September 2019 – Renaissance Guy

Some Like It Temperate

I want to share something that took me a while to understand, but once I did, it changed my understanding of the world around me. I’m not a scientist, so I’m probably not going to get this exactly perfect, and I’ll defer to professional judgment, but maybe I can help illustrate the underlying concept.

So temperature is not the same thing as hot and cold. In fact, temperature and heat aren’t really bound together inherently. On earth, they’re usually correlated, and as humans, our sensory organs perceive them through the same mechanism in relative terms, which is why we usually think of them together. This sensory shortcut works for most of the human experience, but it can become confusing and counterintuitive when we try to look at systems of physics outside the scope of an everyday life.

So what is temperature? Well, in the purest sense, temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy among a group of particles. How fast are they going, how often are they bumping into each other, and how much energy are they giving off when they do? This is how temperature and phase of matter correlate. So liquid water has a higher temperature than ice because its molecules are moving around more, with more energy. Because the molecules are moving around more, liquid water is less dense, which it’s easier to cut through water than ice. Likewise, it’s easier still to cut through steam than water. Temperature is a measure of molecular energy, not hotness. Got it? Good, because it’s about to get complicated.

So something with more energy has a higher temperature. This works for everything we’re used to thinking about as being hot, but it applies in a wider context. Take radioactive material. Or don’t, because they’re dangerous. Radioactivity is dangerous because it has a lot of energy, and is throwing it off in random directions. Something that’s radioactive won’t necessarily feel hot, because the way it gives off radiation isn’t the way our sensory organs are calibrated. You can pick up an object with enough radiated energy to shred through the material in your cells and kill you, and have it feel like room temperature. That’s what happened to the firemen at Chernobyl.

In a technical sense, radioactive materials have a high temperature, since they’re giving off lots of energy. That’s what makes them dangerous. At the same time, though, you could get right up next to highly enriched nuclear materials (and under no circumstances should you ever try this), without feeling warm. You will feel something eventually, as your cells react to being ripped apart by, a hail of neutrons and other subatomic particles. You might feel heat as your cells become irradiated and give off their own energy, but not from the nuclear materials themselves. Also if this happens, it’s too late to get help. So temperature isn’t necessarily what we think about it.

Space is another good example. We call space “cold”, because water freezes when exposed to it. And space will feel cold, since it will immediately suck all the carefully hoarded energy out of any body part exposed to it. But actually, space, at least within the solar system, has a very high temperature wherever it encounters particles, for the same reason as above. The sun is a massive ongoing thermonuclear explosion that makes even our largest atom bombs jealous. There is a great deal of energy flying around the empty space of the solar system at any given moment, it just doesn’t have any particles to give its energy to. This is why the top layer of the atmosphere, the thermosphere, has a very high temperature, despite being totally inhospitable, and why astronauts are at increased cancer risk.

This confusion is why most scientists who are dealing with fields like chemistry, physics, or astronomy use the Kelvin scale. One degree in the Kelvin scale, or one kelvin, is equivalent to one degree Celsius. However, unlike Celsius, where zero is the freezing point of water, zero kelvins is known as Absolute Zero, a so-far theoretical temperature where there is no movement among the involved particles. This is harder to achieve than it sounds, for a variety of complicated quantum reasons, but consider that body temperature is 310 K, in a scale where one hundred is the entire difference between freezing and boiling. Some of our attempts so far to reach absolute zero have involved slowing down individual particles by suspending them in lasers, which has gotten us close, but those last few degrees are especially tricky.

Kelvin scale hasn’t really caught on in the same way as Celsius, perhaps because it’s an unwieldy three digits for anything in the normal human range. And given that the US is still dragging their feet about Celsius, which goes back to the French Revolution, not a lot of people are willing to die on that hill. But the Kelvin scale does underline an important point of distinction between temperature as a universal property of physics, from the relative, subjective, inconsistent way that we’re used to feeling it in our bodies.

