cheese it, the cops!

seems rather a good moment for us, the monsters!, climate-change-holocaust deniers. if al gore is a crazed sex poodle, then the earth is not really growing warmer. wait! what? well maybe that doesn't bear on climate change at all; but it does show you something about american saints. then there's kevin rudd, who famously just kept saying that climate change is the greatest moral crisis mankind has ever faced, like an al gore message therapist. then he decided to back off on limiting carbon emissions when things went politically wonky. by his own account he should have set himself alight in protest outside the australian parliament, or whatever they might call it down there. stop the killing! or whatever it may be. actually, that five minutes where he decided he would chill out rather than suicide-bomb the parliament was the very five minutes that consituted the tipping point, the moment after which the total destruction of everything became inevitable, no matter what we do. kind of a relief, really. now we are free! that's good enough for me and bobby mcghee.

well anyway, remember when human beings were killing one another by the millions in wars and genocides? that time was right now. remember when we developed technology sufficient to destroy life on earth in its entirety? right now, millions of people are dying of poverty and preventable disease. and you're telling me that climate change is the greatest moral challenge we've ever faced?  definitely, in the computer models we constructed. well at least it's the greatest occasion for grandiloquent moral grandstanding by hypocrites and pseudo-scientists. why were martin luther king or mahatma gandhi leading liberation movements for millions of human beings when they could have been grousing about the weather?

when it comes to the question of what is the greatest moral crisis mankind has ever faced, i say turn it over to the scientists. only some great hack in a labcoat can help you define "greatest" or "moral." often when i am considering some terribly immoral act, i turn to "the journal nature" to discover the exact degree of its moral wrongnitude. frankly, i'd just let the objective facts make policy. oddly, the objective facts agree with me, on this as on so many other points.

i'll be damned! or perhaps not, after all.

the spill is suddenly politically toxic. it's almost amazing that obama hasn't learned the lessons of katrina: like: ok i'm moving to the gulf for a week, setting up command headquarters in n.o. i'm personally in charge: if bobby jindall or the pres of plaquemines wants something, tell them to call me.

so if you happen to be in lahti, finland next week, you can catch me keynoting the nordic society for aesthetics. the theme is environmental aesthetics, so with the goal of writing some sort of paper, i got hold of environment: an interdisciplinary anthology (yale 2008): the kind of thing you might teach in an environmental studies 100 course, if you were taking an interdisciplinary or partly-humanities approach.

now i'm sick of being a global-warming denialist or whatever; it's boring, and really all i can do either way is wait, and either cook or not. but people are obsessed, as became obvious again when i spoke at u maryland a couple of weeks ago on "the future of urbanism." the architecture school was committed to one thing: reducing per capita fossil fuel consumption. to do that, the best technique - supposedly - is to pile people on top of each other in extremely close proximity: the future is purely urban. any aspect of human relations to the world that does not focus exclusively on carbon emission is a dangerous distraction in these, the last days of time.

sadly, we're never going to hit the point where an apology is due, only slowly slip into some other terminal crisis, as this one slowly dissipates. but anyway, reading the little intro to global warming in environment - it is of course the first theme in the book - reminds one again that "science" in the hands of these people means an incredibly tendentious, screechingly emotive tissue of mistakes.

here's the first paragraph: "If an asteroid hurtling toward earth would, with strong probability, strike this planet in forty years, raise sea levels permanently between six inches to sixteen feet, force up to one quarter of all species into extinction, inaugurate plagues and disease, inundate parts of some nations, drown populated islands whole, render coasts uninhabitable, instensify hurricanes, typhoons, and tornadoes into record-breaking storms, cause frequent floods and landslides, and kill millions of people, then every government would work furiously to discover how that asteroid might be diverted or destroyed. There is no asteroid....But the rest of the scenario is very possibly true."

