Code Pink defends Berkeley

(Kavanna reporting from Berkeley, CA) Binah provides his insights from the rarefied atmosphere of the Boston area, while I have the pleasure of reporting sightings from the Left Coast.

Recently, while driving up Shattuck Avenue toward the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley, my wife and I passed a zaftig woman adorned in a pink t-shirt and combo mullet-mohawk. Given the woman's dual-watermelon-like upper body, her large t-shirt only reached to her midriff.

She was standing near the USMC recruiting center beside a graffiti-splattered panel truck. The truck was parked in the spot so graciously provided gratis to Code Pink by the Berkeley City Council. While driving past, I could only make out the word "womon" on the truck. The phrase is an analogue to "womyn," a feminist attempt to eradicate male cultural imperialism.

My wife, a former vegan, liberal social worker from Madison, Wisconsin (and now an omnivorous crypto-conservative) became enraged. She rolled down the window on our SUV, and yelled, "Who do you think is protecting your constitutional rights?" The womon responded, "I am." A similar question was asked by a correspondent for the Daily Show of another Code Pink protester, which can be seen at The Daily Show.

What is little known is that the Associated Students of the University of California at Berkeley (ASUC) passed a resolution against the Berkeley City Council's stance critical of the Marine Corps recruiting center. The resolution urged the City Council to submit a letter of apology to U.S. servicemen and women.

WHEREAS, the City of Berkeley (COB) recently made statements against the United States Marine recruiting facility in downtown Berkeley claiming they were “unwelcome intruders” and "not welcome in our City"; and

WHEREAS, the United States military possesses a fundamental right to recruit volunteers for the service of national defense; and

WHEREAS, United States military men and women do not determine the foreign policy positions or actions of United States and are simply performing their jobs in their distinguished careers; and

WHEREAS, even though the COB opted to withdraw the aforementioned Resolution voicing their opposition to the Marine recruiting office, their position still became widespread and known to the residents of Berkeley and to the entire nation; and

WHEREAS, as a large percentage of residents in the City, the students of the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) respect the service of our servicemen and women; and

WHEREAS, the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) and the ASUC Senate have the constitutional obligation to specifically promote “the welfare and interest of the students of the University of California at Berkeley”; and
WHEREAS, several federal and State lawmakers have threatened to pull funding from the programs within the COB including $975,000 for the Robert T. Matsui Foundation for Public Service at UCB; and

WHEREAS, the students of UCB should not share in the repercussions of the COB’s actions;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the ASUC does not support the COB’s rhetoric and methods used against the Marine recruiting station and strongly urge them to submit a letter of apology to our military servicemen and women.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the ASUC strongly convey that the COB and the UCB are separate entities and firmly request that federal funds not be pulled from any programs benefiting UCB.

THEREFORE BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that the ASUC President and External Affairs Vice President send and submit the ASUC’s position to the Berkeley City Council and to any federal lawmakers threatening to remove funding from UCB programs.

Of course, part of the motivation for ASUC's resolution was to avoid the withdrawal of state and federal funds. Nonetheless, UCB should be applauded for not being so leftist as to outweigh common sense.

Noble savagery and white guilt

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Not that Rousseau didn't write some pretty dumb things, e.g., in The Social Contract - see here.
---
Some time between the fall of Napoleon and the First World War arose a mentality - in some cases, a full-blown ideology - rightly called "white supremacy." In Europe, it was a never-completely-respectable by-product of the immense lead in knowledge, technology, and social organization that opened up between the West and the rest of the world in the 19th century. While a side effect of the fact of progress, it also sat uneasily with the West's belief in progress and a better future. In the Americas, the mentality was a by-product of the white colonists' earlier destruction of native ways of life and the colonial institution of slavery. While the abolition of slavery marked a first large step away from white supremacy, as a social attitude, abolition in some ways heightened the sense of a gap between white Europeans and others.

Then came the First World War and, even more emphatically, the Second. Some time between the end of the earlier conflict and the end of the latter, "white supremacy" collapsed. It had never been congruent with the West's more "official" thought-systems (Christianity and liberal Enlightenment) anyway. Great 19th century dissidents, like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Mark Twain, had questioned the confusion of moral and political with economic and technical progress.* The physical and, even more, the moral destruction wrought by the major 20th century conflicts badly damaged the sense of automatic progress that the West had come to believe before 1914. While civilization had made possible life in numbers and quality unimaginable a few hundred years ago, the most advanced forms of progress before 1945 were still available to only a minority of citizens. And technical and organizational progress had, almost without anyone noticing, created means of destruction also unimaginable a few centuries ago.

Suddenly, progress and civilization no longer seemed all that. Perhaps, it seemed to some, just "skin-color privilege" anyway. Thus was born white guilt. Strangely, the origins of white guilt had little to do directly with the legacy of slavery or racism, or the decimation of non-European peoples by European colonialism and diseases. It started as an internal crisis of confidence, haunted by the sense that modern history had ended badly.

Most of the resulting agonizing hasn't done white people much good. It has also not done much good for non-white peoples once at the margins of white society but, since 1945, increasingly integrated into modern life. Black author Shelby Steele has written a short but magnificent book on how white guilt has twisted the promise of civil rights, weighing it down with undeserved and often unacknowledged baggage that prevents everyone - whites for their reasons, black for theirs - from understanding the society they live in and how it might be improved. You can find brief summaries of his argument here and here.

Steele explains how racial oppression works and why "black rage" didn't start until after the civil rights movement was nearly finished. The oppressed usually don't feel rage until and unless they're almost free. When the parameters of society change in such a big way, then it becomes okay for the about-to-be-freed to be angry. The strange result is that, in Steele's view, whites had moral authority on questions of race when they were acting as oppressors; only when they stopped did they lose it. From a rational point of view, this makes no sense. It can only be explained if you accept some additional assumptions stolen into the discussion some time between the mid-60s and the 80s, that period when modern liberalism came unglued: all white people are racist, and only white people can be racist. Neither is true, but such assumptions explain why the promise of racial integration, palpable in the 1950s and early 60s, went sour and why later progress, while real, has also been harder than it should have been. What got in the way was identity politics.

While identity is not irrational, identity politics is. It asks politics and politicians to do what they cannot. In the case of groups emerging from oppression, it is an understandable but blind and self-defeating response to a negative past. What it produces is demagogues and racists (like the white supremacists of the defeated South, a Farrakhan, or Hitler, the pseudo-messiah of the humiliated post-1918 Germans) and white liberal pandering, like political correctness.

But the larger irrationality and injustice of identity politics is living in a self-imposed mental slum, hemmed in by knee-jerk, defensive attitudes. For parasitic "identity" demagogues, the point is divide and rule. The way you divide and rule is to chop up voters as a whole into rigidly defined groups and brainwash them into feeling that they're helpless victims. Then they'll keep voting for you. They'll also fail to make connections with people outside their group and thus reinforce their isolation. Does this sound familiar? It also supports stunningly low political standards. Black voters, for example, simply hold black leaders to a low bar. Guaranteed Congressional seats just make it worse: it means some second- or third-rate black politicians will definitely hold office for as long as they want. But it also guarantees they will go no further. Black leaders with biracial appeal find their options very limited.** Obama is exciting, in part, because he doesn't fit this pattern. He had to run state-wide to become an Illinois senator and get white, as well as black, votes. Barack Obama successfully escaped America's "race reservation" system and electrified the nation in the process. Somehow, he slipped through the cracks.

The justice of the civil rights movement was and is beyond question. But the concept of white guilt makes no sense. It strikes me as a shamefaced cousin of white supremacy, exchanging superiority-by-virtue-of-skin-color for unearned-guilt-by-virtue-of-skin-color. Also lurking around this subject is the toxic concept of the "noble savage."† (The Left is incomprehensible without reference to "noble savagery," unearned guilt, and self-hatred - secularizations of familiar Christian concepts.) Civilization is defined, not by race, but by values and institutions - rules, essentially - and civilization is definitely better than non-civilization. The concept of "race," a nineteenth-century pseudoscientific idea of questionable pedigree, needs a hard look. Older definitions of civilization were based on religion or, to put it in more neutral terms, institutions and rules. These definitions are historically much sounder than the race concept.

