Maverick Philosopher

The Great Blizzard of '78 Remembered

I had an odd schedule in those days.  I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight.  I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station.  Got off, hiked  up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass.  Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my old friend and apartment mate,  Quentin Smith,  and was in bed by four again.  That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78, every single day holidays included.

That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential.  I told  one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense."  She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation."  Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours."  True enough.  And I still do.  I don't get up at midnight any more.  I get up between 1 and 2 AM.  I've become a slacker.

One  night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night.  The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog.  A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it difficult to get the door open.  But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged.  I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.

  

Konstantin Kissin on Wokeness

Listen, then propagate. Do your bit. More at triggernometry.

Questions about Global Warming

Crisis or hoax? How much of which? At the top of the Stack.

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Ed Buckner writes,

I can help with your first three questions.

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own? And if irreversible, how would you know that?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity, and what are the human causes?

To the first, undeniably yes. The science is that as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a physical effect that causes temperature to rise, all other things being equal. Note the rider: things are generally not equal, as there are other (well known) effects on climate. This also answers your third question. Yes, the warming caused by CO2 is man-made.

BV: You did not answer my third question. I asked to what extent is GW man-made. A priori, from the armchair, we know that if there is GW -- if the Earth's atmosphere, land masses and oceans are in the aggregate getting warmer and warmer over time --  then GW cannot be wholly anthropogenic and also that human activity cannot have zero effect on it.  The empirical question for the climatologists is: how much of the GW is due to human activity?  The answer to this question has serious repercussions for policy decisions.  I suspect, though I do not claim to know, that the percentage of GW due to human activity -- carbon emissions and what all else -- is not high enough to justify the draconian "Green New Deal " measures of the GW alarmists.  The onus probandi, I should think, is on them to prove otherwise.

Is the science settled with respect to the empirical question I have posed? Has consensus been reached among competent climatologists?  That is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know,

You write, "Yes, the warming caused by CO2 is man-made."  I didn't ask that question. I didn't ask what causes the warming. I asked, given that GW is occurring, about the extent to which the causes -- whatever they are -- are man-made. Not that I deny that CO2 plays a role.  But as you know, CO2 is also produced naturally, and some of the warming produced by naturally occurrent CO2 is precisely not man-made.  

So here is another empirical question: How much of the CO2 in the atmosphere originates naturally and how much from human activity? Has scientific consensus been reached on this question?

However, there is other stuff you must know. First, the known physics does not explain the predicted rises in temperature. The predicted rises are based on speculation to do with water vapour ‘positive feedback’.

Second, ‘global warming’ is ambiguous between cause and effect. We know a bit about the forcing, less about the water vapour possible cause. Regarding effect, we only have temperature measurement to go by, and the records are not long term enough. I have looked at Antarctic data and there is no evidence of any change, except at the limb of the Antarctic peninsula, which is coastal and affected by the sea. Also, the peninsula is some way from the Pole, and is naturally quite warm.

BV: Very interesting. So you are saying that the water vapor caused by GW causes more GW?

Third, and this addresses your question about reversibility: for every amount of CO2 in the atmosphere there corresponds an equilibrium temperature. Were all CO2 emission to halt, the atmosphere would take a while to establish that equilibrium, then remain there, so long as the CO2 concentration remained constant (which it won’t, as it will tend to fall).

Fourth, and global warmists tend to avoid this fact like the plague, the rise in temperature is logarithmic to the CO2 concentration. If the concentration doubles, equilibrium temperature goes up x degrees. If it doubles again, another x degrees. And so on. So a lot of the scare stories show linear charts of concentration, not logarithmic, which is somewhat misleading.

Fifth, and here I agree somewhat with the warmists, while the effect of warming can be continuous with no step changes, there is a well-known step change that occurs when ice melts. With an average of 1/10 degree below freezing point, the ice will not tend to melt. With the same amount above, it will eventually melt. So Antarctica would melt if its average temperature were a tiny amount above freezing point. But that won’t happen because Antarctica is huge and most of it close enough to the Pole that temperatures are way way below freezing.

Hope that helps.

BV: It does indeed, and thanks very much. The fourth and fifth points add to my understanding of the topic. The fifth is particularly interesting since it raises the logico-philosophical question of the metabasis eis allo genos, the shift into another genus, the somersault from a quantitative change into a qualitative one.

By the way Ed, since you are an historian of logic, do you have a list of sources on the metabasis eis allo genos?  I first encountered a reference to it in Kierkegaard. Does Trendelenburg say anything about it? Must go back to Aristotle. Medievals had to have addressed it.