ok think about this "if" construction; think about 'very possibly'; think about what this rhetoric is doing. one thing it is not doing is reporting a series of objective facts; it is trying to make you start running around in circles screaming.  i particularly enjoy "six inches to sixteen feet," a good representation of the actual quality of the data. one tends to remember the sixteen feet. kill millions? or dozens, to represent the range of estimates in the scientific community..

then there is the usual distinction between climate and weather. (the first thing that we better say about this distinction is that climate consists of weather). they want this because then one cold winter or, say, five smaller-than-average hurricane seasons in a row would have no tendency to show that what they're saying is false. but then virtually every line of the text violates its own stated distinction: it starts counting hurricanes year by year, of course dealing only with segments reflecting an increase. "In Europe, the summer of 2003 was the hottest in 500 years." "In 2000, about 25,000 lives were lost in Venezuela's worst flooding in history." by the author's own standards, no conclusions follow about climate at all, of course.

what happens is you start with: what if it were like this....? then you describe an apocalypse, pointing out that it is possible, that is, that there is some possible world in which it is true. then you enumerate bad things that have actually happened. since of course bad things happen all the time (now, as before), it looks like you are accumulating overwhelming data. but every piece of data is just another fallacy, just there to make you afraid. it is fallacious because the only thing that is not nailed down is the actual causal connection to global warming. at the crucial moment you just declare that it "may" be connected and go on to the next bad thing. the current fashion for connecting climate to national security indicates that this will soon be happening with wars, genocides, etc: they may be connected to climate change. remember your most embarrassing moment? that may have been caused by global warming. that is a true statement and, by the standards of environment: an interdisciplinary anthology or al gore, the distressing story of your most embarrassing moment constitutes scientific evidence that the world is getting warmer.

"Tropical diseases will spread more widely with greater virulence....The dengue virus in South America and Rift Valley fever in Africa and the Middle East have extended their range. Malaria probably will too." right, so to even begin to connect this to climate change, you'd have to sort out all the myriad factors - many of which are not well understood - that affect the spread of disease. there was a time when tuscany and maryland were infested by malaria. but they don't bother to do much of anything except to declare that global warming and the spread of dengue fever may be connected. the mistake in this paragraph is the simple assertion that tropical diseases will spread. measuring conclusions to data and sticking with the basic rhetoric y'all associate with scientists such as al gore and john kerry, you should have said they may spread. if tropical diseases recede, on the other hand, believe me somebody's model would connect that to climate change.

indeed if average precipitation increases, that may well be connected to global warming. if it decreases, that may well be connected. if it increases in some places and decreases in others, as it has throughout the last few bllion years, that may well etc. if deserts spread or contract, glaciers melt or accumulate. ask yourself: what event, data point, etc would convince al gore that his models were grossly exaggerated? no data cannot be fed into a faith this flexible, this committed, this needy. no data can count against it. it's an entirely lovely conception of a thoroughly post-empirical science.

in short, the arguments come far short of any evidence. they are framed and infested by a thousand emotive and rhetorical devices designed to constrain you to agree and to gloss over the breathtaking shortcomings. it's fuckin pathetic. come back to me when you're sincere and not merely manipulative: try to show me, not just bludgeon me into nodding along with an endless stack of random jive.

one thing you're going to see in the gulf spill is that it will turn out to be the government's fault. it will bring the governorship of bobby jindal or perhaps even the presidency of barack obama to a crashing halt. this is the actually interesting purpose of government, of erecting over ourselves a gigantic human power. it makes the world comprehensible as an arena of human responsibility, so that no matter what happens you have someone to burn at the stake. the paradigm is katrina, where bush's lack of global warming initiatives gave rise to the hurricane etc, etc. or the financial crisis: a regulatory failure. who to blame for the weather has been a really difficult question for some time, but statism has put it to rest. that is, when you reach a certain pitch of real state power combined with a kind of imagination of omnipotence you finally get a comprehensible universe, a purposive universe, a universe that is potentially a just universe, though it continually fails.

