Saturday, February 11, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Climate Change: Time to Act
I recently heard someone express that idea that the campaign to try to do something about climate change had been let slide too much, and that the banner should be taken up again. That may be dangerous talk, because it might be possible to make things quite unpleasant, and the idea that human activity has caused climate change is not supported by science. I followed the matter of climate change closely in the 1970's and '80's, but during the '90's I let it slide. When I started paying attention again within the past ten years things had changed, and there were many sincere people who had come to believe that human activity was causing global warming. I was inclined to go along, but I could remember a few decades earlier that there were many people who expect that an ice age was about to begin, and their facts looked good, so I decided to look at the facts, and I entered a quagmire.
There are many pieces of interlocking data that have been put together to "show" that human activity was causing climate change, and most of those items were being taken on faith by reporters and most of the people how talked about the matter. I decided that I wanted to know more than was reported in the general press. The general assertion is that carbon dioxide (CO2) that has been produced by humans was acting as a greenhouse gas that was making the world warmer. There are several items that had to be checked. The first one was whether the surface temperatures were rising, and that one may be unanswerable.
People have only been using thermometers and recording temperatures for a few hundred years, and during that period it is pretty clear that the average temperature has risen, but the end of the "Little Ice Age' was in the middle of that period, so one would expect that temperatures would have risen. For evidence of temperatures in earlier times I had to look at secondary evidence.
From history we know that the Romans grew wine grapes in Great Britain when they occupied that island from 59 BCE to about 450 CE, but wine grapes hadn't been successful there since then, until the late 1990’s; the growing season was not long enough. We also know that there was a Norse settlement on Greenland that fed itself from 1000 CE until sometime in the thirteenth century, and that agriculture there has been extremely limited since then. Greenland hasn't has a harvest of barely to ripen for about eight hundred years, but there are hopes. Thus, it would appear that the temperatures are now about what they were two thousand years ago but not up to levels of eight hundred to a thousand years ago. Other secondary evidence from tree rings, etc. has been ambiguous. From this I concluded that global warming is within the same range as in the last few millennia.
I also looked into whether sea level had changed significantly. The evidence there is ambiguous, because there have been subsidence and land rising in many places around the world. On the Mediterranean Sea, where there have been human made docks for thousands of years, the evidence is ambiguous, but the sea level is around the same as it was when Rome ruled the region. It is higher in some places and lower in other. It is clear that sea level was much lower before 5,000 BCE, but since then it has barely moved.
The next thing that I looked at was CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The news reports never go into the details of what greenhouse gas is and why some gasses are and some are not. It turns out that a greenhouse gas is one that will absorb solar energy and either hold it or re-emit it as infrared energy. The characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is a molecular dipole, which means that one side of it has a positive charge and the other side has a negative charge. Most gases are not dipoles, except ones that have asymmetrical shapes. Water is quite asymmetrical, and it is a strong dipole. CO2 is perfectly symmetrical, so it is not a dipole, and it emits very little in the infrared part of the spectrum. Then I looked for how the people who claim that human activity is causing global warming got by that. They are claiming that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, so its tiny addition to greenhouse effect is magnified by the time factor. That might be a good explanation, if it weren't for the fact that CO2 cycles through the atmosphere within two years, which still doesn't add up for a gas that has a greenhouse effect that is less than one percent of water vapor's.
Then there is the matter of how much CO2 humans put into the atmosphere. The calculations vary but are in the same range, and it happens to be less than the typical year to year variation of CO2, so it is impossible to say whether there actually is any net additive by human activity.
When I got this far I decided that anthropogenic global warming was a hoax. I have no doubt that the Earth has varied in temperature over time, but the Sun is a variable star; its output varies. The Earth's orbit around the Sun also varies, so there is more or less energy from the Sun getting to the Earth. And there probably are other cosmic facets of the earth's travel that vary, so one should expect the earth's surface temperature to vary. But there is no evidence that human activity has altered climate; although agriculture has altered local weather in some places.
