Herd of Cape Buffalo, on the way to the watering hole

Probably should go back and read Part 1, if you haven’t!

For those that don’t know, I have been a hard-core environmental activist my entire career. I wrote a book on my backyard (full of amazing forests) and was an activist participant, organizer and strategist for forest protection across the U.S. for a good 15 years. I’ve also, at the same time, worked with timber companies, as well as oil refineries, in the context of my Design Clinic as an engineering professor as well. So you don’t have any surprises here — as an engineering professor in the Pacific Northwest, I work with almost everyone.

But in the late 2010s, regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), my ardor toward all of this started to cool. After three decades of catastrophic predictions regarding AGW, none were basically coming true. Sea levels weren’t rising in any particular way. Storm frequency, the same. Regional modification of climate? Yes. Glaciers were melting. But glaciers started their retreat, at least in a way I could observe (using interpretive trail signs!) far before the magic date of the mid 1930s for the impacts of human development. And in my own backyard of the Palouse, basically no change at all.

But even more than that — it was the matter of tying actual events, in a meaningful way, to human activities at a global scale. As I traveled the world, I did see effects of extreme weather. Storm cycles in the Philippines made a big impression — certain areas were seeing 30 year storms every seven years. And so on. Why not just tie that to CO2? “Models” said so.

Ah, those climate models. They’ve told us over and over the world is going to end. Sea level rises of 8′. Total inundation of coastal areas. On and on. I didn’t know much about models (except they’re large finite difference codes run on supercomputers — the Earth is a big place…) and didn’t really want to find out. I actually know a fair amount about these kinds of models, because in a way, they’re just an inversion of the same stuff we use on airplanes. And trust me — those ones used to fine-tune aerodynamics of airplanes are spot-on. (I am a bona-fide aerospace/rocket scientist.)

But they’re spot-on for a reason. You can take an airplane (or appropriately scaled facsimile) and put it in a wind tunnel. I worked at NASA Ames for a couple of summers, and watched them do it. Every finite difference model in the world has to be tuned to give a correct answer. You tune this for given flow regimes, with a real airplane in the wind tunnel, you’ll get amazing results inside the computer. But that’s because you have a physical object, appropriately instrumented, that you use as your baseline.

To say that you can do this with the world is ridiculous. And the stupid keeps piling up. Even using temperature profiles any time and assuming that they’re accurate, before a self-declared “Age of Satellites” or “Age of P-3 Orions” is just nuts. And when you combine the self-inflicted errors from bad measurement WITH the inarguable spread of people across the planet, which would inherently impact many of those temperature measurement sites, you start seeing you have a major grounding validity problem on your hands. Grounding validity is matching whatever model you have with reality, at the appropriate temporal and spatial scales.

But I kept my mouth shut, and deferred on it all. Saying anti-AGW statements would get me thrown out of MY tribe. And I noticed that stridency on this had only increased. If only it were supported by actual events.

It wasn’t until Anastassia Makarieva and Andrei Nefiodov, my Russian theoretical physicist friends, showed up on my doorstep, that I really woke up. Why? Because one of the recommendations to “solving” AGW, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was logging the Siberian/boreal forest to increase reflectivity, called albedo, of the planet to stop it. We were going to destroy wild nature on a planetary scale to save it.

Both Anastassia’s and Andrei’s work on how forests actually work should be part of the larger discussion regarding AGW. They are, along with their advisor, Viktor Gorshkov, advocates of a theory known as the biotic pump. What the biotic pump says is that without forests, you can’t have internal continental moisture – you get deserts instead. The forest itself is the primary transport mechanism for moisture into the interior of continents. Chop down forests, things dry out, save on the coast. On top of this, there is another extremely important implication. Vegetation interacts with the atmosphere in a profound way, that feeds back into the cycle.

This turns out to be a huge conundrum in how atmospheric systems work. Scientists like Antonio and his brother Paolo Nobre, have written extensively about atmospheric rivers, that bring literal rivers of moisture over the mountains and from the seacoast, that create the wet conditions required for places like the Amazon jungle to flourish. Chop down the trees, the weather stops happening.

Contrast this to what we would call an open loop system. An open loop system is one that is pre-eminent in basically all current climate models, where climate happens, and vegetation either thrives or dies dependent on what the atmosphere is, and the model says. The notion that these planetary systems are actually coupled doesn’t enter into models. And aren’t likely to be included any time soon – think of the additional complexity. Water vapor itself — the primary greenhouse gas — isn’t even a factor in most climate models. It’s CO2 uber alles, like some magical dial that all global climate depends on.

