You are all still talking about Rational Stuff.

Clive’s original article was talking about Feeling Stuff. Yet … none of you will speak to his topic.

Terra-ist and Bruce … I suggest that if there is intelligent other life in the universe, there is a possibility they don’t think like we do, and don’t communicate like we do. So it’s absurd to expect them to do so.

It may be our inability to perceive those other vibrational spectrums outside our five senses that is the real sticking point. When we will only trust what we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell … physics and neuroscience suggests we are missing a bucketload of spectra in our perceptions and we DO NOT KNOW what else is going on.

We’ve built lots of machines to measure those vibrations, and confirmed there are forces we cannot perceive, but can utilise. Are we so arrogant that we think we’ve nailed it and there’s nothing left to find out? Really? Gosh, why are we still funding science then … oh, to make money out of it, of course!

And one of your chosen quotes:
“Earth might become uninhabitable, but on a thousand biospheres new forms of intelligent life are created with every turn of our galaxy. It all is relative.”

Those who have studied astronomy and thought about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life - often using the Drake Equation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Equation
Usually end up wondering, “Where the hell are they?”

As the evidence piles up that life may well be common in the universe, one factor in the Drake Equation begins to look more and more important. That factor is L, the “expected lifetime of such a civilization for the period that it can communicate across interstellar space”.

It is quite plausible that intelligent life forms almost invariably destroy themselves a short time after they develop advanced technology. Why? Well, life itself is the result of a competitive process called “natural selection” or, more crudely, “survival of the fittest.” Resources are finite, but living organisms possess an infinite capacity to reproduce. Lethal competition within species is inevitable. The greater the intelligence, the greater the lethality and potential for destruction, either deliberate or incidental. The only protection against becoming a victim is deterrence - to ensure that destruction is mutual or perhaps preemptive. But that perversely only guarantees destruction as mistakes are inevitable.

The disturbing truth is that when push comes to shove, “civilised behaviour”, like pacifism, environmentalism, generosity etc. is anathema to survival. But ultimately, so is uncivilised behaviour. To find myself making such statements is shocking to me, but they seem to follow logically from what we know about life, the universe and human nature. Perhaps this is the ultimate Copernican Revolution. Homo sapiens is not exempt.

You think it is about good and evil? Can I remind you we haven’t been able to settle that question since anyone thought up the concept, and rather a lot of harm got done in trying?

Hannah Arendt talks about the “banality of ordinary evil”. It lies within ordinary lives practiced blindly without respect to emotional being, I believe.

So I don’t mind reminding you too, that many ordinary evils come out of good intentions, and just as many good things are the direct outcomes of the most appalling evils … of spite, cruelty, and woeful indifference. It’s not the right question!

After Zoroaster

Although a useful summary, I wish the article had been more informative on the issue in the title: How to deal with climate change grief. How are we to respond? Are we to spend the rest of our lives grieving over the unnecessary loss of species and unprecedented human suffering and loss of life? What are we to do? Personally, I am at a loss. What could possibly matter?

I have some other priorities … I think I said that above? But I also promised you my best if you gave me yours - and I think we gave each other a fair hearing? How does it feel for you? Feels good to me, and I thank you for showing us as much of your underpants as you did.

One more thing to share with you, to make you think, and maybe consider flashing your dacks again sometime if it occurs to you during your “second childhood”. There is an oft said cliche, said in reaction to the person who complains of feeling hurt by something written or said, “stick and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me”.

There is recent research that shows that when a person is insulted, the same pain circuits are triggered in their brain, as if they were being punched in the face. So that cliche is untrue and should be binned asap. Insults do cause pain and should not be just casually backhanded to your own doubles partner.

Team building workshops 101 and modern parenting 101, too. This is something I do enforce on my kids. I make my criticisms constructive, and deliver them with love. Sometimes, that means I have to be negative, but they need to know what the limits of being human are. Love is not sentiment, and I suspect you know the difference already, so I’ll shut up and smile.

May you grow down gracefully with awareness … and spit when no one is watching … remember the things you wanted to do when you were a boy and weren’t allowed or didn’t get the chance, and make sure you get to do those things now. Keep making the cool jokes. Maybe someone will write about the Industrial Revolution and we can go argue that.

