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Climate change, the human perspective.
I can remember my dad telling me that when he was a boy, growing up in Cornwall in the 1930's and 40's, the climate was different, there were colder winters and hotter summers... I know in my lifetime the climate here in the south west of England has changed too, lately "summer" seems to be the odd hot week separated by long periods of overcast and the odd very wet week. In April we had snow, just last week in June we had hailstones.
So while it isn't getting warmer hereabouts, as in "Global Warming", it is getting wetter, and perhaps more moderate with less extremes between winter and summer, the seasons are more bland and mixed, and the plants appear to be reflecting this change too.
Here in the south-west generally speaking most of our "weather" comes in off the Atlantic. In the past cold winters were caused by our weather coming from the cold north easterlies, and hot summers were caused by the Azores high building up and stabilising for several weeks, and hot southerlies off the med and sahara.
In the past summer thunderstorms could deposit incredibly fine red sand from the sahara, we haven't seen that for more than a decade at least.
The significant part about most of our weather coming in off the Atlantic was this, there are no cities, no croplands, no modern concreted over drainage channels or anything like that at play here, the Atlantic today presents the same interface as the Atlantic 1,000 years ago.
In the USA it is fairly common for the public to follow the jet stream, here in Europe this is quite uncommon, instead we watch highs and lows and pressure charts, the trusty barometer is still a better indicator of weather than the milti-million pound met office computers in their new home just up the road.
We used to say, when the met office was based in Bracknell near(ish) London that the weather forcast consisted of ringing up some guy in Cornwall and asking him to look out the window, and then forecasting that for London. Now that the met office has moved here to Exeter it appears they simply look out of their own windows, and forecast that for London, and London is the centre of the universe innit.
So in 30+ adult years of watching the pressure charts, I am aware of a change, you don't get the big, stationary, long lasting highs deflecting the lows into different paths any more, most of the lows just sweep across from west to east more or less, and thanks to the moderating effect of the sea and also not having to "fight" highs they all seem to be pretty much the same, with a main structure about a thousand miles across and the front systems they carry being a fairly well wound up spiral which of course means it is mainly an occluded front (off the ground) with the spilt to warm and then cold fronts happening right out at the periphery of the system.
Obviously there is a danger here in treating 30 odd years of first hand experience plus another 40 or 50 years of second hand experience as being significant enough a sample to give an accurate indication of long term trends... Exeter has 2,000 years of history and historically speaking there have been periods of everything, hotter, drier, colder, wetter, it has all come and gone.
Now the new met office just up the road tries to model all this, and they have powerful computers to crunch the numbers with, usually in the top ten in the world, and yet the actual accuracy of the forecasts is no better than the inception of atlantic weather buoys which allowed us to create realtime pressure charts, which the human eye could extrapolate as well as anything else.
Now we can talk all we like about man made effects on climate, sunspot activity, the wandering magnetic field and periodic inversions of same, volcanism, and so on, but the fact is that it is a BIG system, it has an awful lot of momemtum, it has an awful lot of inputs, it has an awful lot of factors, it is in fact a pretty good example of a truly chatoic system.
I say a truly chaotic system rather than a chaos system, because mathematical and therefore computer models of chaos systems tend to work with stuff like Lorenz attractors or a butterfly flapping its wings in Tibet 1,000 years ago.
In the truly chaotic system there are billions of butterflies flapping their wings every day of the past 1,000 years, there is solar wind, local solar system gravitic changes, the wandering magnetic core, oh, and of course the effects of human civilisation.
The best model for the climate is the one nature is running in real time, and in statistical terms the most sophisticated computer models have no more value than my own personal anecdotal observations, the dollar value and man year value of the met office predictions gives them more weight, but statistically they are no more significant than my own, and practically my own projections based upon the Atlantic pressure charts and a decent barometer are significantly more accurate.
