The view on climate change seems settled. Everybody agrees it is happening and that it will be catastrophic to the planet. Naysayers, such as myself, are regarded as ridiculous or outrageous. I want to rehabilitate my view by defending three propositions: the evidence of climate change is inconclusive; that climate change is man made is denied in action though not in words, and even if there is world wide climate chane, it will not be a catastrophe.

There was a dramatic change in climate measurement in the Eighties and Nineties. Space satellites were able to measure the surface temperatures of oceans and those measurements were combined with land measurements to update global temperatures. Those new measurements showed global measurements to be increasing exponentially but it was not clear that the increase was a result of the change in the measurement of global temperature or an actual increase in the globe’s temperature. Al Gore, in his academy Award documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” said that global warming would continue and speculated that within a generation a third of Fkorida might well be found underwater even though the chart on the wall behind Gore showed global warming as plateauing even though at a higher level than in previous decades.

I looked carefully at the official yearly reports on climate change produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the oughts. They provided curious results. They did not provide straightforward charts of a list of years and the corresponding global temperatures, Rather they said that global temperatures had been modified by historic trends and other adjustments not specified. They also said things like “Four of the last ten years were the highest global temperatures” without saying it was on a high plateau that might have stabilized, and those reports did not mention the global temperature when it had gone down.

Meanwhile, and furthermore,other claims of precipitous dangers as a result of climate change were also made. There were forest fires in both Northern and Southern California that were attributed to the dryness of the timber as a result of climate change, and so an impending apocalypse. But more ordinary events intruded on that narrative, Firebugs were identified as the culprits. Power lines had been introduced into areas that had recently been populated. Some of the connecting electrical lines had fallen down and ignited the fires. The solution is to bury power lines even though that is more expensive than hanging them in the air tied to masts. There had been in the Fifties a water shortage in New York City which led restaurants to provide glasses of water only if they were asked by the patrons. This was going to be a long term problem. The problem was solved by building another water tunnel to bring clean and abundant water from the Adorandicks. Water levels in oceans are rising, as well may be the case. But the reason that so much money has to be spent on redeeming flood insurance is because people buy lots ad build because ocean views are so popular and the government subsidizes flood insurance.

There are a lot of glaciers melting. A new Northwest Passage is opening up between Canada and Greenland. But maybe there was anNorthwest Passage a thousand years ago that we have not yet discovered. After all, there were grapevines a thousand years ago in Labrador and flocks of sheep in Greenland. We have not achieved that level of global warmth at the present time. Worry about it when we get that warm. Maybe climate change is cyclical though measured in millennia. A more recent climate event was what is called the little ice age where in the fourteenth century there was sufficient cold for retreats of farming went down mountainsides and the weather may have resulted in the Black Plague.

If most Americans believe that climate change is certain, why is it that so few efforts are exerted to alleviate it? Low lying cities like Miami or Houston have not been evacuated or prepared to evacuate, yes, New Orleans built a new set of dams and levees but that only happened after Hurricane Katrina. New York City did not even plant swamp grass in the Manhattan side of the East River to alleviate flooding. Bo big taxes on McMansions which are notorious fuel guzzlers while not encouraging building apartment houses which are fuel efficient. Yes, there are state subsidiaries for solar power, bur that is state funded to subsidize realty costs.

There atr two reasons for that. First off, people like apocalyptic stories even if they are scary because they are able to organize their minds about dangers and survival and see political leaders as corrupt or evil. Exodus was an apocalypse except that a miracle interview. The story of Jesus is an apocalypse. IN those still living will arise the second Coming.So apocalyptic imaginations are satisfying for their own sakes, such as a nuclear war between the USSR and the ya which might well have happened and preoccupied our imaginations between 1947 and 1989 The second reason is political. Apocalypses are invented to distract from more dangerous political events. The United States invented Earth Day so as to deflect people from thinking about the previous unrest that had disturbed the Vietnam War. Earth Day was relatively hartm;rss

A year or so ago the United Nations decided that it should no longer declare how high should be the new acceptable climate change increase. That was because the rise was just conventional; It was decided by consensus rather than because it represented irreversible or catastrophic change. That is because the rise depends on when people thought climate chane started. Most people think it started with the Industrial revolution and smokestack emissions. I n that case, it started around 1800. But that started to decline in the Eighties because there was a switch from factory wastes to computer industries which use less energy to produce their industries . Even more recent industries, such as AI data storages, now again require vast amounts of energy but people don’t seem to be concerned with that, only who will pat taxes for that. Total emissions don’t matter Climate change doesn’t matter.

Let us presume for a moment that climate chane is real and will prove devastating. That will mpt make it catastrophic. Yes, the Southern United States may become unlivable. But Canada can develop four crops of wheat and so will Siberia. There will be plenty of food for the world’s population, and a reallocation of the world’s poopu;ation in the ext two hundred tears. Don’t worry about it. Just adapt.

RELIGION, LITERATURE

Creation Fables

The stories earliest listed in “Genesis” are fables rather than myths and so disclose a higher level of consciousness than to be found with myths.

The creation story in “Genesis” is a far more modern thing than it is usually credited with being It is a kind of philosophical presentation and so very different from mythology which, as Ovid, that great student of mythology, noted, there are always biological transformations of things even while the gods remain subject to the forces of nature and the raging of human passions. Narcissus may become his image only symbolically, and not all narcissists become their images, but these are still myths because of the element of biological transformation.. The stories that follow the creation story are best explained, on the other hand, as fables, which are stories that explain a set of circumstances that do not seem to be created but which somehow were at a point in time and have become part of nature. Tigers have stripes and the Red Man got baked right, neither too dark or too light.. Fables suggest that there is a history for what seems natural, a sometimes serious, sometimes fey attempt to make explicable what seems not to need explanation or else to make explicable something which seems paradoxical: how something could come into existence when it already had to be there. Good examples of fables that follow soon after the creation story are the tower of Babeel, which is an exaggeration of what people can build and what happens to them, which is to have multilingual peoples, or Noah’s ark, which is an exaggeration of a boat that could be built rather than transforming animals so they could swim.

FILM, LITERATURE

"The Night Manager"

John Le Carre is a serious novelist.

The secret of spy novels and movies is that they describe ordinary people doing universal things, however exotic is the setting and the premises are and that the people act outside the law. People can’t escape from or suspend their human nature evgen if they think they are beyond the restraints of the law. A good or even exemplary item of that is available in Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” where an anarchist wanders around London with bombs wrapped around him under his coat feeling comforted that at any moment he could explode himself. That seems bizarre or crazy until the reader recognizes that this is a kind of freedom. The anarchist has freedom to destroy himself which is an ultimate freedom because his control over it is absolute and without the constraint of others, purely subject to personal will. All people want to some extent to do what they want, to say fuck you to the world however ugly it may be and that gets externalized in the image of that anarchist.

Updike's "Toward the End of Time"

The first of a two part post on John Updike’s “Toward the End of Time” through the analysis of generic types.

Persistently undervalued, except perhaps for his Rabbit novels, because he is regarded as covering up facile meaning with an engaging writing style, the quintessential New Yorker writer, John Updike deserves more appreciation, even in one of his lesser novels : Toward the End of Time”. But in order to appreciate the novel’s achievement, step back a few steps and consider the kind of book it is, which is what I call a deficient epic. Updike is very careful about what each of her novels are, whether the saga of “In the beauty of the lilies” or the polemical politics of “Terrorist” or “Couples” as the romantic serio-comedy.

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