“No, Nurse, I don’t need the medication now thanks, I’ve just released the endorphins on the tennis court.

But, while you on a home visit you could have a kind word to the dog who’s looking a bit down in the dumps: normally he’s my role model with his lived-in motto of Happiness is Action.”

Ah she’s gone and seems to think I can cope with another night and day. A pity I earned such credit as a babysitter the other night, they might want me to do it again and excuse themselves if they read this with the idea that I am being asked to do it so I matter to someone. What’s a cheque book for for G sake? As you can see, since I am sure you can read Irony, I know that I am lucky if I put myself in others’ shoes, but then I know I would be indecently patronising if I felt sorry for them and expressed it.

Here [he meant in an attached file - see below] is an analysis of atmospheric methane. Since the Soviets plugged their leaky pipes there has been no sign of a human contribution!

If you read the IPCC reports they admit they do not understand what is
going on.

It seems to me to be quite shocking that methane should be included in any
ETS given the present level of understanding!

Julius again: the attached file of an 8 page doc, which I could send you if I had an address, but may now be findable by an Internet search, starts as follows:

Methane in the Atmosphere
Methane (CH4) is seen by many governments as a greenhouse gas almost as important as CO2.
Estimates published by the IPCC indicate that fossil fuels (both coal and natural gas) and
livestock, are each responsible for 20% of the total annual emissions of methane. The remaining
balance is a further 20% from a variety of anthropogenic sources and 40% from natural sources
with wetlands as the major contributor.
The IPCC emphasis on the importance of methane has resulted in fugitive natural gas emissions,
coal seam methane, and agricultural livestock being included in schemes to limit greenhouse gas
emissions.
This paper provides a general review of the measurements available for methane, a comparison
with the behaviour of CO2 and a new analysis. An alternative explanation of the significant
sources of methane is derived from the measurements. This shows anthropogenic methane has
not been a significant or detectable contributor to the annual variations of methane in the
atmosphere since the early 1990s. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a
very large leakage of methane into the atmosphere from natural gas pipelines in Siberia. This
has been well documented. These leaks were remedied soon after the collapse of the USSR.
Methane is present in the atmosphere at the level of 1,700 ppb by volume compared to CO2 at
380 ppm. The total methane in the atmosphere is of order 5.1 Gtonnes compared to more than
2,900 Gtonnes of CO2.
Data are available on the website http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/contents.htm with CO2 and
CH4 concentrations in monthly and yearly form. The data used comes from a network of CSIRO
and Scripps Institute locations that provide a continuous record of CO2 and methane in the
atmosphere. These locations have been selected to be distant from intense industrial and
population sources and are considered to measure the “well-mixed” atmosphere.
A simple demonstration of the changes in atmospheric methane is shown in Figure 1. These
measurements are from the South Pole and show a seasonal variation of 2 percent. The
concentration of methane is at its yearly maximum in winter and falls to a minimum in summer.
The other very obvious feature is a reduction or even a halt to the annual increase in atmospheric
methane from 1999 on.
1560
1580
1600
1620
1640
1660
1680
1700
1720
1740
1760
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
CH4
ppb
Figure 1 Methane measurements at the South Pole from NOAA-ERSL Dataset.

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As I feared, not much use trying to send the graphs on the blog, so I won’t try and send any more, but you could try using some of the key phrases for a search as I am about to.

WHAT SEEMS CLEAR IS THAT INSOFAR AS THE PANIC PRODUCING FEEDBACK PROSPECTS DEPEND ON METHANE THERE SIMPLY IS NO RELIABLE MODELING OR DATA WHICH WOULD SUPPORT THAT VIEW EXCEPT AS SOME SORT OF POSSIBILITY NOT DEMOSTRABLY GREATER THAN THE PROBABILITY OF COMETS WIPING OUT MOST MAMMALIAN SPECIES.

True it is possible that the methane in the tundra, if not in the ocean depths, could become one of those comets if the CO2- H2O feedbacks were positive and big enough.

