Beware Of Science!

 Dr. Doom  ( Phd. Cantab )

I believe it was an aide to the Australian PM who just recently said that Climate Change was a UN hoax dreamed up by scientists "in cahoots" with that New-Worldian-Order organization.

Although unstated, I got the distinct impression that the scientists who were working with the UN were the Dr. Doom and Doc Ock types, leading to reflection on what Dr. Sheldon Cooper first pointed out: the prevalence of advanced degree holders in the legions of evil!

Actually, scientists err usually on the side of caution, rather than haste, for we are still in the grips of our old-timey-geological-era ways of looking at things: like, the mills of the gods grind fine, fine... but they do grind slow, slow..., slow.

As I have written before, such is not always the case, and may be rarely the case in chaotic or near-chaotic regimes.

For example, consider a CNN report on climate:
New temperature records highlight global warming's continued rise
By Ben Brumfield, CNN
Updated 3:38 AM ET, Sat May 9, 2015
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/09/world/global-warming-record-quarter/index.html

(CNN)New climate change records have come along to remind us that Earth's thermostat is steadily pushing upward.

More exactly, there are two global high temperature records and a smattering of climate change low points.

March 2015 was the warmest March since record-keeping began in 1880, says the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association. And the first quarter of 2015 was the warmest first quarter on record in those same 136 years.

That gives 2015 a stab at trumping the hottest year on record -- which was 2014.

The uninterrupted continuation of the warming trend is no surprise. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred in the past 17 years... 

 yadda, yadda, yadda; ice caps melting and whatever.


The article emphasizes the slow but steady progress of change...
However, remember the year 10,000 died in Europe from a heat wave, and the scientists who issued the definitive report remarked that they expected such results, but not so soon!

Perhaps the CNN article should have emphasized the slow but steady progress of change and compare it to that of a sandpile, rising from a table top as individual sand particles are dropped slowly... until a point is reached when it avalanches.
Then everything changes quite rapidly.

We never know all the parameters; our knowledge is never perfect.

Consider another CNN story from the same day:
American doctor declared free of Ebola finds the virus in his eye months later
By Faith Karimi and Joshua Berlinger, CNN
Updated 11:23 PM ET, Fri May 8, 2015
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/08/health/ebola-eye-american-doctor/index.html

(CNN)American doctor Ian Crozier was treated for Ebola in Atlanta last year and declared free of the virus in his blood. But he had no way of knowing it still lurked in his eye.

At the time, his eyes were the least of his worries.

"There were lots of things sort of higher on the food chain," he told CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360." "I was struggling to learn to walk again."

But not long after, mild burning and light sensitivity afflicted his eyes.

Less than two months later, he was back at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta; testing showed the virus was still living in his eye...

Now, did you really see that one coming at us?  Something like that could avalanche into a whole new pandemic.

Maybe that Australian bloke has a better view of Doc Ock:

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Global Warming in the Wall Street Journal

The WSJ has an article on global warming, but it is "Global Warming" - The Political Debating Point, and not the "global warming" which is being studied by science. In a time honored way, they have the signatures of sixteen scientists affixed at the bottom....
I assume these guys are agreeing with the article, because I did not get to read that far.

I do not really care whether global warming may or may not be proven; I do not care if it is influenced by the economies of mankind. I do not care what those 16 scientists believe, since I do not have their works in front of me, and I do not care what an equivalent group of 16 scientists opposed to the opinions of the first 16 might say: do not care.

No one involved in this dispute, neither the WSJ, nor the writer, nor the signing scientists, nor the far-from-insightful commenters has any take on the issue on the spiritual significance of the issue.
What is spiritual significance? Does it have to do with the Unseen? Spiritual significance covers a wide territory, and at least part of it deals with Tacit Cognition: things known and perceived, yet not expressed by the usual forms of language and images and mathematics, all of which we can see and hear.

When I ran 6 days a week back in to 1990's, I ran outdoors and ran anywhere from 4 to 10 miles, and this was an hour to 2 hours per day in the outdoors: nothing but me and nature. I found that as winter drew on, I had intuitions about the winter weather from December through the middle of February - sort of a running Farmers' Almanac. By November I made my winter weather predictions, and I found that I was correct 80% of the time, or 8 winters out of 10. This is a bit better than random guessing.
Did I have "tacit knowledge" of the oncoming weather? I don't know. I always assumed that there were probably cues and indications - woolly caterpillars and such - that must have been related to the coming weather, but I was never consciously aware of them. (I was also in a climate-sensitive industry, which explains the focus on my part.)

The Earth where we live has a spiritual significance in my life. God creates the garden, and it is man's duty to dress it, till it, manage it, and husband the resources in a continuous stewardship.

Look upon what we do in the world today: yammering for oil to run smack dab through the main aquifer of the country, oil in the Gulf, the toxic process of fracking...
Answer this: how long will we be able to conjure up fossil fuels?
Peak oil may not be tomorrow, nor next year, nor even 100 years, but when it occurs, we will have deplenished our children's and grand-children's inheritance, just as we have saddled them with debt while we either pleasure ourselves with wealth... or we torment ourselves with our poverty and inability to make ends meet! The 1% and the 99%! Neither is fulfilled.
We are ignorant of how to live with the Earth in a sustainable manner, but instead we live in a mad compound-interest of exploitation, getting higher and higher short-term returns which are clearly inimical to our long-term health.

Take genetically modified food as a paradigm: it is complex enough that we will see 30-pieces-of-silver scientists sign their names to a WSJ article soon saying that no genetically modified part of food can get into the bloodstream. (And this will be due to the fact that Chinese researchers have just shown that micro RNA from GMO foods does indeed survive the digestion process. Actually, this complot of scientists in favor of GMO foods may have happened already... years ago at the behest of 3M corporation. Caution: scientists may be hazardous to your health.)
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