Quantum Style Causation Resplendiscent.
The USA is being sandbagged by its billionaires, in particular its fossil fuel energy billionaires [Like those heirs known as the Koch brothers; See Note]. “Sandy” is the second hurricane to strike the North East USA in a year (after Irene last year). And it is the first hurricane to mix with a North-Easter:
Do Whatever To The Planet, The Planet Will Do Whatever To You
Sandy, a crossfire hurricane!
The USA’s sabotage of the Kyoto Protocol, the USA’s fossil fuel policy, and its encouragement of CO2 pollution by proxy in China are amounting to a deliberate disruption of the biosphere. A refined analysis (not done in this essay) shows that the USA has a Machiavellian interest to proceed that way (as does, say, Russia, or Canada). So it does make sense. Satanic sense. Plutocratic sense.
A hurricane is basically a Carnot engine with the warm ocean for its energy reservoir, and the stratosphere as its cold sink.
A strip of ocean 800 kilometers wide, & 3 degrees C (6F) above normal along the USA eastern seaboard was a direct enabler of hurricane Sandy. These days, 20 degree Celsius waters off the eastern seaboard passes for normal, and an already formed hurricane can survive with such temps. Sandy gained strength, though, because the temps were higher than that.
But not to worry: hundreds of millions of citizens of the USA will be told by their wealthy, much admired masters, that one cannot establish a direct causal relationship between the rise of CO2 and other industrial greenhouse gases and the big bad hurricane-northeaster.
Never mind that this rise of warm blanket gases is about 60% since 1750 CE. Indeed we went from 280 ppm of CO2 to 450 ppm of CO2 + CH4 + N20 + an entire zoo of other greenhouse gases, such as CFC-12, ( CFC-12, (CF2Cl2) diChlorodiFluoromethane is more greenhousey, overall, than N20, and is now banned; thanks to a weird low temperature chemistry, it devoured the ozone layer).
And never mind that the world is ruled by impossible-to-determine-with-pin-point-precision causality. Causality where it is the system that causes, and not the one cause, because, ultimately, there are no causes, but for waves. A wave is intrinsically vague (in French, “vague” means “Wave”). The Quantum says processes have no points.
George Lakoff points out in Global Warming Systemically Caused Hurricane Sandy: “Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy — and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation.
Systemic causation is familiar.Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.
There is a difference between systemic and direct causation.”
One can go further than that. Systemic causation is all over. Quantum Physics itself is systemic. That was its most baffling aspect. Whereas Classical Mechanics used direct causation, Quantum Mechanics did not. Quantum Physics is all about inferring the singular, from the whole.
Nor did the modern statistical mechanics advocated by the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann was immensely successful by average standards (he met with the emperor, and his first lecture in philosophy (!) more than filled up the largest hall at the university of Vienna, standing room only). However, he took badly asinine criticism of Mach and others, and committed suicide in 1906, just after Planck had published that postulating that energy was only sent by packets (“quanta”) provided with a process explaining the observed blackbody radiation, and the non occurrence of the “ultra violet catastrophe“.
Notice that Planck introduced the “Quanta of Light” (Lichtquanta”) as an unknown mechanism. The greatest strides in science are not made by connecting causality what is known to what is known. Great strides come from postulating a meta-phenomenon, something outside of the realm of what is known.The fundamental axiom of the Quantum is that it is processed by the entire system it can access (and partly penetrate, as it’s made of waves).
The fundamental practical axiom of the Quantum is that it is processed by the entire system it can access (and partly penetrate, as it’s made of waves).
Interestingly the greatest minds (including Einstein) had a very hard time to understand this. Even the Copenhagen School (Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.) did not really understand it fully.
If the Quantum itself is systemic, it’s not surprising that nature is systemic.
How is the Quantum systemic? Through the interference of waves. That is the fundamental axiom of Quantum Physics, the De Broglie axiom: any matter is guided by a wave whose frequency is determined by the momentum-energy of said matter (it’s then not too clear what’s matter, and what’s a wave, or a bump in the night, a charming difficulty of particle physics).
Waves can interfere constructively, or destructively, or somewhere in between. So think of systematic causation as such a thing. It makes sense, even in detail.
For example smoking causes cancer after the smoke interferes with inhaling, or not and various waves of diet and genetics and epigenetics, and immunological competency, and what not. So many causal waves give haphazard looking interference patterns. The same thing happens in a hurricane.
Ultimately there are no causes, but for waves interfering: that image applies extremely well to hurricanes. In particular Atlantic hurricanes originate as the spawning of easterly waves.
One thing is sure, though: if Wall Street keeps on going the way it does, it will drown, and not just for 6 hours. As the Rolling Stones have it in “Jumping Jack Flash””
“Watch it!
I was born in a cross-fire hurricane
And I howled at my ma in the driving rain,
But it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas!”
The hurricane generated tide, the storm surge, went 4 meters high. Present USA policy will certainly lead to sea level settling permanently dozens of meters above that.
A two degree Celsius average temperature rise will certainly insure this. Why? Because at the maximum of the last glaciation, 20,000 years ago, the temperature on the Northern Atlantic (center of the problem) was only 5 degrees Celsius less than now. Yes, five Celsius. So two degrees Celsius over the entire planet can make a giant difference: we would go back, quasi instantaneously, to the situation, 4 million years ago. Most species will not resist to the shock, oxygen production itself may be impacted.
Not realizing this has been a giant mistake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (Of course the IPCC acted that way, that is, erroneously, because only then could it get support from the governments! Corruption is a many varied thing…)
The seas will rise dramatically very soon, because the system being set in motion is highly non linear, like an avalanche… or a storm surge (which practically can take the exact appearance of a tsunami!) True, before an avalanche, a tsunami, or a storm surge, or an earthquake, nothing much is going on, and the cicadas are busy singing. It would be wiser to learn swimming.
Will awareness be born in a cross-fire hurricane and ma [Wall Street] being howled at in the driving rain? Or will the gas be all right now, in a spasm of collective hypnosis?
Its leaders make no mystery that they want to make the USA again the number one producer of fossil fuels. Cutting off mountains to produce coal to export to the American factories in China, fracking the wilds all over, buying off farmers with dollars, chasing them out with fumes and foul waters. No problem. That’s why Sandy paid a visit: to remind the two plutocrats running for residents of the White House, that they are nothing.
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Patrice Ayme
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Note: sand•bag n. A bag filled with sand and used as ballast, in the formation of protective walls against a flood, or as a weapon.
v.tr. 1. To put sandbags in or around.
2. To hit with a sandbag.
3. Slang
a. To treat severely or unjustly.
b. To force by crude means; coerce: sandbagged us into cleaning up their mess.
c. To downplay or misrepresent one’s ability in a game or activity in order to deceive (someone).
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 