My understanding is this; going back to some New Scientist articles i read a few years ago. What they call ‘positive feedback loops’. The best example I can think of is the permaftost in Russia, that has lots of embedded methane. As the temp goes up, the methane is released. Once the methane is released the temp goes up and releases more methane. Many of these potential loops have been identified (as well as many negative feedback loops), and I believe they’re discussed in the IPSS Synthesis. Yes they are…
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf page 16 onwards

I’ll short cut it some more for you. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the almost religious fervour some of us “greenhearts” have about the need to address the “problem” that is currently labelled as “climate change”.

We are farsighted enough to realise this isn’t about a bit of bad weather, this is about the survival of the entire human species. And sorry to nag, but Michael H-W and me are the ones who are going to have to work out how we all survive.

So we feel a “sense of urgency” and “panic” pushing us on in the debate, forcing us to have the courage to do things like … getting angry and demanding a bit of good manners from our own allies … or daring a bunch of anonymous lurkers to behave themselves while I conduct the first steps of a therapy of a random old man in a public uncontrolled blog!

So Julius, my friend, please be aware you are under scrutiny. And pay attention to your backhand.

I’m afraid you may have come in too late to be properly abused for your apathy (i.e. as lazy and irresponsibly about “the greatest moral issue of our time”) but perhaps not for a psychological diagnosis of what it signifies. Oh dear, don’t think you could possibly just be a sensibly happy person?

The key argument for alarm is this, as I understand it:

Adding CO2 to the atmosphere in what is said to be unprecedented quantities within the last X thousand years undoubtedly adds to the greenhouse effects of various components of the atmosphere, including water vapour as overwhelmingly the most important, so that less energy is sent back out into space at the infra red wavelengths than comes in from (principly light wave frequency) solar radiation.

That wouldn’t matter all that much if there was no positive feedback set off by this process because each doubling of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere only adds small amounts of greenhouse capacity to the atmosphere directly (the function being logarithmic or inverse exponential if you like).

The positive feedback as I understand it must derive largely from small increases in heat evaporating more of the ocean waters which results in more water vapour in the atmosphere and thereby greatly increases the greenhouse effect which traps more heat from going out into space. We haven’t yet got to the feared point where release of methane from the tundra or the ocean depths will multiply the greenhouse effect because methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. In fact the evidence seems to be that methane (which doesn’t last long in the atmosphere) has actually been declining in its contribution to the atmospher over the last few decades). However, further to the feedback via water vapour hypothesis (certainly based on some indubitable facts) I am not quite sure where the balance of positive feedback via water vapour is supposed to lie. Not only is water vapour a greenhouse gas but, once it turns into cloud and then rain there is a lot of heat energy released into the atmosphere (the latent heat of condensation I suppose from distant memory) which I daresy makes molecules of other gases, greenhouse ones and others, agitated and the bearers of lots more heat energy before that then gets whisked away upward and poleward by convection etc. Mind you more cloud could mean more albedo (reflecting radiation back into space) so it ain’t simple.

So, as Dr William Kininmonth and others say the positive feedback modeling is an absolute crock maybe we don’t have to worry about the odd one or two degree rise in temperature being the foretaste of runaway heating after some tipping point is reached, quite apart from the chance that we are in for a cooling period (even if only enough to offset manmade heating) for reasons largely unmodeled.

Fortunately my tennis is not, I now see, until 1.30 but I must remember to resist the temptation to teapot poses on the tennis court. Tennis is far too serious for that.

He recently thrilled me with the statement that he’d been a polite man all his life, he’d had enough, it would be No More Mr Nice Guy from here on. His emotional reaction had been caused by what he perceived as increasing discourtesy shown to elderly gents by society at large. We talked about it. I agreed with him, that younger people are more rude than his generation; and frequently do treat older people as though they are invisible. I encouraged him to express his anger to me, supported him in it, and he then felt safe enough to show what was underneath his anger.

His distress was actually about a fear that as he aged, he wouldn’t matter to anyone anymore. He would lose relevance. And what if no one had any reason to treat him with respect? He feared what would happen to him then.

