On the Evidence for Naturally Occurring Global Temperature Cycles

Over the past four years, I have gone from protesting human-caused global warming at the “Forward on Climate” Rally in Washington, D.C. to my current state of seriously doubting that humans play more than a marginal role in the Earth’s climate.

I have only chosen to write about this my views now because I have found multiple confirmations of climate predictions made by AGW skeptic David Dilley and discovery of the cycles of the Primary Forcing Mechanism that drive climate change globally.  There are two specific predictions in the last year that I find quite impressive.

1. Dilley’s prediction in February, going against the mainstream academic researchers, that 2017’s hurricane season will be especially harsh. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-hurricane-forecasts/meteorologists-see-normal-atlantic-hurricane-season-in-2017-idUSKBN17M2J8
   The newspaper where Dilley lives wrote the following about his system:

   “Dilley developed a computer model concept, which he touts as a one-of-a-kind long-range forecasting tool. It relies on weather cycles. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration uses several short-term weather cycle-type oscillation models — as well as La Nina or El Nino influences — to forecast six months to a year into the future. NOAA does not use weather cycle data to predict hurricanes four years out.” - http://www.ocala.com/news/20171129/hurricane-irma-made-2017-season-to-remember

2. And then quite recently, I came across a blog post Dilley wrote in 2008, stating “about the year 2017 there will be another warming.” Again, this was not predicted by mainstream research organizations, which thought “the tapering off of an El Niño period... would hold down global heat levels.”

Given Dilley’s record of success in predicting weather events, I am somewhat surprised his work, freely available on his website since 2007, has not received mainstream attention.

Before discovering Dilley’s work, there are three main sources that progressively strengthened my skepticism regarding human caused climate change.

The first time I began to take climate skepticism seriously was in reading The Scientist as Rebel, a book by distinguished Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson. Dyson, who is quite liberal on most issues, claims there is no firm scientific evidence that increased carbon levels in the upper atmosphere and oceans will cause the climate crises that many other scientists forecast.

Dyson points out that the dire predictions about global warming are based on largely unproven computer simulations. Scientific truth is defined by proven experiment. I see an analogy here between the housing-market computer models used by bankers before the 2007 crash, and agree with Dyson that the scientific community needs to be wary about accepting long-term predictions of recently-developed computer models as equivalent to the results of orthodox laboratory experiments.

I find it too much to believe a scientist with as distinguished a career as Dyson would sacrificed his legacy for a corporate bribe, no matter how much he was offered. This significantly increased my openness to future arguments on the issue.

Despite Stefan Molyneux's Alt-Lite apologetics for the Alt-right, I’m including his video detailing his own experience writing code for computer climate models. Molyneux details the failure to hold climate computer models to any sort of falsifiable standard, and the resulting politicization of the climate research field. At the time, Molyneux had yet to stray into far-right apologetics, and his conviction on the issue was quite influential for me.

Soon after hearing Molyneux’s take, I found the work of Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who has been perhaps the most powerful and ruthless critic of climate alarmists, testifying before Congress, and later partnering with the conservative propaganda outlet Prager University [not a university] to make this useful overview, on the problems surrounding the idea of human caused climate change.

Discovering David Dilley’s work was the the real turning point for me. Only Dilley provides a scientific alternative to the mainstream, and the more I’ve thought about his proposals, freely available here, the more convinced I’ve become. At the risk of losing credibility for a hometown bias, I will also link to UA-Huntsville professor Roy Spencer’s website, as the discrepancy between surface temperature readings and Satellite temperature readings is an issue climate science should address.

Is it better to be bad than unlucky?

The phrase “better to be lucky than good” implies a logical contradiction, because how can something be better than goodness? The fact that we take the phrase as syllogistic truth today is a testament to the divided (pathological?) nature of today’s cultural consciousness.

It’s only in the past 70 years--since the development of modern warfare--that humanity has come to accept that the very core of our identities--our careers, how long we will live, whether or not we become rich, whether or not we live a long life--may be determined by random occurrences. Unlike many centuries-old sayings and common phrases, the phrase “better to be lucky than good” is only 75 years old. Before then, luck was a play thing--a part of children’s games and nothing more. They did not separate events from consciousness like the modern philosophy of “randomness” does.

Though I fully accept the validity of theoretical physics notion of quantum indeterminacy--that "randomness" is built into the fabric of things--I think it's dangerous for us to extend this to human experience. Randomness is fine for analyzing past events or predicting future ones, but the present moment is the domain of consciousness.

