Because of the emotions tied up on the issue of global warming, there is a danger that when one ‘opens one mouth’ or ‘writes a few words’, they are likely to be summarily dismissed by those  who feel that the world can be divided into two groups, -those who support the man-made global warming hypothesis, and, -those who do not support the man-made global warming hypothesis.

So, there is difficulty in sharing inquiry into the topic of climate variance, man’s activities and the relationship between the two, since such inquiry tends to be seen as a  ‘re-opening’ of  inquiry that has already been ‘settled’, the result being that everyone is identified as being ‘a member of one or the other of two groups’ so that ‘further inquiry into the topic’ is CLOSED, apart from developing more detailed understanding WITHIN one or the other camp.

There is, of course, another ‘line of inquiry’ and that is; ‘what is the source of this division of opinion on this topic of climate variance, human activity, and the relationship between the two.’

Such inquiry is no longer constrained to  ‘what goes on out there’ but instead pulls the ‘tool of inquiry’ (the observers who are coming up with these hypotheses) into the ‘augmented’ inquiry (‘augmented’ to include together with ‘what is going on out there’, …at the same time,  ‘what is going on ‘in here’, in the observer’),… this approach of including the observer in the observed (including the inhabitant in the habitat) being an approach that many of the pioneering scientists who have worked on the issues of  relativity and quantum theory have suggested is essential.

In this respect, the point that we tend to forget, is that ‘our theories’ are not ‘reality’ (Marina Leibman’s remarks in the video clip underscore this).  They are ‘idealisations’ that we must not confuse with ‘reality’ (and, as she suggests, idealised theories can be ‘invented horrors’).

The problem is, … our models tend to be ‘rational’ while our experience informs us that the natural habitat and its natural inhabitants are decidedly NOT rational.   Things may look calm the day before the revolution but that is because the focus is on the visible movements of the people and these have been suppressed by a powerful policing force (the camel looks fine as we continue to add the straws).  What we infer from the visible dynamics does not inform us of the ‘real’ situation which starts from ‘energy-of-place’.  Visible movement is merely the ‘kinetic energy’ aspect and the ‘mother of kinetic energy dynamics’ is the ‘energy-of-place(space) dynamic’ or the ‘potential energy loading’.

This failure to acknowledge the sourcing role of the energy-of-place is a major problem (it confuses understanding) and the notion of  NORMALITY contributes greatly to the confusion.   There is no such thing as ‘normality’, it is entirely subjective and based on visual dynamics.  Ok, that is discussed in the ‘Global Warming? or Global Norming?’ article but it remains an elusive concept in our acculturated way of thinking, so how to ‘bring it out’?

Western man likes to try to ‘control things’ by policing against ‘departures from the norm’.  An earthquake is a ‘departure from WESTERN MAN’S NORM’ but it is perfectly ‘normal’ for mother nature.  Western man has not found a way to ‘police departures from the norm’ in the case of ‘earthquakes’.   Western man has not found a way to ‘police departures from the social norm’ in the case of ‘revolutions’ and ‘wars’.

In the case of earthquakes, we know they arise from the relative tension across a fault-face and while we cannot stop the fluid flow of the earth’s lithic matter which is the source of geological faults, we know that when the stress is continually released before it builds too much, the earth tremors are relatively small.  In fact, nature’s way is to continually release the stress as it builds.  While such stress-releasing is not predictable, neither in timing nor in magnitude, nature’s practice of releasing it very often as it builds and less often leaving the stress to build for ‘the big one’ can be observed and this observation gives rise to the so-called ‘power law’.   The following graph plots the magnitude of earthquakes detected in southern California over a sixty year period.  The vertical axis is the number of detected earthquakes and the horizontal axis is the log of the magnitude of the earthquake (i.e. the Richter scale measure, by which the largest ever recorded earthquake [Chile, May 22, 1960) is 9.5).