One more question: if the issue is global warming, why the talk of climate change? That move involves an ascent from the species to the genus.  Obviously the global climate can change by getting hotter and by getting cooler.

Can you answer me this one, Ed?  (Knowing me, you know that I suspect wokeassed chicanery at work.)

COMBOX now open.

Climate Coloniality

More totalitarian wokery.

Energy Policy: The Dementocratic Approach

I gassed up the Jeep Wrangler this morning to the tune of 62.83 semolians for 13.787 U. S. gallons of regular at $4.499 per gallon at Costco in Mesa, Arizona.  The line was not bad at all a little before noon. Victor Davis Hanson comments on the big picture:

Climate-change moralists love humanity so much in the abstract that they must shut down its life-giving gas, coal, and oil in the concrete. And they value humans so little that they don’t worry in the here and now that ensuing fuel shortages and exorbitant costs cause wars, spike inflation, and threaten people’s ability to travel or keep warm.

The Biden Administration stopped all gas and oil production in the ANWR region of Alaska. It ended all new federal leases for drilling. It is cancelling major new pipelines. It is leveraging lending agencies not to finance oil and gas drilling.

It helped force the cancellation of the EastMed pipeline that would have brought needed natural gas to southern Europe. And it has in just a year managed to turn the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of the world into a pathetic global fossil-fuel beggar.

Now gas is heading to well over $5 a gallon. In overregulated blue states, it will likely hit $7.

The sentence I bolded enunciates a truth little known, one that you cannot expect Uncle Joe's publicist Jen 'Circleback' Psakis to inform you of. The mendacious little weasel claims that the oil producers are not making use of their existing leases when she knows full well that drilling has huge upfront costs and that the oil companies need loans to proceed with projects the success of which is not guaranteed. 

Psakis illustrates how truth can be enlisted in the service of deception. The truth that the drillers are not drilling is used to divert attention from the truth I bolded.

Climate Bluster

A redacted version of a Facebook entry from about a year ago. 

 

......................................

 

He who does not know is inclined to pretend. A world of ignorance is a world of bluster. One species thereof is climate bluster. "The science is settled!" It is not. What is settled, but only among leftists, is climate ideology. An ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs. Beliefs needn't be true to guide and misguide action. 

 

What drives climate ideology is hostility to individual liberty and its sine qua non, private property and free markets. Climate alarmism is part of the Left's socialist and totalitarian agenda. The ideological nature of the alarmism is betrayed in more than one way. One way is by the refusal of leftists to proffer an honest characterization of what they mean by 'climate change.' That there is climate change is a truism. But they are pushing either a falsehood or an extremely dubious thesis.  Objective truth and its subjective correlate, truthfulness, are not their concerns: leftists are out for power.  Their aims are practical, not theoretical: to change the world, not to understand it. (Marx) Ameliorative change presupposes understanding. The truth must take the lead. Leftists have it backwards: the truth is whatever empowers the agents of the agenda who aim to impose their will on reality (Nietzsche).

 

Note the obfuscatory tactic: smuggle a substantive but extremely dubious claim under cover of the truism that climate changes.  Intellectual honesty is not a mark of ideologues.  It cannot be since 'truth' is whatever  is dictated by the needs of power. Another intellectually dishonest tactic employed by leftists is to accuse doubters of being deniers with such smears as 'climate denialism' when it is clear that to doubt a proposition is not to deny it. But the truth I just enunciated will be ignored by those for whom truth is not a binding norm. 

 

Leftists mean by 'climate change' the conjunction of the following distinct claims. The Earth's climate is changing. The change is irreversibly in the direction of higher and higher temperatures of the Earth's oceans and land masses. The change is catastrophic for life on Earth. It is so catastrophic that extreme measures must be taken immediately, for example, the measures outlined in "The Green New Deal." The catastrophic change is imminent or near-imminent: such as to occur in 10-15 years. The etiology of this catastrophic change is well-understood. It is largely man-made: the anthropogenic causal factors are not minor, but major: they dwarf non-anthropogenic factors such as solar activity. The specific cause of anthropogenic climate change is also well-understood: carbon emissions.

 

Now ask yourself: Are each of these claims individually plausible? No. Only the first is. And how plausible is this conjunction of claims? It is bound to be less plausible than the least plausible of them.  I humbly suggest that the Left's climate bluster is a lot of hot air.

 

Should we reduce carbon emissions? Yes. And explore alternative sources of energy? Absolutely.

