global-warming

Green Oceans, the Monterey Declaration, and How I End up in These Places

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Isla del Cano, Corcovado Park, Costa Rica

Sometimes, I wonder how I’ve managed to get myself into so much interesting misery in my life. I wouldn’t change a thing, just FYI — but there are days when I gotta wonder. My real activism career started when I met Leroy Lee, the architect of the Phantom Forest scandal of the early ’90s, who decided I was worthy of training. That led me to one of my primary mentors, famous Combat Biologist Al Espinosa, a fisheries biologist on the Clearwater National Forest, who was famously run out of the organization for chronically refusing to lie about the impact of timber sales on water quality in one of the places in the world most known for clear water. Hence the name.

That carried me forward into the orbit of other friends, like Steve Kallick, famous Alaska activist, lawyer, and one of the primary authors of the Tongass Timber Reform Act.

It goes on from there. But what happens when you start building a (non-paying) career around social/environmental change, is that you learn things that are simply impossible to learn anywhere else. There is no book on how to sue to stop a federal timber sale. And no one’s written the comprehensive book on how people inside agencies rig things for their own interests. You gotta figure these things out on yourself — or preferably with the help of a great mentor. One of the most recent silly things has been the “No Kings” protests, populated by oldsters, possessed with Trump Derangement Syndrome, and screaming about issues they know precious little about. Don’t believe? With any activist movement, one of the smartest things you can do is show up with a clipboard, a list of SIMPLE terms, and start asking people in a flat monotone voice about their actual familiarity with those terms. You’ll quickly learn most people running have NO idea how anything works.

Why? Most current issues are above the complexity limits for most people’s understanding. Not only do they not know, they CAN’T know. Their brains won’t process it. Take the current immigration debate. People on the pro side of unfettered immigration will wax on about keeping families together, etc., while at the same time refusing to acknowledge that many women brought their kids to the border during the Biden years, and abandoned them at that border. Naturally, that created a fertile hunting field for cartel predators, who were more than happy to scoop them up and sell them into prostitution. It’s not like this kind of thing has no historical precedent. Read about the Children’s Crusade of the early 13th century. Inspired by religious fervor, thousands of children gathered to march to the cause of liberation of the Holy Land. They, too, were sold into slavery in Tunis. Now which does your brain prefer? Hardworking Mexican families, or a complex supply chain of childhood sex slavery, controlled by cartels, and running through multiple Central American families? Complexity, especially when bracketed by real-world unimaginable cruelty, is always a tough sell.

I’ve already told the story about my friends, Anastassia Makarieva and Andrei Nefiodov, largely responsible for getting me off the bench for the latest moral racket– the Net Zero campaign for CO2 emissions. It makes me dizzy to think about all of it, but the subsequent organization of all this led me to connecting with the Executive Director of the organization, Green Oceans. Green Oceans is fighting the commission of a series of huge wind farms off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts. They’re losing right now, for a variety of reasons that I’m not going to go into. But it was interesting that whoever made their strategy could have used some help more than a couple of years ago.

The problem is not alone that the wind turbines that are in the process of being installed are a blight and an eyesore on the ocean. This has indeed happened in some rich people’s backyard, and so it’s easy to go to the elite’s desire to not have this kind of thing in their backyard. The real problem is that the permitting process necessary (done by the federal government) allows what is known as an “incidental take” of marine species in the context of construction and operation of this wind farm. That means the project gets to damage or kill a certain number of wild animals in the context of making and operating that wind farm. Gotta break some eggs in the Natural World if you’re going to save it. Amirite?

The problem is those numbers associated with this project are mind-boggling and astronomical. 90,000 dolphins are acceptable for Incidental Take, as well as 500 northern right whales. Right whales are already an endangered species, and there are only an estimated 400 of those critters left in the wild. The mind literally reels. Imagine a similar declaration with bald eagles — you get to eliminate all of them, as long as you did it by accident. How would that play?

Plus, the group had a near-impossible time finding legal counsel. No one wants to be on the other side of Big Green and Anthropogenic Global Warming, even if this wind farm will contribute basically nothing against global tallies of CO2. Gotta start somewhere!

There are other projects accelerating in the name of CO2 sequestration and reduction, like bulldozing thousands of acres of Joshua trees for solar farms. We’re on the cusp of going through a major “burning the village to save it” phase in all of the AGW stuff. And the attacks will come from moral rackets from the Left.