that's why "mistrust of government" is always growing: well, one should always mistrust flighty pagan gods of one's own invention, even as one propitiates them with blood sacrifice. but really if you trusted government at this point you'd be trusting it to make you immune from the world, from sickness and poverty, terror and depression, crime and arbitrary disaster: in short, you could trust government only if it made you entirely invulnerable to pain and death. and you expect it to. and it promises to. and in its ridiculous reality as a bunch of human beings it always necessarily fails.

ice-age wyeth:

we've had 48.5 inches total according to weather.com.

if i was cnn, i'd be parachuting anderson cooper and dr. sanjay gupta into downtown baltimore right now. kaboom!

all the birds in southern york county are living on my porch.

it is frigging insane out here. new freedom reports 17 inches of snow...on top of 27 inches from last friday/saturday.. wind picking up and it keeps snowing harder. baltimore is shut down, and in fact i think it'll be a hon city katrina. only one thing to do. loot. start with a gun shop.

well two feet or more of snow here in new freedom pa, and coming down hard. dayum.

this kind of stuff is hilarious and it's going to start making itself apparent everywhere, because when the doubts began to arise, people started actually to check. the science was utter crap until it was ok to call it into question. the smugness of having all the decisive science on your side against your irrational monstrous opponents was bought at a certain...price, namely that the science itself is a bunch of yackety smackety. the certainty is inversely proportional to the critical consciousness, of course, while the moral self-approval isn't proportional to anything, being infinite and all.

thanks, druff!

i'm getting more and more insufferable, gloating about climate change retrenchment. and i'll tell you this: it's going to get more and more extreme. it's going to be an object lesson in science as horseshit. now first of all, think about the function, the actual social/political function, of constantly intoning that the science is indisputable and on your side, i.e. that your opponents are irrational idiots. and then think about the scope of self-delusion, arrogance, authoritarianism. think about the real function of "education" and enforced unanimity. oh yes, and the next hysterical orgy of definitive claptrap? roll your eyes.

almost twenty inches of snow and as the sun comes up the new world is gleaming. each little breeze brings a shower of powdered diamonds off the trees. every secretive animal around me in these woods and fields - maybe deer, fox, coyote, bobcat, squirrel, rabbit - has become apparent by its trail. all sound silenced, hand on a ringing bell.

johann hari, huffpost:

They didn't seal the deal; they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives.

well, that's a relief. at least we can give up now and try to die with dignity.

anyway, a few bald assertions: (1) nature, the earth's atmosphere, etc do not seek balance or equilibrium. they seek nothing at all, and they are volatile. (2) human beings are animals - entirely, 100% natural creatures - and like, say, plants, they can have entirely transformative effects on the climate and that would still be a completely natural event. what else? a supernatural event? (3) running around in circles screaming, or pacing dourly up and down the street with "the end is nigh" sandwich boards and a strange gleam in your eye just isn't working out strategically.

npr is doing a series on security problems caused by climate change. the first thing i note is that "security"=state authority, so that "security problems"=destabilization of state power. and i will just register this: you don't have to be anarchist to see that sometimes destabilization of the state is a good thing, namely when the state is profoundly repressive.

anyway the first piece, linked above, was a completely incoherent thing about a village in colombia that was destroyed in a flood. this was connected with ascendant drug gangs in the area, and both were connected to global warming and the melting of glaciers. each piece might be a story, but the reporter was completely unable to draw any causal connections. the supposed origin of the flood, much less the drug trade, in global warming - the premise of the piece - was a complete blank, filled in by mere politically-driven speculation or wishful thinking. in his defense, and remarkably, he actually said that he couldn't nail down the connections on which the piece was based. i think that two years ago, when npr was doing a more-or-less indistinguishable series of reports, they didn't mention or even conceive that they were merely asserting, without doing anything to show, that all the bad things happening were due to global warming. that is, there is a sudden chastening of the "movement." if that's due to climategate, then climategate is great: it's forcing people to try to produce evidence and to understand slightly that they have been grasping at mere dogma.

now notice that when i say things like this, i am not laughably opposing all the science. i am demanding empirical evidence, an explanation of chains of causation, whereas the basis of the report was: here are three things that are happening in the same place. they must all be causally connected, and the root cause must be global warming: a pathetic excuse for an account or even a story.

