How to think

One of my favorite screamer* liberals is Kelpie Wilson at Truthout. Today she tries to warn us about global climate change. She even contains a graph, of average climate change by location, in multi color - Lemme likes the style. But she doesn't mention if the graph is mean temperature (most likely) and never once comes close to the reality of global warming. Yes - we are currently experiencing an increase in temperature, which correlates well to the increase in output of energy due to sunspots. No carbon fix or people regulation is gonna fix the problem. What will fix the problem is 1 - Adapting to the changes short term 2 - Allowing a natural sequence of weather process and 3 - Tendency of everything to gravitate toward the mean.

Dr. Lenny considers himself a natural resources scientist and a conservationist. The idea of adaptation would be to plan for the current climate change to dissipate over time and then reverse back toward cool when the solar inputs decrease. The when time frame is not really up to us. So now is the time for some southern oregon land managers to plant warmer grape varietals and perhaps citrus and olive trees - but that depends on the trend increasing. How do they measure average temperature? What is an average temperature anyway? If you have coffee and ice water at the restaurant at breakfast, when you plunge your hands into each the average temperature is 50 centigrade. Does that mean your coffee will not scald your hand? (Please do not try this).

But the example does bring up a point on how we measure things, including what we know. I wish there were reliability ratings on beliefs - like i can believe that water boils at 100 C with a 99.8% confidence level. But if i lived in Denver, the statement would be 100% wrong, due to the effect of altitude on boiling point.

There is so much that we know because it has been taught to us as baseline belief and fro me, because it integrates well with the system that i use to think about newly present facts. I also run the gamut of possibilities with what i hold to be true and then assign values to the new conflicts generated for thinking about in more depth later. When depends on how much the new belief disrupts the old system. Truth is where you find it, and where ever you find it, you have to choose to believe it as truth. When you do, then you have to accept it as such and go from there. To deny a truth that you truly believe is a form of insanity. But if the new valid truth conflicts with old valid truths, then one is not valid and i always feel that i must resolve these conflicts consistently within my thought system. That is one of the reasons i can paralyze myself in thought process and have to read a book like atlas shrugged in a week, while working on the conflict resolution and regaining personal growth capacity and productivity. It becomes difficult sometimes to function the way people expect when the shift of point of view is extreme.

Dr. Lenny does not support big environmentalism at all, but supports thoughtful recognition of ecology with land use. It took a while to work through the Greenpeace and WWF agendas and to watch the action path, to learn that the person on the ground matters more than all the scientific publications ever printed, when the decision is to be made on the ground. Most people carrying chainsaws and bucking logs for a living are putting their lives on the line to produce a product that american manufacturing needs to support the lifestyle. I went through the whole gamut on owls - from people who think they are tasty to people who feel that it should be a jailable crime to own a feather. There are many truths that are not commonly held.

I think it is time to look at what we know and re-evaluate the worth of the knowledge against some subjective measure based on a similar historical event. Perhaps some of our cardinal assumptions are wrong, just like the temperature statement in Denver.

* screamer is not a derogatory term, but an important political concept.