Underlying "noble savagery" is a feeling that certain people are more pristine, closer to the Earth, or have groovy rhythm - or something. Such thinking is ridiculously patronizing, but it or something like it is widespread among self-loathing white liberals. In their view, civilization itself is a crime, which makes problematic their use of "progressive" as a self-description. Of course, much - maybe most - of this self-loathing has non-political roots. It just seeks political expression and justification in its advanced stages.

Primitive peoples in the state of nature are what they are: in more ways than one, humanity in the buff, showing the full range of what primordial humanity can be. In civilization, people have strong disincentives to violence and strong incentives to be constructive, very different from the lawlessness of a tribal world. Tribes are free as collective units, but not as individuals - they're bound by powerful tribal custom. Only modern civilizations have reconciled individual freedom with civilization, by replacing the alienation of power and sacrifice of personal freedom required in traditional civilizations with civilization based on rational self-interest and common consent - the social contract, in essence, embodied in the rule of law. A free society is necessarily a lawful society, not an anarchy.

In truth, "noble savages" don't exist and have never existed. But the noble savage doctrine in the hands of civilized people imagining themselves to be or desperately searching for those noble savages has been, with no competitor, the most fatal and destructive delusion in history. It's at the core of the lethal radicalisms of the last century, and it's responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in its genocides and dictatorships, and in the Second World War. The noble savage notion, played with by civilized men and women, is an invisible poison.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's an interesting review of Steele's book.
---
* Seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers, like the American founders, were much less confused about this than their successors. They were hopeful about progress, but also knew it wasn't magic. And they had few illusions about human nature.

** This pattern is in no way unique to blacks, but part of a larger phenomenon of powerful special interest groups that organize around government-bestowed special status. Once granted, it's rarely taken away, because no politician is powerful enough. The larger public good is lost because of the aggressively reactionary stance of these narrow interest groups and their leaders.

† Actually, Rousseau's notion of the "noble savage" was not so wildly off, and he did recognize the basic problem of pre-state societies, which is their inability to control violence. In this, his view is not so different from Hobbes. His concept of "savage" was "noble," but not the romantic, quasi-pacifist, tree-hugging silliness often implicit in late 20th century concepts. It was apparently Diderot, one of the key figures of the French Enlightenment and editor of the influential and widely-read Encyclopédie (1751-80), who put the notion into its Romantic form.

Culture and conflict in the Middle East

Many in our post-modern, "post-liberal" society, intimidated by the pseudointellectualism of the half-educated, stumble when they encounter the unfamiliar world of human societies very different from our own. It is here that the politically correct often find the most profitable point to ram home their confused but potent messages of cultural relativism and nihilism. The spread of higher education in the last 60 years hasn't helped: as an unexpected side effect, it's created an entire class of such people. They know less than they think, and what little they do is garbled and half-baked.

It's refreshing when an anthropologist, used to working in a specialized research in remote parts of the world, addresses the general educated reader with his decades of experience in studying pre-state and tribal societies and simultaneously illuminates an issue of pressing importance. Such are Philip Carl Salzman and his new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East. Salzman has taught anthropology at McGill University in Montreal for many years and was a founder of the Commission on Nomadic Peoples of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. His main research has been the study of the tribal peoples of Iran and Pakistan, in the anthropological mode and thus mainly on the "structure" of their culture. (However, his book does have a fair amount of recent history and some memorable personalities as well.) Anyone familiar with so-called "primitive" peoples will recognize the general point: they're materially primitive and have no government or state; but at the same time, they have an elaborate culture of tribal custom and lore that takes an outsider many years to fully understand. That aspect of anthropology is anything but primitive.

Readers of this blog will recognize the general thrust of Salzman's argument about the nature of tribal society, especially its Middle Eastern version: the unique intertwining of Islam and tribalism, very different from the other great universalistic religions (Christianity, Buddhism, later Judaism) and even from most other, non-universalistic religions (Hinduism, earlier Judaism, classical Greco-Roman paganism); the pattern of conflict along the lines of "balanced opposition," familiar in somewhat different language as the "power challenging" of Pryce-Jones, in his classic, The Closed Circle.** In fact, the similarities to Pryce-Jones are striking, but Salzman's book is shorter, less dense, and focuses on just one large anthropological point. Like Pryce-Jones, Salzman has a precursor, the brilliant scholar and historian Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African author of a universal history with a famous, lengthy philosophical-anthropological preface, the Muqaddimah. Salzman makes liberal use of Ibn Khaldun's ideas about the cycle of Islamic history, the circling from tribal invasion and conquest of decadent, sedentary cities; to the tribal conquerors themselves becoming sedentary and decadent; to their being overthrown by another tribal invasion. The prototype was the original Islamic conquest itself, in the seventh century.

Tribal societies worldwide, Muslim or not, are based on "balanced opposition," with the power to use legitimate violence spread equally among all adult males, regulated only by charisma and luck. This system is incompatible with civilized life and the state, which monopolizes legitimate violence. It is perfectly adapted to nomadic life, but fails when transplanted to sedentary ways. "Balanced opposition" creates endless, unresolvable conflict by its very nature, because it contains no larger peacemaking power: no state, no social contract, no force of public opinion outside small tribal groups. It survives only because (and if) each segment of society is balanced in size against other segments. Oppressive and exploitative states emerge when one group acquires overwhelming power against other groups - then winner takes all. That is how most states emerged historically, in fact. They didn't come into existence to serve the public good. Anthropologists are typically sympathetic to non-state tribes if and when they are crushed by these classical tyrannies - it would be hard not to be. But don't romanticize: the freedom of tribal life is collective. It's not individual freedom, which is a late product of advanced civilization, with civil government and the rule of law.

It's not as if Middle Eastern peoples themselves are blind to the nature of this system. There is a famous Arabic saying: I against my brother, my brother and myself against my cousin, my cousin and I against the world. Islam might have overcome this problem to create a state or states founded on rule of law, but it failed to do that. Instead, the tribal way re-emerged, mixed with Islam (I and my cousin against the non-believer), within Islamic civilization itself. This system, incompatible with the traditional state, is obviously even more incompatible with the modern liberal-democratic state, with its essentials of rights, citizenship, and the public good. The tribal world has exact replacements for each of these, making it self-sufficient and self-contained. The autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, reviewed here earlier this year, is one large demonstration of these truths by specific example.

It shouldn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway: modern anthropology is not about social Darwinism or feeling superior to "savages." It's about the power of culture, because humans are cultural animals. They certainly do not function by instinct. Most humans through most of history (including the ancestors of everyone reading this blog) lived in something like this system. The same raw material of human nature is at work among civilized peoples as among as "primitive" peoples, but the collective shape of culture is different. Primitive peoples have many of the same values we do: individualism (at least among adult males), self-interest, notions of fairness and justice. But, in contrast to modern civilizations, nomadic peoples are dominated by group loyalty, with honor and shame typically the overriding motives. It's all there for a reason, because amongst us, we have a substitute that functions in their place: the rule of law, constitutionalism, and an openness to crossing group boundaries. It's just what makes peaceful cooperation and progress possible. At once a source of durability and backwardness, their lack is what makes progress in tribal society impossible.

Most of Salzman's message would have been unexceptional up until about 25 years ago. Since then, liberal academic and intellectual culture has been been subject to the obfuscatory fog of "post-colonialism" (Said). Many in the Arab-Islamic world itself are aware of these conflicting values and critical of the tribal system. The imposition of tribal ways on the Near East's civilized peoples by the Arab-Islamic conquest was the seed of their later decline and these societies' present difficulties in coping with the modern world.* But Said-ian doctrines are so many clubs with which to beat these critics. It's one of the most noxious contributions of the post-modern and post-liberal West to the rest of world and has crippled political debate and clear thinking in Western societies themselves.

POSTSCRIPT: Jared Diamond discusses conflict and revenge in tribal New Guinea here.

