"Climate Hubrists" : deniers of any limits to human ability to control reality

I separate Holocaust deniers from Climate Change deniers, I really do.

Most Holocaust deniers deny that the event ever happened - and continue to deny that, even in their heart of hearts.

But Climate Change deniers only pretend in public that they believe human-originated harmful Climate Change isn't happening and won't happen.

What they really and not so secretly believe - in their particular heart of hearts - is that Man can easily solve any bad climate change, or indeed any other global disaster that might happen, as fast and as easily as any comic book Super Hero might.

Enough already about War's impact on Nature : what about Nature's impact on War ?

With only the very best of intentions, environmentalists have tended to focus on what war does to nature - say for example, in reviewing the impact of leaking oil from the thousands of oil tankers sunk at the sea during war in the last 120 years.

But again, totally unintentionally, all this effort tends to show Man as all-powerful (here in a war mode busy destroying nature) and Mother Nature as basically an endless victim.

But in fact, the reverse is true.

History is replete with examples where Mother Nature has effortlessly shattered the over-arching hubris of war-makers : any number of  history-changing examples spring to mind - usually where unexpected bad weather destroys the plans of invasion fleets - on the water, in the air, over land.

Picking winners and losers, triage, genocide,eugenics, artificial breeding : all plenticide by other names

When punters down at the casino continue to believe that they can beat the odds , we call them gamblers.

But when PhDs believed they can beat the odds, we called them modern scientists.

And modern planners and modern statesmen and modern leaders of industry.

Efforts to 'drain the gene pool'* to just a few types is a form of scientific gambling.

Chemistry PhD = Hubris ?

As penicillium mold spores drift about through the air, the fortunate ones land on a suitably moist food supply.

The spores almost need the moisture more than the food , as they can feed on almost any organic matter.

But when they get stressed, usually when the food supply runs low , they may respond by producing the antibiotics we rather loosely call by the single word 'penicillin' , to keep at bay bacterial competitors for that same food.

Note I said antibiotics in the plural, because, depending on the particular food source at hand, each penicillin produced might be in fact ever so slightly different.

Technically, the key part of the penicillin molecule - the famous strained beta lactam ring - must always be there , for it to work as a antibiotic .

But the extra bit on the side of that key component - the side chain - can vary widely and will tend to produce various kinds and strengths of antibiotics.

Many of them offer different - useful - qualities - from the original penicillin (type G).

Now, in Nature , all these marvellous variants are mere happy accidents induced by the chance of varying wind currents and drifting spores.

In the Lab, biologists and chemists feed the penicillium spores all sorts of extra food treats , (fancied up ,the technical word for these humble food supplements is precursors) hoping to see a useful variant emerge.

When the new improved variants do emerge , the chemists tend to glorify this 'brute force' approach to the discovery of new chemicals by daring to call the results "semi-synthetic" penicillin.

But this just hubris and hooey.

It is merely a way for human chemists - who tried and failed to make penicillin from scratch* like the tiny mold spores so readilyand so easily did - to regain some lost luster for their profession.

(*To chemists , this is their holy grail of  "total synthesis".)

Because it is really no different than the ancient practise of farmers trying out plants on differing soil mixtures and cultivation techniques and running with the methods that gave the best yields.

The chemists, rather like the British , lost really big in WWII.

Partly to physics (the A-Bomb) and partly to biology (natural penicillin triumphing over the chemists' failure to make synthetic penicillin) .

And like the British, they've been trying to re-write the history of WWII ever since ....

WWII as a preview of the Sixth Extinction

The most frequent contribution most of us (scientist or laity) make to the public debate about the Climate is to discuss our beliefs about changes that may  (or may not) happen sometime in the future , when human hubris collides with natural reality.

Unfortunately , that leaves more than enough "ifs and maybes" for many other citizens to permanently tune out on this all important public debate.

By contrast, The Mills of Nature discusses what actually did happen in the recent past , when pure human hubris really did get seriously stuck axle deep in the dirt of natural reality.

To protect the guilty and the inept , WWII history has normally been told back to front : 'the Allies won the war in 1945 --- and here is how it all happened'.

It becomes distilled down a human drama between six extremely ham-ish actors, all judged more than capable of eating the scenery.

Cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors"

Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, FDR and Tojo were still better known for extraordinarily skills in speech-making and morale-raising than for any administrative prowess they might have had. 

But the current historical consensus about WWII argues they were just the kind of leadership needed to fight this sort of war.

So we end with this intimate human drama , a clash between the six men fronting the six biggest civilizations, played out for us above the footlights .