As a response to this, pre-emptively, a group of atmospheric scientists and I are launching a campaign centered around what we are calling The Monterey Declaration, named after the location of one of the scientists’ universities. The point of the Monterey Declaration is to get people to agree to not destroy the natural world to save it. You’d think it would be a no-brainer, but it’s more challenging than you might think. But I like the name. It sounds cool. Here it is below.

The Monterey Declaration – 

As environmental scientists, physicists, chemists, climate scientists, engineering scientists and applied mathematicians, we are writing this declaration in regards to the issues of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), and human actions proposed to mitigate AGW.  

We are deeply troubled by the potential damage on wild and intact ecosystems that may be created by large scale geoengineering mitigation policies being pursued in the name of stopping AGW. Because of our current state of incomplete knowledge of the effects of global warming on weather systems, we strongly believe that we should not destroy the remaining natural ecosystems on the planet in the name of  slowing global warming.  We believe in preservation with appropriate humilityregarding the actual state of the science, and are advocating for preservation of the remaining wild and relatively untouched ecosystems which are still functioning on our planet.

Life has existed on Earth for at least the past 3.5 billion years.  It is also highly likely that plant life formed the atmosphere we breathe today. That natural vegetation has modulated extremes in atmospheric composition as the Earth passed through cataclysmic events, such as the Permian Extinction 252 million years ago, the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event 66 million years ago, as well as five interspersed Ice Ages, scattered through the geologic record, with the most recent and familiar being the Quaternary Ice Age that we still are in.  Throughout these events, the complex system formed by the sun, orbital dynamics, the surface of the Earth, the ocean, the atmosphere and the biota of the Earth has proven especially resilient, rebounding from events, such as the Permian Extinction, that devastated over 90% of life on the planet. 

Though much more research is needed to truly understand the interactions of large-scale geological disturbances, as well as the bounce-back of biota on the planet after these events, one thing is clear;  The Earth, as a complex system, tends toward climate stability in its natural state.  The fact that life on Earth is still here is proof that the climate is not prone to various runaway conditions.

None of the above is reason to dismiss the valid concerns about how humans affect the climate. At the same time, we should increase research on what is actually more immediately important – the weather.  Weather is downstream of climate, and more easily disturbed on a local and regional level.  Even regional disturbance by humans is poorly understood, and can likely interfere with local stable weather patterns that are important for the thriving of human societies and the biosphere.   We endorse more data collection, theoretical modeling, and improved computational methods in this area, precisely because one of the biggest questions, as well as deep historical legacies of the scale humans are likely to affect, is where the rain will fall.

We believe that with appropriate direction and more research, we can resolve both human needs for a stable climate, as well as a deeper understanding of how regional climatic phenomena, such as how forests create ‘biotic pumps’ that bring water inland, can be meshed with the larger planetary climate system. We believe that we have not gone past the point of no return (and the data supports this view) nor seen large-scale changes in weather patterns across the globe.  Because of this, we urge immediate and resolute protection of our remaining wild ecosystems, from the Amazon, Congo and Indonesian rainforests, to the boreal forests of Siberia and Canada, as buffers from CO2 emissions.  Grand schemes of atmospheric, oceanic or landscape modification by human effort hold the likely and ominous potential for backfiring in unknown, unprecedented, and possibly catastrophic ways.  We must remind ourselves of our need for humility regarding how these systems interact with the climate.. 

We also want to hold all scientists involved in this contentious issue to a Gold Standard of debate – recognizing what is truly known, as well as what is unknown.  There are deep scientific disagreements within the scientific community on this issue.  We, the undersigned, are calling on the entire community to avoid the perils of political pressure, and work diligently to form a truly systemic view of our planet’s climate.  We call on the formation of a Blue Ribbon panel to lay out knowns and unknowns in the state of our science, and urge all parties to strive for a better, globally systemic understanding.

The main point of the Monterey Declaration is this: we must not sacrifice the functioning systems of the natural world in the name of saving the world.  As Aldo Leopold said “the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.”  We are at the precipice of deleting some of the most important pieces in the name of saving the world.  We strongly encourage all parties to step back from the brink.

