On the Role of Agribusiness in Global Warming

Agriculture is a major source of carbon and methane emissions, which in turn are responsible for the general trend of the warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. In fact, agriculture emits more than all of the cars on the roads. 10 percent of the emissions carbon dioxide and methane in the U.S. come from the agricultural sector. Livestock is the biggest source of methane. Cows, for example, emit methane. Methane from a number or sources, including the thawing permafrost, accounted for 30 percent of global warming in 2023. As global population has grown exponentially since the early 1900s, herds of livestock at farms have expanded, at least in the U.S., due to the increasing demand.[1] We are biological animals, and we too must eat. More people means that more food is needed, and the agricultural lobby in the U.S. is not about to let the governments require every resident to become a vegetarian. Indeed, the economic and political power of the large agribusinesses in the U.S. have effectively staved off federal and state regulations regarding emissions. It comes down to population, capitalism, and plutocracy warping democracy.

The full essay is at "On the Role of Agribusiness in Global Warming."

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1. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.

On the Impact of Political Rhetoric: From “Global Warming” to “Climate Change”

Words matter in politics. The side that can frame a question by definitively naming it in the public mind enjoys a subtle though often decisive advantage in the debate and thus in any resulting public policy as well. For example, “pro-choice”privileges the pregnant woman, while “pro-life” defines the abortion debate around the fetus. Similarly, “global warming” implies a human impact, whereas“climate change” defines the issue around nature. Even though the shift from“global warming” to “climate change” is more in keeping with the evolving science and won’t be bumped off by a cold winter, political players have been the driving force—language hardly being immune to ideological pressure.

Regarding the weather shifting popular perception on the issue, research published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 2011 claimed that a bad winter can indeed discredit the “global warming” label.[1] The Washington Policy Center claimed two years later that the heavy snowfall during the latest winter had led to “climate change” replacing “global warming.”[2] The cold refusing to relent in March of 2013 and hitting North America hard in January of 2019 seemed to undercut or repudiate the scientific “global warming” hypothesis even though meteorology, a empirical science,  always demands long-term data.

However, in looking back at the name-change, we must consider the influence of political actors, who are prone to manipulate the public's perception in part by using words to frame the debate. In 2002, for example, Frank Luntz wrote a confidential memo to the Republican Party suggesting that because the Bush administration was vulnerable on the climate issue. The White House should abandon the phrase “global warming,” he wrote, in favor of “climate change.”[3] As if by magic, although “global warming” appeared frequently in President Bush’s speeches in 2001, “climate change” populated the president’s speeches on the topic by 2002.[4] In other words, the president’s political vulnerability on the issue was answered by changing the label to reframe the debate. Not missing a beat, critics charged that the motive was political in downplaying the possibility that carbon emissions were a contributing factor.[5] Both Bush and Cheney had ties to the oil and gas industry. In fact, Cheney's through Halliburton may have played a role in the administration's advocacy in favor of invading Iraq under the subterfuge that it had been involved in the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001. 

The Obama administration likely went with “climate change” rather than "global warming" because the former was less controversial. The corporate Democrat tended to hold to the center politically; after all, Goldman Sachs had contributed a million dollars to his first presidential campaign in 2008. In September 2011, the White House decided to replace the term “global warming” with “global climate disruption.”[6] The administration subsequently annulled its own decision. 
So much attention on the matter of a mere label indicates that just how important what you call something is to its outcome. Labels are not always neutral. For instance, the term "African American," was making inroads whereas "Black American" was hardly ever heard. "African" slips in ethnicity whereas "Black," or negroid, refers to race. Changing the axis on which the controversy had hinged was in favor of the race-now-ethnicity. Meanwhile, the American public didn't notice the artful conflation of ethnicity (i.e., culture) and race. Obama used the ethnic term and applied it to himself even though his mother was Caucasian. He also claimed Illinois as his home state even though he moved to Chicago after college. He could benefit politically from the support of Black Americans and Illinoisans. 
Similarly, Obama could benefit politically from adopting "climage change." As the academic journal Public Opinion Quarterly reported in 2011, “Republicans are far more skeptical of ‘global warming’ than of ‘climate change.’” Whereas the vast majority of Democrats were indifferent to the label being used.[7] With “global warming” carrying “a stronger connotation of human causation, which has long been questioned by conservatives,” Obama stood to gain some republican support simply by changing how he refers to the issue.[8] That support was part of the president's ability to straddle the center in American politics. 
Given the effort that has gone into labels, it is amazing that more time in the Congress has not gone into debating labels. I am also curious why the American people did not realize that they were being manipulated by the choice of label. If "climate change" allows for the contention that human-sourced carbon emissions into that atmosphere have not been a cause of the warming of the oceans and air, then it is possible that the very survival of the species could be in jeopardy because of  the choice of a label for short-term economic and political reasons.

