Global Warming

PBS just aired Global Warming: The Signs and the Science. I interrupted my work to watch it, my work of the moment being on tenterhooks between writing a new introduction for Macroinformation.org [purged by the fed: see my Macroinformation blog] and getting back to Michael Crichton’s State of Fear: which is about global warming. As is so often the case, Crichton’s science is thrilling; while the thriller plot gets mighty annoying.

This post must remain "part 1" until I’ve persisted with the novel. Crichton’s plot is great is consigning the crisis to journalistic manipulation. It’s obvious that industry wants to keep polluting as it pleases; Crichton has not yet revealed what he thinks its complement is: what agenda is served by crippling industry? Environmentalism at the federal level would be one candidate. Nazis sucked up resources to persecute Jews, not only stealing everything from the Jews, but taxing other Nazis to do it. So, any cause becomes a self-bloating cause in itself: justifying fiddling the evidence, etc. In any case I must find out what agenda Crichton is setting up for ridicule before saying more here. It makes no difference there what scenarios I myself can cook up.

But I don’t need to read further to get to this more important point: neither the PBS show nor the Crichton novel (thus far) say anything about a flaw pk may be unique (or close to unique) in seeing: Crichton dates global warming as a concern to some fairly recent date: when funded concern surfaced, in the public eye. Maybe I’ll re-skim and try to find that date. Whatever it turns out to be, know this: I taught global warming at the college level in 1967 or 1968, vastly earlier than Crichton’s date. Shortly thereafter I was illegally fired from my post.
Neither the PBS nor the Crichton-thus-far betray a hint about such long-standing censorship, persecution of awareness.

My response to being fired, together with new hebetudes in my Ph.D. program, (together with my meeting Ivan Illich,) prompted me to found FLEX: to offer a public internet which would allow the public to bypass existing institutions: publish, and read, whatever information it wanted; no more censorship (except by the public as a whole), no more certificates, no more licenses ... Any scientist could publish – no peer review necessary FOR THE PUBLICATION, any novelist could publish, any crank ...

But we need another word on what I mean in saying that "I taught global warming at the college level in 1967." The date I taught it could easily be determined. Lemont C. Cole’s article Can the Earth Be Saved? got the cover position in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I was not a biology teacher, certainly not an ecology teacher; I was an English teacher. But I was instantly convinced that ecological awareness must be spread to anyone under any excuse. So I assigned Cole’s article (with his permission), to my next class of freshmen, also assigning a paper on Cole’s efforts as rhetoric! (Hell, I’d just assigned Churchill, just assigned Hitler ... as rhetoric.) It wasn’t normal English studies, but that’s the kind of teacher I choose to be (and I wish I still had some of the yahoo responses from the class).

The Crichton novel is very good on the complexity of the matter: global warming is a set of theories the truth of which are far from settled. What evidence there is can be taken in more than one way. What it means, what will happen, is far from clear (all of which Cole had been more than clear enough on nearly four decades ago).

But as Knatz.com has been iterating for a decade, as I said nearly forty years ago, It’s not nothing: we don’t know, and we damn well ought to reign ourselves in from behaving like chickens with no heads.

Is that why I was fired? Teaching beyond my specialty? Or was it because I’d joined the group silently protesting US behavior in Vietnam before the chapel on more than one occasion? That year the English department had twenty-one members: huge, obscene, for a small liberal arts college. That year eleven of the twenty-one were fired. Yes, the bulk of that eleven had joined the silent protests on one occasion or another. But, ten of those firings were loudly squawked about in the school paper, clearly a political purge. My firing was not mentioned in the paper. My firing was conducted silently, in secret, my students didn’t even know about it.
So just maybe I was fired as part of the political purge, and I was fired silently because I was trying to raise ecological awareness.

The PBS show was very good on saying that there are already technologies at hand that could help: it’s time to start using them. My point here is that we have no records of what portion of the voices saying that in 1967 were silenced: by political and institutional means.
One day, day after day, Christians are persecuted. Then the next day, everyone is a Christian. And the church is administered by the persecutors!

The PBS show seemed clearly to suggest that the old institutions should now lead the way. Those are the same institutions that have been regularly lobotomizing themselves: for years, for decades, for centuries ... Ah, now that the Church has murdered so many heretics, let’s look to the Church for a little heresy: now that some of the heresies got through anyway and have become orthodoxy.

