Islands Trust Meeting on CO2-Forcing

While this is sort of like a ‘report’ on the Islands Trust open community meeting on Pender Island (British Columbia, Canada), I am putting this up as a ‘blog’ rather than a ‘newsletter’ because it is not about an observer-excluding journalistic view of this event, it is about my situationally included experience.  I attended the meeting since members of the community were invited to do so, to openly ‘share their views’ on proposed ‘climate change’ amendments to the ‘Official Community Plan’ for North Pender Island.

These amendments were precipitated by .. “the Provincial Government of B.C.’s ‘Bill 27 (the Local Government (Green Communities) Statutes Amendment Act) which requires that all Official Community Plans be amended to included greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets and climate change policies by May 31, 2010.”

Anyone interested can see the ‘Fact Sheets’ associated with this initiative at www.islandstruct.bc.ca/climatechange

To give a taste of this, here’s an excerpt from the FACT SHEET on ‘The Science of Climate Change’ at; http://www.islandstrust.bc.ca/climatechange/pdf/scienceandimpactsofclimatechange.pdf

It is pretty evident that the Islands Trust has misappropriated the title ‘Science of Climate Change’, but that is the reality of these current times, and the meeting was not to debate the ‘so-to-speak’ ‘science’ but to comply with Provincial law and thus to do one’s ‘local bit’ to achieve the province’s targets of 33% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020, and 80% reductions in CO2 emissions by 2050.

Without going into the details of what it feels like to try to present a ‘minority view’ while at the same time cooperating in a community-spirited way (in my case, by suggesting that the amendments to the Official Community Plan orient on a first priority to ‘adaptation’ to climate change, and on a second priority to ‘pursuing the reductions of emissions that are heavy in pollutants such as the oxides of Suphur and Nitrogen’), I shall reproduce herewith a Poster Presentation which I placed in a prominent position in the entrance of the Community Hall where the meeting was.

Before leaving the reader to browse the Poster Presentation (which did attract some interest and consumed all of the handouts that I had made available (about 25)), I would like to thank Ian Clark, Marina Leibman and John Christy, who responded informatively to my email exchanges on the topic of climate change.   While I quoted them verbatim in the Poster Presentation, my written handout ‘extrapolated’ ‘a lot further’ than any of them would likely have been willing to go (or, if willing, able to go and still stay employed).   Nevertheless, what I gathered IMPLICITLY from all three, and of course I could be wrong, is that all three see ‘celestial/cosmic forcing of climate change’ as being in a natural primacy over ‘local internal forcing of climate change’.

Historically, this has been a religious issue, and that was how I oriented my remarks in the written hand-out (not wanting to incriminate the above-mentioned three, I included their statements only in the Poster Display and not in the written part).

So, here it is for anyone who may be interested.  I may write later on about how it feels to be in a small minority in a small community, as contrasted with the ‘city’ where anonymity is such that the ‘man on the street’  never evolves a profile that is immediately recognized by everyone in the community.

The Poster Title;

The Poster Left Middle:

The Poster Middle-Middle, Below Title:

The Poster Right Middle:

The Poster Lower Middle:

__________

Ok, here is the handout, which as I say, does not reflect the views of Ian Clark, Marina Leibman and John Christy, but seems to me, to capture what is common in their ‘outlook’;  i.e. the notion that ‘celestial forcing’ is primary, which is consistent with my own view, and which leads to consideration of the relation between ‘celestial-forcing’ and ‘local-forcing’ which is the theme of the written handout;

The War on CO2: How can one scientist’s ‘Moral imperative’ be another’s ‘Invented Horror’?

The launching of a war on climate change, however mad it seems to some of us, is underway, and like any war, it consumes resources and it changes our lives, and in spite of this, there is no guarantee that the war ‘will be won’.  How can it be won if the assumptions that drew us into it turn out to be false?  Continuing open dialogue in our community, as to whether CO2 ‘is truly the smoking gun’ it is imputed to be, would appear essential.