All these systems operate in some homeostatic form — meaning a process of self-regulation on the internal system — that all living creatures function in order to survive. Exactly where that internal/external system boundary is can obviously be an area of debate. Is a forest 10K acres? 100K? 20? The answers are often fluid. But the notion of the alternative — a one-way system, isn’t borne out by reality. If you doubt this, visit the coastal redwoods in Northern California. Redwoods are a microcosm of the biotic pump, living on seaborne moisture, and in turn preventing the desert that one can see further down the California coast.

It was then I realized I was in The Matrix. What is going on with suspected AGW has little to do with the science. Or at least the grounded science. But it has a ton to do with the memetics of climate science, which are often psychopathic in their direction. The current state of the accepted field, that lines up with the Mainstream Media, is Authority-driven, with the atmosphere playing the proxy of the boss, with the rest of the complexity absent from time and spatial variance, as well as flaws in measurement.

And Conway’s Law was still in play. The design of the system must fundamentally represent the social system that created it could not be more evident. The knowledge regarding that design of understanding is stuck there in the middle. Those with tremendous status and sophistication — the modelers — were controlling the debate on what was actually happening, armed with prestigious lab and university affiliations. And like the climate system model themselves, it was top-down.

Had we not just come off the catastrophe of listening to the Expert Class in COVID mitigation, I also don’t know if I would have paid much attention. Getting banished from one’s tribe (and I, as a forest activist, and definitely a fan and defender of the natural world) is no fun. But when your tribe has been hijacked, as has most certainly happened with climate science, and the main thing I love — the natural world — is on the literal chopping block, I had to gird my loins for battle one more time.

While AGW has been an issue for the last 20 years, I believe that COVID has made the passion for intervention even worse — regardless how crazy the intervention is. I’ve seen it said that a single billionaire, Lex Luthor-like, could set themselves up on an island with a huge sulfur atomization gun and spray sulfur into the atmosphere. The same principle I’ve maintained — that humans will, barring a major technological revolution (think paradigm-shifting like nuclear explosions) means that such actions will likely have little effect with their efforts. A major volcanic eruption can cause climate disruption for a couple of years (think 1883 Krakatoa). But most of what happens, damage-wise, happens to regional systems, including the people living adjacent. It’s a narcissistic fiction to think otherwise, and it’s also supported by Andrei’s scale analysis of energetics on the planet (see Part 1.) But that won’t stop the narcissistic billionaire. After all, they’re doing the brutal work of saving the world by destroying the atmosphere. It’s for our own good. Sound familiar?

But what happened with COVID — whether you were a COVID elite winner, and coasted through the pandemic with DoorDash, or suffered through losing your business because of lockdowns, the message of social and spiritual isolation was clear. In my adjacent town of Moscow, ID, the city government attempted to prosecute a group of singers from the full bible church, Christ Church, for holding a protest singalong. This was elite memetic prosecution and immiseration at its finest. The older progressive community, who are probably a good 30 years in age older than the younger Christ Church community, used their proxies to arrest the leader of the protest event. I’m not endorsing all the activities of Christ Church, and there’s a lot to talk about in the context of their minister, Doug Wilson. But clearly we’re moving toward late-stage liberalism. And it’s not bringing together its own membership with any degree of personal agency allowed for its members. Though the city government ended up paying out $300K for violation of Christ Church members’ civil rights, the diatribes in the local newspaper never relented.

Various social scientists have called this kind of hysteria “mass formation psychosis” and that may be accurate. But it is worth a minute to consider the causal path of how we got to a population susceptible to such behavior. People isolated, even with advanced development, need other people to maintain an open mind toward life circumstances of others. When humans are isolated, there is a process of depression that inherently occurs. And as I’ve written about before, depression of a population is a necessary precursor to Authoritarianism, which then (tri)dichotomize themselves into either Followers, True Believers, or the Unclean. Short version — the Followers/NPCs are low energy. And the True Believers are profoundly coherent, and undifferentiated, inside their In-group within an In-group. And the Out-group is, well, the Out-group. They can be disposed of.

What happens in the context of that spiritual devolution inside the movement is very similar to atomized gasoline presented with a match. Old people might just go to sleep. But young people, presented with an opportunity to connect with like minded people, rapidly become explosive. Google ‘Extinction Rebellion’ if you need to witness the various climate protests.

A similar behavior was witnessed among the masses protesting the Israeli invasion of Gaza this past year. The precipitating act by Hamas on October 7 has long been forgotten. But the profound need for belonging by young people, post-pandemic, finally found its catalyst in mirroring empathy for the Palestinian people. Hamas’ attack was only a day, whereas Israel’s invasion is still, as of this writing, ongoing. The fact of the complicated history of the region, as well as ostensible cultural proclivities (it is extremely challenging to understand how queer people would rally for a culture that would likely kill them, were they living there) all were subsumed in the human need to connect.