Intuitively, we would acknowledge that this is a nice (for us) feature of nature in that ‘she deals with stresses as they develop’ more often than leaving them to build to the point of destructive (to us, transformative, to nature) release.

nature attends to stresses that build so that there are many more smaller earthquakes than larger ones

nature attends to stresses as they arise, hence there are far more smaller earthquakes than larger ones

The message is that the energy of place is continually stressing up and the movements that are visible to us are secondary to the spatial-relational energy-of-place dynamics.

The message with respect to our ‘managing’ of the social dynamic is that, since we monitor visible behaviour and we ‘police departures from normal behaviour’,  we don’t know whether the ‘apparent normality’ we see ‘out there’ derives from the natural relieving of stresses or from the quality of our police force.  Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette screwed up on this one, and instead of making a lot of small adjustments along the bourgeoisie-proletariat fault-face, they let the stress rise until the ‘big one’ arrived (the French Revolution) and the revolution turned the wheel through 180 degrees so that the ‘normality’ of the proletariat became the new base for ‘policing departures from the norm’.

Since ‘norms’ are purely subjective, our western policy of ‘policing departures from the norm’, which prevails within sovereign nation-states (western democracies) and on a global basis; i.e. the world powers seek to manage the global social dynamic on the basis of ‘policing departures from their norm’.

And in all cases, there is ambiguity in observing visual movements, as to whether the sustaining of normal behaviour derives from the natural liberating of stresses or from the quality of the policing action.   When there is a commonality between those with the more powerful police force and those with the most dogmatic norms that they are ‘policing departures from’, then the same sort of conditions are set up as between the bourgeoisie of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the French proletariat.  This could play out in endless ‘terrorist attacks’ or in outright civil war (all wars are civil wars in a shared common space).

These were the sort of thoughts that were shaping the article ‘Global Warming?, or, Global Norming?’;  i.e. that norms are purely subjective and based on visible behaviours while the ‘real story’ is to be found in the ‘energy of place’, the stresses that build in spatial relations that will find one way or another to ‘release’.

‘Policing departures from the norm’ seems to be, or to have become, a western way of life.  We have used technology to back it up.  In our living space, we insist that the ambient dynamic holds to the norm and we police departures from the (temperature) norm with ‘air conditioning technology’, or, should we say, ‘with living space conditioning technology’.

On the world front (the global front has no ‘front’ since it wraps around into itself), the western powers would similarly like to ‘police departures from THEIR/OUR norms’ and use technology (military) to do so.  The use of western military technology to assure education of females in Afghanistan is an example of western power ‘policing departures from THEIR/OUR norms’, upholding ‘ideals’ with the consequence that stresses are likely to continue to rise across the western-powers – Afghan-Islamic traditionalist fault-face.   The visible scenario of young girls happily going to school in Afghanistan may be more indicative of the quality of the western policing force than the release of tensions within Afghan society, if so, the period ‘earthquakes’ where the scenario is one of burned schools and dead students may continue to punctuate the serenity of the ‘policed norm’.

Tolerance for the norms of other cultures comes into ‘the equation here’; e.g.  Historians such as Maria Rosa Menocal suggest that “tolerance was an inherent aspect of Andalusian society” In her view, the Jewish and Christian dhimmis (the people under protection)  living under the Caliphate, while allowed fewer rights than Muslims, were much better off than in other parts of Christian Europe.  Jews and Christian heretics emigrated from other parts of Europe to Al-Andalus.

Evidently, there is a choice in the granular level of ‘policing norms’; i.e. one can do it at the group level or at the level of the individual, hence the multicultural approach or the melting-pot approach.

If one takes a long term view, perhaps there will be fewer ‘big ones’ (earthquakes) if the norm-policing strategy is policed at the group level rather than the individual level.  This is what aboriginals in Canada continue to negotiate for (two nations side-by side as agreed in the treaties).