With FLEX, governments, universities, journalists, PBS, publishers of Crichton novels ... should have died on the vine by now. Why pay $6 to HarperCollins when you could buy a Crichton novel from Crichton (via FLEX), maybe for $1? Why watch a PBS documentary when you could already have read all the constituent papers from their authors, via FLEX, any time once the scientists post them?

Every year, every day, our institutions bury ideas, select which information, which theories, are to spread, which to be stuffed under a bushel. And every day, every year, we sit at the feet of these institutions, as though they were our proper leaders.

Supporting the same institutions that led us in lies yesterday
will not lead us to the truth today.
And while I’m here I’ll repeat: we are not sure that the earth is warming. The earth is warming: and cooling. Part of it’s "natural": meaning "not influenced by civilization". We can’t be sure what the results will be. Therefore, it does not follow that there’s no problem, that we can go on burning everything.

Intelligence should prevail; but can’t: not while we’re under the thumb of the same institutions that didn’t listen to Bucky Fuller, drove Illich’s books out of print ... fired pk, didn’t publish him.

Read what Illich was saying in 1967, 1969 ... Read what Illich was saying before he even started on Deschooling Society, and see what we should have been doing since 1967.
And Illich, in my hearing, never even mentioned global warming. He was just trying to get us to (opt to) live like human beings!

Part 1 PS: As usual, I'm reminded of a favorite pk joke. Back in 1971, 1972 Nixon proposed having US troops out of Vietnam by some date, some American political event, an election. A few weeks later he was proposing to have US troops out by some other date, a later date. Nixon could promise and promise, postpone and postpone, always sending more troops. I proposed for his campaign new promises for ever later dates by which he could talk peace and wage war. My proposals involved his committing new treasons, new illegalities, new sins ... and the White House liked my letter! But Nixon was just a typical institutional man. That's what all of our institutions have always done, figured out ways to diet tomorrow, never today. The fattest people can credit themselves with intentions of the severest diets. Murder enough saints, let enough time pass, and any cretin can pose in the garments of some dead heretic, now a hero. What was PBS paying authors on global warming in 1967?

That's when we needed to diet.
That's when we needed FLEX.
(Of course we always needed to diet, but 1967, 1968 was when ecological awareness was first spreading to a few receptive parts of the public: a few scientists, a few teachers.)
If we survive all this, it won't be for lack of scheming to fail.

2005 11 05 Global Warming Part 2 will begin soon: I’m getting close to finishing State of Fear. I pretty much know now what Crichton is saying the "other" conspiracy is, counter to big industry, big pollution; but I’m not sure I’m going to discuss it here: not till more people have had time to read the novel, which I strongly recommend: for the science, not for the adventure. I will say though that the passage on "ecology of thought" is delicious, fabulous. And I must copy its insults of contemporary universities to my InfoAll.org: under School’s Purpose. [InfoAll.org purged by the fed: see my InfoAll blog.]
One of the excellencies of the novel, in the thriller part but not unrelated to the science, is the conviction of rightness on the part of the media stooges: a congregation of faithful, immune to evidence, to reason, but oh what suckers for rhetoric.

Part 2: Neat. Read State of Fear. Or, don’t read it: just buy the paperback, go directly to page 500, read the ecology of thought stuff, then skip to the last few pages and read those. That’s where a smart characters proposes a temporary institution which should actually improve a great many things.

I thought Crichton became almost-great to actually great with Jarassic Park. Still, you had to read a lot of crap to get to the scientific wisdom. And in that latter category I now think State of Fear is his best work.

Except I’ve gone right on to his Prey.

Obstinate egotism ...
is a hallmark of human interaction with the environment.
Michael Crichton

2005 11 23 Crichton’s Fear novel suggests that feeding selected science and pseudo science is what our manipulative rulers are reduced to in the wake of the Cold War. He shows a number of stats that wouldn’t convince many that the earth is warming. True. It’s uncertain. And that’s MY point. Reuters has a good article today with more views. I quote a tiny part:"Even small risks in the climate need to be considered, just as we try to avert accidents at nuclear power plants," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an expert in ocean currents.

"I don’t think this is scaremongering. We don’t really understand the system," he said of risks that the warm Gulf Stream current in the North Atlantic might shut down in one possible "tipping point" scenario.
And: "Records of the ancient climate found in ice caps and ocean sediments show there have been staggeringly big shifts in the past. "Past climate change is ringing alarm bells," Rahmstorf said, referring to the climate’s fragility."

2009 12 13

A web article today reports on catching the scientists fudging data. It's delicious, though it seems clear that their well-funded enemies first called them names and drove them to distraction.

Dig this quote:"This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds," said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. "We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here."