Don't Worry, Be Happy - 3

Reality is too real for comfort

I. Introduction

In the first post of this series, I wrote about a call a mayor received from our climate denier president (Don't Worry, Be Happy).

He was a mayor who supported climate denialism.

He was a mayor on a sinking ship, or to be more exact, an island a la Atlantis, yes, an island slowly becoming submerged below the waters of the Chesapeake Bay (66% gone).

Right now.

Like thirteen or so islands that have already done so in that area (The Extinction of Chesapeake Bay Islands).

II. Consistency

Some eight years ago I posted "Global Climate & Homeland Insecurity" which quoted military officials who indicated clearly that the greatest threat to national security was climate change caused by global warming caused by the promiscuous use of fossil fuels (cf. The Uninhabitable EarthDon't Worry, Be Happy - 2).

Regular readers know that here at Dredd Blog we are not deniers, we just report what is happening, what is real, and that with no apologies (we didn't make this reality, but it is here: You Are Here).

III. It Is Now Cosmopolitan

The president I mentioned above, who called the mayor, is not cosmopolitan, even being the odd man out at the climate change agreement in Paris recently.

But, when it comes to posts or articles in a well known and cosmopolitan magazine, some degree of doomerism has now become Americana.

Not long after the first post in this series, a blockbuster of a piece, published in a well known magazine, caused an eruption of discourse:

"We published “The Uninhabitable Earth” on Sunday night, and the response since has been extraordinary — both in volume (it is already the most-read article in New York Magazine’s history) and in kind."

(The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition, emphasis added). The reactions were in accord with the cultural amygdala realm of fear generators (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala).

Fear brings on the need for the product called "security" on a scale called "national security" or cultural security.

Anyway, the impact of climate change discussed in the article is not socially acceptable to those who have a world view expressed by the phrase "don't worry, be happy," thus, the inevitable uproar of fear engendered denial ensued.

It was caused by group-think fear, which is an essence I have mentioned in the past here on Dredd Blog:

One of the most destructive and perplexing problems facing contemporary society is the pervasive tendency of people to respond with hostility and disdain toward those who are different from themselves. This tendency to reject those who are different is well-documented in the literature on prejudice (e.g., Tajfel, 1982), the similarity-attraction relationship (for a review, see Byrne, 1971), and reactions to deviance (e.g., Miller & Anderson, 1979; Schachter, 1951). A common notion in much of the theorizing concerning these effects is that people prefer similar others over dissimilar others because of the consensual validation of one's own beliefs and attitudes provided by similar others (e.g., Byrne, 1971;Festinger, 1954; Tajfel, 1982). The research reported in this article was concerned with the psychological basis of this need for consensual validation.
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Put simply, people's beliefs about reality provide a buffer against the anxiety that results from living in a largely uncontrollable, perilous universe, where the only certainty is death.
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Thus, as Byrne (1971) and others have suggested, attraction to similar others can be explained as resulting from the consensual validation of beliefs that such others provide. From a terror management perspective, then, positive reactions to similar others and negative reactions to dissimilar others occur partly because of the impact such individuals have on faith in one's worldview.

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A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival. There is already experimental evidence suggesting that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

(Convergence - Fear of Death Syndrome). The dynamics are well understood by those who study the phenomenon, however, it is generally not a treatable fear.

IV. The Clamor

The author of the New Yorker piece soon experienced the dynamic, and wrote of it in his follow-up piece:

Within hours, the article spawned a fleet of commentary across newspapers, magazines, blogs, and Twitter, much of which came from climate scientists and the journalists who cover them.
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What are the risks of terrifying or depressing readers so much they disengage from the issue, and what should a journalist make of those risks?

I hope, in the annotations and commentary below, I have added some context. But I also believe very firmly in the set of propositions that animated the project from the start: that the public does not appreciate the scale of climate risk; that this is in part because we have not spent enough time contemplating the scarier half of the distribution curve of possibilities, especially its brutal long tail, or the risks beyond sea-level rise; that there is journalistic and public-interest value in spreading the news from the scientific community, no matter how unnerving it may be; and that, when it comes to the challenge of climate change, public complacency is a far, far bigger problem than widespread fatalism — that many, many more people are not scared enough than are already “too scared.” In fact, I don’t even understand what “too scared” would mean.