1. Tom Jacobs, “Wording Change Softens Global Warming Skeptics,” Pacific Standard, March 2, 2011. 

2. Washington Policy Center, “Climate Change: Where the Rhetoric Defines the Science,” March 8, 2011.

3. Oliver Burkeman, “Memo Exposes Bush’s New Green Strategy,” The Guardian, March 3, 2003.

4. Ibid.

5. Washington Policy Center, “Climate Change: Where the Rhetoric Defines the Science,” March 8, 2011.

6. Erik Hayden, “Republicans Believe in ‘Climate Change,’ Not ‘Global Warming’,” The Atlantic Wire, March 3, 2011.

7. Tom Jacobs, “Wording Change Softens Global Warming Skeptics,” Pacific Standard, March 2, 2011.

8. Ibid.

Climate Change: An Outsider in Democracies

The U.S. House of Representatives was created in part as an outlet for the immediacy of a people’s passions; other governmental institutions at the federal level provide a check. The term of a House representative is only 2 years, whereas that of a U.S. senator is 6 years and that of the U.S. president is four. So presumably societal  or even global  problems requiring immediate action find pressing representation in the House, whereas the perspectives of U.S. senators and presidents, being limited to six and four years respectively, are not long-term-oriented enough for problems that could blow up in decades. To register in the crowded minds of House representatives, a long-term problem yet in need of immediate attention must trigger the immediate passions of the constituents unless the representatives value principled leadership (i.e., acting in the best interests of the constituents and the country). Yet passions demanding immediate action tend, I submit, to involve anger. Climate change is thus excluded, and the long-term forecasts do little to impress upon a people how urgent rectifying action really is. Even if the scientific reports of current conditions emphasize extant dramatic changes (not to mention future forecasts with disastrous implications for humanity generally and particular regions, immediate passion is not sufficiently stirred for the U.S. House at least to prioritize addressing the problem.

A report published in January, 2019 indicates that the world’s oceans were then already 40% warmer than a U.N. panel had projected in 2014.[1] Although the data was not yet in to be included in the report, 2018 was expected to the warmest on record for ocean temperatures.

Considering that the oceans had been providing “a critical buffer” in having “slowed the effects of climate change [in the atmosphere] by absorbing 93% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases” that were from human uses (presumably including the methane released as the permafrost melts), the reported acceleration of ocean warming should have sounded over the lands as a clarion call for immediate action.[2] The most important implication from the report is that the oceans would absorb far less of the extra heat from the atmosphere if the oceans’ temperatures get high enough, which likely would come sooner than projected, the atmosphere would then show more and more of the immediately noticeable increased heat in the atmosphere. Although losing much or all of the “absorption drainage” by virtue of the seas would likely register very starkly into immediate effect as people spend time in the atmosphere—and thus likely trigger immediate governmental action, awareness of the implication before that point is likely too indirect to register on the awareness of constituents.