Now I have to figure out a way to get the general media to look at the actual evidence on global warming.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Now
'Now' is an interesting concept, and it has been defined reasonably well for at least the last several millennia, but how well do we understand it, and what does it really mean?
Studies of brain function and perception have shown that there is a lag between stimulus and the brain's reaction to the stimulus. Such a lag is necessary, because impulses have to travel along nerves to the brain, and the electrolytic conduction of nerves is not instantaneous; it isn't even as fast as a current through copper wire. It is likely that sensations from the feet take the longest time to reach the brain, but vision, even though the eyes are extremely close to the brain takes time, because the brain has to process the images that are formed on the retina before it can react to the images. The amount of time that it takes varies from person to person, but the between sensation and brain reaction is about three hundredths (0.03) of a second, with reactions times from 0.035 seconds to 0.045 seconds being more common.
The variation can be seen in the results of the catching a dropped dollar bill test. One person holds while the person being tested holds his fingers away from the bill until it is dropped. When the bill is released, the testee tries to catch the bill. Some people say that no one can catch the bill, but a small percentage can, and those are the people with the reaction time of 0.030 and 0.035 seconds.
The interval between initial sensation and reaction is the period that makes up 'now'. We never see, hear, feel, or perceive in any way anything that takes place outside of that short span of time. The world doesn't actually exist outside of that span; we can see images, energy, and matter that existed before the present now, but those things are gone, only the memories of their existence is in the present now.
I have tried to picture the present in an analogy, but nothing is quite the same. It is kind of like balancing on a rail with nothing in front or behind. The rail is 0.035 seconds wide, which for light is a fair distance, but for humans isn't very far at all. The rail slides forward, or it stands still and events come at us, we can't tell, and I am not sure whether it makes any difference. We live our lives in this band of time, and we can only get out of it through imagination. Memories and artifacts from the past are evidence that there was something before the present band of now, but memories may be defective, and we can never be sure about external evidence, because it might have been altered in some way or planted. We have no evidence that the future is there (or will be there), because there is nothing beyond our band of now, and no memories or artifacts from the future have been brought in its past, our now. The future is pure imagination.
When we speak, we use verb tenses to indicate the past, the future, and now. There are several tenses for the past, because our views toward it vary. Sometime we wish to express that something happened before something else in the past; sometimes we speak of continuing action in the past, and sometimes we speak of things that are simply over and done. There are forms for all of those ways of speaking. When we speak of the future, we often use modifiers, although we can speak directly about the future. So in addition to "I will", we can use "I plan to" and I expect to". Anything said about the future is indefinite, more indefinite the further into the future we project. There are a few different ways of speaking of the present, but fundamentally it comes down to saying "I am..." The present tense refers to things that are actually happening in the band of now that we are living in at a given moment.
In writing there are conventions about tense. Some are good and reasonable, while others are absurd. The most absurd convention about tense in writing is the "Historical Present", which is closely related to "Reportorial Present". The two are related and it appears that the historical version was derived from the reportorial form. At some point in the sequences of now, someone decided that news reporting should be in the present tense. That happened sometime in the last hundred years and was not adopted uniformly, because some news is still written in the past tense. Examples of the Historical Present are somewhat amusing.
It is silly to hear that Eisenhower commands the army at D-Day; Eisenhower has been dead for decades. To hear that once is slightly amusing, but a few minutes of such absurdity is annoying. History hasn't always been written that why. The ancients wrote history as things that happened in the past, and that was true through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, but during the twentieth century the present crept in.
The reportorial present can be even more absurd, especially when it is mixed with a proper time sequence. I have heard news reports that stated that someone "is" involved in an automobile accident, and 'is' taken to a hospital, where he was treated and released. That kind of reporting makes a great statement about itself and about the mental processes of the people who make such reports.