This commentary [and ‘poster display’] is to share how misconceptions in the ‘problem-framing’ have led us to launch a war on ‘GHG-forcing’ that is, both literally and figuratively, ‘shadow-boxing’.

CO2 concentration variation is a result of warming that ‘shadows’ global temperature variation that is inherently ‘celestially-forced’ (by solar cycles amplified by magnetic field and solar-wind ionizing that drives cloud formation).

That may sound as if I am ‘taking sides’ but it is not so.  There is something much more general going on that this particular instance of a ‘polarized division of views’ is just one instance of, but what an informative instance it is!  More remarkable than this particular case (climate change) of polarized difference between scientists who believe in ‘Celestial/spatial [solar cycle]-forcing of climate change’ and ‘Local-internal-process [CO2 concentration variance] forcing of climate change’, is the fact that we, as a community of well-intending people can be so SIMILARLY polarized in our viewpoints ON SO MANY DIFFERENT ISSUES.  The similarity of our polarization is pervasive across all manner of inquiry including; medicine (Holism versus Allopathy), evolutionary theory (Creationism versus Darwinism), politics (Liberalism versus Conservatism), religion (Liberalism versus Fundamentalism) etc. etc. and in all cases, the difference in view has a common ‘geometric root’.  While some believe in ‘Spatially-forced variation’, others believe in ‘Local-internal-process-forced variation’.

In medicine, Hippocrates defined health as ‘man being in balance with nature’ (man-the-system and nature-the-supra-system in which man is included), which is a ‘Spatially-forced’ view, while others believed that ‘health’ derives from one’s internal functioning, which is a ‘Local-internal-process-forced’ view…  In evolutionary theory, some believe that either Nature or God creates this ongoing evolutionary unfolding that manifests in the gathering and re-gathering of a collective of diverse dynamic figures/forms in which we are included experients (or, ‘strands in the interdependent [ecological] web-of-life’), while others believe that such change is ‘Local-internal-process-forced’ as in fundamentalist ‘genetics’, ‘biochemistry’ and ‘biophysics’ as they are imputed to occur within ‘individual’ ‘organisms’.  In both politics and religion, some believe, as Jesus seems to have, that we are all ‘sinners’ and that, for example, the sins of the adultress derive first-of-all from the sinful practices in the community in which one is included (i.e. that ‘evil’ is a ‘Spatially-forced variation’), while others believe in the efficaciousness of the stern judgement of Moses which regards ‘evil’ as deriving from the interior of the individual (Local-internal-process-focused variation).  In the Spatially-forced’ view, one’s actions must be such as to help transform the community (the source) whereas in the ‘Local-internal-process-forced’ view, one’s actions must be such as to eliminate the imputed ‘local’ sources of evil..

There was a ‘sea-change’ in worldview between the Keplerian era (Harmonies of the World, as in ‘Spatially-forced variation’) to the Newtonian era (Clockworks World, as in ‘Local-internal-process-forced variation’) that has been firmly entrenched in our Western culture.  Instead of Kepler’s [1571-1630] laws expressed in terms of spatial relationships, we shifted to Newton’s [1643-1727] laws in terms of the ad hoc notion of ‘local external forces’ and ‘local [internal-process-driven] agency’ of local, ‘independently-existing’ material bodies’.   While Kepler was an ‘overt Alchemist’, Newton was a ‘covert Alchemist’.  In alchemy , there is the problem of ‘squaring the circle’ since the area of a circle involves ‘transcendent numbers’ (heaven, female) while the area of a square involves rational numbers (earth, male).  Kepler dealt with the same ‘heaven-and/or-earth-as-source’ reconciling ‘issue’ in astronomy, in terms of solid forms rather than planar forms, and in his ‘alchemical cosmology, it was equally necessary to reconcile ‘gender influence’ as in his depiction of inclusionally nesting spheres-of-revolution of the planets by way of ‘regular solids of geometry’, arranged so that ‘female’ and ‘male’ forms nest within one another.  The notion is that the ‘Spatially-forced variation’ and the ‘Local-internal-process-forced variation’ are in ‘conjugate relation’ (a notion that is supported by modern physics, as will be discussed momentarily).