Even though Thomas Jefferson and John Adams agreed in retirement—long after they had sparred like dogs—they agreed that a viable republic (and we could add climate) requires an educated and virtuous citizenry (as it elects the elected government officials in a representative democracy). So universities in the U.S., unlike the E.U. and Asian countries, require that students wanting to become a lawyer or physician first get a degree in another school of knowledge, such as in the Liberal Arts and Sciences. To be sure, such a broad education admittedly helps in being able to make inferences, such as that when the oceans cut back drastically in what the amount of the extra atmospheric heat they can absorb, the atmosphere will warm up rather quickly. Still this is not enough to result in a “wake-up call,” for the proportion of college-educated adults in a given population has not been high enough. In other words, too many voters are not likely to connect such dots and thus will only be motivated to urge immediate governmental or global action with enforcement powers when the atmosphere has gone into “hyperdrive” in terms of warming that can be dramatically felt. Pain, it seems, like anger, can register as an immediate passion of the people whose representatives in at least short-termed offices will be motivated to act upon.
In a general sense, even designing one governmental institution, such as the U.S. House of Representatives, to give immediate passions influence in government is not enough for problems such as climate change to be treated as priorities. The fault extends ultimately down to human nature—how our brains are hard-wired and socially conditioned—so it may be said that the design at least of the U.S. Government is faulty with respect to human nature. In the U.S., a culture wherein the instant gratification of consumerism and quarterly earnings reports are given undue influence at the expense of self-restraint and a longer-term perspective and motivation, a problem like climate change wherein the immediate baleful effects are mitigated by the oceans falls between the cracks. This, I contend, is a major flaw in that the constitutional design has a gaping hole into which problems that are dramatic primarily in the future fall. Both in business and government, systemic design should be redesigned to give due emphasis—and even more so as to counter both the short-term-oriented American culture and human nature—to problems whose immediate effects mask the disaster coming in the future. It is as if an earthquake were reported and yet officials in cities on a coast would not recognize the obvious implication that a tsunami could come so an alarm should sound immediately rather than when the gigantic waves could be seen.  

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1 Lijing Cheng et al, “How Fast Are the Oceans Warming?” Science 363 (no. 6423), January 11, 2019.

2. Kendra Pierre-Louis, “Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds,” The New York Times, January 10, 2019.

When Partisanship Takes on Science on Global Warming: The Part before the Whole

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams concurred on the following preference—namely, a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent over the artificial sort of birth and wealth. Talent here is not merely skill, but also knowledge. Hence the two former U.S. presidents agreed that citizens ought to be given a broad basic education in free schools. The corollary is that as a citizenry lapses in virtue and knowledge, decadence will show up in public discourse and consequently public policy. If kept unchecked, the tendency is for the republic to fall.
Therefore, as governor of Virginia, Jefferson proposed a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge in 1779. His rationale was that because even “those entrusted with power” who seek to protect individual rights can become tyrants, popular education is necessary to render a republic secure. Jefferson’s hope was that by teaching “the people at large” examples of despots in history, the electorate would be more likely to recognize despots in their own time and throw the bastards out on their noses. As for those whom voters put in public offices, Jefferson believed that “laws will be wisely formed, and honestly administered, in proportion as those who form and administer them are wise and honest.” Hence, “those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights of their fellow citizens.” This is why, beginning at around 1900, law schools in the American states began to admit applicants to the undergraduate degree in law (LL.B. or J.D.) who had already earned an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts and sciences. It was not as though the undergraduate degree in law had been promoted to graduate status.
Having had largely self-governing, popularly-elected colonial legislatures for much of the seventeenth century, the nascent American republics would stand on the two pillars of virtue and talent (including knowledge) instilled in the self-governing peoples themselves as well as their elected and appointed public officials. It is said that the only constant is change, as in the extent to which an electorate is virtuous and generally knowledgeable, as well as in the related rise and fall of republics. One notable example is ancient Rome, which went from being a republic to a dictatorship under the purported exigencies of war. Lest the rise and fall of republics seems a bit too dramatic to be considered realistic, I offer the more modest thesis that a decline in virtue and knowledge among an electorate renders the public policy increasingly deficient in dealing with contemporary problems. The matter of climate change is a case in point.