As he says, people living in state societies (societies with civil government) and, even more so, living as citizens in modern liberal democracies, have a hard time coping with the conflict between organized killing implicit in war, "civilized" warfare between armies or not, and peacetime life. In tribal societies, the conflict is not felt: there is no sharp boundary between peace and war, or between impersonal justice and simple vengeance. Men aren't ashamed of their killings, but boast of them. It's not exactly the way Hobbes conceived it - tribal life is far from solitary - but he came pretty close to depicting the "state of nature." What's particularly astonishing is that in many tribal societies, most adult males are involved in some way in the killing of other adult males. The obvious advantages of having governments were not strong enough, until recent human history, to overcome the ingrained taste of tribal peoples for their traditional collective freedom.

An interesting corollary of Diamond's analysis is that it explains why so many such tribal societies accepted colonial rule by outsiders so quickly: it reduced or eliminated internal conflict.

Diamond concludes with a relative's harrowing story of the Holocaust and the dilemma those of us who refrain from executing justice on our own face when the state doesn't keep up its end of the bargain.
---
* Ironically, the Arab group that Israel has the fewest conflicts with is the Beduin of the Negev and Sinai deserts. Being nomadic, with no economic need for land to grow food or political claims to sovereignty, they view modern states and borders as little more than nuisances and just slide past them.

** Judaism is a bit of an odd duck here, no doubt because its origins lie in the late Bronze Age (second millennium BCE), before the rise of universalist religious and philosophical thinking in the first millennium. This epoch, the so-called Axial Age, saw the pre-exilic and post-exilic Hebrew prophets, Zoroaster, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the philosophical movement among the Greeks. Developments in later antiquity, such as Hellenistic science and philosophy (Stoics, Epicureans, Aristotelians, Platonists), Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, Islam, and Confucianism were secondary outgrowths of the Axial Age. Judaism straddles the earlier tribal/national and later universalist/philosophical eras, with its universal truths implicit and esoteric in biblical times, and open and explicit in later eras. No other religion has seen so much creativity generated by such a tension between the particular and universal.

Tides on the Maine coast - plus a thought or two

The coast of northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) have some of the world's more dramatic tides. (See the Bay of Fundy.) Binah visited the coast of Maine a few days ago and saw the low tide at just about its lowest.

Here's how much the tide retreated over less than half a day:



POSTSCRIPT: An Australian contrarian take on American foreign policy in the Bush years.

The crucial point, I think, is that the resurgence of pro-American leaders has happened only in the last couple years, in part because the US has shown some real staying power - that earns respect, if not love. (And there are parts of the world where it is far better to be respected than loved.) Another reason is that, in spite of his "no mistakes here" public attitude, Bush and company have made some very visible mid-course corrections, under the pressure of events - teaching everyone that the US, while powerful, is not some Terminator-style imperial monster. Finally, the article emphasizes Asia, but the trend is evident elsewhere too, in Europe and Latin America, for example.

(Thanks to Instapundit for this very interesting link.)

Just passing by

The past year: snow, ice, and cold. Even Baghdad had its first snow in centuries this past winter, something I was unaware of.

Ice ages everywhere. There's some confusion here about "ice ages." The possible solar variability-driven cooling they're talking about is a "mini" or "little" ice age, like the Little Ice Age of 1350-1650 (with lingering aftereffects until the mid-19th century). It means a possible cooling of maybe 1 ^oC averaged over a year, perhaps a little more. (That's a noticeable change.) A real ice age results from the combination of astronomical changes (in Earth's orbit and spatial orientation) and movements of the continents. The continents are and have been in place for many millions of years; the astronomical conditions come and go. We're not due for it in the near future. Real ice ages mean temperature drops in polar and temperate regions of 5-7 ^oC up to 10-12 ^oC. These are much bigger than what's apparently caused by solar variability.

The Sun will have its say. Interestingly, the new NASA solar variability model is predicting a "strong" solar maximum in a couple years. Their new model is another one of those simplified and approximate models used in place of the full theory of solar magnetism, which is far too hard to solve. (Also, no one knows enough about specific conditions in the Sun to even state the full theory properly.) The model is "semi-empirical," which means its uses a mix of some theoretical principles with a lot of analysis of past solar cycles (just like weather prediction on Earth). Its validation is "retrodicting" past solar cycles, but that's not a controlled laboratory test. It's really educated guessing, because it's all we've got. OTOH, the sunspot cycle right now, as observed, seems exceptionally weak, although we've just passed the minimum. In any case, the correlation between Earth temperatures and solar magnetic activity continues to hold up very well, as it has for decades and centuries.

The fading "consensus." The notion that there is a "scientific consensus" on "global warming" - that apocalyptic worldwide warming due to human-emitted infrared-opaque gases is happening, has recently happened, or will soon happen - is a fraud. There's a wide range of opinion on the subject among scientists, shaky (at best) empirical basis for the belief, and scant theoretical basis either, apart from slipshod and mistaken analogies. In climate and closely-related sciences, the "global warming" fanatics are and have always been a small if loud and aggressive minority. Many fencesitters are beginning to grasp the magnitude of the hoax.

These books are more signs that the "consensus" is coming apart:

• Lawrence Solomon, The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud.
  
  
• Roy Spencer, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor. Spencer is a former NASA climatologist and planetologist.

Contrary to the cult propaganda of Al Gore, these are voices of reason, facing a politically-motivated and imposed pseudoscientific fantasy pushed by vicious environmental activists, demagogic and bullying politicians, and unhinged ex-scientists, then incessantly repeated 24/7 by ignorant journalists.*

(Hat tip to Instapundit.)
---
* You can see examples of the vicious fanaticism of the enviro-wackos on the Web, with reviews that repeat non-facts (formerly known as "lies") about the authors of these books.

The Kennedy assassination and the liberal breakdown

James Piereson has just written a short and penetrating book on the aftereffects of the Kennedy years and Kennedy's assassination on American liberalism, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. Liberals and liberalism clearly suffered a nervous breakdown in the years after 1965. Piereson argues persuasively that the Kennedy administration and especially his death had a decisive negative effect on liberalism, which has never really recovered from that period.

The factual core of his argument is accepting, as all educated persons open to reason do, that the assassin Oswald acted alone, motivated by his far-left political beliefs. Piereson marshalls the evidence to this effect and notes the lack of counterevidence, especially to support the wide range of conspiracy theories that substitute for simply accepting the facts. But while Oswald acted alone, he did not think alone. He was a convinced Marxist, of the emerging "new" Left type, incensed by the Kennedy administrations attempts to eliminate Castro and his regime. He had defected to Russia in 1959, returned with his Russian wife in 1962, then attempted to meet Cuban diplomats and agents in Mexico City a couple months prior to the assassination. There's no evidence that Oswald was a "sleeper agent" programmed by the Soviets, and little evidence in that direction in connection with the Cubans. But there's also little question about his motives. The available evidence runs to thousands of pages of police and FBI files, scraps of declassified KGB files, plus Oswald's writings and publicly-stated beliefs. Part of the reason for the lack of a wider-ranging official investigation was simple embarrassment over the FBI and Secret Service's having missed such an obvious danger.

At the time of Kennedy's death, liberals were obsessed with a vague entity called the "radical right" and starting their long mental night of disconnection from reality. As Piereson goes to great pains to explain, especially to readers under 50 who were not present or old enough to understand the events first-hand, liberals continued to be obsessed with the "radical right" even after Kennedy's assassination. Little could be done to persuade the liberal elite, the media, academics and clerics, et al., to pay attention to the facts. Here was the origin of all the conspiracy theories about the assassination: a refusal to accept the obvious and a replacement of facts by preconceived "narrative." It was a failure of the respectable establishment itself; the wackos then cashed in on the establishment's own abandonment of reason and capitulation to fantasy. This is the moment when the media began to float free of facts and liberalism started to come unhinged. "Narrative" buried plain truth. Conservatives, on the other hand, had little difficulty accepting the bare facts and, as a matter of disposition, did not have the naive belief in automatic upward progress that most liberals shared at that time. They were shocked, but not surprised, by the assassination.

While Johnson was able to turn Kennedy's memory into a remarkable legislative accomplishments in 1964 and 1965 (the Civil Rights Bill, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Bill), liberals had by that point become dissatisfied with the old-style liberalism of the Progressive and New Deal eras and its programmatic basis. Kennedy had inadvertently awakened a yearning for something else entirely: a liberalism of style and ultimately a cultural radicalism, converting politics from bread and butter self-interest into obsessions about identity: the personal as political. Some even saw it at the time: Kennedy's own aristocratic air; the wealth and glamor of Jackie and their children; and America's burgeoning culture of celebrity, about to become pervasive with the rise of television, which itself made Kennedy's election in 1960 possible. Johnson won what was at that time the largest landslide in American history in 1964, but this victory proved ephemeral. Within a few years, liberalism was under fatal assault, not from without, but from within, as radical children rebelled against liberal parents.