That is an example of existential terror, Julius. Now, like you, he can’t show that feeling easily, but he did allow his eyes to get moist-ish … and I respected his emotion, the physical signs of its presence, and the reason it is there. I didn’t do anything too wussy now, like hold his hand or encourage him to weep, just witnessed and shared the feeling too. And then he FELT BETTER.

We didn’t change anything. We didn’t do anything. We didn’t start a campaign or do a teapot impression. We felt a deep profound emotion, together, as two human beings. The simple act of sharing that feeling, allowed another elderly gentleman very similar to yourself … to go on being polite and reasonable … in an increasingly bewildering society that seems to be begging for him to do it down.

So I’ll put it on the table as an example of an adaptive coping strategy.

I feel echoes of your underlying emotions in your stories here … that you have borne the pain of losing a child … and fighting a war … and jumping out of planes! I’m so impressed by you. No lack of respect for your life experience, not over here. And it is well known now we psychs have bothered talking to the elderly about their life experiences, that your age group have a lot of smart tactics on dealing with strong negative emotions, and they are worth knowing about.

Now, I”ll offer you this. Lack of empathy isn’t about lack of imagination. You have to have an imagination in order to be truly empathetic. It’s only that no one told you how to do it before, that you haven’t noticed. You also have to be very brave, to go where you’ve never gone before, and do something with your brain that you’ve not tried before.

For my part I only reply to the non-moronic amongst those who seem to deny that AGW is real or deny it is serious. For example, it is not impossible to find out how to communicate with people like Dr Tom Qurk, Dr Ian Wilson, Dr William Kininmonth, Dr David Evans et al. One can put to them, as I have most recently done, the hypothetical explanation I have proposed above for why the net increases in atmospheric CO2 over the last 60 years or so should be attributed to fossil fuel based emissions contrary to the hypothesis that they are basically oceanic which emerges from the Quirk article cited. No reply yet, but any reply will not be of the level of bovine stupidity suggested by John2066 but reasoned I am sure, unlike those which depend on “99 per cent of scientists working in relevant fields etc.” - a totally false figure by the way.

Why do you think that Melbourne has been experiencing a drought and heatwave which is more than just the longest and hottest (on one day anyway) by not a very large margin in a comparatively short history of accurate record keeping? If you read the IPCC report sections cited by Andrew Glikson above (and he is an AGW believer and scientist) you will realise that much greater climatic changes than anything so trifling as our drought and heatwave have been characteristically caused by regional occurrences that have nothing to do with global warming, let alone CO2 emissions. One striking example is the big African monsoon shifts which led to the greening of the Sahara and then, presumably, the drying out and the destruction of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. If I could place a bet I would say that, whatever might happen in a few decades time, the cause of the current drought will be calculated to be the result of oceanic events involving not just ENSO but the Indian Ocean. Whether or not these will be explained by long cycles of solar and lunar gravitational effects on the oceans is another matter.

If you want to do some serious thinking and writing about the subject consider the implications of the fact that heat usually means more rain, drought and cold go together. That of course depends on their being a lot of water about in the vicinity, as there is all round the Australian coast line.

This has been a very entertaining thread.

Could someone ( maybe Julius ) reasonably comment on why , if the global temp has only changed 1 or 2 degrees in the past 100 years, people are so concerned about exponential upward temperature trends and imminent disaster?

Surely any margin for error would be greater than the stated increase and how can we so positively infer a trend on such a small uncertain range?

This question comes from an interested apathist and i apologise in advance if it is quite silly and i will prepare to assume the teapot pose.

Literally nothing will ever convince them, it doesn’t matter how many hundreds of people die from heatress in Melbourne, that we have a 47 degree day in Victoria smashing all previous records, that Victoria itself is turning into a filthy desert. They just deny deny deny it.

Or maybe, deep down, they are pleased with these things happening…….

Generally though I don’t think we would have a large jargon barrier to cross for communication.

ROBBI64 has suggested lack of empathy and may be right (well I am a man to start with) and just perhaps that goes with lack of imagination. But, that is probably not right as, at least in words and concepts I have a probably justified reputation for wide-ranging originality.

Perhaps you have never experienced what I think of as fear. I remember the fear that I experienced waiting for the biopsy news when my charming clever child was about to be diagnose with the cancer that killed a year later.

