I dislike the fact that the public intellectual space and discourse is defined by the false dichotomies.

You are either for global warming (they call it climate change now because there was no warming) or against it. You are either pro choice or pro life. You are either an antifascist or a fascist. You are either an atheist or you believe in one of the middle-Eastern bronze-age theologies. You either believe that all people are the same or you are a racist.

I think the cause of this is the fact that people are not very good at thinking and having coherent opinions, but they are far better at forming groups around simplistic concepts. If you can reduce an issue to being for or against something, then you can politically exploit idiots who are unable to think in more complex terms.

Let me explain what I think, using issues of global warming, abortion, fascism and religion as an example. Let’s start with global warming in this article, and go on from there.

I see Earth as a complex thermodynamic system; it seems to be the only place in the Solar system other than the Sun, that derives a significant portion of its warmth from nuclear energy. I shit you not – more than 80% of the energy that keeps the Earth’s core in a molten state is derived from either nuclear fission or radioactive decay. This is the reason why we have such a powerful electromagnetic field, unlike Venus and Mars. Earth has a magnetic field on par with the gas giants. This is because the Theia impact, some 4.31 BY ago, gave Earth enough heavy elements for two planets, while expelling the light elements into what later became the Moon. As a result, Earth has its own nuclear furnace that keeps the inner core spinning within the outer core and the mantle, producing a strong magnetic field. This heat emanates from the core and eventually into space.

The second source of Earth’s energy is the Sun, which, obviously, heats up the atmosphere, the oceans and the crust during the day, and this energy radiates into space during the night. The speed of this release of energy can be moderated by the buffers, also called the glasshouse gasses. Also, since the equatorial areas absorb more solar energy than the poles, there is a thermal gradient between those. Depending on the amount of buffers in the atmosphere and the layout of the continents and the oceans, there is a certain variability to this thermal gradient between the equator and the poles; if the oceans can’t bring the energy from the equator to the poles quickly enough, the Earth starts warming up.

As it warms up, the oceans release carbon dioxide, one of the important buffers, into the atmosphere, because it is more easily soluble in cold water (which is easy to demonstrate by warming up carbonated soda). This then contributes to the moderation of the equatorial-polar thermal gradient, essentially smoothing the seasonal transitions and increasing the habitable area of the Earth’s crust. If it goes too far, it can make the equatorial areas very hot, but habitability of those areas is already questionable today, because they aren’t actually a pleasant place for humans. On the other hand, thawing of the polar regions would more than make up for the loss of equatorial habitability by opening up the currently inaccessible areas for human habitation. Another issue are the coastal areas, that would be flooded by the melt-water resulting from the polar ice. This would result in the gradual loss of the very densely populated coastal areas, but I see no cause for panic, since the gradual increase of the water levels would force people to simply migrate to a safer area. Of course, you can never eliminate the possibility of a sudden event, something of a Dansgaard-Oeschger variety, that would seriously threaten mankind, but those occur with some regularity in any case.

So, what is my long-term prognosis? First of all, I take my data from a vastly longer time-span than is the case with most climatologists; I work with the last billion years of climate. This includes several pre-Cambrian global glaciations, the Cambrian melt, warm period that started subsiding some 65 MY ago, entering a drier, cooler climate, increasing the thermal gradient between the equator and the poles, starting the formation of polar ice, and gradually absorbing the carbon dioxide gas in increasingly colder water, reducing the amount of atmospheric buffers. The polar ice on the other hand increased the Earth’s albedo, thus contributing to the situation by reflecting more sunlight into space. Eventually, this reached extremes somewhere in the late Pliocene, early Pleistocene, some 2.6MY ago, when the amount of atmospheric buffers declined to dangerous levels, where even the minor orbital and axial variations started throwing the climate out of whack. These are called the Milankovitch cycles, and the interesting thing about them is that they exist only in the Pleistocene; I heard about that once and it made me wonder so I looked into it and now I know why that happens. Basically, if the CO₂ levels fall below the Pliocene levels, the Earth starts to balance on a very precarious edge of a runaway glaciation, where due to the lack of buffers in the atmosphere it becomes possible for more ice to accumulate on the polar areas than can be removed in the summer. Due to the albedo effect of the ice, this increases the problem in the next season, and so on. If left unhindered, this process will eventually and quite certainly result in a full global glaciation, poetically known as the snowball Earth, and that is game over for most forms of life on land, including humans. That’s the tricky part – the thermal curve of the last 65 MY has a clear downwards-pointing trend, and it’s because of the ring of seawater that formed around Antarctica, enabling the Coriolis force powered sea currents to quickly dissipate energy, de facto working like an air conditioner or a fridge, powered by Earth’s rotation and convection.