I started this exposition to discuss the use of the present tense in fiction, rather than to consider it in other types of writing, but fiction writing is like historical writing. A work of fiction recounts or retells in written form something that happened. The writer is telling the reader something, but it has been written down, so it clearly has to be an account of past events, even if the fictional time is far in the future of when the reader reads. Just as it is absurd to read the Dwight Eisenhower is invading Normandy today, it is absurd to read an account of an invasion of Planet X that is written in the present tense.
The whole process of telling stories has been around for a few hundred thousand years; although for most of that time it was truly telling, because the story-teller spoke to the listeners, but most of the forms and conventions of story telling have not changed. Story telling is intimately intertwined with language in general and with the linguistic structures. The structure of language is the essence of logic, and differentiation in time and cause and effect are central to logic and to language. Just as people three hundred thousand years ago couldn't listen to a story teller recount a story that happened during the day time during the previous Fall in the present tense, because they could see that it was night in the Summer in a different location, so it was not happening at that moment. Today we don't have a story teller sitting on the other side of the fire recounting events from times past; we have books from which we read; but the book serves the purpose of the story teller. The book sits with light from the fire of the electric light shining from its features, and the book tells us the story. We use a different sense to take in the story, we can read at out own pace and don't have to wait for the storyteller to relieve himself. Now the story teller waits when we have to do something else, but the book is still telling us what was written. The book is already there, so we know that the events being described aren't happening at tis moment; although they be imaginative events that take place in the book's time far in the future, but the events have already been set down, so,like the storytellers story about the migration five years ago, we know that the book already happened; how else could it be written.
Writing a story in the present tense destroys one of the basic assumptions about stories: that it is possible. A story can't be recorded and be happening simultaneously. The people aren't doing whatever there on the page; the page has been printed, so the people did their deeds sometime in the past. To reflect that the events already happened, the story is written in the past tense, just as the story teller told us many thousands of years ago of events that happen in times even earlier, and the story teller didn't lie about when the events occurred; he told us that it was in the past, in the days of his youth or in the times of his father or in the days of his grandfather's youth or in times far past. What has happened has happened, and it probably won't happen again, so make stories make sense, tell them as things that have happened. The story teller that we use today, the book, shouldn't lie as to when something happened by claiming that it is happening at this moment.
Studies of brain function and perception have shown that there is a lag between stimulus and the brain's reaction to the stimulus. Such a lag is necessary, because impulses have to travel along nerves to the brain, and the electrolytic conduction of nerves is not instantaneous; it isn't even as fast as a current through copper wire. It is likely that sensations from the feet take the longest time to reach the brain, but vision, even though the eyes are extremely close to the brain takes time, because the brain has to process the images that are formed on the retina before it can react to the images. The amount of time that it takes varies from person to person, but the between sensation and brain reaction is about three hundredths (0.03) of a second, with reactions times from 0.035 seconds to 0.045 seconds being more common.
The variation can be seen in the results of the catching a dropped dollar bill test. One person holds while the person being tested holds his fingers away from the bill until it is dropped. When the bill is released, the testee tries to catch the bill. Some people say that no one can catch the bill, but a small percentage can, and those are the people with the reaction time of 0.030 and 0.035 seconds.
The interval between initial sensation and reaction is the period that makes up 'now'. We never see, hear, feel, or perceive in any way anything that takes place outside of that short span of time. The world doesn't actually exist outside of that span; we can see images, energy, and matter that existed before the present now, but those things are gone, only the memories of their existence is in the present now.
I have tried to picture the present in an analogy, but nothing is quite the same. It is kind of like balancing on a rail with nothing in front or behind. The rail is 0.035 seconds wide, which for light is a fair distance, but for humans isn't very far at all. The rail slides forward, or it stands still and events come at us, we can't tell, and I am not sure whether it makes any difference. We live our lives in this band of time, and we can only get out of it through imagination. Memories and artifacts from the past are evidence that there was something before the present band of now, but memories may be defective, and we can never be sure about external evidence, because it might have been altered in some way or planted. We have no evidence that the future is there (or will be there), because there is nothing beyond our band of now, and no memories or artifacts from the future have been brought in its past, our now. The future is pure imagination.