 

What you have to understand is that for the Left, the (apparent) issue is never or hardly ever  the (real) issue. Leftists will make a crisis out of anything if it can be used to attack individual liberty and the private property and free markets that are its foundation. The real issue and goal is a "fundamental transformation" (Obama) of the USA into a socialist state. 

Climate Bluster

He who does not know is inclined to pretend. A world of ignorance is a world of bluster. One species thereof is climate bluster. "The science is settled!" It is not. What is settled, but only among leftists, is climate ideology.

What drives the ideology is hostility to individual liberty and its sine qua non, private property.  Climate alarmism is part of the Left's socialist and totalitarian agenda. 

The ideological nature of the alarmism is betrayed in more than one way. One way is by the refusal of leftists to proffer an honest characterization of what they mean by 'climate change.' That there is climate change is a truism. But they are pushing either a falsehood or an extremely dubious thesis.

They mean by 'climate change' the conjunction of the following distinct claims. The Earth's climate is changing. The change is irreversibly in the direction of higher and higher temperatures of the Earth's oceans and land masses. The change is catastrophic for life on Earth.  It is so catastrophic that extreme measures must be taken immediately, for example, the measures outlined in "The Green New Deal." The catastrophic change is imminent or near-immanent: such as to occur in 10-15 years. The etiology of this catastrophic change is well-understood. It is largely man-made: the anthropogenic causal factors are not minor, but major: they dwarf non-anthropogenic factors such as solar activity.  The specific cause of anthropogenic climate change is also well-understood: carbon emissions.  

Now ask yourself: how plausible is this conjunction of claims?  Bear in mind that a conjunctive proposition is true if and only if each of its conjuncts is true.  

I humbly suggest that the Left's climate bluster is a lot of hot air.

Elias Canetti and Greta Thunberg

The former has the latter's 'number.'

Zwei Tendenzen, die sich nur scheinbar widersprechen, kennzeichnen die Zeit: die Anbetung der Jugend and das Absterben der Erfahrung.

Two trends, which only apparently contradict each other, epitomize this era: the worship of youth and the extinction of experience. (The Agony of Flies, Noonday, 1994, p. 168/169, emphasis in original.)

How Cold Is It?

Answer here. Trigger Warning! Do not (Melissa) click on this link if you are a snowflake or otherwise p.c-whipped. Seriously politically incorrect content!

Weather is not the same as climate. We all know that. But some seem to think that any sort of weather is evidence for one sort of climate. Here. Just as all roads lead to Rome, all weathers lead to Global Warming.

It's a Dry Heat

It's hot and dry in these parts this time of year, the candy-assed snowbirds have all flown back to their humid nests, and we desert rats like it plenty.  That's why we live here.  It takes a special breed of cat to be a desert rat.

You Californians stay put in your gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing, People's Republic of Political Correctness. Give my disregards to Governor Moonbeam.  And that goes double for you effete and epicene residents of such Eastern states as the Commonwealth of Taxachusetts. Isn't that where Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren spouts her nonsense?

Yesterday afternoon I was out and about in my Jeep Wrangler. The onboard thermometer reported the outside temperature as 116 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.

Malcolm Pollack inquires, "Meanwhile, how do you manage in such heat? Do you just stay indoors? I suppose it's like living in Minneapolis in the winter."

It is no problem at all.  We love the desert and deserts are typically hot in the summer.  But there is often a 30 degree differential between the high and the low.  'Surely' it is better to live in a place where it is dry and hot in the afternoon but cool in the mornings rather in a flat and boring Eastern or Midwestern place where it is a humid 90 around the clock.  Surely.  (Might there be a bit of geographical chauvinism in play here?)

Do we just stay indoors?  Of course not.  This morning around 5:30 I hiked down to the swimming pool where I swam and did water aerobics for about an hour, chatting up the ladies and satisfying my social needs for the day.    Then I went into the hot tub (sic!) for 15 minutes where I did stretching exercises. Then back into the pool for a cool-down, followed by a shower and a walk home.  Other days I ride my mountain bike to the pool, swim, then go for a good ride while wet: with the soaked bandanna around my neck I'm as cool as a cucumber.

This afternoon I will go out around 3:30 to do some pro bono chess coaching at a local library for all comers, young and old.  (I'm a strong coffee-house player; highest USCF rating in the 1700s.)  Getting into a locked hot car that has been in the sun for an hour or two takes some getting used to, but one finds that steering a car requires less contact with the steering wheel than you might think.