What humans did here with their industrial revolution and combustion of fossil fuels is to raise the atmospheric CO₂ concentration to either early Pleistocene or even early Pliocene levels; the data isn’t clear enough. But what does that mean, exactly? Is it a bad thing, in a sense that the climate will undergo a dramatic change, destructive to human civilization, before it re-establishes itself on the Pliocene levels? Is it a good thing, in a sense that it either delayed or completely prevented the onset of the next glacial maximum, and possibly even brought us out of Pleistocene ice age altogether? I don’t know. Earth is such a complex thermodynamic system, I’m simply unable to make a precise enough simulation in my head to account for all the factors and variables. What I do know, with absolute certainty that comes from looking at the last billion years of climate data, is that without this increase of CO₂ levels this glacial minimum that we call Holocene would ultimately come to an end, and we would sink into a glacial maximum, colloquially known as the ice age. Also, since the circumantarctic air conditioner keeps on pumping heat out into space, one glacial maximum will eventually cross the threshold of runaway glaciation where even the equator would freeze over, and that will last until the continental drift eventually breaks the heat pump of sea currents, some hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the future. Basically, this means it’s game over for life on Earth as we know it, and since the Pleistocene itself with its climatic instability means the process has already started, it is unlikely to take more than a few millions of years before the Earth cools down so much that Milankovitch cycles will no longer be able to bring it into a glacial minimum. So, without that evil beast of global warming, we are not safe in the bosom of Mother Earth with its perfect balance of climate and whatever bullshit the tree-huggers want you to believe. On the contrary, we live in a climate that is so viciously unstable, it forced animals to evolve hibernation and seasonal migration in order to survive the seasonal extremes. Earth is in its death throes, and it’s called Pleistocene. It’s only because our lifespan is so insignificant that we don’t perceive it as a terrible train wreck that it is. The only event in the last 65 MY that went contrary to the trend of gradual cooling and the eventual death in ice is our industrial carbon dioxide release.

But if you expect my prognosis to be bright, you’re wrong. I actually think our CO₂ release is merely a “blip”. The circumantarctic current is a vast, unstoppable global force. With our pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere we might actually trigger a Dansgaard-Oeschger event by melting too much polar ice at once, breaking the thermohaline circulation and resulting in some violent climatic extreme that might cool the planet down in one instant to simply sink all our CO₂ into the oceans and resume the cooling trend, maybe even accelerating it. That’s what you have when you work with complex thermodynamic systems – it’s always chaos, and in chaos the scale can tip both ways in unpredictable ways. So yes, our CO₂ release is the best news that life on Earth got since the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s the only thing that could possibly delay or even prevent the runaway glaciation. It could also wreck the climate enough to wipe us out. But our prognosis was never bright, to begin with. We have our extinction event sometime in the future, in a runaway glaciation. It’s a certainty. What we did with our industrial civilization might delay it or prevent it altogether. It could also kill us more quickly. The thing is, I don’t know what will happen, because the thermodynamics of it all is too complex for me to simulate, and from what you’ve read so far you can see that I’m actually quite a bit ahead of the general trends in climate science.

And now we come to the conclusion: why the question “do you believe in global warming” makes me facepalm and despair to the point of tears. It’s because I know the level of superficiality and ignorance that lies beneath that question. It’s because I know I’d have to write this article in order to explain what I really think about it, and because I rarely think in yes/no dichotomies, that so rarely function beyond the level of elementary mathematics, where you have simple questions such as “is n, an element of N, an odd or an even number”, and all elements of the set result in unequivocal Boolean answers. The real world is more like the R set, in which such a question would apply only to an insignificantly small subset, making no sense whatsoever outside that range.

When people think about hurricanes, they think of them in context of bad weather. I, however, think of them as a thermodynamic phenomenon of cooling the ocean, which accumulated too much energy from the Sun and, in context of seasonal change, releases the excess via entropy into the atmosphere until thermodynamic equilibrium is established.

People also think of war in terms of bloodshed and conflict of nations and ideologies and interests, but the more I think of it, I think of war in terms of a sociological hurricane – a thermodynamic phenomenon of equalizing energy potential (wealth and control of resources) of different groups of people in a situation when current distribution of resources doesn’t match the balance of power between the groups.

