EQUIVOCATING ABOUT WHAT'S 'UNEQUIVOCAL'


When it comes to predictions about the possible course of climate change, there are some questions that demand research, not hysteria, in order to establish and distinguish causes from effects.

The environment reporter with The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, Canada is Martin Mittelstaedt. He reports regularly on the "climate change" file and has followed the international discourse on this topic since at least the time of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, which set the stage for drafting the Kyoto GHG targets announced in 1995. In a front-page article in the 31 January 2007 editions of the paper, he has published an article entitled The fallout of global warming: 1,000 years. The subhead of the article declares: "In stark terms, scientists confirm that climate change is 'unequivocal'". This article recycles themes that have become commonplaces of the entire discussion, notions that many now take for granted. This commentary asks some questions about some of these themes.

First: what evidence provides the basis for the assertion at the very beginning of this article that "humans have already caused so much damage to the atmosphere that the effects of global warming will last for more than 1,000 years"? Yes, there is clear evidence that global climate is undergoing changes. Yes, many of these appear unprecedented according to the timescales over which natural events are observed and studied to which humans are also witness. Yes, human activities are contributing greenhouse-gas effects that would otherwise not be present.

However, beyond these three affirmations, the following has yet to be established: are these contributions triggering global universal effects, or effects at multiple point-sources that also happen to be distributed globally? Are there no other sources of universal effects? Even more fundamentally: are there climate-altering processes that operate across geological-type timescales that have not yet been investigated in this regard?

The selection of timescale is dependent on a geological record, e.g., core samples. This record is known to be incomplete, i.e., to include gaps great and small. At least some of these gaps are themselves believed to mark, or likely to mark, major climate-changing events such as meteorite strikes. Hence, the geological record taken as a whole incorporates non-linear transformations.

An outstanding feature of a non-linear transformation is that any trace of what the world and its climate looked like before the point of transformation has been erased in, and by, the transformation itself. Only in a linear transformation, and even then only with certain special kinds, can we continue to view the state of a system before the point of transformation as well as after. In the natural environment, however, transformations of a linear kind, if detectable at all, are detectable only within selected finite bounds of time and space. At broader scales, going further out to include a vaster range of time and space, these linear transformations are overtaken by non-linear transformations whose prehistory can no longer be recovered by extrapolating backwards in time.

What if ="climate change" is in fact a collection of effects seen at multiple point-sources that also happen to be distributed globally? Then, what is most likely is that the natural environmental system must adjust to a new "normal" equilibrium whose duration cannot be predicted in advance. What seems most unlikely under such a scenario is that the human-induced effects and contributions have overwhelmed nature's capacity to compensate.

Here, however, one must choose. If the scenario of human contributions triggering global universal effects is true, then the scenario of effects at multiple point-sources that also happen to be distributed globally must be ruled out. If the scenario of effects at multiple point-sources that also happen to be distributed globally is true, then the scenario of human contributions triggering global universal effects must be ruled out. Either way, until this is settled, the rest of the discourse about climate change cannot achieve coherence. To proceed otherwise is to promulgate disinformation. Without researching and establishing the science of all the various ways in which climate actually has changed, all modelling of climate change, global warming etc., will and must remain aphenomenal.

The Mittelstaedt article appears at a moment in which it is being suggested quite widely that big industry has ceased resisting the climate change bandwagon and is now joining it. Yes: many industrial leaders have indeed ceased bashing what it used to deride as the environmentalist lobby's "rhetoric", to embrace what is now called the "weight of the evidence". However, as mentioned above, this "evidence" is seriously flawed by a lack of coherence on a fundamental point. Turning to the matter of its "weight", i.e., its credibility, a cautionary tale comes to mind.

From about 300 BCE until about 1650 CE, almost two millennia, the world of European scientific knowledge was quite certain that the speed at which any object fell to earth depended on its weight. Ergo: heavier objects must fall towards the earth faster than lighter objects. Gravity existed before humans and human consciousness of it, but no one associated this personally perceived phenomenon of gravity with a physically approximately constant rate at which all objects are bound to accelerate towards the earth anywhere on its surface. That connection was established only by the persistence of Galileo and the work of Newton. Once established, this connection demonstrated the falsity of thinking that heavier objects must fall towards the earth faster than lighter objects. Except for Galileo and Newton, however, we could all still be operating according to the notion that heavier objects must fall towards the earth faster than lighter objects. Here is the problem. One cannot believe both things to be true. To accept that both can coexist as equally true, or as parts of the same larger truth, requires embracing an incoherence in the foundations of our knowledge.