From 1991 to 2009 I drove a 1988 Jeep Cherokee out here with no A.C. I'm not lying!  I'm frugal.  (Bought it in Ohio at T-giving in '87.)  One summer I drove in one shot from Bishop, California in the High Sierra across the Mojave and Sonoran deserts to Phoenix.  Stopping for gas in Blythe, California, just shy of the Colorado River and the Arizona border the temp. was 115.  You drive open-windowed with an ice-cold wet bandanna around your neck.  The only other motorists with their windows down were Mexicans.  I felt a certain 'solidarity' with them.  Does that make me a racist?  Am I guilty of 'cultural appropriation'?

Tomorrow morning I pick up a guy at 5:30 and we head East into the desert for a little target practice, arriving at my favorite spot at 6.   After expending 200-300 rounds between us, we head back around 8.

So no, we don't stay indoors.

I would say that Arizona is absolutely the best place to live year-round in the U.S. for all sorts of reasons.

There's a rattlesnake-infested wilderness right outside my door.  Up for a hike?  We leave in the dark, commence hiking at first light, and are done around ten A. M.

Risks of Desert Hiking

On Roasting Oneself: The Five Ways

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Did You Know that there are Climate Heretics?

Malcolm Pollack quotes extensively from Dr. Judith Curry, climatologist, about whom Scientific American published an article in 2010 entitled, "Climate Heretic Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues." 

If Islam is an anti-Enlightenment political ideology masquerading as a religion, then current climatology is an anti-capitalist political ideology masquerading as an empirical science.  Or am I exaggerating?  By how much?

One thing is clear: talk of heresy and heretics has no place in the hard sciences.  If a 'science' has heretics, then it is no hard science.  Current climate 'science' is science only by analogy to a serious science such as physics.  And this for two reasons.  First, it is heavily infected with ideology.  Second, climatology falls short of strict science if strict science must satisfy all of the following:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

You need to study Malcolm's post.

And then to further clarify your thoughts, study my  Global Warming: Questions that Need Distinguishing.

UPDATE

Malcolm sends this:

Thanks for all the recent linkage. This climate business, in particular, really winds my stem. One thought about your post - you wrote:

If Islam is an anti-Enlightenment political ideology masquerading as a religion, then current climatology is an anti-capitalist political ideology masquerading as an empirical science.

I'd go one level deeper: I think, in fact I am completely certain, that current climatology is a religion masquerading as an anti-capitalist ideology masquerading as an empirical science. Plenty of people have done the spadework to make a persuasive case that the modern Left is actually a secular religion that continues, in more or less a straight line, the "mission into the wilderness" that so animated the Puritans. I'm thinking, for example, of Paul Gottfried's Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy, George Kenna's outstanding The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, and pretty much all of Mencius Moldbug. (By the way, if you want to get to grips with "neoreaction", you really have to read some Moldbug, if you haven't already. A great place to start is here.)

I know we may trip on the definition of "religion", but global warmism has all the features, save one, of a good universalist religion: sin, atonement, redemption, salvation, indefinite time-frames, and unfalsifiability (if the 19-year pause, the expanding Antarctic icecaps and the consistent failure of all the models to make even moderately accurate predictions don't do it, I suspect nothing will).  It also happens to coincide very satisfyingly with the "progressive" goals of centralized power and a general sort of "boffinocracy", if you'll forgive the coinage.

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Are Most Terrorists Muslims? And What is a Terrorist?

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The Empirical and the Experimental

The hard sciences are not only empirical but experimental.  I leave it to you to work out the distinction and to pursue the question as to how 'hard' climate science is.

A Leftish Defense of the Objectivity of Truth

Here in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  You know you are dealing with a lefty when he gets off the phrase, "climate-change denial."  Memo to Peter Lupu: I would like to hear your opinion of this article.  You might subject it to a Facebook fisking.  It should turn your crank, especially the benighted comments.  I read a few of them and they reinforce me in my view that, to put it with aphoristic exaggeration,

The only good combox is a closed combox.

 

Global Warming: Questions That Need Distinguishing

My posting of the graphic to the left indicates that I am a skeptic about global warming (GW).  To be precise, I am skeptical about some, not all, of the claims made by the GW activists.  See below for some necessary distinctions. Skepticism is good.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry and a key partner in the pursuit of truth.

A skeptic is a doubter, not a denier.  To doubt or inquire or question  whether such-and-such is the case is not to deny that it is the case.  It is a cheap rhetorical trick of GW alarmists when they speak of GW denial and posture as if it is in the ball park of Holocaust denial. People who misuse language in this way signal that they are not interested in a serious discussion.  When GW activists speak in this way they give us even more reason to be skeptical.