(ibid, The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition, emphasis added). And so, the cosmopolitan climate change green world meets the doomer world as clamor clouds the cognitive skies.

V. The Missing Groupie Psychoanalysis

Dr. Freud recognized the societal need to develop a treatment of groups, but also realized it would not be as easy as individual psychoanalysis and treatment:

If the evolution of civilization has such a far reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization——or epochs of it——possibly even the whole of humanity——have become neurotic under the pressure of the civilizing trends? To analytic dissection of these neuroses, therapeutic recommendations might follow which could claim a great practical interest. I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness. But it behooves us to be very careful, not to forget that after all we are dealing only with analogies, and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to drag them out of the region where they originated and have matured. The diagnosis of collective neuroses, moreover, will be confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual we can use as a starting point the contrast presented to us between the patient and his environment which we assume to be normal. No such background as this would be available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way. And with regard to any therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses power to compel the community to adopt the therapy? In spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities. [p. 39]
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Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature
to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this——hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. [p. 40]

(The Authoritarianism of Climate Change). Indeed, the dementia caused by paranoid fear has resulted in the U.S. Government being currently changed from gung-ho "climate change is real" into gung-ho denialism.

VI. Conclusion

Americans have been conditioned to accept climate change as a cool thing, something chic, and a way into the in crowd ... but when the discussion gets too real the progressives become hostile along with the deniers.

This is real and serious right now (When Rising Seas Hit Home: Hard Choices Ahead for Hundreds of US Coastal Communities (2017), Union of Concerned Scientists).

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quote from video below: "... the lead element of the federal bureaucracy in Washington on [Climate Change] ... is the Defense Department ..." - Professor Wilkerson

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Germ Warfare Comes To America

American Hospitals are in the enemy's cross-hairs

I. Destroying Americans With Depravity Bombs

Some seven years ago, in a Dredd Blog series (Your Health Is Their Number 1 Enemy?! , 2). I quoted people who were no doubt trained at the War College.

I quoted people who wrote that your health care is the biggest threat to the Pentagon.

That anti-health care diatribe was posted at National Defense Magazine, a well-known site.

After reading it, I posted:

Pentagonia, capitol of Bullshitistan, well aware of the current political climate, has declared who its greatest enemy is, believing it is health care:

The U.S. military keeps searching the horizon for a peer competitor, the challenger that must be taken seriously. Is it China? What about an oil rich and resurgent Russia?

But the threat that is most likely to hobble U.S. military capabilities is not a peer competitor, rather it is health care.

(The Enemy the Pentagon Should Fear Most: Health Care, National Defense Magazine, emphasis added). We have been pointing out this very strange ideology for a while now, using "MOMCOM" symbolism to isolate the militant energy fighting against the middle class and poor in the United States.

(Deja Vu - Guns v. Butter Election Looms, March 22, 2010). That post I quoted from was subsequently deleted by National Defense Magazine (the link in the quote above is to The Wayback Machine copy).

The sicko sycophant who wrote the National Defense Magazine article is an enemy of the welfare of the people of the United States, whom the military took an oath to protect by, among other things,  protecting the U.S. Constitution.

II. Target Number One: The Helpless

Americans are known historically for lending a helping hand to their neighbor, as is written at the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me

Is this a fake?

your tired,

your poor,

Your huddled masses

yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse

of your teeming shore.

Send these,

the homeless,

tempest-tost

to me,

I lift my lamp

beside the golden door!"

(Wikipedia). Who are the enemies of these American sentiments, who are the enemies of rural hospitals, who are these enemies of the American people who need health and other care at times during their journey to a better life?

III. "Let's Seriously Hurt and Harm

Twenty or Thirty Million American People"

That is something that enemies of the American People want to do, and would do if they could.

But they can't.

Alone.

They need people in powerful places inside America to lose their minds and turn on "tired ... poor ... huddled masses yearning to breathe free ... wretched refuse ... homeless ... tempest-tost" people in rural America, in American cities, and anywhere sickness and disease attack us.

These moles in "a despotic minority" are feverishly and fiendishly working to remove health care in order to "make America great again."

IV. What "Can't Happen Here" Is Happening Here

I recently quoted an Encyclopedia Britannica article concerning the once-most-quoted historian:

"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces."