What is the situation we now face regarding the discourse about climate change? A big struggle has been waged for the last 40 years over the role and contribution of human agency in transforming and degrading the physical natural environment. That was the context in which the consequences of human activity for climate began to be raised. This turned into a struggle over "whether" and to what extent human activity was responsible for climate change. To escape what had become a seemingly "sterile" standoff between industry and environmentalists, the ground of the argument shifted. Now it was argued: it doesn't matter who's responsible, the climate is changing irrevocably because of an accumulation of bad things done in the past by industry and other forms of human agency. So, now, all resources and efforts should become invested in stopping this new juggernaut.

We live in a world with an economy dominated by monopolies. Monopolies assert rights ahead of the peoples to the lands, air, waters etc. These monopolies' newly discovered urgency to save the environment regardless of who is responsible for wrecking it is the latest form in which monopoly right has cloaked itself. Monopoly right can indeed prevail on this front if and only if scientists, and scientifically knowledgeable and educated members of the public, fail to stand up and ask: what's the basis for assuming climate change is unidirectional and irreversible, when nothing else in nature is?

The Mittelstaedt article mentions a consensus of more than 2000 scientists that climate change is unidirectional and irreversible; however, this establishes nothing more than the fact that 2000 people agree about something. Also mentioned is an unbroken record of climatological data going back to the 1850s, i.e., less than 160 years. This also establishes nothing, however, about the dynamics of an atmosphere that is billions of years old. Just as indecisive on this question of overall dynamics is the evidence the article mentions of core samples indicating something unprecedented about methane and carbon-dioxide levels in the last 650 000 of those billions of years. Amidst the "weight" of all this "evidence", it's easy to forget that, for almost two thousand years, knowledgeable people in Europe watched heavier objects fall faster to the ground than lighter objects. But we shouldn't. The stakes are too high -- not only in the meteorological sense, but especially in the social, political and economic atmosphere of global cartels striving to entrench monopoly right.

CHALLENGES TO THE APHENOMENAL MODEL:
HOW CUBA ADDRESSES THE "ENERGY CRUNCH"

During 2006, the Cuban government declared "the Year of the Energy Revolution".

Up to now, the consequences of Cuba’s “energy revolution” have been discussed among development economists and Cuba enthusiasts in terms of the model of development that is paced to conform to a “sustainable” footprint within the ecological system of the planet as a whole. Niether their government's declaration, nor how the declaration was implemented, have been examined in the context of what Cuban people themselves believe to constitute a revolutionisation of development. Contrary to certain assumptions harboured widely among many proponents of "sustainable development" who accept Cuba's solution as a possible model, this is no grab-bag of techniques that can be refitted and implemented just about anywhere. It is an entire process, including discrete steps, that has been developed consciously and popularised into a real movement within Cuban society.

This note introduces three aspects of Cuba's energy revolution that conventional development economists, even those supporting Cuba as a viable alternative approach, have failed to weigh or assess fully if at all.

Cuba's systematic approach is garnering increasingly international recognition. The World Wildlife Fund recently declared Cuba the only country whose development fell within the criteria of what its experts considered sustainable. More recently a Cuban lab that looks at renewable energy sources was singled out for international recognition.

The first of several major implications of the work of the Renewable Energy Laboratory at the University of Oriente in Santiago de Cuba which no commentary outside Cuba has yet grasped is the fact that, based on careful preparatory investigation, Cuban enterprises increasingly can and do modify imported commodities and-or how they are fitted for use and consumption in the Cuban system. This activity carries on in addition to and on top of mass-organised materials recycling programs of the type most recently reported, for example, in yesterday's editions of Cuba's national daily newspaper "Granma" by Lourdes Perez Navarro, about how "Energy-savings program permits recovery of more than 40 000 tons of materials"

What is actually going on here, “beneath the surface” so-to-speak, is the organisation of The Consumer as a power capable of countervailing the diktat of international finance capital as The Producer. This countervail takes place in the context of sectors of commodity trade that have become more-or-less thoroughly socialised, so that the Final Product as delivered by the international trading system is not, and need not be, The Last Word as to what The Consumer eventually gets to consume.

This countervailing power is exercised, however, *not* over the exchange-value of the commodities in question, but over their use-value once purchase and importation have been arranged. From the standpoint of the state-organised system of material commodity production within Cuba, these transactions may be accounted as a kind of cost of raw or only semi-finished material, rather than as a purchase of goods whose cost is to be recovered through resale in domestic markets.