Anyhow, the connection with ‘Global Warming? or Global Norming?’ is that the inherent ‘resistance’ to change is due to the fact that influences from a distant past directly influence the present dynamic, whereas our rational models are based on the assumption that the present depends only on the immediate past.  What follows is the notion that ‘what we do today’ is what changes ‘what goes on tomorrow’, but that is clearly not the case (as is illustrated by the Lorenz water-wheel).    We are already included in a complex dynamic where multiple ‘buckets’ filled in the remote past are influencing today’s dynamic.  What we do today is nothing other than adding in a ‘bucket of influence’ into the overall dynamic and while we would like that ‘bucket of influence’ to turn the wheel of fortune in a desired direction, it may in fact add in to the other influences in such a manner as to turn the wheel in the opposite direction (e.g. the natural movement towards education of females in the Islamic world may be reversed by the western ‘bucket of influence’ intended to move the wheel faster forward).

Just about all of ‘this stuff’ is ‘below the surface level of popular discussion and debate’ on ‘man-made global warming’ so that it will not even be heard if the mention of ‘man-made-global warming’ brings out the ‘two sides’ with their respective bags of arguments.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this ‘author’s subtext’;

“Because of the emotions tied up on the issue of global warming, there is a danger that when one ‘opens one mouth’ or ‘writes a few words’, they are likely to be summarily dismissed by those  who feel that the world can be divided into two groups, -those who support the man-made global warming hypothesis, and, -those who do not support the man-made global warming hypothesis.”

I don’t really have an answer to this ‘communications challenge’.   So, I kind of ‘pegged the whole article’ to the stake in the ground of Marina Leibman’s visible credibility in saying;

“There is no global warming caused by human activity, first because greenhouse gases do not affect climate. They do not affect climate. That is a physical theory, it is an invented horror – it does not exist.” Leibman dismisses reports of increased thaw of permafrost as invented reports made by scientists in need of money. “– Marina Leibman, Chief Scientist, Earth Criosphere Institute, Russia (source – NTD News

If Marina Leibman’s bold statements can’t make a difference than the views of Joe Nobody out here in the blogosphere are unlikely to make a difference.

Why this is, is because we have virtually stopped reasoning for ourselves and have become dependent on what the mainstream media feeds us. and it certainly doesn’t feed us grass roots philosophical inquiry of the type shared in this newsletter/blog.  Because we have left the truths of our real-life experience behind by having come to believe that ‘science rules’ and that one has to be a scientist to understand science, our current modus operandi is to try to figure out who, out there, is telling the truth.  And this opens the doors to becoming swayed by hollow but fear-mongering rhetoric such as Al Gore’s as reinforced by the pack that has rallied around this notion of man-made global warming (and which has been willing to ‘cook’ the data to make sure it supports the theory), making it into a ‘religious movement’ a ‘moral imperative to go to battle against climate change’ as Gore puts it.

In any case, I liked the authority of Marina Leibman’s forthright remarks (freedom of speech on such issues is apparently still possible in Russia!) and my hope was to ‘use Marina’ to inspire a re-opening of inquisitiveness in the topic of climate change that momentarily suspend people’s ‘closed beliefs’ and allow me to share a few thoughts on the matter which are in no way my own, but rather a coherent web of ideas  which have been articulated in the past by the Heraclitus’s, the Pasteur’s, the Poincaré’s etc.

Also, perhaps because it is the Chinese viewpoint, I thought that New Tang Dynasty did a great straight forward news reporting on the permafrost issue (using the ITN raw data), the likes of which it is almost impossible to find, nowadaws, on the main US/Canadian/British news channels.

To me, the source of the confusion lies in our focus on visible physical dynamics.  We draw cartoons that show stressed people turning beet red in the face and steam whistling out their ears.  But even if we have a whole community of such types, the ‘authorities’ will read in their police reports, ‘everything is normal’ and return to their cocktail parties, … all the way up to the instant ‘the big one’ arrives.

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