Which is perhaps interesting, but I said this was relevant to looking at the world, so how’s that true? Sure, it might be more scientifically rigorous, but that’s not always essential. If you’re a redneck farm boy about to jump into the crick, Newtonian gravity is enough without getting into quantum theory and spacetime distortion, right?
Well, we’re having a debate on this planet right now about something referred to as “climate change”, a term which has been promoted in favor over the previous term “global warming”. Advocates of doing nothing have pointed out that, despite all the graphs, it doesn’t feel noticeably warmer. Certainly, they point out, the weather hasn’t been warmer, at least not consistently, on a human timescale. How can we be worried about increased temperature if it’s not warmer?

And, for as much as I suspect the people presenting these arguments to the public have ulterior motives, whether they are economic or political, it doesn’t feel especially warmer, and it’s hard to dispute that. Scientists, for their part, have pointed out that they’re examining the average temperature over a prolonged period, producing graphs which show the trend. They have gone to great lengths to explain the biggest culprit, the greenhouse effect, which fortunately does click nicely with our intuitive human understanding. Greenhouses make things warmer, neat. But not everyone follows before and after that.

I think part of what’s missing is that scientists are assuming that everyone is working from the same physics-textbook understanding of temperature and energy. This is a recurring problem for academics and researchers, especially when the 24-hour news cycle (and academic publicists that feed them) jump the gun and snatch results from scientific publications without translating the jargon for the layman. If temperature is just how hot it feels, and global warming means it’s going to feel a couple degrees hotter outside, it’s hard to see how that gets to doomsday predictions, and requires me to give up plastic bags and straws.

But as we’ve seen, temperature can be a lot more than just feeling hot and cold. You won’t feel hot if you’re exposed to radiation, and firing a laser at something seems like a bad way to freeze it. We are dealing on a scale that requires a more consistent rule than our normal human shortcuts. Despite being only a couple of degrees temperature, the amount of energy we’re talking about here is massive. If we say the atmosphere is roughly 5×10^18 kilograms, and the amount of energy it takes to raise a kilogram of air one kelvin is about 1Kj, then we’re looking at 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kilojoules.

That’s a big number; what does it mean? Well, if my math is right, that’s about 1.1 million megatons of TNT. A megaton is a unit used to measure the explosive yield of strategic nuclear weapons. The nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the bigger of the two, was somewhere in the ballpark of 0.02 megatons. The largest bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, was 50 megatons. The total energy expenditure of all nuclear testing worldwide is estimated at about 510 megatons, or about 0.05% of the energy we’re introducing with each degree of climate change.

Humanity’s entire current nuclear arsenal is estimated somewhere in the ballpark of 14,000 bombs. This is very much a ballpark figure, since some countries are almost certainly bluffing about what weapons they do and don’t have, and how many. The majority of these, presumably, are cheaper, lower-yield tactical weapons. Some, on the other hand, will be over-the-top monstrosities like the Tsar Bomba. Let’s generously assume that these highs and lows average out to about one megaton apiece. Suppose we detonated all of those at once. I’m not saying we should do this; in fact, I’m going to go on record as saying we shouldn’t. But let’s suppose we do, releasing 14,000 megatons of raw, unadulterated atom-splitting power in a grand, civilization-ending bonanza. In that instant, we would do have unleashed approximately one percent of the energy as we are adding in each degree of climate change.

This additional energy means more power for every hurricane, wildfire, flood, tornado, drought, blizzard, and weather system everywhere on earth. The additional energy is being absorbed by glaciers, which then have too much energy to remain frozen, and so are melting, raising sea levels. The chain of causation is complicated, and involves understanding of phenomena which are highly specialized and counterintuitive to our experience from most of human existence. Yet when we examine all of the data, it is the pattern that seems to emerge. Whether or not we fully understand the patterns at work, this is the precarious situation in which our species finds itself.

Unchosen Battles

Sometimes, you get to pick your battles. On items that don’t directly affect me, I can choose whether or not to have an opinion, and whether or not to do the research to be informed. Sure, being a good, well-informed person with a consistent ethical framework dictates that I try to have empathy even for issues that don’t impact me, and that I ought apply my principles in a consistent way, such that I tend to have opinions anyway. But I get to decide, for instance, to what degree I care about same sex marriage, or what’s happening in Yemen, or the regulations governing labor unions. None of these things has a noticeable effect on my day to day life, and as such I have the privilege of being able to ignore them without consequence.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. There are lots of policies that do directly affect me. The price of tuition, for instance, is of great concern, since I am presently engaged in acquiring a degree which I hope will allow me to get a job that will let me pay my bills, ideally without having to take out a small fortune in loans to cover it. Transport policy affects because I am an adult with places to be who cannot drive, and current American transport policy borders on actively hostile to people in my position.