"climategate," in other words, will improve the science. as long as the unanimity was enforced, by mechanisms described in the emails, the science was mere dogma. where there are no doubts, there is no knowledge. i think this shows something about the role of consensus and dissent in human knowledge, about the dangers of epistemic backslapping etc. now that the thing is flowing the other way, there is the danger that we will fail to mobilize and save ourselves from the alleged scourge. right. but on the other hand, now it becomes possible actually to show that there is a scourge, so that if we were to mobilize, we might be able to do it on the basis of information instead of mere yearning after solidarity or collective wishing.

if i'm trying to figure out whether the planet is getting hotter, and if so why and with what effects, the last people i'm gonna ask are al gore and sarah palin. first of all, despite all evidence to the contrary, neither is in a reasonable position to read, much less assess the data. second, their views are dictated not by reality but what they want reality to be: their positions are, of course, political positions. their voices are irrrlevant and incompetent, and they should shut the fuck up.

ok there are various problems with this. it's rather odd because friedman appears to be defending the foreign-policy approach of dick cheney...well, that's not so odd, i suppose. but look: there are many, many features of the world that lead to a 1% chance of disaster. you can't totally mobilize in the face of each, and indeed it's impossible to, as they bristle, and as the responses might be mutually incompatible etc. as i walk out into this morning's sleet and drive to work, i'm taking a hundred 1% risks, which is definitely not to say that i'm taking a 100% risk. you'd have to show that the risk is very high, that reducing it or eliminating it is possible, that reducing it or eliminating it is not prohibitively costly, that responding does not render it impossible to respond to other similar risks, etc. if you wanted to show that this was "the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced," &c, you'd better show that it's quite likely, and you'd better compare its likelihood to the other 99 problems that might kill us all. this hints, of course, that all debate must be cut off so that total instant mobilizaton can take place. good luck with that, cause we gonna hack your emails.

friedman's piece does show why the emails were devastating, despite protestations, and despite the fact that, of course, they don't show that there is no warming etc. but the day before yesterday, tom friedman was one hundred percent certain that the world was getting hotter. two days later it's down to even-if-it's-only one percent, but all the same conclusions follow, all the same policies are rational.

if the emails that were leaked were fabrications, then one might reasonably conclude that climate-change skeptics (no doubt funded by exxon-mobil etc) were engaged in a smear campaign. but since no one appears to be asserting that the emails aren't authentic, i'd say y'all smeared yourselves.

i don't doubt that the climate-emergency lobby is sincere. it's interesting how one discredits oneself in one's urgency; i think as disturbing as anything in the emails are the indications of active suppression of results in tension with the declaration of impending apocalypse, the assertion of control over peer-reviewed journals, etc. then of course the fact that there's no criticism in the journals is used to show that there is a consensus. the whole idea is to discredit your opponents,thus helping to save the world, but the effect is to discredit yourself. it might appear obvious that if you have the truth, you should impose it by totalitarian means: you have to enforce the truth, amply justified because it is the truth. what you create is a situation in which you are impossible to believe, even if you are in fact right.

john dewey and karl popper, among many others, connect science to democracy and freedom: only an hypothesis that is completely open to criticism can be taken as having been rationally supported. here we see one aspect of this: when you learn that disagreements were suppressed, you realize that you have no reason to suppose that the claims are true. in manufacturing unanimity to mobilize us into action, they leave behind anything that had anything to do actually with establishing the truth of their claims: they exempt them from testing of the sort that would show them to be plausible. and they undermine their credibility entirely: show themselves to be people for whom finding and saying the truth are not the primary motivations.