The word “random” comes from the Old English word “rinnan” which describes how river water runs and flows. Over the course of the last 800 years, the word has come to mean the opposite of the total connectedness of its original meaning “to flow”.

The flow of human consciousness excludes that possibility of randomness. The act of asserting consciousness creates a feedback loop that extends and projects more consciousness. To attribute the events of the present to “randomness” is to cut off that feedback loop from its power source.

Consciousness is nothing more, nothing less than the entirety of civil society taken as a whole. Consciousness is empathy for our fellow beings. Consciousness is the anticipation that the future holds unpredictable joys. Seeing the world through the lens of randomness excludes these emotions.

The present moment is not a simulation (despite what Elon Musk thinks!) What happens in this present moment is all that we have got. Computers have catapulted the idea of randomness to the front of our cultural consciousness. But right here, right now, there is no reset button. To call what happens in the present moment “random” is to turn off consciousness.

To confuse the randomness of computer programs and simulations with an essential part of reality is to turn away from consciousness. We need to spend more time facing the other direction.

On the Social Construction of Race and Gender

On the left today, we often hear about how race and gender are “social constructs”.  But what does this mean, and why do we on the left believe it is important?

There is a lot of confusion, even among academics, about what this means.

Experience can be categorized into the physical, the biological, and the mental. To say something is a “social construct” is simply to say that it exists on the mental level. (Marx referred to these levels as the “base and super-structure”).

Levels of existence	Base		Superstructure
	Physical	Biological	Mental
How do humans experience them?	The fact of our physical existence	How our organs, bones, and muscles works	Experience, thoughts, memories, emotions
What else has this existence?	Rocks, non-living molecules, water, fire, air	plants, amoeba	Social animals

Many academics argue against the primacy of social constructs in determining human behavior, claiming that “behaviour is a complex outcome of both biological and cultural influences.” (Wikpedia) This criticism is the same as arguing that “the laws of geometry are essential to understanding genetics.” Anyone who can comprehend a Punnett Square can tell you, “no, they are not!”  

Academia treats geometry and genetics as completely separate disciplines in separate departments, and yet some academics refuse to acknowledge that sociology and biology share just as big a gap.

Human social behaviors are best understood as socially constructed.

Claiming that genes determine behavior (the “resilience gene” or the “warrior gene”) is not very useful, because the process of how social behaviors is better analyzed from the social level.  Genetics is useful for analyzing biological features, such as handedness or eye-color. It is not useful to say genetics causes social behaviors, any more than it is to claim the laws of geometry “cause” biological evolution, or that Annie Oakley “caused” WWI (by not killing Kaiser Wilhelm decades before the war when he asked her to shoot the ash off of his cigar.) There is simply too large a gap between genetics and society for this type of analysis to be useful.

I like this blogger’s description of the social construction of gender:

“Gender is a construct of identity and language, as the ability to think and express a gender identity is essential to claiming one (rather than having one thrust upon you, as many do upon seeing a baby’s genitals). It’s not until children become verbal that they begin to process and sort out what they understand gender to be, as they try to map language to the world they see. Since our society so strongly prefers a binary understanding of gender that maps onto genitals, it simplifies things and collapses gender and sex into one thing.”

Capitalism is quite good at taking social constructs and manipulating them for its purposes. For example, capitalism relegated to women the unwaged work of social reproduction--socializing and preparing the next generation of workers.

Capitalism also, terribly, led white slave owners traders in the mid to late 17th century to create new legal categories of race in order to keep workers divided, and, later, to provide a moral justification for the funding of further imperialism through the rapid accumulation of capital on the backs of slave labor.

Race is an arbitrary legal categorization based on a superficial biological marker (skin color), which does not correspond closely to the genetic similarity of different individuals (i.e. a Chinese person will often have greater genetic similarity to an African than to many of the other Chinese from his or her hometown!).  

The following is some thoughts on religion, and my belief about its role in how social constructs were first formed.

The purpose of religion is to transform the biological into the mental. “Religion” comes from the Latin “religare” meaning “to bind.” As ominous as this sounds, I believe that religion is an innate human impulse, the whole point of which is to remember good experiences--to “bind” the memory of the experience to the mind through the creation of new descriptive language. Religion, thus, brought humans into a new type of existence--mental existence.

Originally, gender, I believe, is an example of this religious impulse to bring mental life into the biological experience of being human.

Today, though, through the process of cisgender normalization, gender sadly has come to play an opposite role. Rigid, bourgeois-prescribed gender norms take mental life out of our experiences. Free thinking is shut down by the ritualized shaming and assaulting of non-cisgender-conforming people.