Liberalism proved more fragile than expected, in contrast with standard liberal beliefs at the time. In less than 15 years, it went from an optimistic, hopeful, and forward-looking movement to a guilt-ridden and backward-looking movement of punishment and decline. I might discreetly add that the "new" punitive liberalism serves the class interests of the cultural elite. But the public at large are its designated victims, which is why it can't be directly sold to them. Instead, it has to be imposed by the courts and screamed in everyone's ears by the media and academia. This explains why the Boomers, radical children of the Greatest Generation, didn't look to conventional politics as their vehicle, unlike their parents and grandparents. Instead, they fomented the rise of "para-politics": the media, activist groups, and the courts. With these, they could reshape politics, not by voting or running for office, but by seizing the cultural megaphone and beating the drum of fake crisis as a front for the real agenda. As the Obama candidacy suggests, "punitive" liberalism is still with us, although since the 80s, it has had to adopt a wide range of cloaking strategies to hide itself - otherwise, voters would simply reject it.

The events of the decade-and-a-half starting in 1965 revealed that American liberals had become a panicked mandarin class, projecting their decline outward, and obsessed with exaggerated or invented problems, constantly trying to bully voters into accepting their dark vision. Whatever prospect the "new" liberalism of the 60s and 70s had of achieving legitimate electoral success was dashed in 1980 by Reagan's election. The Clinton years of the 90s proved frustrating for left-liberals. While Clinton was fairly popular (even though not a majority president) and his later policies more so, the left of the Democratic party found little way to force its agenda into American politics, in spite of its disproportionate influence in liberal institutions (universities, media, mainstream churches).

The Kennedy assassination itself, as Piereson explains in some detail, was the central event in this change. Waves of nostalgia and myth-making engulfed the liberal classes, distorting who Kennedy was and why he was killed. A sense of irreplaceable loss overcame much of the nation, giving rise in some quarters to despair, which is typically the root of political rage and radicalism. JFK's assassination was the first of a series of assassinations in the 60s and 70s encouraged by the rise of television, much as an earlier wave of assassinations in the late 19th century was encouraged by the rise of the telegraph and the penny press. The killing of Malcolm X in 1964 and Sirhan Sirhan's 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy (motivated by RFK's support of Israel - Sirhan was a Jordanian-Palestinian) did not fit the template of the liberal obsession with the "radical right" either. Only Martin Luther King's 1968 death at the hands of James Earl Ray, a self-confessed loser acting out notions of white supremacy shared by parts of white society in those days, fit anything like what the liberal "narrative" required, although King's death, like the movement he led, is best viewed as a follow-on to the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination.

Pre-1965 liberalism is now a lost world to us. It's hard to remember that modern liberalism, from the 1890s until the early 1960s was the main party of ideas and reform in American life. Kennedy's own policies, while containing a liberal strain (such as the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and a belated recognition of the civil rights movement), were also exceptionally aggressive in opposition to communism as it spread into the Third World and newly decolonized countries. The Kennedy assassination started the disintegration of this older "reform" liberalism and accelerated its replacement by the new punitive liberalism. The mid-century liberal movement itself became split into radicalized and neoconservative wings. These events showed that, contrary to what many of its spokesmen believed, modern liberalism was not as rational a movement as it imagined itself to be. It had strong latent reserves of denial, selective misuse of facts, and wishful thinking. It took a series of unexpected and inexplicable disasters, starting with the Kennedy assassination, to bring that potential out. Often it's not events themselves, but people's reactions to them, that prove decisive.

In the years since, nothing has replaced the centrality of liberalism as America's guiding political philosophy, not Reagan-Goldwater-style conservatism, not neoliberalism, nor the flash-in-the-pan of neoconservatism. Its absence has opened a void in American life not yet filled.** Instead, the leftover fragments of the once-ascendant liberalism fight it out in a deepening twilight. It is worth remarking on the striking fact that, 40-plus years later, liberals and liberal institutions (especially the media) are still acting out and upon many of the themes of that era of disintegration. The era of FDR came to an end between 1968 and 1980. The era of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon - including its misunderstood events, trends, and traumas - is, strangely, still with us.
---
* The terminology reflects the vague anxieties of liberals who, by the late 1940s, were establishment, although they often had a hard time admitting this, even to themselves. (That's why Senator McCarthy could make them such an effective target for populist-style attacks, especially while the Korean war was still on.) While various portentous theories about the "radical right" were floated to "explain" who "they" were, the concept was never defined. If they were the pre-war isolationists, they had been discredited and marginalized. If they were the American fellow-travelers of fascism, they were never large in number and in precipitous decline by the 1960s. If they were the new post-war conservatives, there was never any danger of political violence - the problem here is that liberals had weak answers to attacks from the free-market, individualist right, whose anticommunism and opposition to collectivism were always more consistent and better thought-out. The real problem was that liberals continued to have a "no enemies on the left" mentality that served them poorly during the cultural revolution of the later 60s and 70s.

By then, as Piereson points out, it was clear that the main threat to liberal democracy in America was from this violent and anti-American "new" left. That movement's toxic residue remains in our major liberal institutions (academia and the media), which have been powerfully corrupted by it. Unfortunately, today's remnant of liberals still have a hard time seeing this - and thus, are slow to accept the free-market revival of the 80s, the end of the Cold War, and threat that political Islam poses to Western and non-Western nations. In the first two instances, they fundamentally misinterpreted the course of modern history. In the last, many cannot process something so alien to Western sensibilities.

** Just one fact alone demonstrates the enormity of the change. In 1964, almost 55 percent of registered voters were Democrats. Today it's slightly less than a third.

Kulturpessimismus - or Kultursnobbismus?

Do you ever feel as if modern capitalist society tends to make work, and take the fun, out of everything, from sex to art to education? And what's the point of "leisure" anyway? If you've ever wondered about such things, read on, because some very smart but hard-to-understand German thinkers pondered hard on this question earlier in the century just ended.

Moralists disguised as nominal Marxists, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer pioneered a cultural critique of capitalism familiar to most of us in a filtered, retail form. It drops key assumptions of classical Marxism based on economic analysis and the class theory of history. Their version of this critique features no progressive proletarianization or immiseration of the masses, ideas that were already implausible by the end of the 19th century. We know now - as smart people knew then - that, if you want wealth, capitalism is your answer. Their critique comes from a different direction and asks a different question: Why do we want wealth, and what price do we have to pay when we make it our sole goal? Their line of thinking resonates with an older critique of commercial society, borrowing from aristocratic and religious ideals: value independent of market price, contemplation, and "useless" activities done for their own sakes.

This neo-Marxist critique came together in 1920s Germany, against the background of incipient European decline, the arrival of the first wave of modern popular culture, and the publication of Marx's early, "humanistic" writings. The crucial turning point was the 1923 founding of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research - later known as the "Frankfurt School" - endowed by a wealthy German-Jewish grain merchant who believed that modern commercial society had missed something important in trying to make everything, everyone, and every activity utilitarian. Reviewed here by Thomas Meaney, a new biography of Adorno explores his life through his multifaceted work, which touched on art, history, economics, and much else besides.*

The price is evident when we turn "fun" into work and when our full personalities become defined only by our work. We should also keep in mind the numbing impact of the "culture industry" - in those days, radio, newsreels, and low-end, trashy journalism - today, 24/7 television news, blockbuster books more assembled than written, and trashy, low-end journalism. From watching the Nazi takeover of Germany and the Nazis' horrible misuse of this modern, hi-tech system of mass culture, Adorno wrongly came to believe that modernity was somehow inherently fascist. After he came to the US in 1938, he retained many of the attitudes of the pre-1914 German mandarin class (best typified by novelist and humanist Thomas Mann) and simply hated mass culture. Adorno became quite obsessed with finding "fascist tendencies" and capitalist co-optation everywhere: radio quiz shows, Sunday afternoon classical music for kids (imagine that today) - even disposable diapers.