What can a philosopher say about global warming? The first thing he can and ought to say is that, although not all questions are empirical, at the heart of the global warming debate are a set of empirical questions. These are not questions for philosophers qua philosophers, let alone for political ideologues. For the resolution of these questions we must turn to reputable climatologists whose roster does not sport such names as 'Al Gore,' 'Barbra Streisand,' 'Barack Obama,' or 'Ann Coulter.' Unfortunately, the global warming question is one that is readily 'ideologized' and the ideological gas bags of both the Right and the Left have a lot to answer for in this regard.

I have not investigated the matter with any thoroughness, and I have no firm opinion. It is difficult to form an opinion because it is difficult to know whom to trust: reputable scientists have their ideological biases too, and if they work in universities, the leftish climate in these hotbeds of political correctness is some reason to be skeptical of anything they say.  (Both puns intended.)

For example, let's say scientist X teaches at Cal Berkeley and is a registered Democrat. One would have some reason to question his credibility.  He may well tilt toward socialism and away from capitalism and be tempted to beat down capitalism with the cudgel of global warming.  Equally, a climatologist on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute would be suspect.   I am not suggesting that objectivity is impossible to attain; I am making the simple point that it is difficult to attain in a subject like this and that scientists have worldview biases like everyone else.  And like everyone else, they are swayed by such less-than-noble motives as the desire to advance their careers and be accepted by their peers.  And who funds global warming research?  What are their biases?  And who gets the grants?  And what conclusions do you need to aim at to get funded?  It can't be a bad idea to "follow the money" as the saying goes.

Off the top of my head I think we ought to distinguish among the following questions:

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity, and what are the human causes?

(3) is the crucial empirical question. It is obviously distinct from (1) and (2). If there is naturally irreversible global warming, this is not to say that it is caused by human activity. It may or may not be. One has to be aware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Suppose there is a close correlation between global warming and man-made carbon emissions. It doesn't straightaway follow that the the human activity causes the warming. But again, this is not a question that can be settled a priori; it is a question for climatologists.

4. If anthropogenic, is global warming caused by humans to a degree that warrants action, assuming that action can be taken to stop it?

5. If GW is caused by humans to an extent that it warrants action, what sorts of action would be needed to stop the warming process?

6. How much curtailment of economic growth would we be willing to accept to stop global warming?  And what other effects on human beings could the anti-global warming policies be expected to have?

The first three of these six questions are empirical and are reserved for climatologists. They  are very difficult questions to answer.  And it is worth pointing out that climatology, while an empirical science, falls short of truly strict science.    This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high, and rightly so.  Is climate science science according to these criteria? No, it falls short on #s 3 and 4.  At the hardest hard core of the hard sciences lies the physics of meso-phenomena.  Climatology does not come close to this level of 'hardness.'  So don't be bamboozled: don't imagine that the prestige of physics transfers undiminished onto climatology.  It is pretty speculative stuff and much of it is ideologically infected. 

Our first three questions are empirical. But the last three are not, being questions of public policy. So although the core issues are empirical, philosophers have some role to play: they can help in the formulation and clarification of the various questions; they can help with the normative questions that arise in conjunction with (4)-(5), and they can examine the cogency of the arguments given on either side. Last but not least, they can drive home the importance of being clear about the distinction between empirical and conceptual questions.

An Egyptian View of Obama

This may well be a spoof, but a spoof can convey the truth.  According to the PoMo Prez, "Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security."  The commentators rack their brains for an explanation of this bizarre claim.  Is Obama insane?  Is he on drugs?  Is it because he's an Affirmative Action hire?

Stop Whining, Bostonians: The Great Blizzard of '78 was Worse

I was there. The Great Blizzard of '78 Remembered

That it was worse.

That the NYT's alarmist predictions of no snow are risible given how much of the stuff is visible.

By the way, I loved my years in Boston-Cambridge.  Boston was my Mecca, the hub of the universe.  But I was a young guy, liberal as the young are wont to be, who hadn't yet thought hard and long and in an experience-informed way about political and social questions.  I owned nothing and I paid no taxes.  Quite the contrary: I received food stamps.  I was scraping by on a very low stipend in a very expensive city.  So I applied for, and received, public assistance.  I had no qualms about doing so at the time.  The food stamps allowed me to quit my awful and dangerous job as a taxi driver.  (The only thing worse than a Boston driver is a Turkish driver.)  I used my time well and kept my nose to the philosophy grindstone.  But the point is that I was able-bodied and should not have been allowed on welfare.  Welfare programs breed dependency and lack of self-reliance, among other ills -- which is not to say that there should be no such programs.