that doesn't show that what they're saying is false; it shows that they are false. and it certainly undermines the claim that what they are saying is supported by the evidence. we don't know whether it is, and essentially they no longer care whether it is, even as they chant it continually like a mantra. that's why al gore and tom friedman aren't scientists and that's why the scientists whose results they deploy are not scientists either.

gene robinson  today: the leaked emails "do not prove that global warming is a fraud." well of course they don't. what they demonstrate, however, is that the climate research unit - like all other decent people, more or less - concluded long ago that climate change is real and disastrous and man-made etc, and then asked themselves how they could save the world by proving it. if you accept the methodologies and the conclusions produced in an atmosphere like that, you are a fool. it's the technique of theology, not science.

if you sit there and tell me that you think what al gore says about climate change can be separated from his political agenda (=extreme enthusiasm for regulating your behavior; happy anticipation of world regulatory regimes eventuating in a bureaucracy that provides earth with a second atmosphere), i say you are a chump. and if you think science can be conducted in an atmosphere wherein to disagree with a certain set of conclusions is to be a political monster - tantamount to sarah palin - then, etc.

i say that you and i, who i'm presuming are not scientists actually out reading tree rings, cannot in any way evaluate the data (which is polluted from the ground up) and come to a reasoned conclusion. really, i assert with the utmost seriousness not that global warming is a fraud but that we have no idea what is going on and that a rational conclusion is unavailable.

one thing to realize is that the "information" is developed in academic contexts. now you might think that this lends them epistemological legitimacy, and in some cases it does: professors and ph.d.s do actually know stuff. but a problem with academia is that it is the least politically critical or independent context in the world: it is absolutely unanimous. the politics ranges from al gore on the left to al gore on the right. the consensus is enforced with informal brutality: there is the sheer constant presumption that all decent people agree. a young professor who is a climate-change skeptic is untenurable in a philosophy or english or history department, not to speak of disciplines in which the question is really being addressed. in a case where the research is meant to drive policies, and where the policy agenda is left, there just is no sense in thinking that reasonable conclusions can be drawn. there is no one at all to say: wait. what? stop: only a stampede of people whose grad training left them all with identical lobotomy scars.

one puzzling aspect of the response is expressed by robinson like this: "He appears to be conceding skeptics' claim that over the past decade there has been no observed warming. In truth, though, that wouldn't be much of a concession. At issue is the long-term trend, and one would expect anomalous blips from time to time." ok. so. the view is that warming has reached a disastrous pace since 1900. and the purely scientific conclusion is often put in terms such as these: if we don't, say, halve carbon emissions by a week from sunday, we will reach the tipping point at which life on earth with be extinguished by that wednesday. and you're telling me that on those timescales ten years is an insignificant blip? not according to...you. then i guess you won't mind if we don't do anything for ten years.

hmm. y'all seen this? you could read the whole thing here. just kind of came across wikileaks, which seems like a pretty good thing.

john kerry  appeared as a witness as barbara boxer's climate-change hearings, declaring that the science is unequivocal (he started there and then went hyperbolic). now why call a senator to assess the science? because on this matter politicians are scientists and scientists politicians. this, i suggest, makes assessment of the evidence impossible.

this story says that for the first time, analysts are regarding climate change as a national security threat. oddly, i've been reading that story for years. if it is a national security threat - "direct" to boot - then i'd say blow it the fuck up with our big weapons.

i was watching a documentary on climate change last night. admittedly, it was from 2006, right at the height of the apocalypse. but both al gore and a climate scientist were comparing climate-change skeptics to holocaust deniers. now i say that when that is your approach, the claim to be talking for science is absurd. to express skepticism about the data etc is to be a monster. i propose to you that a scientific inquiry cannot be conducted at all on this basis. if the wrong results show that you are a monster who must be repressed, then the science cannot be, is not being, pursued. it is far more like the enforcement of theological orthodoxy by the medieval catholic church - complete with burning at the stake - than like the open inquiry we'd associate with science.