It's a mentality that can border on self-parody. Adorno's own attitude toward the Nazis was highly ambivalent, before it turned decisively negative. Like many old-school Germans, he welcomed the Nazi attempt to ban jazz and other manifestations of popular culture - especially American ones - and half-hoped that maybe something authentically pre-capitalist would emerge from the Nazi obsession with völkischkeit. (This is identity politics and noble savagery, German-style: Wagner is playing the background, and, sporting little horns, Siegfried and Brünnhilde are running naked through the dark Teutonic forest.) Like many of the old-fashioned after 1945, Adorno retained a strong suspicion of democracy and an equally strong belief in an elite class to guide the masses to the right things. Europe had had such a class before 1918 and, for all its faults, it did keep the worst effects of mass politics in check. Some German conservatives believed that the Nazis might do something like that for Germany, after the unstable and widely-resented experiment of the Weimar Republic. It took them until the late 1930s before it started to dawn on them that the Nazis were the disease, not the cure - in fact, the disease in a far worse form than anyone could have imagined.** Many were wallowing in a confusion that should be clear today and should have been even then: there's a big difference between mass manipulation and democratic politics. If there's a danger to democracy from a fascist grouping, the cure is to keep applying democratic rules, not suspend them. That's the fatal mistake the leaders of the Weimar Republic made in 1930, when they suspended the constitution. They were decent-minded politicians, but totally blind to how the Nazis could, three years later, obtain total power by just taking over a Germany already in a "state of emergency." They failed at succeeding Germany's panicked and ruined post-1918 mandarin class, itself frustrated by its inability to find a place in an age of mass politics and thus attracted to alliance with the Nazis.

In spite of his dislike of American pop culture and suspicion of democracy (it could lead to fascism, ya know!), Adorno's best work was written in America, including the book he will certainly be remembered for, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. As Meaney puts it, this work lifted Adorno into the class of such great aphorists as Nietzsche and Montaigne. Similarly, Adorno's Frankfurt colleague Max Horkheimer also wrote his best work in the US, particularly his most accessible and famous book, Eclipse of Reason. Being fish out of cultural water, without the universe of German idealist philosophy and Marxism alike to fall back on, they were forced to reformulate their ideas from scratch and state them in clear, direct English. This brought the ideas and their style far closer to the liberal Enlightenment culture more familiar to educated American audiences.

The Frankfurters reached their intellectual peak in the 1940s and 50s and included cultural figures later well-known in their own right, like psychologist Erich Fromm. In the end, the School became an important source of the "new" Left that started to emerge at the end of the 1950s. It rejected classical Marxist critiques of capitalist society and reached for a smorgasbord of cultural criticism - sometimes perceptive, often incoherent, occasionally even sounding like old-fashioned religious and aristocratic critiques of capitalism and democracy. But the new Left was unable to put what limited intellectual substance it had into a serious intellectual structure or a political program. It ended up in fatal competition with the more accessible aspects of the counterculture - sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Even today, people are often confused by this, since they tend to link counterculture and new-leftism. In fact, the former killed the latter. For the Boomers, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll were the serious point - politics was just a distraction. Both Horkheimer and Adorno ended up taking a dim view of the 60s student rebels anyway, seeing them more as advanced representatives of consumerism than as real radicals. In this, they were surely right.

The mid-century Frankfurt and Marxist theories seems quaint today. But both Eclipse of Reason and Minima Moralia remain relevant and highly readable.
---
* Adorno was a student of modernist composer Alban Berg, himself a student of Schoenberg.

** A significant minority of these German conservatives, especially the Prussians, had Jewish ancestry, making the issue even sharper. In the late 1930s, elements of the old Prussian aristocracy, Catholic lay leaders, and a few remaining figures of the democratic Left started a series of attempts to kill Hitler. On July 20, 1944, they nearly succeeded. They, not the Communists (who happily took credit after the war for "anti-fascism"), formed the only effective internal opposition against the Nazis. The later savage Nazi reprisals against this class marked the end of the old German aristocracy. They had started by compromising with Nazism in the early 1930s and ended up being eaten alive by it.

And they all ran home ...

... and home it was, Beantown, or elsewhere. It was a glorious Patriots Day, with perfect weather, maybe a little on the hot side. All the Marathon coverage here.

Chag Pesach sameach: And it's Patriots Day ...

... here in Beantown, and it's Boston Marathon day. Celebrating freedom in, not one, but two - count 'em - two ways :)

Check out the world's fastest seder (in Hebrew, and fast).

Chaos, weather, and climate

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

- Richard Feynman

In the face of chaos, we might throw up our hands and abandon any attempt to understand climate at a deep level or make any predictions. After all, meteorologists don't try to predict weather beyond 10 days or two weeks. Such humility certainly beats the arrogance of the IPCC and "global warming" fanatics who wrongly believe that the climate problem is in the bag.

It isn't. Contained within it, as a subproblem, is the hardest question in physics, that of chaotic turbulence and turbulent heat convection - itself a problem that not only remains unsolved, but will probably never be solved in complete generality. Add to that the further severe difficulty of discontinuous water transformations (ice, liquid, vapor, and back), and you have a problem like nothing else in science. Soon we'll learn how the misguided idea that this problem is solved ever got started.

The search for the invariant structure of climate. Chaos means that climate can only be understood, crudely speaking, as a range, or climate regime. (Technically, the "range" is really a strange atttractor.) Besides, we're not talking about one thermodynamic variable (pressure, or temperature, say) at one point. We need a set of such variables at every point in space (multiple, spacetime-dependent fields) to specify what we mean by the state of atmosphere.

What's needed is some controlled simplification or approximation that captures this "range," without having to track every variable everywhere within the atmosphere, for all times. The Lorenz attractor, which is defined by only three variables (we need a continuous infinity of them), has an invariant set. "Invariant" means it doesn't change over time as the system does its chaotic thing. What's lacking is a "supershadow" of atmospheric turbulence, an invariant covering set for the whole atmosphere that would allow a simplification of the chaotic part.

On a somewhat different but related tack, it's better to avoid describing the atmosphere using local intensive variables like pressure or temperature. These are local averages and indicate the state of the atmosphere only at one point at a time. The right variables are extensive (meaning, they scale with the size of the system and are additive) and, for an open system, like our atmosphere, not fixed sums over static volumes, but flows. (That is, stop thinking about heat, for example, and start thinking about heat flow.) We already know what the basic flows are: dry air, water vapor and condensed droplets, heat. Their magnitude gives a much better sense of climate globally than beating the dead horse of meaningless temperature averages. (Besides, we need more than just temperature.) Even more compelling is the topology of these flows: their connectivity, regardless of where exactly they are in space or what exactly their magnitudes are.

If we're going to get a grip on "climate change," we'd better get a grip on "climate" and "climate state." Contrary to what everyone assumes, there's no good definition of either at this time, and thus no good definition of "climate change." The question, left unanswered and often unasked, is assumed away. In all branches of science, we get to meat of "what?" questions by looking for invariant or almost-invariant structure. This posting has pointed to some good candidates constituting a starting point for future definitions. And if more quantitative characteristics can also be nailed down, we can start ranking different aspects of atmospheric change in order of importance. At that point, we would have the beginnings of what is so far lacking in climate modeling, controlled approximations.

Why look for answers when you think you already know the answer or, worse, don't even know the question?

POSTSCRIPT: Certainly this past winter has been one of the longest and snowiest in a long time, reinforcing the trend that started in the late 90s. Wisconsin gets it here.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the non-warming non-crisis in Greenland. It mentions the last warming period in Greenland in the 1950s, not to be confused with larger-scale warming trends mentioned in previous postings. And it makes an interesting and telling point: the warmest post-Ice Age period was the Hypsithermal (or Holocene) Climatic Optimum, about 8000 to 4000 years ago.* For example, Siberia had forests growing all the way up to Arctic Ocean, although the warmth was also worldwide. But the kicker is that Greenland's ice cover was not significantly smaller during the Hypsithermal. Evidently, it's pretty hardy, and there remain some big things that scientists don't understand about it.
---
* In the northern hemisphere. In the southern, it was about 10,000 to 8000 years ago.