And then there’s healthcare. I’m not a single issue voter, far from it, but healthcare is a make or break issue for me, since it dictates whether I, and many people I care about dearly, live or die. The policies of the US government in this area determine access to the tools of my life support, whether my insurance company is allowed to discriminate against me, and what price I have to pay to stay alive. These policies are life and death, but that turn of phrase is overused, so let me put it another way:

With the policy as it is now, I can scrape by. Others can’t, which is tragic, but I’m lucky enough to have money to burn. If the policy changes to make my medication affordable the same way it is in Mexico, I will in one stroke save enough money each year to cover my tuition forever. If policy changes to remove existing protections, then nothing else in the world will matter, because I will go bankrupt and die in short order. It won’t even be a question of choosing between medication and food or rent; without my medication I don’t live long enough to starve to death, and the money I’d save by starving is trivial anyway. I don’t have the privilege of choosing whether to care, or even which side I fall on. I would love to have other priorities; to say that Climate Change is the greatest threat, or immigration is a moral imperative, or whatever other hill I might elect to die on. But for the time being, as long as I want to continue breathing, I have my political opinions chosen for me.

That’s the way it’s been for as long as I have had political opinions of which to speak. But recently, there’s been a shift. Suddenly, after years of having to beg minor officials to listen, with the presidential election gearing up, people have begun to take notice. Talking points which I and the people I work with have been honing and repeating for seemingly eons are being repeated by primary front runners. With no apparent proximal trigger, our efforts have gained attention, and though we remain far from a solution that will stand the test of repeated partisan attempts to dismantle it, a potential endgame is in sight.

But this itself brings new challenges. Where before we could be looked upon as a charity case worthy of pity, now we have become partisan. Our core aims- to make survival affordable in this country -have not changed, but now that one side has aligned themselves publicly with us, the other feels obliged to attack us. Items which I previously had to explain only to friends, I now find myself having to defend to a hostile audience. Where once the most I had to overcome was idle misinformation, now there is partisan hatred.

This is going to be a long campaign. I do not expect I shall enjoy it, regardless of how it turns out. But my work to etch out a means of survival continues.

Who Needs Facts?

Let us suppose for the sake of discussion that the sky is blue. I know we can’t all agree on much these days, but I haven’t yet heard anyone earnestly disputing the blue-ness of the sky, and in any case I need an example for this post. So let’s collectively assume for the purposes of this post, regardless of what it looks like outside your window at this exact moment, that we live in a world where “the sky is blue” is an easily observable, universally acknowledged fact. You don’t need to really believe it, just pretend. We need to start somewhere, so just assume it, okay? Good.

So, in this world, no one believes the sky isn’t blue, and no one, outside of maybe navel-gazing philosophers, would waste time arguing this point. That is, until one day, some idiot with a blog posts a screed about how the sky is really red, and you sheeple are too asleep to wake up and see it. This person isn’t crazy per se; they don’t belong in a mental institution, though they probably require a good reality check and some counseling. Their arguments, though laughably false, coming from a certain conspiratorial mindset are as coherent as anything else posted on the web. It’s competently and cogently written, albeit entirely false. The rant becomes the butt of a few jokes. It doesn’t become instantly popular, since it’s way too “tinfoil hat” for most folks, but it gets a handful of readers, and it sets up the first domino in a chain of dominoes.

Some time later, the arguments laid out in the post get picked up by internet trolls. They don’t particularly believe the sky is red, but they also don’t care what the truth is. To these semi-professional jerks, facts and truth are, at best, an afterthought. To them, the goal of the Wild West web is to get as many cheap laughs by messing with people and generally sowing chaos in online communities, and in this, a belief that the sky is red is a powerful weapon. After all, how do you fight with someone who refuses to acknowledge that the sky is blue? How do you deal with that in an online debate? For online moderators whose job is to keep things civil, but not to police opinions, how do you react to a belief like this? If you suppress it, to some degree you validate the claims of conspiracy, and besides which it’s outside your job to tell users what to think. If you let it be, you’re giving the trolls a free pass to push obvious bunk, and setting the stage for other users to run afoul of site rules on civility when they try to argue in favor of reality.

