because in its heyday uniformitarianism also thrived strongest in America geology.

Geological and meteorological deniers today claim that the climate hasn't changed, because it can not change but merely oscillate over a constant central value, if viewed over geological time periods.

If this sounds even vaguely familiar, it is because American deniers back in uniformitarianism's heyday said exactly the same thing to explain why in their view the geology of the earth hadn't changed and couldn't change.

The House Wine of Modernity (& Denierism) is Uniformitarianism

The American geological elite's favourite words were the food and drink of modernity itself, so these geological deniers were then fully of the mainstream , in fact the mainstream of the mainstream.

Words and phrases like : normal,norm, average, static, unchanging, balance, equilibrium, eternal,universal, oscillating deviations of a local and temporary nature.

Nature was a passive backdrop : unchanging, eternal, universal.

 Einstein, one of the clearest examples of 19th century scientific thinking, believed that the universe had always been there and always would be there : it was neither birthed nor would it die.

Against this 19th century static theatre backdrop, the minds of human actors were the active, changing elements of reality.

Peasants, by contrast, extrapolated from their miserable and uncertain lives to see the forces of nature as still all powerful and dynamically uncertain and us humans powerless to do much more than strive to survive its storms and earthquakes.

But upper middle class males, highly educated in western values , saw reality as very certain and predictable, again extrapolating from their extremely privileged lives.

(They, it can be safely assumed, never had to deal with even the minor uncertainties of life such as just when and how baby would choose to spoil her last remaining clean diaper !)

So if we threw Fred Singer out of a plane over Sub-Saharan Africa and told him to hunt and gather for himself, it would be pretty safe to assume we would find him a few years later, not just thinner and fitter, but also with a totally reversed view on whether Climates - and Nature in general - can and do change.

It is no coincidence that the Rich think reality is stable and unchanging and the Poor feel it is unstable and unpredictable....

why global commensality is/isn't ROMANTICISM

   In a commensal world ,humanity dines with reality - not upon it.
   Hitler cherry-picked much from the Romantic Era - above all he saw that humanity could, be sheer force of will , create vast mental universes.

   But is was his great error was to imagine he - or anyone - could successfully impose these mental universes upon the physical universe (or universes).
   Romantics saw the physical universe, Nature, as endlessly dynamic , a constantly changing kaleidoscope of possibilities.
   They imagined the human individual was also a kaleidoscope of mental possibilities.
   The Modernists, such as Hitler and Einstein,  had a great weakness .
   It was to presume there was something they could drag into this Romantic Era from earlier (Plato to the Enlightenment) ages.
   They envisioned that one could fully know this natural kaleidoscope, fully know it to the point of freezing it and then re-molding it in your own mind-created kaleidoscope.
   They saw all of Nature's unceasing variety as a mere rococo surface, a showiness, because deep underneath, fundamentally, Nature was made up of a few knowable laws.
   Compared to the human mental universe, the physical universe they saw as much simpler.
   Now commensality agrees with the modernists that a single human mind might not just be able to convince itself, but all humanity, that cherry trees bloom year around on the top of Mount Everest.
   Virtual Reality behold yourself !
   But commensality argues that the physical reality remains equally successful in insisting that that no cherry tree ever blooms on the top of Mount Everest.
  Our mental universes are as free as the Romantics  and their foes, the Modernists,said they were, but they remain in, horizontal with, the physical universe, not superior to it.....

Pierre-Simon Laplace is NOT a Commensalist

Michael Marshall

Well if I am a commensalist and you are too, just who exactly is not a commensalist ?

Well Stephen Harper is not and neither is Ricky Santorum , but you probably already guessed that.

More importantly, people like Albert Einstein, that icon of the tired old left, isn't one either.

Nor is his intellectual mentor, Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Laplace, and Einstein, thought of themselves as fully Modernist and firm advocates of the Enlightenment.

Laplace famously claimed that since he believed he already stood above and outside Nature and Reality for all practical measure, only a current lack of sufficient calculating power prevented him from perfectly predicting the present, past and future right down to the atomic level.

But both Chaos Theory (Henri Poincare) and Quantum Theory (Paul Dirac) show that if you are in anyway a participant within the system you are studying (and we finite humans are definitely within the Universe --- as even Einstein and Laplace would have readily admitted that), then even your tiniest efforts to measure it, act upon it and feedback to alter those measurements.

Thus, as with the food we eat and the air we breath , "all measuring instruments (and the beings operating them) dine at a common table" ---  that is they are embedded fully into the systems they are tryong to measure -- thus, in point of fact, they are commensalist with it.

But until someone accepts this, emotionally as well as intellectually, they do not act upon that knowledge or try to temper their hubris.

I do not believe that Einstein would have ever found it easy to accept that a small weather measurement taken in the brazilian jungle could trigger a big twister in Texas....

The 1940 Peace Bomb joins the 1800 Peace Mine...

In any other circumstances, pacifist Leo Szilard might have been best remembered as the inventor (along with fellow pacifist Albert Einstein) of the modern fridge.

Instead he joined some others (sometimes pacifist others) in working on a super weapon that would so frighten the planet's militarists that they would instantly sue for permanent world peace.

Unfortunately, it was agreed that the backward militarist mind would require a convincing demonstration project, before being convinced.

So in the end a few hundred thousand people ended up dead in radiation and fire, all for 'the greatest good of the greatest number' ---but universal peace still did not break out - far from it.

So poor Szilard is today primarily remembered for instigating the Manhattan Project rather than inventing the perfect fridge ....or the perfect peace.

By contrast, Robert Fulton, a fellow New York City area resident like Szilard, (albeit from a hundred and fifty years earlier ), is best known today for building the first commercial steam boat service in the world, between New York City and Albany.

But as H. Bruce Franklin points out in his ground-breaking book "War Stars" , Fulton had had his utopian pacifist weapon scheme as well.

This submarine and sea-mine system was designed to destroy the British navy, freeing the high seas for universal free trade and commerce and thus introducing an era of permanent world peace.

This was/is standard centuries-old Liberal dogma, still much spouted today.

Fulton's willingness to sink a few real ships (along with their real crews) is also right on par with all the many Liberal peace bomb efforts: in the utilitarianism-driven willingness to see a 'few' die (unwillingly and unasked) for the greater good of the greater number.

Between Fulton and Szilard, New York has thrown up a number of Liberal pacifist and their peace weapons - perhaps most notably that shy pacifist Carl Norden.... and his precision WW II bombsight of the same name.

All these plans start off as efforts to design a totally new advance on weapon systems.

But these superweapons are not for profitably continuing sales in continuous wars.

Rather they are to 'demonstrate' their horrific effects just once and then usher in world peace forever.

All of them have a scope and gravitas and a vision about them that seems perfectly cut to fit Manhattan's taste in grandness-for-the-sake-of-grandness, thus becoming 'the Empire State Building of New York intellectual conceits'.....