Little darling ...

... it's been long, cold, lonely winter. It has been, the longest, snowiest, and coldest overall and worldwide, in quite a while. And there's still that big Antarctica freeze-down going on Way Down Under.

The UN World Meteorological Organization has belatedly recognized what many meteorologists and ordinary people have been noticing for the last decade: apparently, the globe hasn't warmed since 1998. The trend has been a little more complex, I think: probably cooling slowly from the mid-90s to around 2003, then sharper cooling since then - all interrupted by a couple hotter, drier years 2000 and 2001, suspiciously around solar magnetic maximum. (The same happened in 1988-89, at the previous maximum.) Readers of this blog will not be surprised, either about the longer cooling trend or the short warming spells around solar magnetic maxima. The post-1998 seems to be connected to a re-sync-ing of the Earth's internal climate cycles, signaled most forcefully by changes in El Niño/Southern Pacific Oscillation (ENSO). Something similar going the other direction happened in 1977, apparently leading to a nearly two-decade warming spell.

I'll leave aside that little technicality about spatial averages of local thermodynamic variables like temperature being meaningless. A statistical proxy index doesn't have to be the temperature of anything (and it isn't) to still indicate a trend. What the trend means, is far less obvious than many people (including the IPCC) think.

Naturally, this frustrates my plan to write my mature masterwork, an Italian opera called Si Ricalda Il Globo. It's supposed to feature, as protagonist, the frustrated crown prince Alberto, so rudely pushed aside by the nouveau riche and less polished Arbusti clan from Texas. His scientific antagonist is Il Dottore Termale, played by a certain Christoforo, who enters with his dramatic baritone aria, "Non si fà la media delle temperature." Alberto also sings baritone, but more screechy. They're rumored to be twins separated at birth.

I guess I'll have to wait til the next warming spell.

POSTSCRIPT: Is Ted Turner senile? I guess only Jane Fonda knows for sure. Recently on the Charlie Rose show, he raved on about yestercentury's "crisis" of overpopulation and how we're all going to be eating other in a fit of cannibalism as it gets warmer and warmer. Nothing like crabby left-wing billionaires bloviating about a world they don't understand.

If it is cannibalism, let's eat the Left first and agree now to play my opera as background.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: But no cannibalism on Passover - chag sameach!

Fat tails and outliers: Extreme weather

It's often claimed, on little physical basis, that "global warming" with rising concentrations of infrared-active gases will lead to more extreme weather. We need to define more clearly what "extreme weather" is and apply some of principles learned from other open, "driven" systems, with non-conserved totals of energy, matter, and so on. The weather lives in Extremistan, at least to an extent.

Concentrate on just the atmosphere. The amount of dry air is essentially fixed, but not so the water in the air (both vapor and condensed), which is highly variable. The amount of heat (which is also rather variable) is less important than the heat flow. While the heat flow is split among radiation, evaporation, and turbulent convection, the total flow is relatively fixed. The division among the three mechanisms of flow is less stable.

Start with the total available. Instead of taking each "extreme" weather event one at a time, let's reverse the logic, with the same reasoning used by geophysicists when they consider earthquakes.* Imagine you're a storm god with a more or less fixed annual budget of heat and water. Taking the totals as the staring point, how do you divide them up every year? All at once? Blow your budget on a few big events? Or on many, many little events?** The "storm-generating system" is an open, not a closed, system; one with stuff flowing through, not isolated and in thermodynamic equilibrium. Extremistan statistics (fat tails) should be the default way to analyze it. It's natural then to assume that "storm budget" for a year will be dissipated by the cumulative effect of a range of events, some small, some medium, some extreme, all together making a distribution of event frequency versus event size.

Unfortunately, a wholly bogus case for "increasing extreme weather" has been built on using misguided Mediocristan (Gaussian) statistics to analyze extreme events. The fundamental problem is the same as in the other misapplications of the classical Central Limit Theorem to such events: the distribution moments are supposed to finite, but in fact, are not. So the sampling of the distribution by observations is misinterpreted to infer that the total of such events is increasing in time (non-stationary), when in fact the moments (like the variance) are simply diverging.

A subtle point: The number versus the energy release of extreme events. A "global warming" world is one where many differences in climate fade, leading to a fall in certain kinds of "weather events," like fronts and tropical storms. In such a world, it's reasonable to conjecture that both the number of extreme events and the cumulative energy dissipated by them go down.

But that reasoning alone is not precise enough to tell us how much each will go down. Periods of warming (like 1910-40 and late 70s to mid-90s) had fewer tropical storms. But a few of them were nonetheless memorable for their size; for example, the unnamed 1938 hurricane that hit Long Island and New England, or Hurricane Gilbert, which hit the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico in 1988.

It could be that both the number and cumulative energy of extreme weather events goes down under "global warming," but that the energy per storm or event can go up. The number of events can go down by more than the amount of energy dissipated goes down. Thus the ratio (energy/event) can go up. A possibility to think about.
---
* This is the Gutenberg-Richter law, one of a large set of modified power-law distributions with "fat tails" (slowly falling probability for larger and larger events, instead of a sharp fall-off). The upper cut-off is not literally infinite, but very large. In practice, it's set by the total amount of energy available - in the earthquake case, the total amount stored as a potential energy in the Earth's crust under tension. Conceivably, all that stored energy could be released in one giant earthquake.

** Don't laugh. If the Greeks had known about Extremistan, they would have deified it. Actually, they did: Tyche, or Fortuna.

Cycles of climate: Variations

If infrared-active gases were causing significant "global warming" as popularly conceived, what effect would it have on climate cycles? The general effect would follow what an earlier posting pointed out: an easing of relative differences. Temperatures would rise everywhere and everywhen. Cycles would remain but become less pronounced in intensity overall. Shorter cycles, like El Niño (ENSO), would be damped down relatively more; while longer ones, like the Pacific (Multi)Decadal Oscillation, would be damped down relatively less, assuming that the "global warming" is gradual. But all would be damped.

The main heat reservoir of climate cycles is the oceans. Their temperatures would also rise, although much more slowly than the atmosphere. Just for that reason, we should expect fewer tropical storms and a decline of "horizontal" weather generally.

Being versus becoming. A more exact statement about tropical storms and "horizontal" weather generally: we expect these to become more important, not during cool periods, but cooling periods. That's when different heat reservoirs in the climate system (oceans and atmosphere in particular) face larger temperature differences: the air cools off faster than the water, for example, making hurricanes easier to make. But once the cooling stops, and it's just cooler, this enhancement of extreme weather should fade. That is apparently what happened in 1999-2005: cooling first, now it's just cooler than before, with the rate of change slowed or stopped.

Why isn't there a symmetry going the other way? For example, if it's not warmer, but warming, the air heats up faster than the ocean. But that's just the point. The ocean will lag, and not have the excess heat to drive tropical storms so much. Over land, the situation is reversed: the land warms up faster than the air. So we probably should expect more overall mid-continent thunderstorm activity, but locally formed and dissipated - not associated with horizontally moving fronts.

A final thought on climate cycles. A few postings ago, I mentioned that tests of statistical significance (using modern non-parametric methods) suggest 50-80% of temperature trends in modern times are connected to solar variability. Meanwhile, the global sync'ing of regional climate oscillations has its own powerful effect, one that seems to be off the same level of significance. It's probable that most of the known climate variability on times scales shorter than the Ice Ages (less than roughly 10,000 years) is due to a mix of these two factors.

Again, a very important topic, not given enough attention, multidisciplanarily marginal in the academy, and subject to a strong tendency to shove down the memory hole.

POSTSCRIPT: We'll know this "global warming crisis" is serious when the people who keep claiming it's a crisis start acting that way.

Cycles of climate: The Moon

A quick chaser on the Moon ....

Oceans are 70% of the Earth's surface. Ocean tides are due to differential gravitational pull on the ocean water. The side of the Earth closer to the Moon or the Sun experiences a slightly stronger pull than the side opposite. This gives rise to the familiar "dipolar" or double-bulge shaped of the distorted oceans.

Daily and monthly tides. We're all familiar with the rise and fall of ocean tides. They're ripe for Fourier analysis, as they have several periodicities built into them. The first is the daily cycle, caused by the Earth's rotation about its axis relative to the Sun. The next is the monthly cycle of the Moon.