the holocaust-denial analogy is enough to sustain the skepticism: science has an institutional and social/political context, and that context right now is one in which no result is plausible: the motivations for taking a particular position are too disconnected from the question of truth. we're devoted to trying to eliminate the opposition by slander, or by any means whatever: it is a moral imperative to repress data that throw the thing into question. imagine what it would be like to be a climate-change skeptic in a university environment. what you have to understand is that this discredits the scientific status of the dominant position.

all of this, of course, does not decide or even really bear on the question of whether and to what extent and why the climate is warming, either way. but it has to make you think twice about just nodding along. these folks are trying to produce by shame and preachery a total consensus. then they're claiming to speak on behalf of neutral science. it's ridiculous.

now just to worry the holocaust-denier analogy for a moment: there is all the difference in the world between denying an extremely-well-documented historical event, and questioning predictions about the future made on extremely complex grounds. one thing you might notice: the predictions are all over the place, though there is a contest to come up with the most dire, because in this situation, the "scientist" issuing the most dire predictions is the morally best person. there is no historical question, essentially, about the existence and scope of the holocaust. obviously, there are a million open questions in the climate change debate. now the best moral posture might be to assume that the most dire predictions are true. that, of course, does not show that they're true.

so this is the coolest summer i can recall in this region. now, that has no - or little - bearing on the question of global warming. but let me ask you this: if this had been, in your region, the hottest summer on record, what would you or the so-called experts (there are real experts: i'm talking about the spokespeople), take that to show? i think you'd better get worried when all data supporting x is relentlessly emphasized, while all data in tension with x is dismissed. the global warming debate has an a priori moral edge: questioning it doesn't merely supposedly display your ignorance; it displays your evil. the running-together of the scientific and moral aspects - fact and value - make the actual research doubtful: the researchers already know, as a matter of commitment or personal moral display, how the thing has to turn out. what if you were a serious climate researcher and your data seemed to show that the world was cooling, or that the warming was slowing, or that it would level off at a reasonable level, or that it wasn't primarily due to human emissions? well, if you were to report that, you'd be an evil crank in the pay of exxon. you will be discredited, without actual wrestling with your data. your academic position would be endangered. so you'd have to retrench, re-interpret, re-research etc. i say this corrupts the research fundamentally.

if, as predicted, the hurricane season is average that will be due to the extreme acceleration of global warming, because if it weren't for global warming, the season would be severe or mild. of course a severe season would be the fault of global warming, resulting deaths on the head of the bush administration or general motors or clean coal. no hurricanes at all would of course demonstrate the astonishing unpredictable changes we're inducing.