If the consuming society were capable of organising, and-or [also] compelled / impelled by global encirclement to organise, all material commodity production itself from the outset, this arrangement would not be the preferred solution. But in a world divided between the rich North and subjugated, impoverished and manacled South, the collective organised intervention in such countries of The Consumer to fit the imported product to the end-uses of the population becomes a practical possibility for restraining some of the oppressive yoke of the global diktat of international finance capital.

Utilising its own internal state monopoly capitalist mechanisms, the Cuban government and people have thus hit upon a highly original amendment to the model that said that the mode of consumption is, or has to be, dictated entirely by the mode of production. In sum: within the Cuban context, and notwithstanding the criteria of the awarding jury, what this lab is actually accomplishing is ultimately not about “stustainability” according to the Brundtland Commission’s definition. That definition has been concerned only with sustainability of the status-quo against practices and tendencies that would tend to degrade current levels of actual or potential consumption and production. In contrast to the mindset back in 1987 that was informing the work and report of the Brundtland Commission, the Cuban government and people have actually set out upon an entirely different and truly novel path. Given particular conditions of the degree to which material commodity production has become socialised, consumers backed by a popular state power can modulate considerably the degree and extent of the diktat exercised by international finance capital as the power behind the throne of The Producer.

That is one of the least discussed, but real, messages of the Energy Revolution in Cuba.

With regard to Marxist economic theory, it has been assumed up to now that Production and Consumption stand in a dialectical contradiction that is antagonistic under capitalism but that disappears under “socialism”. In reality, as this Cuban example brings out, in a world of globally socialised production on the one hand, and relations of production dictated by international finance capital on the other, a pro-social regime that is neither bound to nor propped up by international fiance capital may indeed intervene to modulate the diktat of international finance capital. This diktat derives from the widescale ownership of means of production on the world scale beyond the territory of that regime by international finance capital. Normally this diktat also provides the oppressive and antagonising pole of the contradiction between this social form and the exploited and oppressed peoples of the colonial, semi-colonial and neocolonial countries. However, by converting and re-using imported finished goods as inputs for a collectively-organised process of consumption, the manner in which use-values are realised becomes modified, such that the antagonism of the contradiction is displaced.

As this organised and conscious approach to consumption, within a pro-social regime, gives rise to new forms of domestic material production of goods and-or services, arrangements can and will be put in place to integrate new production and further consumption such that both become entirely domestically based and no longer dependent on imports. Deploying the collective organising powers of a pro-social regime in this way entirely redefines and displaces the traditional roles of commodity imports. What the Cuban government’s renewable energy lab is doing represents in embryonic form a significant modification of the import-substitution strategies of conventional “development economics”. These strategies up to now assumed little or no significant agency for developing countries as consumers of the exports of developed countries.

That is the second of the messages of the Energy Revolution in Cuba that is not being, but deserves to be, discussed.

From a standpoint of engineering innovation, there remains to unfold yet another entirely different strategy, or strategic stage, within the energy revolution. This stage would be based on harnessing natural energy sources directly without intermediate conversion of the energy content into electricity. That should provide the starting-point for entire lines of domestically-produced substitutes for conventional existing energy sources. The issue is how to get there ---- how to accomplish this final step of complete domestication of the sources of energy for the Cuban economy --- without sacrificing one millimetre of such financial and economic independence as the the Cuban people have been able to achieve so far over the last 58 years, in the teeth of both the ongoing U.S. embargo in place since 1961 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc since 1991 including the barter relations developed in that latter connection. That is where intermediate steps, such as the end-use conversion approach to the import and dissemination of appliances and other energy-consuming equipment based on the orientations of this laboratory ratings project, enter the picture.

This is the third of the messages of the Energy Revolution in Cuba that is not being, but deserves to be, discussed.

All these messages, separately or in combination, pose the profoundest challenge to the present and future of deploying aphenomenal models to address the “energy crunch”.

WELCOME TO THE DISCUSSION OF THE APHENOMENAL UNIVERSE


The idea of this blog is to share examples of the aphenomenal model with a view to isolating its methods and figuring out how to get off the path that got us there.

The apehnomenal model is readily detected: wherever there is an unwarranted conclusion, or whenever questioning of the underlying assumpotion(s0 of an argument or proposition uncovers something irrational or incoherent, it's highly likely one is dealing either with an aphenomenal model or sloppy thinking. If what appears to be merely sloppy thinking is being reinforced at various levels, there's likely more to it than sloppiness. The details of the aphenomenal elements and gtheir sources then become a matter of research and hunting down the spoor of the beast.