According to a study at Yale in April 2013, Americans’ conviction that global warming was happening had dropped by seven percentage-points over the preceding six months to 63 percent. The unusually cold March—quite a reversal from the previous March—explains the drop, according to the poll’s authors. The cold may actually have resulted from a loosening in the artic jet-stream southward—like a rubber-band whose elasticity has been compromised—due to more open water in the arctic ocean and thus less temperature differential in the air. Even so, only 49% of Americans believed that human activities were contributing to global warming. In fact, only 42% of Americans believed at the time that most scientists had concluded that global warming is really happening. Thirty-three percent of Americans were convinced that “widespread disagreement” exists among scientists.
In actuality, a study showed of more than 4,000 articles touching on human-sourced climate change, 97% of the scientists having written the articles conclude that human-caused change was already happening. Less than 3% either rejected the notion or remained undecided. “There is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception,” one of the study’s authors remarked. “It’s staggering given the evidence for consensus that less than half of the general public think scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. This is significant,” the author concludes, “because when people understand that scientists agree on global warming, they’re more likely to support policies that take action on it.” Going back to Jefferson and Adams, ignorance among the electorate in a republic can be sufficient to divert enough political will that legislation needed to fix a societal (or global) problem is sufficiently thwarted.
Perhaps some of the apparent ignorance on global warming in 2013 could actually have been partisan angst. If President Obama favored policies predicated on the assumption that human-sourced global warming was then already underway, just his support alone could have been enough for some Republicans to hold firm in their denial of even other-sourced global warming. In holding knowledge hostage to score cheap partisan points, citizens and their representatives do not demonstrate much respect for knowledge as well as virtue; the vice of partisanship subdues the good of the whole in preference for the good of a part.
If Jefferson and Adams were correct that a virtuous and knowledgeable citizenry is vital to the continuance of a republic, the extent of ignorance and partisan vice related to global warming in spite of the nearly unanimous scientific conclusion and the huge stakes involved may suggest that the American republics and the grand republic of the Union may be on borrowed time (and money). Moreover, that the ignorance and vice pertains to global warming enlarges the implications to include the continuance of the species. That is to say, a virtuous and educated species may be necessary for its very survival.

See this PSA on global warming: http://www.thewordenreport.blogspot.com/2013/05/global-warming-psa.html


Academic Sources:

Philip Costopoulos, “Jefferson, Adams, and the Natural Aristocracy,” First Things, May 1990.

Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, “Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in April 2013,” Yale School of Forestry and Environomental Studies, 2013.

John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Mark Richardson, et al, “Quantifying the Consensus on Ahthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” Environmental Research Letters, 8 (2013) (2), pp.

Press Source:

Tom Zeller, “Scientists Agree (Again): Climate Change Is Happening,” The Huffington Post, May 16, 2013.

Springtime for China's Coal Industry: Is China Too Big to Swerve Enough to Avoid the Climatic Iceberg Ahead?

Even as Chinese government officials “called on the United States to recognize established science and to work with other countries to reduce dependence on dirty fuels like coal and oil,” China was “scrambling to mine and burn more coal.”[1] Notably, short-terms concerns were dominant. “A lack of stockpiles and worries about electricity blackouts” were “spurring Chinese officials to reverse curbs that [had] once helped reduce coal production.”[2] By December, 2016, coal mines were reopening, and with them coal miners were returning to work. The renewed activity would of course make it more difficult for China and the world to meet CO2 emissions targets, “as Chinese coal is the world’s largest single source of carbon emissions from human activities.”[3] In fact, China’s use of coal results in more emissions “than all the oil, coal, and gas consumed in the United States.”[4] The implications for being able to contain the global rise in temperature within 2 degrees C are not bright from this real-life scenario. It is important, therefore, to grasp the underlying dynamics behind China’s plight.

Even as 2014 had brought “the autumn of coal,” and 2015 and early 2016 instantiated the winter, the new spring later in 2016 came during what would be the hottest year for the planet since record-keeping began. The cyclical pattern evinced here does not fit with the maximizing nature of global warming.