But the biggest issue, whatever is driving climate change, is momentum, not just of the weather system itself, but also of whatever is driving it. If I could press a magic button and eliminate 99.99% of the world population in the next 28 days with some zombie virus, it isn't going to either stop or alter the dynamic that is already built into the chaotic system.
Man is not affecting solar sunspot activity, or the migration of the magnetic pole, which is why "climate change" is not purely an Earth phenomenon. It is happening elsewhere in the solar system.
Sure, by definition we must be having some sort of effect, but beyond the local heat islands of cities and forest clearing for agriculture and so forth, how significant are these effects in the grand scheme of things?
Unless the human effect is sufficient to be a catalyst then attempts to prevent climate change but effect the entire solar system, unless the human effect is catalytic then we cannot "fix" the climate here without simultaneously "fixing" the climate of Mars, Venus, etc.
If the human effect is sufficient to be a catalyst then we can "fix" the problem locally here on Earth alone.
SO we have a binary situation, and the two options are both sub-sets of one action.
If the human effect is sufficient to be a catalyst then we are literally talking about Terraforming or, in other words, Planetary Engineering.
If the human effect is insufficient to be a catalyst then we are literally talking about Solar Engineering, shaping entire solar systems to our own desires.
Both of these, to be practical, require the imposition of order, in other words a PLAN, upon a chaotic system, and yet our actual capabilities at this time are that mankind is itself a chaotic system, and so if we are to even hope to address "man made climate change" we must first, by definition, take absolute control of mankind himself.
This isn't hegemony on a global scale, it is more like empire on a global scale.
Someone, or some thing (eg a computer) will have to be Emperor, with an end to all political and social freedoms and choices, which includes all monetary and business freedoms too.
The Borg.
The Borg Emperor cannot, by definition, have any power greater than the sum of the parts that make up the Empire, the power of the Empire comes from the ability to direct, totally, that sum of power.
The power to command everyone in the Empire to stand on something 12 inches high, and then, at the stroke of midday Empire Standard Time, jump down to the ground.
Or the power to turn on every electrical applicance, or turn them off.
You can have a chaotic system, or you can have a directed system. Grabbing a part of a chaotic system and imposing direction upon it does not make it any less of a chaotic system, any more predicatable, any more controllable, any more directed.
Sure, human beings have an effect upon the chaotic system that is climate, but the effect we do have is also chaotic, and therefore less likely to create a "disturbance in the force" than if we were directed like the Borg. We cannot have directed effects without first sacrificing our chaotic nature to the Borg Emperor. The cure is worse than the disease.
There are abundant classic proofs of this.
Some 70% of the atmosphere we breathe is Nitrogen.
When you draw atmospheric gas into an internal combustion engine you are therefore drawing in 70% Nitrogen.
The more efficient you wish to make the internal combustion engine the hotter you make the combustion process for that particular fuel, an IC engine just converts heat to motion, and a jet turbine is an IC engine too.
The hotter you make the combustion process the more readily that 70% Nitrogen inside the combustion chamber gets chemically converted to nitrous compounds, a.k.a. "pollution".
So one the one hand the directed attempt to make internal combustion engines less "damaging" to the environment is working.
On the other hand this directed attempt is guaranteeing that engines are less efficient than they could be, and damaging the environment in other ways, ways that will in the long run do more damage than controls imposed saved.
So, Planetary Engineering is out of our league, what is left? Where is the motivation for all the caterwauling about man made climate change?
If it isn't the stated goals, and they are out of our league, then the only thing left is method, and the method is by definition imposing directed control over a chaotic system, and since this chaotic system is humanity, then the directed control is more commonly known colloquially as a "power trip".
So, every time anyone opens their mouth and starts talking about climate, they are talking about power and control over other human beings.
If democracy is two wolves and one sheep deciding what to have for lunch, power and control is factions in the military-industrial complex and proles deciding what is best to further widen the power gap.
When our "leaders" talk about climate change they may as well be talking about "The Jewish Problem", because they are talking about the same thing, imposing power and control and eliminating that essential human characteristic, chaos, also known as individuality and freedom.