_______________________________________________

You’d think all of this would be unnecessary. But it’s not. One of the things people can’t seem to accept about any issue in the public eye is that they all have psychopathic elements, who are more than happy to leverage your emotions regarding an innocent stand-in to get their way. Or cause chaos. And they’re specifically counting on you to not notice incongruence in the details. As well as create a premise that allows them to kill your gods. So much about dealing with them is remembering this one fact. I saw it over and over fighting over the last few groves of old-growth forest. The timber industry would double down on the places most precious to us, regardless of commercial value. They were going to teach us a lesson, not unlike the sacrifice of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan ordered by the Taliban in 2001. Psychopaths have no bottom, so if you think you can go low, trust me — they can go lower.

The project is sponsored in part by the Norwegian and Danish governments, and the local rich people are largely in support of it — looking for a path to virtue-signaling redemption. Isolation of local ingrates and malcontents come far too easily in this day and age, and this project is no different. And the saddest part of this — the over 90K take of dolphins and basically extinction of the right whale population, continues a long history of ecological collapse off the coast of Massachusetts.

If I’ve learned anything in the context of working on any issue in the U.S., or even the world, it’s that Wild Nature is always the first thing under the bus. Why? Because people are decalibrated that it even exists.

But those of us that know, well, we know. In my own little tome of environmental literature, Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater, I ended the book with the line:

“Who will take care of my soul when the wild country is gone?”

Lordy.

Dark Matter, AGW, and Emotionally Driven Decision-Making

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

The Little Black Wolf, on the beach outside of Asotin, WA

One of the more recent, fascinating aspects of the societal fight over CO2 and its attribution, solely through modeling, toward Global Warming (if not Anthropogenic Global Warming) is how GW is portrayed in the media. The drumbeat is constant — more hurricanes, more extreme weather events, all killing more and more people, and of course, causing more and more property damage.

The problem with this take is that basically none of it is true. In this piece by Roger Pielke, a professor emeritus from UC-Boulder, in climate science, he very agnostically takes apart the statistics, and the signal therein, regarding potential change in weather from climate change. Short version — some evidence of heat waves, some evidence of increased precipitation, but no flooding. No evidence of really extreme weather events, and hurricanes, etc. Inside the piece is a video that’s well worth watching. Roger is actually pretty milquetoast in his declarations, supporting the impossible-to-support CO2 hypothesis of climate change, while at the same time showing that not much is really going on there with the biblical plague aspect.

By any standards, it’s a reasonable, from an emotional perspective, view, and hard to fault him on it.

One of the things that I and my colleague, Joe Biello, another full professor in mathematics, specializing in atmospheric science, have been working on, though, is the larger question of ‘attribution’. Attribution is the process of assigning a given hurricane to having a root cause of AGW, and CO2, and then arguing for Net Zero or some other CO2 reduction philosophy, that even the true believers attest will make no change until after we are all long dead. But the fear engine must be stoked, and apparently the larger AGW community decided that just global temperature rise wasn’t going to do it. We had to go the biblical plague route to get the peasants to start screaming. And here we are, bombarded with catastrophe after catastrophe, all leading in a straight line to AGW. Even though the basic statistics show this is garbage. That’s attribution.

What’s interesting is when you constantly insist, even AGAINST the scientific consensus that there has been no change in the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC) that Europe is going to freeze, and the world is literally going to end through its reversal, you open up some serious memetic Dark Matter possibilities. Dark Matter, in the physics lexicon, is all that stuff that you can’t see in the universe, that still pulls everything else around. You can’t see it, you don’t know it’s there, and its only evidence is how it affects everything else.

But the core memetic thought here is that Dark Matter is very meta-cognitive-y! Far easier to look at the flood and scream it’s a mental model that everyone is familiar with, and tell them if they don’t listen to you, they’ll be dead. Some serious psychopathic energy you’ve got pumping!

But nothing keeps going without money. Let’s say you’re an insurance company. Your board is bombarded with the message that AGW is going to create extreme weather events. These are in the future, of course — this is insurance. And most of the actuarial information comes from models, that alternately predicted sea level rise of 8′, or no ice at the North Pole by 2014. You sign one of those modelers on as a chief consultant — don’t want to be caught holding the bag.