But spatially-sourced variation that is invisible and seems to ‘come out of the blue’ (as with earthquakes, avalanches, lightning etc.) was categorized ‘occult’ (if in Nature, or else as ‘an act of God’ as it still is, in modern legal terms) and was ‘stripped out’ of Newton’s ‘Principia’ and stripped out of ‘Newtonian thinking’).  Tradition has continued to try to keep ‘the occult’ out of our popular scientific approach to inquiry.  Earthquakes, avalanches and other ‘spatial-energy-forced’ dynamics that ‘won’t fit into’ standard ‘locally-originating’ dynamic theory are handled as exceptions by specialized fields of study [nonlinear dynamics, complexity, self-organized criticality]), so that our standard approach is to attempt to model everything as if change were due to ‘Local-internal-process-forced variation’.

Thus, for example, if the norm for society is crazy/incoherent behaviour, a sensitive individual that has the misfortune of trying to cling to nature-grounded ‘sanity’ in such confusion may consequently have a ‘breakdown’, in which case, psychologists will inevitably look ‘inside’ of the individual for the ‘cause’ of the breakdown; i.e. in search of ‘defects’ or ‘weaknesses’ in the individual’s personal history and/or ‘imbalances’ in his/her biochemistry.  In other words, the assumption is that the behavioural variation-from-the-norm must be ‘internal-process-driven’ and it is easier to look into the interior of the ‘local system’ than to acknowledge the spatially-forced nature of the variation (i.e. to acknowledge that the behavioural variation derives from the dynamics (spatial-relational tensions etc.) in the social space the individual is situationally included in.).  Not only is ‘local-internal-biochemical-imbalance-forced variation’ simpler to deal with, there is more opportunity to spin some profit from it (as is also the case with the war on CO2).

Modern physics (relativity and quantum physics) gives credence to the natural primacy of ‘invisible spatially-forced variation’ (energy-field-flow-forcing) and relegates ‘local-internal-process-forced variation’ (visible material dynamics) to the status of ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’).  The marriage of heaven and earth (the mysterious source of transformation) is resolved by the fact that space is energy-loaded and has a wave nature so that natural phenomena are, at base, ‘resonance phenomena’ made up of ‘harmonics’ which have both a ‘real’ and an ‘imaginary’ component.  For example, the hurricane or ‘storm-cell’ has a visible component, the pinwheel appearance (rotating vector), but our intuition informs us at the same time that there is a not-directly-visible rotating field that is the primary dynamic, which is ‘pulling’ the air around.  (Gabor’s quantum physics compliant Information Theory provides a mathematical description of the relationship between the real [visible-male-rotating-vector] and imaginary [invisible-female-rotating field] components; i.e. they are ‘complex conjugates’ which together describe the inherent wave-nature of dynamics.).

The bottom line is that this polarized division of views on ‘climate change’ is coming from a root-source common to many other polarized divisions of view; i.e. from the split between those whose preference/habit is to understand nature’s dynamics; (a) as deriving from ‘Spatial-forcing’ and/or (b) as deriving from ‘Local-internal-process-forcing’.  Alchemy and the ‘occult’ which was overt in the 16^th century and went ‘covert’ in the 17^th century, in spite of being ‘invited back out’ by geology, relativity and quantum wave theory, has yet to be fully rehabilitated.  And that is why we are cultivating (amongst other debacles) a global war on CO2 that will waste our community’s time, effort and money on ‘shadow-boxing’ with an alleged ‘cause’ of climate change, which is instead a ‘result’. — ted lumley