"As the ice cap is retreating, it is exposing almost perfectly preserved plant specimens dating back 5,200 year, indicating that it has been more than 50 centuries since the ice cap was smaller than it is today." – Jason McManus, Daily Galaxy

So about 5,200 years ago the glacier was smaller than it is now and the local conditions are not unprecedented. "Climate Change" is a silly moniker considering that there is no alternate state for the climate to be in.

"Climate Consistency" doesn’t exist. Never has, never will. It is going to get colder and it is going to get warmer. This will happen cyclically over time spans measured in decades, millenniums, ages, epochs, eras and eons. We can create models to predict the short term but I hold that it is hubris to think that we are going to create models that are accurate enough to bet the lives of millions on.

Too many people have their careers, egos, politics, economics and philosophies bound up in the climate models being correct. Rest assured, the climate models are all wrong. Every last one of them, even the ones I agree with. That isn’t a slight on the men and women who created those models, it is just a condition of the universe. Any model of any system suffers the same fate, the model is not the thing.

Or as Korzybski put it, “The map is not the territory.”

We make models because they are useful when they are accurate enough. To make them wieldy enough to actually function, we have to create a model that is a gross simplification of both size and time. With climate models we are trying to cram 115,000,000,000,000,000 cubic kilometers and 200 billion watts per second over thousands of years into a few cubic meters and a handful of days.

They then conclude that we’re doomed and that they can save the world if we do exactly what they say right now. I come to a different conclusion and figure that we’ll be a lot better off to actually see what is going to happen and then react to that.

About 200 Billion watts per second… just saying.

The job of modelling is to simplify a system while not letting it become so wrong as to no longer be useful. I think the true believers are downplaying Bonini’s paradox for fear that it undermine their righteous cause.

Should we make an educated guess at what the climate will do over the next hundred years and bankrupt ourselves on mostly symbolic actions that we know will not have a meaningful impact on even our computer models?

Colder is more dangerous for humanity than warmer and I would be more concerned if the majority of the planets glaciers were expanding. As it stands, more are contracting than expanding… yes gentle reader, few are actually going to disappear any time soon and some are expanding.

There is some element of political and market machinations involved, there always is when trillions of dollars and the votes of millions are placed on the table… but it strikes me that it is largely motivated by the the scientists and activists who need to save the world. Their self image is based on the grandiosity of a messiah complex where saving the world is the only activity that is worthy of their time. They will go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to prove to themselves and others that the world needs saving and that they have the one true answer.

If I am honest with myself, my view on the imperative for us to become a spacefaring civilization is uncomfortably close to their emotional attachment to the fight against Climate Change.

But where they are out of touch with reality, I just wanna save the human race.

I’m sitting in the city that is hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics, and listening to the media go on and on about the “heroes” that are here to compete.

This irritated me somewhat and got me thinking about why we venerate the men and women who play games as if they have actually done something… rather than just pretended to do something. What, in our evolution, could have brought about this odd psychological behaviour?

Over our history, going back to well before we were even h. sapiens, two of the larger driving evolutionary factors have been food gathering and fighting off other groups of humans and proto-humans. Those who were better at hunting and fighting had better survival rates and the people who were attracted to them produced children that carried these traits.

So where does playing games come in? It make us stronger, faster and more agile. Those who got a pleasant neurological feedback from playing games would play more ∴ become stronger, faster and more agile ∴ would be able to hunt and fight better.

So those who were driven to play would be more likely to attract mates than their more sedentary sibling… even though it was rather more calorie intensive than lounging around the cave. This would then layer in the drive of sexual competition so that even those who don’t get a thrill from playing games will participate so that they to can hunt and fight better… which allows them to attract a mate as well as their more “playful” sibling.

Through most of our history, the play hunting and play fighting would have been overshadowed by prowess in the actual activities that athletes only pretend to do.

It was fine and dandy if you could play a game better than anyone else- but if the other guy could actually do the real task better than you, they got the mammoth, they sacked the city… and they got the girl. So for most of our history, the people that pretended to do things never got the attention that was showered on those who actually did the real things.

I don’t think anyone can name the winners of the 786 BC Olympics but the names of Achilles is remembered from hundreds of years earlier because he actually did… rather than pretended to do (although he was also renown for the pretending as a adjunct to the doing).

As our societies became more technologically advanced, the actual hunting was mostly replaced by farming and combat became the work of large coordinated groups with weapons that killed at greater and greater distances with more and more anonymity.

When the real activity becomes too abstract or it is removed from our view, the evolutionary imperative isn’t smart enough to follow it and fell back to those who pretend to do the activity.

We went from venerating actual accomplishments to the hero worship of those who pretend to do things. This also may explain why actors (and yes writers) are better known and more admired than the people who actually do the real things themselves.

If the ability to provide food for the tribe was rationally held in high esteem, Norman Borlaug would be one of the greatest heroes of all time. He saved anywhere from hundreds of millions, to billions of people from starving to death. He died last year and hardly anyone noticed. I find that to be a sad thing.

The media and fans can load up all the BS they want about the “heroes” of the Olympics, the Superbowl, World Cup or whatever your sport of choice is… they aren’t heroes and it isn’t heroic.

Soldiers actually undertake acts of heroism. Crawling into a dark cave in search of dangerous men who want to kill you takes courage that is completely absent from sliding down a hill very fast, catching a prolate spheroid past an arbitrarily marked line or kicking a spheroid past another person and through an arbitrarily defined surface plane.

The pretend activities of athletes most certainly are difficult and they take a lot of perseverance and great effort – but they aren’t heroic. And just because you can die while competing in a sport, that doesn’t get you there. More people die from slipping in the shower but that doesn’t make me a hero every morning.

That said ranted, it is probably a better world because if this shift in hero worship. Could you imagine the effect it would have on wars today if all the hero worship that has fallen on those who pretend to fight was placed back on those who actually fight?

It could make for smaller more personal wars where the individual action is heralded and the anonymous mass killings of bombs and biologicals where seen to be “unworthy”.

I think it would be more likely that the people who get the most press would be those with the highest body count no matter how they get it.

So while I won’t join the throngs as they lavish praise on grown men and women who play games that fake activities almost nobody does any more… I’ll accept this as a suitable release valve for that particular evolutionary selection trait.

One thing I don’t understand is why Vancouver picked Japanese CHIBI style to create the mascots?

Oh wait… that’s right.

Never forget that Olympics is all about the gold.