The Chinese government was not adjusting fast enough, given the climatic toll even by the closing months of 2016. The sheer scale involved is likely the main culprit—China’s population being over a billion. Despite ambitious hydroelectric-dam projects and “the world’s largest program to install solar panels and build wind turbines,” coal still produced almost three-quarters of the country’s electricity.[5] Even with conservation measures on the use of electricity—which, by the way, are practically non-existent in sunbelt republics like Florida and Arizona—a billion people must necessarily consume a lot of energy cumulatively. Even with the one-child policy, the sheer size of China’s population was something the government could not ignore.

The dynamic I have in mind is that of the Titanic, the largest ship of its day (1912) and yet with a rudder that was too small, given the size of the ship, to turn it sufficiently in time to avoid the upcoming iceberg. By analogy, a climatic “iceberg” was approaching Earth so fast and was so close even by the end of 2016 that the governments of large, empire-scale, countries like China and India would need larger rudders in order to steer close enough to alternative energy sources to have even a chance of avoiding a collision with full-blown climate change. The culprit, in other words, lies not only in the proclivity of human nature to privilege instant gratification backed up by short-term politics and thinking; our ships of state are outmoded, given how large we’ve allowed our species to become. The problem is thus not in China’s rough transition from central-planning to a government-regulated free market.

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[1] Keith Bradsher, “Despite Climate Vow, China Scrambles for Coal,” The New York Times, November 30, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

Coal Industry Challenges Lower Carbon-Emission Targets: Human Nature on Full Display

With heat-waves underway and glaciers melting, climate-change was undeniable in the summer of 2015. Human nature itself was on full display. It was almost as if the human race could not summon itself into action even as the hardships of a warming world were a foregone conclusion.

"We're the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it," said Obama on August 3rd when he announced a new set of regulations for U.S. power plants that call for a 32 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, from 2005 levels, by 2030. The EPA also issued final rules for new power plants that call for phasing out new coal-fired units unless there is technology in place that can capture and store carbon emissions. Obama said the rules would reduce carbon dioxide pollution by 870 million tons, the equivalent of what is produced by 108 million homes or 166 million cars.[1] He acknowledged a battle lurked ahead, as industry groups were already gearing up to fight the rules in court.

                            Penguins face receding ice and rising waters. (Natacha Pisarenko of AP)

On the same day, the World Glacier Monitoring Service released a study providing new evidence that the world’s glaciers had melted to the lowest levels since the late nineteenth century, and the ice-melt in 2015 would likely be twice the rate in the 1990s and three times the rate the decade before that. "Globally, we lose about three times the ice volume stored in the entirety of the European Alps every year," Michael Zemp, director of the WGMS and lead author of the study said.[2]  On July 20^th, “James Hansen, the former NASA climateologist who brought climate change to the public’s attention in the summer of 1998, [had] issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065.”[3] Coastal Florida, including its vast commercial and residential real-estate, hang in the balance. Meanwhile, Californians, in the fourth year of the worst drought there in a millennium, witnessed a 50-acre brush fire swell seventyfold in just a few hours, with many other fires raging too.[4]

In spite of the clear indications that the Earth’s atmosphere was warming at an uncharacteristically high rate, the National Mining Association of coal-mining companies requested a stay in court on the EPA’s new rules while the courts have the opportunity to determine the lawfulness of the agency’s attempt to commandeer the nation’s electric grid."[5] Doubtless the focus on the EPA's power-grab did not include the fact that that July was the hottest globally since record-keeping began in 1880. The first seven months of the year were the hottest January-to-July span on record. In fact, from ice-cores scientists determined that the planet was its warmest in at least 4,000 years.[6]

Because coal-fueled power plants made up about 40 percent of the carbon emissions in the U.S. at the time, the companies were playing with fire in that their legal opposition to the rules could make an appreciable difference in how much climate change results from emissions. Put another way, a point of law could conceivably decide whether the lives of future generations of people are just uncomfortable or impossible.

