Johann   page 10

Sure, it makes no difference to whether you want to put a sweater on, but that's not the point. The troposphere is vast, and 0.2 C represents an immense amount of kinetic energy, which in turn drives dramatic changes in circulation and precipitation patterns. You can get a sense for this by calculating how much energy an average of 0.2 C represents.

Start with this: how much does a cubic meter of air weigh? Have you ever thought about that? A cubic meter of dry air at sea level weighs about 2.7 pounds. How much energy does it take to raise 2.7 pounds of dry air by 0.2 degrees? It turns out you can look that kind of thing up. It takes about 245 joules.

Now take that 245 joules/m^3 and multiply it by the volume of the troposphere. As you recall from calculus, you can approximate this by taking the surface area of a sphere 6,371,000 meters in radius and multiplying by the troposphere's roughly 11 km height. You should end up with a figure on the order of magnitude of 10^18 joules.

Or you can think of that as being roughly the same as 20,000 Hiroshima sized bombs. Granted the density of air 10 km up is somewhat less, but we haven't factored in the gigatons of water vapor in the atmosphere. Or interactions with the oceans; most of the excess energy goes into the oceans, and that in turn affects climate in countless ways. That's how palm trees grow in Southern Britain, even though Cornwall's further north than Maine.

And yet... You just can't feel a 0.2C change. Then again you can't feel the Coriolis force either, but that can bend a subtle pressure gradient hundreds of miles long into a cyclone, a feat no human agency can resist, much less match.

Scale matters. If there's anything scientific and mathematical literacy should teach, it's that. That's why the future of the planet can't be trusted to a semi-literate ignoramus.

https://politics.slashdot ... sid=10693485&cid=54537461

I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’.

When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.

For my mother, the Nazi holocaust was a chapter in the long history of the horror of war. It was not itself a war – she was emphatic that it was an extermination, not a war – but it was a unique chapter within the war. So for her, war was the ultimate horror. When she saw Vietnamese being bombed during the Vietnam War, it was the Nazi holocaust. It was the bombing, the death, the horror, the terror, that she herself had passed through. When she saw the distended bellies of starving children in Biafra, it was also the Nazi holocaust, because she remembered her own pangs of hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Norman Finkelstein

https://www.opendemocracy ... our-s-antisemitism-scanda

Ja, Gebote braucht der Mensch doch wohl um zu überleben
also schafft er ständig neue, sie zu übergeben

an die Welt, die nach ihm sein wird und an seine Erben
denn es lässt sich mit Geboten wirklich leichter sterben

Lernte ich doch in der Schule: Niemand solle lügen
und so war ich völlig sicher: Keiner wird betrügen

Doch im Lauf von dreißig Jahren lernte ich verstehen
Das Gebot kreiert man ja nur, um es zu umgehen

Wasserpredigt - Weingelage, so stehn die Gesetze
Und wer heut Moral noch fordert, ruft schon auf zur Hetze

Darum sah ich mich gezwungen, eigne mir zu schaffen
Zehn Gebote für mein Leben als die letzten Waffen:

Aufrecht steh'n wenn and're sitzen
Wind zu sein wenn and're schwitzen

Lauter schrei'n wenn and're schweigen
Beim Versteckspiel sich zu zeigen

Nie als And'rer zu erscheinen
Bei Verletzung nicht mehr weinen

Hoffnung haben beim Ertrinken
Nicht im Wohlstand zu versinken

Einen Feind zum Feinde machen
Solidarität mit Schwachen

Und ich hab sie nie gebrochen bis auf ein Gebot:
Bei Verletzung wein' ich manchmal, was ich mir verbot

Bettina Wegner