And it’s the same for AGW. It is precisely these dynamics why I’m writing this piece. Short term, Authoritarian coherence for a long-standing problem is a false god if there ever was one. And has the potential to lead a population to far greater atrocities than the original sin. The reality of banning fossil fuels, whose role in GW is far from clear (and potentially insignificant) will be the death of billions of the planet’s human residents. And the chaos unleashed will very likely affect the natural world worst of all.

If we were even remotely operating in a world where wisdom, which depends profoundly on metacognition (knowing what we don’t know) were the rule, you’d think we’d at least see solutions floated about preserving and restoring native ecosystems, regardless of their content, across the globe — and especially in ocean systems where our core knowledge of functioning is exceptionally poor. As well as dedication to rapid development of nuclear energy.

But we’re not seeing nor hearing this. Such a world connection perspective barely exists. What we hear are more monomaniacal calls for destruction of the natural world in the context of saving it. Nothing could be more emblematic of this than the razing of 4000 acres of Joshua trees for a solar farm. As with all things, it’s the dialog not being had which is the most interesting. If it really were about solar panel siting, how many acres exist across the tops of buildings in L.A. that can’t be placed there because of building code restrictions?

And it keeps piling up. In the lee of two moderate-sized hurricanes, Helene and Milton, that just hit the Gulf Coast of Florida, there is basically no headlines saying that these two storms were NOT caused by AGW. Every headline fingers CO2. What is really pathologically interesting is that only 20 years ago, the script that no one single storm could be traced back to AGW was an orthodoxy among climate scientists and meteorologists alike. But that was simply not providing the messaging coherence the current apocalyptic cult behind AGW needs to thrive, nor provide the spiritual connection. You’ve got to get down deeper in the limbic stack. And that means greater fear, as well as more profound threats to apostates like myself. There will be no debate. If your message isn’t The End Is Near, they don’t want to hear it.

What’s happened to the environmental activist community in particular, and the Left in general, is they’ve anointed CO2 and AGW as their One Ring — the magic talisman that they are going to use across-the-board to fix all our woes. But it fails to understand that the singular devotion to such a notion makes the entire movement perilously open to kidnap by far darker forces. J.R.R. Tolkien remains one of my favorite authors of all time, and the comparison between Sauron’s re-creation as Annatar, the Lord of the Gifts, and the singular focus on CO2 is particularly apt. The environmental community is participating in forging its own One Ring, just as the elves did on the sidelines in the Second Age of Middle Earth. And when it gets used against those of us that believe in protecting the natural world, as it inevitably will be (look no further than forest fire “prevention” if you need a simple example) don’t say a couple of us didn’t see it coming. If you’re not on the side of what J.R.R. Tolkien referred to as the Free Peoples, then you’re against ’em. That means being comfortable with the notion of freedom — which the Left seems to have totally abandoned. What would Galadriel do, indeed?

We are going to have to come to terms with our core humanity, and our predilection with profound fear of abandonment being sown by our current group of narcissistic psychopaths. But this fear is deeply rooted, for reasons. I close with a short parable.

About 15 years ago, I was on safari in the Greater Kruger Park in South Africa. I was lucky, and ended up with only me and the guide in the open-top Land Rover for most of my stay. One day, we were driving around, and happened upon a herd of Cape Horn buffalo moving down to the watering hole mid-afternoon. Two lions, an old one and a young one, were sitting on the side of the road, about 20′ away from our rig, watching the buffalo move.

A female cape buffalo, from that moment

The younger one

When driving in a safari wagon, usually one person does the driving, and the other person holds an elephant gun. I think ours was a classic 450 caliber Rigby, typical for use in hunting large game animals. We were only taking pictures, but I got to hold the gun because the driver couldn’t. Once we stopped, I stood up to take pictures of the lions. Immediately, the lions’ heads snapped around. Though lions won’t mess with bands of humans (you can take walking tours with groups of 10, though there are still guns involved) a solitary human is a prey species. The guide yelled at me to “drop” and went for the gun. The minute I vanished, the lions went back to watching the buffalo. We later heard from a ranger that a refugee from Mozambique had been treed for three days by three lions, before he had finally been rescued. And that lions had eaten something like 300 people fleeing the civil strife in Mozambique just that summer.

We have to confront the fundamental spiritual isolation of our current society, as well. It directs the psychopaths to use our fears against us, for what will be terrible ends. And like it or not, at this moment in time, it is FAR worse on the Left than the Right. If we cannot, the voice of the lion will be all that we hear.