(Stockholm Syndrome: The Declaration of Intellectual Dependence). That description is way too close for comfort.

V. Conclusion

Those Americans who came and went, before we were born or became Americans, knew history well enough to use the phrase "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" (Supreme Court).

Those who want to do the harm to Americans (harm that hostile foreign enemies would want to do), and who took that oath not to harm Americans, are in fact domestic enemies.

Defend her from them!

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Trump (R-RU) has a friend named Jim:

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On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction - 21

Fig. 1 WOD Zone map

I. Background

Water temperature and heat content in bodies of water can be mentioned or used by writers in a manner that does not connote the actual dynamics taking place.

In other words, misconceptions can be unintentionally created, whether wanted or not.

So, as regular readers know, I have been trying to clarify some of the greater and more widespread misconceptions that have been generated by research practices that only skim the surface.

In that pursuit, I recently reprocessed my partial copy (CTD & PFL datasets) of the World Ocean Database (WOD) again, in order to make it even more useful.

The exercise I went through was to convert tables in Appendix 11 in the WOD Manual (pages 132 - 137; PDF pages 142  - 148; WOD Manual PDF Link) into SQL tables which I could then access from various software modules.

The manual explains that appendix as follows:

APPENDIX 11. ACCEPTABLE RANGES OF OBSERVED VARIABLES AS A FUNCTION OF DEPTH, BY BASIN

The range values provided has range values for temperature, salinity, oxygen, phosphate, silicate, nitrate, pH, chlorophyll, and alkalinity. The range values in

Fig. 2 World Ocean Areas

the tables are used to help identify the most obvious questionable values for these variables. Please note that ranges are given on 33 standard levels (+ one for depths deeper than 5500 m). All standard depths in between given standard depths have the same values as the nearest standard depth shown (for example, 90m standard depth uses 100m range values. If a standard depth is equidistance between two shown standard depths, the ranges values will be the same as the shallower shown standard depth (i.e. 5 m range values will be the same as 0 m shown values, not 10 m shown values).

(ibid). As you can see, the different ocean areas have different maximum and minimum values per se, and further, those maximum and minimum values change with depth.

II. Conditions

In my work, I only use temperature, salinity, and sea pressure values from the WOD (excluding "oxygen, phosphate, silicate, nitrate, pH, chlorophyll, and alkalinity" values).

Fig. 3

One reason I do so is that I am mainly exploring the hypothesis that "thermal expansion is the main cause of sea level rise for the past 100 years" or so (On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19).

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

That hypothesis is based mainly on ocean temperature, ocean salinity, and sea pressure at relevant depths.

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

The conventional application of that naive hypothesis is that "water expands when heated."

That is not absolutely true, because water also contracts (shrinks) when heated, depending on the temperature of the water at the time the heat is applied (ibid).

Fig. 8

More importantly, water also contracts (shrinks) when heat leaves that water (again depending on temperature of the water at the time the heat is removed).

III. Application of the Tables

Prior to having those tables in an SQL table, the only way I had to analyze the validity of measurements of temperature and salinity was to reject measurements which the general error flags offered.

If the data package had any error condition other than zero (no errors) I rejected the measurements outright.

Now, I can use measurements regardless of useless errors ("the scientist is ugly") by seeing if the measurement is within the maximum and minimum parameters of the ocean area where the measurements were taken.

In addition to that, I can conform the measurement to the maximum or minimum.

If it is too high I can modify it to the maximum, or if it is too low of  a value, I can modify it to the minimum, and thereby preserve some of the valuable measurement data that way.

IV. Complications

The zone map at Fig. 1 can lead one to think "this will be simple because the zones all look like similar square thingys."

Fig. 9

Take a look at Fig. 2 and compare it to the Appendix 11 values and you realize at once how different they all are, and how difficult it is when a billion records are screaming past, to determine exactly which ocean a zone is in (and other difficulties).

So, I reprocessed all of the nearly one billion measurements, applying the maximum and minimum value constraints on the temperature and salinity values if needed.

Interestingly, the PFL datasets (produced by ARGO submarine-like machines) were remarkably accurate, and the CTD measurements were not bad either (overall, less than 1% needed modification to conform to the Appendix 11 restrictions).