I used to be a pretty good poker player and my stockmarket hedging of risk is pretty sophisticated so I have only experienced a few flashes of transient fear-like emotion before getting down to calculating. I lost a lot of money when I bet that Whitlam’s 25 per cent tariff cuts would mean no more currency revaluations. But I lost it on paper and didn’t get close to its causing disaster so was able to look at it merely as a setback. Likewise my losses in October 1987 made me kick myself briefly for not having backed my selling instincts more heavily in the previous couple of months. But I rationalised that I had at least not taken up the WMC issue and planned to buy a few stocks cheaply and did. Mind you, always borrowing money serves to keep one thinking but fear doesn’t have a big place. After all never having had more than about 6 per cent in specs and blue sky shares, though being heavily geared into ASX 200 shares can also be hairy, means that one is prepared for wipeouts (always assuming you can recognise the new name of the company as you search vainly for scrip or holder statement).

Yes, having kids. Thinking one had fallen off a high wall when it was in fact his first epileptic fit (grown out of 10 years later) is a memory of fear with instant action. But not within the last 25 years. Riding (a bike I presume) to work prompts the thought that I gave that up pretty quickly because I didn’t like the sweat and cleaning up but, more to the point, reminds me of finding myself being swept out to sea off a tropical ocean beach only a couple of months ago with absolutely no one on the beach as I reached the run-out in my waist deep walk to one end. Panic for a few seconds until I fortunately recalled childhood lessons from Australian surf beaches and just kept my head and swam hard parallel to the beach for some outlying rocks which fortunately I got to the beach side of on a sudden lift from a wave just as I discovered that my hand couldn’t grip the weed covered rock. The swimming effort left me almost exhausted for half an hour but having a good story to tell, and warning to give, must have made me forget fear. In contrast I can recall noticing quite clearly a few years ago how completely lacking in fear I had been when confronting a large aggressive young man with a savage dog which had attacked my friendly one. I stood in totally relaxed pose and quietly uttered subtly insulting and humiliating words in front of the two young women with him. As on a couple of previous comparable occasions stretching back over many years I was conscious of being in psychological control - but actually quite alert in case I needed to move quickly (a bit like the man at the net when his partner is serving).

So, yes, I suppose you are right, but also we seem to be talking about slightly different experiences when we use the word “fear”.

I’ve got something from this blog thanks to you ROBBI64. I shall now proffer old codgers “I’m pleased to see you share my preference for Teapot imitation over the second childhood act”. Should I then turn and run?

BTW you mentioned a few aeons back as a subject that might have impinged on my youthful consciousness: Hiroshima. Here’s a thought from one who has been to Hiroshima with his Japanese relations. The bombing of it (and Nagasaki) was the most productively effective deterrent-cum-warning the world has seen since Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt (a lesson that was bad news for gays). Can you imagine nuclear weapons not having been used in the last 64 years if the world hadn’t had that demonstration as the Japanese hosts themselves said (being quite urbane and sophisticated cosmopolitans in outlook)? At another extreme is the Holocaust (and other genocides come to think of it) which taught that you had better not p*ss people off by being identifiable as productive people who are smarter and harder working than the rest.

Would you like to take offence at that?

“so when you’re next in a crisis all you have to do is put one hand on your hip, the other in the air and all your troubles will disappear faster than your accompanying plate of chocolate biscuits. Why is this so? Well Dr Graeme Garden has spent many years studying this strange and wonderful phenomenon. His eventual conclusion was that if a person acts like a loony, other people will avoid them. So next time you get hassled by your boss, just act like a teapot and they will eventually leave you alone”

Much more interesting: you seem to reject part, possibly a subsidiary or optional extra part of the Greg Clark thesis about the missing factors in explanations of why the Industrial Revolution took off and ended the Malthusian age of the world before 1800 in England/Britain rather than e.g. China or Japan which had had secure land tenure, markets etc. for the same critical 500 years approx. that he looked at. You reject the idea, I think, that it had anything to do with a hereditary intelligence component. Certainly there were many factors including, according to one historian friend, the switch from gin to beer in early to mid-18th century England! Here however, are a few fact to consider which I find interesting, led off though with my own speculative contribution which is