Of course, most people ignore such obviously feigned obtuseness. A few people take the challenge in good sport and try to disassemble the original poster’s copied arguments; after all they’re not exactly airtight. But enough trolls post the same arguments that they start to evolve. Counter arguments to the obvious retorts develop, and as trolls attempt to push the red-sky-truther act as far as possible, these counter arguments spread quickly among the growing online communities of those who enjoy pretending to believe them. Many people caught in the crossfire get upset, in some cases lashing back, which not only gives the trolls exactly the reaction they seek, but forces moderators on these websites to take action against the people arguing that the sky is, in fact, [expletive deleted] blue, and why can’t you see that you ignorant [expletive deleted].

The red sky argument becomes a regular favorite of trolls and petty harassers, becoming a staple of contemporary online life. On a slow news day, the original author of the blog post is invited to appear on television, bringing it even greater attention, and spurring renewed public navel gazing. It becomes a somewhat popular act of counterculture to believe, or at least, to profess to believe, that the sky isn’t blue. The polarization isn’t strictly partisan, but its almost exclusive use by a certain online demographic causes it to become of the modern partisan stereotype nevertheless.

Soon enough, a local candidate makes reference to the controversy hoping to score some attention and coverage. He loses, but the next candidate, who outright says she believes it should be up to individual Americans what color they want the sky to be, is more successful. More than just securing office, she becomes a minor celebrity, appearing regularly on daytime news, and being parodied regularly on comedy series. Very quickly, more and more politicians adopt official positions, mostly based on where they fall on the partisan map. Many jump on the red-sky bandwagon, while many others denounce the degradation of truth and civic discourse perpetuated by the other side. It plays out exactly how you imagine it would. The lyrics are new, but the song and dance isn’t. Modern politics being what it is, as soon as the sides become apparent, it becomes a race to see who can entrench their positions first and best, while writers and political scientists get to work dreaming up new permutations of argument to hurl at the enemy.

It’s worth noting that through all of this, the facts themselves haven’t changed. The sky in this world is still blue. No one, except the genuinely delusional, sees anything else, although many will now insist to their last breath to wholeheartedly believe otherwise, or else that it is uncivil to promote one side so brazenly. One suspects that those who are invested in the red-sky worldview know on some level that they are lying, have been brainwashed, or are practicing self-deception, but this is impossible to prove in an objective way; certainly it is impossible to compel a red sky believer to admit as much. Any amount of evidence can be dismissed as insufficient, inconclusive, or downright fabricated. Red-sky believers may represent anywhere from a small but noisy minority, to a slight majority of the population, depending on which polling sources are believed, which is either taken as proof of an underlying conspiracy, or proof of their fundamental righteousness, respectively.

There are several questions here, but here’s my main one: Is this opinion entitled to respect? If someone looks you in the eye and tells you the sky is not blue, but red, are you obliged to just smile and nod politely, rather than break open a can of reality? If a prominent red-sky-truther announces a public demonstration in your area, are you obliged to simply ignore them and let them wave their flags and pass out their pamphlets, no matter how wrong they are? Finally, if a candidate running on a platform of sticking it to the elitist blue sky loyalists proposes to change all the textbooks to say that the color of the sky is unknown, are you supposed to just let them? If an opinion, sincerely believed, is at odds with reality, is one still obligated to respect it? Moreover, is a person who supports such an opinion publicly to be protected from being challenged?

Mind you, this isn’t just a thought experiment; plenty of real people believe things that are patently false. It’s also not a new issue; the question of how to reconcile beliefs and reality goes back to the philosophical discussions of antiquity. But the question of how to deal with blatantly false beliefs seems to have come back with a vengeance, and as the presidential election gets up to speed, I expect this will become a recurring theme, albeit one probably stated far more angrily.

So we need to grapple with this issue again: Are people entitled to live in a fantasy world of their choosing? Does the respect we afford people as human being extend to the beliefs they hold about reality? Is the empirical process just another school of thought among several? I suppose I have to say don’t know, I just have very strong opinions.