And then you have seven years of no serious hurricanes. The news doesn’t report the hurricanes, because they basically never happened, even though extreme weather events were supposed to increase — but didn’t. Yet you charged out, through your policies, which were highly supported by the governments, especially in blue states, because of the hysteria. It’s what people believed! And they screamed about The Science – even though the actual science was clear on what was happening.

Now who’s making Dark Matter bank?

P.S. In case you’re wondering if this shows up on the bottom line, consider this graph from American Association for Justice — record profits in the insurance industry for the last number of years.

Back to Basics — Metacognition as Dark Matter

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Two therapy dogs, Ghillie and Cecilia, getting ready for a child client

One of the most frustrating parts of what I write about is getting people to realize that they don’t know stuff, and the real solution when you don’t know stuff — at least to start — is to realize you don’t know stuff. You can’t effectively harness new modes of understanding until you get to the point where you realize that all the old answers you used to think might explain stuff just aren’t going to cut the mustard. Too many contradictions, and such, means you have to accept your ignorance and move on. It is only then that enlightenment can occur.

This is hardly a new idea, and the Zen masters — my favorite go-tos — were big on this. One of my favorite stories from Paul Reps’ collection, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, is below, and deals directly with my line of employment.

Once, a university professor went to visit a well-respected Zen Master to learn about Zen. The Master first invited him to sit for a cup of tea. The professor sat down and started talking about Zen. The Master quietly prepared and poured the tea. When the tea was filled to the cup’s brim, he kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. “It’s full! No more will go in!” blurted the professor. “The same with your mind. How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

But changing adapted mental models is hard. Why, for example, would you bother to learn what I talk about on this blog? You really have to be tortured by your own confusion to sit down and spend the time to instantiate all this stuff. And you’re likely not going to get much community support dwelling on what some rando on the Internet says might change your life. (That Rando would be me, of course.)

In short, you have to possess the developed ability of metacognition — knowing what you don’t know, and having a sense that there is stuff out there that you’re not even aware of.

Why is this so challenging? As I said in this piece, once you open your mind to the notion that maybe the truth is really shared information that different, active sentient agents use for inter-agent coordination (read the piece for details — it’s a little complicated) you realize that if you adopt a different mental model than your friends, you risk alienation and loneliness from your cohort group. And humans no likey that kind of thing, at all. Being alone means that tigers are gonna eat ya. And if you think you’re going to retreat from some likely 10M years of evolution just to figure out how to help pilot our society out of its current mess, I’ve got news for you.

Metacognition — or admitting that you don’t know — in a group is going to have also other active agents rush in to fill you up with their views, which probably aren’t any better, and likely worse than your own. It’s how we get those mass psychoses we’ve got going. And the more externally defined/emotionally available you are to what others think, it’s going to get ugly fast. Corrections in this kind of peer pressure are long-term. People just don’t want to hear your bullshit confusion.

Some things we don’t know are also profoundly comforting in not knowing, especially if you already have a narrative figured out that makes sense with the surrounding sensory inputs in your environment. I used to be a big Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) advocate. But as time went by, and, well, the seas didn’t swallow New York City, I became more and more of a skeptic. And then when people in the IPCC threatened something I happen to love very much — in this case, vast swaths of native forest, which at least some of them wanted to cut down to make the planet more shiny (that’s the albedo thing) I woke up. There are more things in heaven and Earth than my philosophy can know, Horatio.

And then I continued my journey with meeting people like Judy Curry, the former chair of atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech, and someone that had made the jump herself a couple of decades ago. Judy’s book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, is dense — but a classic. Only someone like Judy could go through the probabilistic analyses of what actually is going to happen in the climate space, as a risk management and probability expert. It was one piece in the puzzle that convinced me we actually have a memetic problem with climate science — not so much a scientific one. Status elevation in the field was (and still is) tied to how catastrophic the narrative one creates, instead of anything resembling a grounded reality. Those louder voices have seized the megaphone, and they’re screaming. And if you don’t fall in line, it’s only tigers for you.

And what do those loud voices do? That’s where my expertise kicks in. Some very famous loud voices in the climate science community are also connected in a very closed-loop feedback modality to the insurance industry. If they’re all saying we’re gonna wash away in the next big storm, someone has to sell us insurance so we can rebuild back in the same place. That’s what insurance is all about. And that means they have to raise their rates, because business is business, don’tchaknow? Or the government has to cover the house. Or something. Short answer — the real problem is brain worms in the scientific climate community.