V. The World According To Measurements

Another concern I had was with the TEOS-10 toolbox which I have begun to use (Golden 23 Zones Meet TEOS-10).

Some may think that because that toolbox conforms measurements to well studied conclusions, the measurements are being ignored.

So, the module I wrote uses all PSMSL tide gauge station records, and all WOD zone records (not limited to the "golden 23"), and keeps track of the in situ measurements separate from the TEOS calculated values.

Compare the in situ measurement graph for temperature (Fig. 7) with the TEOS-10 toolbox generated "conservative temperature" (Fig. 4) and notice that they have no major discernible differences.

But the Absolute Salinity graph (Fig. 8) compared with the in situ measurements of salinity (Fig. 5) does reveal discernible differences.

That is no surprise in the sense that the previous 40 years of measuring salinity in ocean water used a less reliable technique (TEOS-10 Home).

VI. The Other Graphs

The graphs, today, that bear most upon my argument against the "thermal expansion is the main cause of sea level rise for the past 100 years," are Fig. 3, Fig. 6, and Fig. 9.

The calculation of thermosteric ocean volume change (Fig. 9) compared with tide gauge records of sea level change (Fig. 6) are at odds with the thermal expansion hypothesis.

Putting them all on one 4-panel graph (Fig. 3) further supports the notion that the thermal expansion hypothesis is at odds with the world of measurements.

The graphs show that. during the same 1967-2016 time frame. sea level was rising as thermosteric volume fell.

VII. Conclusion

The Larson C ice-shelf calving is closer to the truth than the thermal expansion hypothesis is.

That is, the Greenland, Antarctic, and other ice concentrations in the Cryosphere are and have been the single greatest source of sea level change from day one of climate change caused by global warming.

"The ice is melting, the ice is melting."

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

On The Origin of "Conspiracy Theory" - 7

Got Dirt on Hill?

The Trump trinity of actors has committed criminal conspiracy according to the facts revealed in breaking news this weekend (Trump’s Son Met With Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton).

Donald Trump Jr. along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort agreed to go to a lawyer, who does "business" with Kremlin operatives, to collect dirt on a competing presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton (one of the people they met was a spy - New York Supreme Court).

To those in these days of being spoon fed by main stream media agendas, a "conspiracy theory" is a mythical story that cannot possibly be real.

In the real world, millions of court cases involve a "conspiracy theory" as serious as a heart attack, and is commonly what happens when a federal prosecutor brings a case against a defendant in frequently used criminal conspiracy indictments.

Federal criminal prosecutions against conspiracy activity is quite easy to bring about, and prosecutors really like cases based on conspiracy theories:

Over one-quarter of all federal criminal prosecutions and a large number of state cases involve prosecutions for conspiracy.
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Consider how a law school textbook might introduce the elements of traditional conspiracy law: Imagine that Joe and Sandra agree to rob a bank. From the moment of agreement, they can be found guilty of conspiracy even if they never commit the robbery (it’s called “inchoate liability”). Even if the bank goes out of business, they can still be liable for the conspiracy (“impossibility” is not a defense). Joe can be liable for other crimes that Sandra commits to further the conspiracy’s objective, like hot-wiring a getaway car (it’s called “Pinkerton” liability, after a 1946 Supreme Court case involving tax offenses). He can’t evade liability by staying home on the day of the robbery (a conspirator has to take an affirmative step to “withdraw”). And if the bank heist takes place, both Joe and Sandra can be charged with bank robbery and with the separate crime of conspiracy, each of which carries its own punishment (the crime of conspiracy doesn’t “merge” with the underlying crime). Why should conspiracy liability begin at the moment of “agreement,” before any crime is committed? Why can a conspirator be charged with both the inchoate offense of conspiracy and the robbery? Why should the law punish conspirators even if it’s impossible for them to commit the crime they planned? Why is withdrawal from a conspiracy so difficult?

(On The Origin of "Conspiracy Theory", quoting the Yale Law Journal). It isn't what Blind Willie McTell makes up as "fake news" at all.

The agreement between two or more individuals ("conspiracy") to take political dirt from foreign sources, and use it against a fellow American campaign competitor, violates U.S. election law (The latest Russia revelations lay the groundwork for a conspiracy case).

The previous post in this series is here.

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