Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Hardly a day goes by without something being blamed on global warming. Just in the U.S. we have El Nino on the West coast, the increasing severity and frequency of hurricanes on the East Coast, tornadoes in the heartland, and record rainfall across the country all being attributed to global warming. Around the world nearly every major climate event from storm to drought is now being blamed on global warming.

Enhanced by speculative predictions of global catastrophe and the manipulative distortions of those seeking to validate their ulterior motives, the idea of global warming has increasingly become the darling of the politicians, environmentalists, and the mainstream media. Most tellingly, the banner of global warming has become one of the most powerful political levers in both national and international politics - especially for those seeking to attack western industrial civilization for their own political or religious reasons.

But while we're being told to fear the fire of global warming, the ice continues to relentlessly play out its cosmically driven cycle. In what has to be one of mankind's most ironically tragic farces, we're busily crippling our industrial civilization out of imagined guilt over creating global warming even in the face of clear evidence that the next regularly scheduled ice age is already in motion. So obsessed with arguing about whether our tiny campfire is too hot, we fail to notice the wall of ice looming in the darkness of our self-obsessed ignorance.

How can our politicians and those claiming to be scientists be so wrong? How can we be headed into the next ice age when those claiming to speak from authority are preaching fear of global warming?

The idea that the puny efforts of man can rival the power of the universe would be laughable if we were able to escape the ego driven traps of own perspective long enough to appreciate the absurdities of our delusions. We strut about in self-important splendor telling ourselves that since we are the center of our own thoughts and perceptions of the universe, we must also be the cause of the changes we see around us.

Man has long suffered from his ego driven need to see himself as the source and purpose of the world around him. In the primitive world we sought power and confirmation of our importance through mysticism and misinterpreting coincidences. Our desire to believe that at least some among us could be capable of controlling the important aspects of our world - from outbreaks of disease, to the weather, to even ensuring that the sun would rise the next morning - drove our ancestors to weave incredibly contorted belief systems, spinning tortured webs of justifications and conjectures around coincidences and misinterpretations of events.

The glimmerings of enlightenment that accompanied the industrial revolution and the fragile ascendancy of science dispelled some of the old beliefs, but not our human-centric perspective. The products of our industry now dominate the superficial aspects of our lives, and as an extension of our self-important egos we seek even the most tenuous evidence that our activities might be similarly affecting our planet.

Nearly all of the most significant aspects of Western Industrial Civilization involve energy in some way. Basic thermodynamics shows that all energy systems eventually convert to heat. Therefore, if our industrial civilization is having a global effect, it must be to warm the planet. Finding that the ice is returning in spite of all our activities would show far too clearly the cosmic insignificance of humanity. And so some of us are predisposed to find evidence of global warming as a confirmation that we are indeed powerful.

There are others who for their own reasons resent the wealth and quality of life that Western Industrial Civilization provides to its participants. Those whose religious or social-political systems have prevented them from enjoying the full benefits of the industrial revolution and free enterprise have an obvious motive in seeking to demonize that which is beyond their own reach. Envy has long been one of the least rational and most destructive of mankind's emotions. Better to destroy what you can't have than to allow anyone else to enjoy it.

And then there are the guilt ridden who seek to project their own fears of inadequacy and unworthiness onto society. Having convinced themselves that they are personally undeserving of the posterity industrial civilization has provided them, they seek evidence that will validate their desire to project their personal feelings of guilt onto industrial civilization itself. The idea that modern industry is causing global warming has proven so attractive to the guilt ridden that they have embraced it without question.

And so politics and emotion have driven us to see evidence of global warming even in the signs of a developing ice age. Only man is such an absurd creature that he can convince himself to see fire in the ice, to believe he is burning while all around him turns to ice.

The Ice Age Cycle is caused by cosmic forces of far greater power than any terrestrial influence of which mankind is capable. While it's true we've proven quite adept at soiling our own nest and causing short term distortions in the planetary ecosystem, our ability to really control our world exists largely in our own imaginations. We've managed to kill off a few animal and plant species, turn ground up rocks into skyscrapers, and turn night into day with artificial light, but nothing we can do compares with the immense forces involved in a hurricane let alone an earthquake. We've managed to move tiny amounts of surface material round, but that hardly compares with the movement of the tectonic plates and the massive magma flows just under the crust. Even the nuclear weapons that represent the most powerful devices mankind has yet developed pale to insignificance compared to the energy released in a volcanic eruption.

The one area where we are as powerful as we want to believe we are is in the way we interpret our perceptions of the world around us. However, as powerful as wishful thinking might be inside our minds, it's unlikely to have much influence on climate change in the real world. We may be able to convince ourselves for a short time that we are powerful enough to overcome long established cosmically driven cycles, but eventually we will have to face reality. The sooner we trade in our desire to find global warming for recognition that the ice is on its way the better we will fare in the coming climatic changes.