Meanwhile, far back at the ranch , Mother Nature is nothing but an uninteresting and inert painted backdrop.

However, there is another way to tell the story of WWII.

It proceeds more conventionally, from front to back, detailing what Allies, Axis and Neutrals actually thought would happen, day by day, and then contrasting that with what actually did happen.

As a result, it ends up telling a far more downbeat story.

Now we can clearly see human ambitions, on all sides, stymied time and time and time again by natural forces.

 And  by humans that each side regarded as less than fully civilized and thus less than fully human - people in some sense also seen by most as 'just another part of the natural world.'

Nature (and 'these people of the natural world') turned out to be very far from inert --- for six long years it resists Civilized Man's vaulting ambitions at every turn.

So for but one example , over and over again a bad - natural - harvest of the lowly potato in Germany led to the human decision to see that more Slavs and Jews further East were starved or shot to death.

Even now, few us really believe it was Generalissimo Stalin , rather than General Frost and General Mud, who really saved Russia in 1941.

So once again cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors".

But this time , read it with the accent on scenery and not on actors .

I hope you find this Green history of WWII  a humbling and healing affair.

Yes it does cut us down to size before the vastness of an ever turbulent Mother Nature .

But hopefully it will also help us give the lesson on the dangers of Climate Change, before we get to the final exam....

Technology makes planes that fly ; Science merely makes claims that MIGHT fly

The DC-3 , a plane that technologists designed 80 years ago, is still flying in commercial airlines around the world despite the fact that the last civilian units were built over 70 years ago.

Made of the claims that Scientists made 80 years ago about the world and reality have failed to stand the test of time  ---but the DC-3s built back then still fly as good as they always did !

This is why I have the highest possible regard for small "s" science , as broadly defined as possible - and that definition includes all of us who have ever tinkered, by trial and error and careful observation of existing actions , to make something better.

But I regard  the exalted claims of the successes of capital "S" Science,Scientists and Scientism with the attitude of a critic from Missouri : "Show Me !" ....

the long AND the short AND the tall : the eternal commensality of the big and the small (and God blesses 'em all)

It is typical of the hubris of us individual humans and our individual human societies to always imagine that we alone are big and mighty and wise and that all other beings are small, weak and foolish.

A further human hubris of ours is to imagine how better our imagined Utopia would be when all the other, lesser/weaker/smaller forms of life have been liquidated, if need be with with extreme prejudice.

But germicides won't ever remove all the germs anymore than insecticides will ever remove all insects or eugenicides will ever remove all the weak, frail and elderly.

The various forces of Nature combine to interact upon all beings in various ways depending on scale, because each individual scale works over a particular - limited - spatial and energy scale.

Reality , the Reality of matter and energy , is thus permanently stratified into different layers or scale levels.

From the point of view of possible lifeforms, that means a variety of scale-defined niches that are permanently ("eternally") available for the lifeform best sized to excel in them.

Translation : kill off all bacteria sized life and some new life the same size will emerge to fill in that hole of opportunity.

Humans are currently the "fittest" for our big niche but we are not "fit" for all niches, though we continue to delude ourselves into thinking so.

Niches change constantly at the margins so all successful lifeforms display a variety of members, some who appear to be weak and useless, but in fact this merely an evolutionary way to ensure enough variety in the lifeform's generic material to surmount unexpected changes in their chosen niche.

For example , people with a moderate form of the disease of sickle cell anemia survive some insect-vectored diseases better than supposedly healthier people, at least in the many large regions of the world where these insects and diseases are endemic.

The big and the small lifeforms may never grow to like each other or cooperate with each other, but they might as well resign themselves that the big and the small, like the rich and the poor, will always be with us.

Henry Dawson grew to understand the profoundness of the concept of "eternal commensality of the big and the small" in his studies of human-oral commensal strep bacteria interactions.

That is why he was so damn adamant that even winning WWII couldn't come at the cost of tromping all over the weak and the small....

Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...

During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.

But these differences are only apparent , not real.

His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.

And his support for the ultimately successful Naturally-produced Penicillin highlighted the spectacular failure of Daltonian Chemistry's claim to be able to synthesize anything and everything, including Penicillin.

Hubris is a terribly addictive drug and WWII turned out to be its largest, longest and most brutal clinical trial to date.

Only to date, because with Global Warming we appear headed to a rematch between Hubris and Reality, only with this time much worse than the last.

There are lessons - lessons unlearned - both good and bad - we can apply from WWII to the current rematch that might help us avoid the worst of it.

But only if we are prepared to listen.

Henry Dawson can certainly give us some of the good lessons , while his many opponents can provide us with all the bad lessons,  in spades.....