1. Assuming Chinese (let’s simplify for the moment by omitting the Japanese and Koreans) were universally allowed to learn to read and write at all relevant periods would it not have been a much harder decision to make if you were a successful tradesman about 1600 to have your smart sons learn to read and writee than it would have been for the English equivalent. The English, with the advantage of having a newly translated Bible to read, would know that reading could be acquired by a seven year old in about 6 months whereas the Chinese would have faced probably three years to get to the equivalent competence with the traditional script. Think of the expense, including the child not being fulltime earning its keep. A further “intuition” - entirely without knowledge of how the Chinese did maths, though I could probably find it quite quickly - maybe in conjunction with “Jesuit” - is that they didn’t have the advantage of Arabic numerals plus the Hindu contribution of the zero. Maybe not such a big deal for shopkeeping judging by the speed with which I have seen an abacus being used but maybe, also, quite a hindrance to slightly more advanced uses of mathematics, even trigonometry.

2. While the Japanese population multiplied several times over (from about 6 million to 30 million from memory) in the few hundred years from about the Black Death to 1750 England’s population hardly grew, certainly not more than doubled and, about 1650 was in decline. Incidental facts of some interest include the way the Chinese and Japanese prepared and used their “night soil” as next year’s fertiliser thus keeping themselves protected from the general dirtiness of urban England and growing enough food to feed a growing population, including the poor. They also liked baths which the English decidedly did not go in for. In the same period the Chinese could go on cutting down forest to the southwest and, through their well established irrigation techniques, feed the growing millions. (Those growing millions eventually ran into China’s famous famines but that, I think, was not before population had increased greatly. I note that whatever the evidence for high East Asian IQs they weren’t only inhibited in expression by cultural or political traditions and customs but by such phenomena as thyroid disease caused by iodine deficiency).

3. Greg Clark’s evidence for the comparative fecundity of the commercially and professionally successful classes in England over several hundred years is pretty convincing. (Have a look at his book about it). The old aristocracy, being a military one in origin, was for rather obvious reasons not so good at producing surviving breeding literates….That there were a relatively high proportion of people starting out with numeracy and literacy and a little capital seems clear enough. Given that this might, for much the same sort of reasons as Jewish IQ seems to have risen over several centuries have produced a caste of assortative maters who were comparatively smart what is the evidence? Not much perhaps that comes immediately to mind beyond the a priori probability that high reproduction rates before modern contraception by the clever would produce more clever people. But the much maligned, and I believe recently shown to be wrongly maligned, Sir Cyril Burt produced statistics that don’t seem to have been challenged that show a much greater proportion of IQs over 170 than the normal (Gaussian) curve would predict. That would be exactly what one would expect from assortative breeding, especially the smart and literate marrying the smart and literate.

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I think Taxpayer - thank you Taxpayer if you are still reading - wrote a very good contribution. I don’t think I would disagree with any of it. A puzzle though, which I don’t expect a solution to: what was the pseudonym Taxpayer adopted for? One would naturally expect it to be for pretty grumpy ungenerous contributions on something social or economic.

There is no empirical evidence for or against. I’m taking a wild guess.

Julius decides if it’s true, not you. It is his internals, after all. I could be wrong, and I don’t mind if I am. Guess you’d enjoy it, but that’s your jollies.

Yes, I have watched, many many times, the sheer joy certain politicians had in taking it to the opposition. And I knew one or two of them personally, so I do know what motivated them. They had no respect for other people’s emotional being either. It’s fine to enjoy aggression and competition, as long as the person you choose to do it with, consented to be there in the first place. When they didn’t, it doesn’t look pleasant - for them.

I didn’t need to search for reasons to worry. Other people brought them right up to my door and made me notice they might matter. That’s what empathy does to you. Makes you realise how other people feel - and care about it. I can see why rather alot of western humanity might want to avoid feeling this. Can’t you?

If you’d really been reading my posts properly, you would have read I’m not too bothered about climate change. It’s the teapot impressionists, who might target me or you for a bit of displacement activity, that are motivating me here.