But these orbital motions themselves "wobble" on longer periods. The best-known wobble is the 19-year eclipse cycle, the period of the precession of the Moon's orbital plane. There are longer periods too. If we time-average climate data over a certain period, we remove the effect of cycles with shorter periods; only periods longer than that certain period will survive the averaging process. Thus averaging can remove shorter-term periodicities from raw data.

What about climate? Strong tides tend to pull more cold ocean water up from the depths, exerting a cooling effect on the layer of air in contact with the ocean water.

There's astronomical cycle worth mentioning, the long-term strengthening and weakening of the ocean tides caused by wobblings of the Moon's orbit. When the tides are strong, very cold water from the ocean depths gets turned over more and brought to the surface. That has a cooling effect on air temperatures at the surface. Conversely, when the tidal overturning of ocean water is weak, less cold water is pulled up from the depths. The air temperatures are not as cooled by their contact with ocean water. The cycle is approximately 1800 years in length and is noticeable in proxy paleoclimate records of ocean temperatures. How much that affects the atmospheric temperature remains an open question.

Cycles of climate: The Sun

Most stars are variable. Their large variability in total luminosity (watts of output, summed over all wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation) is often due to internal heat cycles, similar to the Earth's internal climate cycles, but on a far grander scale. (Stars are thousands of times bigger than the Earth.) Another, less dramatic but still important, form of variability is due to stellar magnetic fields and magnetic cycles. The Sun is a variable star of this magnetic type. Right now, it is unusually stable compared to similar stars with similar magnetism. But that was probably different in the not-too-distant past - and almost certainly will be different in the not-too-distant future. It's essential to realize that the Earth's climate is not a closed system, but mingles high above our heads with various emissions (electromagnetic radiation, magnetic fields, and charged plamsa) from Sun.

Time scales of climate change. The climate cycles in a previous posting were multiannual and multidecadal, observed by modern scientists with modern instruments. But the paleoclimate record, embodied in proxies such as sea corals, tree rings, gas bubbles trapped in bogs and ice, and much more along the same lines, shows clear signs of longer-term cycles. Historical records made before the arrival of modern scientific instruments in the 19th century are also of value here. A thousand years ago, grapes grew in Britain and southern Greenland was pretty hospitable - it wasn't all just Viking propaganda :)

If we zoom out to the time before the rise of civilization or modern humans, we come to the time scale of the Ice Ages, running from tens of thousands to tens of millions of years. Previous postings (here and here) already discussed the Ice Ages and how they're controlled by a combination of astronomical cycles and movements of the continents. The astronomical part controls the timing of the Ice Ages; and the continental positions and the related poleward ocean currents, their intensity. Infrared-active gases like carbon dioxide and methane are minor to unimportant.

Between the one-to-10-year and the 10,000-to-10-million-year range, we have three "log decades" or "powers of ten" (10¹ to 10⁴ years). There are probably subharmonics of the internal Earth climate cycles lurking here, with lower frequencies and longer periods.

The central importance of the Sun. But when you think "global climate," the first thing that ought to come to mind is the Sun, not something humans are doing. The Sun is the one major influence that affects all of climate everywhere simultaneously. The paleoclimate proxy evidence on this score is very strong.

The mother of all ups-and-downs on centennial and millennial time scales is solar magnetism. This related bundle of cycles has so many impacts on the solar system and the Earth, it would take a whole book to spell them all out, and just at a fairly non-technical level. Here's a whirlwind tour in one large posting.

Solar magnetism: Its effects on the Earth. The Sun's magnetism varies on a roughly 22-year complete cycle, with shorter-term irregular "flickerings" and longer-term, low-frequency subharmonics. The most dramatic effects people see on Earth are a result of the "space weather" that solar magnetism stirs up. At solar magnetic maxima, intense solar storms slam large ejections of rarefied, magnetized hot plasma into the Earth's own magnetic field, setting off upper-atmosphere auroras in polar regions and messing with electrical and electronic equipment worldwide. Astronauts have to go back inside or just come home, to protect themselves from the intense flux of solar plasma. Anything depending on terrestrial magnetism can be knocked a-kilter: humans (if we use a compass), and birds and dolphins (they have small magnets in their brains for navigation).

The last solar maximum occurred in 2000; the one before, in 1989. You can learn more about space weather here.

Solar magnetism: Its origin and nature. Most stars have significant magnetic fields that arise from the circulation of charged particles in their rotating hot plasmas. (The Sun rotates about once in 26 days.) For reasons still not completely clear, the Sun's magnetism, which is roughly laid out like a bar magnet (north and south poles), switches magnetic polarity roughly every 9.5-11 years and completes a cycle every 19-22 years. The hot solar plasma interacts with this magnetic field near the surface, becoming entrained in the magnetic field lines. In the outermost (transparent) solar atmosphere, the plasma pressure is not fully balanced against gravity, and a hot, thin plasma solar wind blows outward, taking magnetic field lines with it. Its speed and particle flux are 400 to 750 kilometers per second and about 100 billion particles (charged ions) per second per squared centimeter. The density is typically 5-10 particles per cubic centimeter, although in a massive eruption, the density and flux can be 10 times their "normal" values. This is pretty rarefied compared to our environment, but still far from a true vacuum.

The Earth's own magnetic field (magnetosphere) generally protects us from the solar wind - but not entirely. When the Sun switches magnetic polarity, the solar wind is interrupted repeatedly by massive ejections of hot, magnetized plasma. These mainly occur near the solar rotational equator, which is close to the Earth's orbital plane. The Earth is subject to some of these magnetic plasma ejections. During this phase of the cycle, the strength of the Sun's magnetic field near the surface reaches a maximum.

Solar magnetism: More stuff happens. The most visible result of this intensified solar magnetism near the surface is sunspots. Other stars, rotating and magnetized, have them as well, and also exhibit a periodic rise and fall in their magnetism and starspots. Sunspots are places where the field near the surface pokes out, forming partial field loops that connect paired spots (one N, the other S, polarity).

The best proxy for solar magnetic intensity, it turns out, is not the number of sunspots, but a combination of the total area the spots cover and the magnetic cycle period length. Strangely, while the centers of the spots are indeed darker than the surrounding solar surface, the areas near the spots (the faculae) are actually brighter. The net result is that, for our Sun, solar magnetic maximum is also a solar brightness maximum; solar magnetic minimum, a brightness minimum. Comparing one cycle to another, a solar maximum is stronger if the associated cycle is shorter; weaker if longer.*

Solar brightness, total and differential. The Earth's upper atmosphere. The solar brightness has varied by somewhat less than two-tenths of percent over recent solar cycles. Using a rule from radiation thermodynamics, the surface temperature of the Earth should, naively speaking and ignoring any complicating mechanisms, vary as ΔT/T = ΔB/(4B). So a few tenths of a percent in solar brightness B (ΔB/B ~ 0.002) might give rise to about a tenth of a percent variation in the Earth's surface temperature. For T(E) = 288 ^oK, that's ΔT(E) ~ 0.15 ^oK, small but not negligible. It's a factor of a few off from predictions of semi-realistic "global warming" scenarios that include the effect of enhanced clouds and convection. And indeed, Fourier-analyzing temperature variability does result in a harmonic spectrum that includes, among other features, a suspicious peaks near 1/11 inverse years of frequency. Years with solar maxima do tend to be hot and dry.

And Nature has a further trick up her sleeve. While the solar total luminosity doesn't vary much, the ultraviolet (UV) part of the spectrum varies disproportionately over the solar cycle, by 10% or more, with "strong" solar maxima showing larger increases in solar UV. Its presence or absence over the daily cycle expands or shrinks the Earth's upper atmosphere and changes the ozone-rich boundary between the upper and lower atmospheres. This daily effect has been measured for over a century by its impact on surface air pressure. (See this old posting.) Without a fairly exact understanding of vertical heat transport in the Earth's atmosphere, it's hard to infer from this daily pressure variation the corresponding variation in the atmosphere's temperature distribution. Naively, it should be roughly 0.4 ^oK, and there are good reasons to think (see below) that the variation is enhanced by a factor of two to three.