By Crispin Sartwell
Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people stood gazing at huge flickering images of Al Gore and chanting slogans in unison. Perhaps you regard this as an inspiring spectacle of human unity. Personally, it gives me the willies.
     I am not a climatologist, but I am an epistemologist, and I know enough to be getting worried about the pressure for unanimity, the cult of personality, the whiff of hysteria, the apocalyptic structure of thought, and the totalitarian implications.
     In Nashville on 7.7.7, fundamentalist Christians were engaged in "TheCall," a huge collective prayer intended to bring about the rapture; at the same moment in NYC, Madonna and John Mayer were warning us that our sins would be punished. I'd say that we're a culture suddenly obsessed with The End, but we were the same in the 1830s. It mutates, but it's endemic: faith laced with a guilt at having failed in what the faith demands, a premonition that we'll get what we deserve.
     It is quickly reaching the point at which, through informal practices of ostracism and exile, no one can publicly voice dissent about the reality, nature, scope, or the danger posed by climate change. That is precisely the moment when the science and the politics are likely to become completely irresponsible, as everyone slaps everyone's back for believing the same, and for muttering ever more astonishing dire predictions.
    Already the rhetoric is revving up to absolute maximum - a kind of shrieking hyperbole - and Gore has taken to calling climate change the worst crisis in human history, the most important issue our species has ever faced, and so on. If it turns out to be nothing of the kind, you can blame the persistence of delusion on the atmosphere of unanimity, which is inimical to human thought.
    Belief that global warming is the worst crisis our species has ever faced is based on science, while belief that the return of Christ is imminent is based on faith. But for the people gathered before  gargantuan Gores, "science" refers at best to some kind of emerging social consensus, and at worst to absolutely nothing, to the merest assertion of a set of authorities.
      And at any rate, unanimity is inimical to good science, placing your flimsy results beyond practical criticism. We'll never have a clear idea of what's going on without the contributions of skeptics, gadflies, and eccentrics.
      Now I would have thought that a cult of Al Gore was about as likely as a cult of Orrin Hatch. But there, as they say, you are. Then again, there have been some pretty amazing little gods: ponder beloved leader Kim Il Sung, for example. I don't know why Gore would want to be president of the United States, when he can run a world regulatory regime, an emerging world government arising in response to the worst threat we've ever faced as a species.
    He's already conducting collective loyalty oaths. On Saturday people literally raised their right hands and took an environmental pledge together. In real Al Gore fashion, it was detailed, interminable, and written in prose flat as a Mercator projection of the world. The astonishing destiny of our planet is, if nothing else, bureaucratic.
    In a way, Gore proposes to put the whole world on a war footing, as though we faced an alien invasion and so had to band together as a species. Indeed, Live Earth, with its concerts on seven continents, was supposed to be an image of this ideal: a peaceful human unity grounded on mutual concern for and stake in the whole planet.
     This is liable to have its dark side. And just as when the Bush administration invaded Iraq, let's say, you would do well to think about questions like these: whose power does this serve and (same question from the other side) what freedoms does it curtail? Is the unity real or fictional, momentary or enduring, and what truths does it repress?
     And what the hell am I doing here, crushed in this crowd, gazing with shining eyes at a huge Al Gore?

you know i'm still trying to figure out something to say about global warming. but surely we might start getting a little worried about the teenage-girl-with-pms hysteria of even the "responsible" media:

Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous — and more intractable — than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war.

ok. the threat of the arms race was more or less the annihilation of the planet. whose model shows that outcome? we're in the phase of escalating the apocalyptic claptrap into a nonstop screech, running around in circles screaming: the rapture religion of the educated left. we need to get the next phase, and you're going to find in a few years that we've calmed down a bit, had our midol.

p.s. this summer you're going to see, in cities all over the country, americans gazing up at a gigantic flickering image of al gore and chanting slogans in unison.

so, i've been pondering this global warming thing. let's say that the atmosphere is warming, that human activity is responsible, and that the results will be disastrous. (i am assuming, not asserting this.) and let's say, for example, that a radical reduction in hydrocarbon consumption could have a salutary effect. the problem is that no particular person, corporation, government, has any particular interst in reducing its own fuel consumption, especially if not everyone is doing likewise; whatever is motivating you to consume fuel will continue to do so. so: if we were to do something about this, it would require an amazing act of pure universal altruism: everyone giving up littlwe bits of this and that, without any self-interested motivation. maybe with sufficiently compelling documantaries, our species can be brought to this point, but the history is not particularly happy. presuming that we do not merely acquiesce, as perhaps we ought, in the destruction of our species, i'd pin my hopes on saleable technological fixes, bought by large governments with the power to tax.

red hot atomic fireballs

and a couple of weeks ago we had a rainstorm in which the wind gusted to perhaps 50-60 mph. we lost power for hours, and a pole out on the road was down. but during the storm, i saw a blue fire on that pole (which is a quarter mile away). i went outside and saw the damnedest thing. the blue fire out there flaired, and then a second later a fireball flew across our field. it started, i believe, at the top of a metal pole that marks our property line: a white ball trailing red sparks, and not near any power line at all. then the fire flaired again up on the road and the same thing happened. i would not have believed it if i hadn't seen it. anybody got some kind of explanation?