Let’s test my hypothesis on the example of two world wars. I am yet to see the satisfactory explanation of the First World War. Nobody seems to be able to tell the root cause. They can tell you the unimportant stuff, they can tell you how the events themselves unfolded, but none of it explains why the great colonial powers felt such a strong itch to go into war, jumping on the first casus belli that presented itself as if war promised more than peace. None of it makes sense – the Austro-Hungarian empire, for instance, was seriously itching to go into war, for which it was the least well prepared of all great powers. Germany was better prepared, and it too itched to go into battle against Russia before it grew unstoppably powerful due to its ongoing industrialization, and yet the end result of the war was a near-destruction and humiliation of Germany. Austro-Hungary didn’t survive the war – it broke apart and its constituents started their independent lives as unstable, immature states, whose erratic behavior seems to have boiled over into the second world war, and the process doesn’t seem finished even now. What are we seeing here, since it doesn’t seem to be motivated by obvious self-interest? We have a war that transformed the society and yet none of the parties involved seems to have benefited from it; all seem to have been disrupted and brought out of balance as a result.

As an alternative explanation, I came up with modernity. You see, the most significant aspect of modernity is change of the entire energy-structure of society. Prior to the explosion of science and technology, the entire society was solar-powered, in a sense that you had land on which you could grow plants, and domesticated animals which fed on those plants, and the amount of resources available to the society was more-less constant and determined by the amount of people who worked on the available land with primitive agricultural technology. Those people were treated as a basic resource that came with the land, and were divided among the warrior class which used force to conquer and dominate. Political power was measurable through the amount of agricultural land populated by serfs, that a nobleman controlled. Each nobleman could directly control only as much land, and the pyramid of power was established, with lower-tier noblemen who directly controlled the serfs who in turn controlled the land, and higher-tier noblemen who had lower-tier noblemen as underlings. The higher-tier noblemen were subjects to a king, who in turn was subject to the highest entity of civilizational cohesion, for instance the Pope. As long as the basic energy source of the civilization remained constant, this was a stable system.

However, with the ascent of technology, industry and free market, the energy structure of society changed, and it became possible to acquire wealth by means other than top-down distribution of force-acquired solar-powered resources. Inventors, industrialists and bankers acquired wealth that rivaled and soon greatly surpassed that of feudal solar-powered structures; the social leverage, essentially wealth, that was created with the invention of the steam engine or the mass-production of high quality steel, or fractional distillation of petroleum, or electricity, or artificial fertilizers, changed the entire energy structure of the society, while the entire social system relied upon an obsolete hierarchy that was established in the pre-industrial age and was ill-suited to handle the needs and challenges of modernity. This is why the entire society boiled over in order to establish a new thermodynamic equilibrium, a political and economic structure that was better suited for the open-ended energy model. One example of that is the abandonment of the gold standard of currency and adoption of the fractional reserve fiat currency, which is able to create new money based on GDP in order not to artificially constrict the economy of the state. This is absolutely necessary when you have a situation where a Rockefeller or a Tesla can invent an entirely new open-ended energy model which creates an extreme amount of new wealth that is not covered by the gold reserves. Unless you want to artificially appreciate gold and thus give the owners of gold reserves an unfair and undeserved amount of wealth, you need to grow the monetary supply by the amount that at least equals the growth of the real economy, and in fact anticipates further growth. Furthermore, you need to acknowledge that nobility no longer controls significant enough portion of the economy to warrant their special status, and political control of the country must take the new balance of power into account.

I see the two world wars as hurricane 1 and hurricane 2 of the same season, where the second one continued where the first one failed to finish the process of achieving thermodynamic balance. Whenever a group of people controls too much resources for the amount of actual power their wield in the current state of affairs, there will be a violent conflict that will establish the real state of affairs. An example of this is the conflict between the Europeans and the native Americans, who controlled too much land for their state of technological and military power, and were therefore wiped out in order to establish a thermodynamic equilibrium.

The Second World War and its aftermath allowed modernity to run its course and try to fulfill its promise, and when it mostly failed, it resulted in profound soul-searching and often destructive self-criticism within the Western civilization, which is now trying to figure out its fundamental guiding principles and its reason for being; essentially, it is trying to figure out whether it has a mandate, and has for the most part relinquished its dominant role, with inferior savages such as Muslims trying to fill the vacuum created by the Euro-American civilization’s unwillingness to assert itself in ways it previously did. Establishing “life”, without any further elaboration, as the supreme value, is indicative of this abdication of mandate.

To me, all the elements of a social thermodynamic storm are ready to produce an outward phenomenon that will redistribute energy across the system according to the new realities that are yet to fully establish themselves.