Pour yourself a beer for science
Infinity is an idea rather than a number. It exists in the gaps between the numbers but is not part of numbering. Numbers are finite and the finite constitutes reality. Despite the vastness of the infinite the finite looms largest in our lives. And yet is interesting that we say ebb and flow and not flow and ebb, because flow is what we know best and ebb hardly at all.
Flow contains the finite and ebb the absenting - what increasingly isn’t there. Intensity of a storm is kinetic, but calm represents potential energy. We are more noticing of stressful, violent earthquakes that traumatise but not peaceable times between. But like numbers and gaps, each is necessary for information regarding the other.
Because of biorhythmic on/off beats we are only effective for half of any working day, and only half the points of this article may find the reader’s attention. We forget or ignore that for unusual weather episodes there are at least equal spaces between. To claim that some weather patterns or earthquake events have never happened before contradicts the cyclic and introduces this odd weather concept, “never”.
In Chinese culture, Yin and Yang represent the two opposite principles in nature. Yin characterizes the feminine or negative nature of things and yang stands for the masculine or positive side. Yin and yang are in pairs, such as the moon and the sun, female and male, dark and bright, cold and hot, passive and active, etc. But yin and yang are not static or just two separated things. The nature of yin/yang lies in interchange and interplay of the two components, for example the alternation of day and night.
Yin and yang are opposite in nature, but part of nature, they rely on each other, and can't exist without each other. The balance of yin and yang is important. If yin is stronger, yang will be weaker, and vice versa. Yin and yang can interchange under certain conditions so they are usually not yin and yang alone. Yin can contain certain parts of yang and yang can have some component of yin. Therefore it is believed that yin/yang exists in everything.
A glass of beer is a cloud inside out. One is a liquid with droplets of rising gas, the other a gas with droplets of falling liquid. They are not opposites because they are just two examples of gravity competing with buoyancy. Beer and clouds are part of the same science and arguably not yin yang.
Geologists have collectively been wondering when the Alpine Fault is going to blow since first European contact 250 years ago. They are not as busy calculating when this will not happen. They are fond of saying there is a 10% chance of something big in the next century, not a 90% chance of nothing occurring at all. It seems positive and negative are not in balance when scientists describe weather.
This is because severe weather was recently replaced by "extreme" weather and then "more extreme". This promotion to a fictitious furthest edge of a weather threshold makes the concept of weather something infinite, removing it from physics and placing it in metaphysics as in “runaway climate change” or faith that “the Alpine Fault will erupt in the next decade", or "most scientists believe in global warming." They are all functions of immeasurability.
Severe weather can be measured, and its measurement is its severity, unlike ‘extreme’ which cannot be quantified. Linguistically extreme goes to the boundary edge of near-collapse and remains there. Extreme - ex(outer)+ eme(most)=outermost which means beyond measurement, rendering forecasting obsolete. Something that cannot be measured finds itself in the camp of the infinite. Being out of balance it is out of yin/yang. If yin/yang refers to everything, being out of yin/yang refers to nothing.
It raises a big problem in logic. Climatologists have three gambits: 1) Uncaring humans are causing extreme weather that can no longer be measured or predicted. 2) Extreme weather is wrecking the planet. 3) Money will fix it.
It is easiest to tackle the second point. Bad weather cannot destroy a planet. If it could then the sun, which is experiencing fires of hell all the time, extreme by any definition, would have destroyed itself often during the last 4.5 billion years. Venus, with volcanic storms lasting 300 years is still there. Pint-sized planet Mercury, home to violent magnetic storms and ancient volcanoes, barely as big as the moon and closest planet to the sun, is wracked by magnetic disturbances more severe than any on Earth and is unfazed.
What does it take to wreck a star or planet? Well, not weather. Actually it is the other way around. Zillions of years of weather shaped and continues shaping each planet. Earthquakes, floods, erosion and the sun's heat, form deserts, valleys, lakes, volcanoes and craters, islands, craggy mountain ranges and plains. We do not even know what is supposed to be normal weather for planet Earth. It is probably the perpetual alternation of floods and droughts, ice ages lasting 50-60,000 years interspersed with interglacials of 15,000 years. If earth spends 80% of its geological existence iced up then averaged 'normal' weather for Earth would be daily blizzards over a frozen wasteland. If that is the case then any warmth could be defined as extreme.
And yet a former boss of NIWA has just come out with “news” that because we have just had a mild winter (mostly in the North Island) the planet must be dangerously warming. We seem to have gotten too far ahead of ourselves. Our climate science is out of balance and has so forgotten what science used to be about, it is now employing religion. The language of climate science is now the language of the infinite. That would be a sad day. Everyone needs to pour themselves a beer, ponder a cloud and stay calm.
Ken Ring of www.predictweather.com is the author of the NZ Weather Almanacs for 2013 and 2014.