So to understand all of how this might be connected, you gotta start admitting you don’t know stuff, and looking for other signals that people are lying to you. The biggest would be insurance company profits. Which is downright metacognitive-y. Because now people are paying increased premiums for things that didn’t happen. And our news media stream is not about reporting things that didn’t happen. You didn’t read a piece recently “China didn’t invade Mongolia this week,” because that wouldn’t have much signal value. Or emotional value either.

But just because I wasn’t aware of insurance profits, didn’t mean that the signal wasn’t there. That’s the whole Dark Matter part of metacognition. Dark Matter is the stuff in the universe that doesn’t reflect light, but it’s still there tugging on all sorts of other stuff through gravity. Considering that it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe, though, you can’t just ignore it. And that’s what is happening in the memetic-sphere with our thoughts. Metacognition is accepting that it really does exist, and then starting the process of adjusting our worldview to understand it.

My friend, and atmospheric scientist at UC-Davis Joe Biello sent me this picture. Once you understand where that Dark Matter is, it’s not surprising that the picture it gives of what’s going on starts becoming more coherent, or in the colloquial, making more sense. Here’s insurance industry profits.

I used to use the signal that the insurance industry was raising their rates as proof that AGW was real. But it turns out not so much. It turns out the same people spreading the AGW hysteria are also looped into the money-making machine. And it’s not that some level of GW is happening (and some is caused by humans) it’s that the hysteria signal prevents more reasoned debates from occurring on what actual solutions might be. Or on what scale we should respond. I’m extremely pro-environment (spent my entire life working on various issues) and totally believe humans can fuck up stuff locally, as well as regionally. Big time. Anyone can see a clearcut. Or an urban heat island. But actually grounding yourself to changes in the global system needs lots more research.

Which we should be doing. But when the hysteria meter is off the charts, instead of understanding how our natural systems, which are obviously complex, modulate the climate, through vegetation, circulation and growth (see my buddies Anastassia’s and Andrei’s work on the biotic pump) we end up with people demanding we turn Siberia into a parking lot. We still don’t know exactly how all this works. But we won’t even study it if all the money is diverted into computer time and large models. It’s like sticking our fingers in our ears and saying “Nyah nyah nyah!” Not very metacognitive-y. Nor wise.

It’s no surprise that human brains work like this. Yeah, I like my work on knowledge complexity. But you’ll also find me recognizing Michael L. Commons’ work on hierarchical complexity as well. Not quite as system-y as mine is but spot on as far as understanding what humans are capable of knowing. And here’s the key. One of the hardest things for humans to process is cross-paradigmatic complexity. In our example case here, the cross-paradigmatic complexity is how AGW research feeds into insurance industry profits. There are at least three jumps across physical to social systems that reveal the relative truth of a lot of this stuff. Most human brains no likey. And even if your brain DOES like it, you’re likely to be missing something. I know I certainly was. The easiest immediate proof that storm intensity and frequency are NOT increasing is found in insurance industry profits. Because if it actually was, you better believe the insurance industry would be howling more than they already are. And there’s also ancillary cause-and-effect (like building more cheap houses in places like Florida) that are also potentially causal in insurance industry profits going down, if there actually were a hurricane. It’s all part of the metacognitive puzzle — not just looking at the connections, but also looking at how, and which are the connections that matter.

This kind of analysis (or really, meta-analysis) can leap all over the map. I’ve been going back-and-forth on the risks of AI tech, for example. And one ALWAYS ends up with the “correlation is not causation” tropes, like increasing ice cream prices are tied to tiger predation, or some such icks. You can look those up yourself.

If there is any answer to all this, it is awareness and your agency. So walk around and think about stuff you really don’t know much about. And then investigate. The worst thing that can happen is you become a more interesting cocktail party guest. Even if no one wants to invite you.

P.S. Judy’s latest contribution to the DOE’s climate report is here. They did a great job in pulling apart a very confounded body of work that is mostly nonsensical. You’ll hear the usual hue and cry about the oil industry blah blah blah, but I really encourage you to read it. It’s good mental exercise.

Should We Really Include the A in Anthropogenic Global Warming? (Part 2)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

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.