What this means for the 11-year solar cycle is currently the subject of intense debate and investigation. Comparing our star to others similar to it, it's not unreasonable to think that it can exhibit (over centuries and millennia) larger brightness variations than seen in the last 30 years of satellite measurements. Combined with enhancement within the atmosphere (especially from the lowering and raising of the ozone "lid" on the lower atmosphere), there's a clear implication that even small variations in solar brightness can have noticeable effects on the Earth's surface.

The solar wind and cosmic rays: Maybe it does something to the clouds. An idea more difficult to evaluate is rooted in another side-effect of the solar wind. The wind strengthens during solar maximum and weakens at solar minimum. Outside the Sun's magnetic sphere of influence (the heliosphere), which extends out to roughly 90 Earth orbital radii (8 billion miles or so from the Sun), is the interstellar medium and a very rarefied flux of extremely energetic charged particles called cosmic rays. (More rarefied than the solar wind itself: the cosmic rays are one particle per cubic centimeter). They're mainly protons (hydrogen nuclei). The solar wind keeps many of them out of the inner solar system, but not all.**

Most of Earth's clouds form, not by spontaneous condensation of pure water droplets (which is a pretty slow process), but by nucleation, water droplets glomming on to other particles floating in the atmosphere, mainly dust and aerosols. This catalyzed or induced condensation is much easier than for pure water droplets and the main reason we have clouds.

What does that have to do with cosmic rays? When they hit the Earth's upper atmosphere heading toward the surface, they leave behind a trail of ionization, temporarily charged atoms - air molecules that are temporarily stripped of some electrons. Such trails are perfect nucleation sites for water droplets or crystals to form.

When the solar wind is weaker, more cosmic rays get through and (maybe!) induce more water condensation in Earth's atmosphere: more clouds, less sunlight, lower surface temperatures. When the solar wind is stronger, the opposite might happen.

The ups and downs of the flux of cosmic rays hitting the Earth's atmosphere is established, for the era prior to scientific instruments, with the formation and deposition of beryllium-10 and carbon-14 in ice and organic material. These radioactive variants (isotopes) of the standard elements (beryllium-9 and carbon-12) are tracers of the strength of the cosmic rays that produced them.

The Sun's variability affects the Earth's climate. We can summarize all of these effects in a little table.

Sol         Sunspots    Solar brightness    Cosmic rays    Clouds        T(E)
magnetism (total area)   (total and UV)      at Earth
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Up            Up             Up               Down        Down (?)       Up
Down          Down           Down             Up            Up (?)      Down

The evidence for significant solar modulation of Earth's climate is indirect but compelling. Every index of climate (temperature, pressure, clouds, and rainfall) shows a component in its variability with the solar magnetic cycle period (9.5-11 years). When we consider the more irregular flickerings of solar brightness over shorter time scales (months to a few years), the connection can be brought down to the level of specific events and timings. Statistical tests of significance consistently yield correlated variability between solar and climate variation at 50-80%.†

And there's compelling history too. Paleoclimate records exhibit a tight connection between cosmic rays and climate proxies. The solar magnetic cycle is itself modulated over much longer times by irregular waves of weaker and stronger solar maxima. The Sun was exceptionally active during the Medieval Warm Period (c. 800-1300) and exceptionally weak during the Little Ice Age (c. 1300-1650), with reported sunspots and reconstructed cosmic ray fluxes correlated in just the way expected from the little table above.††

And where's "consensus" science? You might think this would be an area of active research, with lots of scientists swarming all over it. There has been a lot of work on the Sun-Earth connection since it was first suspected in the 19th century. Interest faded in the 20th century, at least until the 1970s, with the arrival of satellites and the first successful paleoclimate reconstructions.

But there's not enough research in this area. From the point of view of how the sciences are presently divided up, it's highly interdisciplinary and causes suspicion because it crosses so many academic boundaries. And in the last 20 years, of course, we can't escape the bad effect the "global warming" hysteria has had in discouraging scientists and redirecting research funding away from such work. Citing early, limited, and poorly executed statistical studies, the IPCC has repeatedly dismissed the connection, for no good scientific reason. The scientific annexes of the IPCC reports do mention the connection and regard it as important, "poorly understood," and deserving of more research. But that sound scientific advice has been ignored: it's not "with the program."

See here, here, and here for some recent developments in the saga of solar variability affecting - not the Earth - but Mars and Neptune. No industrialization out there: another demonstration of how little we understand climate.

References

Caution with some of the amateur Web sites out there on this topic. Opposing the fake "consensus" theory of "global warming" due to (the misnamed) "greenhouse" gases, their heart is often in the right place. But they're often sloppy with their science. Much more reliable are the three climate blogs linked at right in the blog roll.

= D. V. Hoyt and K. H. Schatten, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change, Oxford U. Press, 1997.

= B. Fagan, The Little Ice Age, Basic Books, 2001.

= W. W.-H. Soon and S. Yaskell, The Maunder Minimum, World Scientific, 2004.

= S. Baliunas, in Shattered Consensus, P. J. Michaels, ed., Rowman & Littlefield/George C. Marshall Institute, 2005. Short, semi-technical survey of current knowledge. Stresses both the evident empirical reality of solar modulation of climate and our poor theoretical understanding of it. The scientific annexes of the IPCC reports are not that different in spirit.

= S. F. Singer and D. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Identifies the MWP and LIA as part of a long-period (1500-year) modulation of the solar cycle attested by hundreds of thousands of years of climate proxies in ice core samples.

= Streaming video of a talk on solar physics basics by astrophysicist Kelly Korreck at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, February 2008 (see this page).

---
* It can be, and is, different with other stars. In some stars, more spots lower the brightness, overall. Their magnetic cycle periods are also not rigidly constant, but vary within a range, from one cycle to the next.

Sun-like stars with similar magnetism typically show brightness variations larger than currently seen on the Sun, a few tenths of a percent, up to about a percent.

** To clear up a frequent confusion: scientists today refer to these galactic cosmic rays as "the" cosmic rays. They have individual particle energies in the 100s of millions of electron volts (100s MeV) to a few billion electron volts (GeV). They probably originate from our Galaxy's cumulative history of supernova explosions.

In older publications, the solar wind particle flux was sometimes referred to as "cosmic rays" as well. These particles have much lower (although still pretty large) energies, roughly 10 to 1000 electron volts (10 eV to 1 keV). These are typical of the energetic X-ray emissions from atoms, and the particles are accelerated by mechanisms that transfer comparable energies. A typical atomic transformation in everyday chemical reactions is one to 10 electron volts (1 to 10 eV), by comparison, up to a thousand times smaller than the solar particles and a million to a billion times smaller than the galactic particles.

† That is, both phase and frequency information are available and are closely correlated, not just frequency information. See Scafetta and West (PDF). Wavelets (a mix of time- and frequency-domain analysis) are a better way to analyze this than pure Fourier analysis. Typically significance is tested with nonparametric methods like principal component analysis.

†† Very large sunspots were noted on the Sun's surface at that time by Chinese astronomers who, unlike their European counterparts, were not prejudiced into thinking that a heavenly body has to be "perfect." Without telescopes, they observed the sunspots at sunrise through thin clouds. Earlier naked-eye sitings date back to antiquity.

The rise of telescopic astronomy in western Europe in the 1600s marked the beginning of more controlled observation of the Sun. But as luck would have it, that happened in the later part of the Maunder Minimum, a dearth of sunspots - and very cold Earth temperatures (Little Ice Age). Over the last 450 years, the Earth has been recovering from the LIA, although the recovery has been interrupted by several, less severe, sunspot minima.

Ironically, there has been some resistance among climatologists to accepting the fact that the Sun is a variable star. The Sun's input of electromagnetic radiation to the Earth's climate is sometimes called the "solar constant" (about 1370 watts per square meter). Discovering that the "solar constant" isn't really constant was like discovering in the 1600s that the Sun isn't an unblemished celestial orb.

Such language confusion, like the use of climate "anomaly" and "forcing" - which have precise technical meanings and don't necessarily mean something bad is happening - is one cause of climate hysteria. Platonism has been dying a long time in the sciences of the West, and it's sustained by both popular and elite misunderstandings of this type.