When we speak, we use verb tenses to indicate the past, the future, and now. There are several tenses for the past, because our views toward it vary. Sometime we wish to express that something happened before something else in the past; sometimes we speak of continuing action in the past, and sometimes we speak of things that are simply over and done. There are forms for all of those ways of speaking. When we speak of the future, we often use modifiers, although we can speak directly about the future. So in addition to "I will", we can use "I plan to" and I expect to". Anything said about the future is indefinite, more indefinite the further into the future we project. There are a few different ways of speaking of the present, but fundamentally it comes down to saying "I am..." The present tense refers to things that are actually happening in the band of now that we are living in at a given moment.
In writing there are conventions about tense. Some are good and reasonable, while others are absurd. The most absurd convention about tense in writing is the "Historical Present", which is closely related to "Reportorial Present". The two are related and it appears that the historical version was derived from the reportorial form. At some point in the sequences of now, someone decided that news reporting should be in the present tense. That happened sometime in the last hundred years and was not adopted uniformly, because some news is still written in the past tense. Examples of the Historical Present are somewhat amusing.
It is silly to hear that Eisenhower commands the army at D-Day; Eisenhower has been dead for decades. To hear that once is slightly amusing, but a few minutes of such absurdity is annoying. History hasn't always been written that why. The ancients wrote history as things that happened in the past, and that was true through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, but during the twentieth century the present crept in.
The reportorial present can be even more absurd, especially when it is mixed with a proper time sequence. I have heard news reports that stated that someone "is" involved in an automobile accident, and 'is' taken to a hospital, where he was treated and released. That kind of reporting makes a great statement about itself and about the mental processes of the people who make such reports.
I started this exposition to discuss the use of the present tense in fiction, rather than to consider it in other types of writing, but fiction writing is like historical writing. A work of fiction recounts or retells in written form something that happened. The writer is telling the reader something, but it has been written down, so it clearly has to be an account of past events, even if the fictional time is far in the future of when the reader reads. Just as it is absurd to read the Dwight Eisenhower is invading Normandy today, it is absurd to read an account of an invasion of Planet X that is written in the present tense.
The whole process of telling stories has been around for a few hundred thousand years; although for most of that time it was truly telling, because the story-teller spoke to the listeners, but most of the forms and conventions of story telling have not changed. Story telling is intimately intertwined with language in general and with the linguistic structures. The structure of language is the essence of logic, and differentiation in time and cause and effect are central to logic and to language. Just as people three hundred thousand years ago couldn't listen to a story teller recount a story that happened during the day time during the previous Fall in the present tense, because they could see that it was night in the Summer in a different location, so it was not happening at that moment. Today we don't have a story teller sitting on the other side of the fire recounting events from times past; we have books from which we read; but the book serves the purpose of the story teller. The book sits with light from the fire of the electric light shining from its features, and the book tells us the story. We use a different sense to take in the story, we can read at out own pace and don't have to wait for the storyteller to relieve himself. Now the story teller waits when we have to do something else, but the book is still telling us what was written. The book is already there, so we know that the events being described aren't happening at tis moment; although they be imaginative events that take place in the book's time far in the future, but the events have already been set down, so,like the storytellers story about the migration five years ago, we know that the book already happened; how else could it be written.
Writing a story in the present tense destroys one of the basic assumptions about stories: that it is possible. A story can't be recorded and be happening simultaneously. The people aren't doing whatever there on the page; the page has been printed, so the people did their deeds sometime in the past. To reflect that the events already happened, the story is written in the past tense, just as the story teller told us many thousands of years ago of events that happen in times even earlier, and the story teller didn't lie about when the events occurred; he told us that it was in the past, in the days of his youth or in the times of his father or in the days of his grandfather's youth or in times far past. What has happened has happened, and it probably won't happen again, so make stories make sense, tell them as things that have happened. The story teller that we use today, the book, shouldn't lie as to when something happened by claiming that it is happening at this moment.
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