"[T]he Rule . . .  aims at nothing less than the comprehensive 'transformation' of the American electric power grid," wrote Hal Quinn, the NMA's president and chief executive officer, in a letter to Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy. "Congress, however, did not give EPA the power to restructure how the nation produces and consumes electricity."[7] Even if reducing carbon emissions by a third from power plants constitutes a restructuring of the power grid, Obama’s point about his generation then in power being the first to perceive the impacts from global warming and the last to realistically keep the world’s ecosystem from getting away from us dwarfs the matter of a regulatory agency overreaching.

Of course, the matter may be as simple as that of a narrow private interest being indifferent to the general welfare. Implementing the rule, Quinn wrote, "will irreparably injure the coal mining industry, coal mining workers, and coal mining communities" and "has no purpose other than to reduce the use of coal for electric generation as a means of reducing power sector [carbon dioxide] emissions."[8] The harm to the coal-mining industry in terms of lost revenue was Quinn’s real concern. That the human race could stand in the balance in just a few generations makes the sordid nature of the industry’s self-interest transparent. In fact, the increased demand for electricity for air-conditioning could mean that the mining industry had a financial stake in global warming even though in just a few generations demand for electricity decreases due to more climate-related deaths. 

James Jansen and his colleagues warned that if carbon emissions were not cut soon, the social disruption and dire economic consequences of the sea-level rise along could be devastating. “It is not difficult to imagine,” the scientists wrote, “that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”[9] That such a prospect was rendered realistic given the clear signs of global warming already extant makes the narrow focus of the coal executives even more astonishing. To be sure, business and societal norms and perspectives can be expected to differ, and even clash, for business is but one component of society. For a part to seek to maximize its own gain at the expense of the continued viability of the whole in the foreseeable future renders the strategy highly unethical, not to mention problematic from the standpoint of society. The latter arguably has an ethical right—obligation even—to constrain the maximizing tendency of the hypertrophic part.

Beyond business and society, human nature itself, particularly in its preoccupation with instant gratification even at the risk of self-preservation in the long term, can explain why such a genetically-successful species could also be that species that alters its ecosystems to the extent that the species itself goes extinct. The force of reason pales in comparison with selfishness. On August 3, 2015, the generation that could grasp the actuality of climate change was both doing something about it and putting up obstacles. Human nature was on full display. The question is whether such nature is compatible with its own survival.

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[1] Kate Sheppard, “Obama On Climate Rules: ‘This Is Our Moment To Get This Right’,” The Huffington Post, August 3, 2015.

[2] Nick Visser, “World’s Glaciers Melting At Fastest Rate Since Record-Keeping Began,” The Worden Report, August 3, 2015.

[3] Eric Holthaus, “The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here,” Rolling Stones, August 5, 2015.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kate Sheppard, “Coal Interests Prepare To Challenge Obama’s Power Plant Rules,” The Worde Report, August 3, 2015.
[6] Nick Visser, "It's Official, July Was Earth's Hottest Month on Record," The Huffington Post, August 20, 2015.

[7] Sheppard, "Coal Interests."

[8] Ibid.

[9] Holthaus, “The Point of No Return.”

California’s Elongated Drought: Warming to a Changing Status-Quo

With the winter of 2014-2015 failing to deliver much of a snowpack to California, Californians entered a fourth year of drought. The measurement on March 3^rd of the snowpack was the water equivalent of five inches, or 19% of the average for that date.[1] The drought’s extension ran counter to the conventional wisdom that droughts last three years in California. Such “wisdom” is problematic not only for its specific content in this case, but also because of the underlying presumption of epistemological infallibility. Ok, I’ll unpack this bit of creative verbosity. Without being aware of it, we tend to assume that we can’t be wrong about things we have not studied. In fact, we even dismiss the knowledge of those who are learned in a given subject in favor of our own belief that we can’t be wrong about what we suppose we know. This tendency of the human brain gets our species in a lot of trouble, yet we as a species are nearly blind to underlying drought.

Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, said at the time, “Last year people thought we were in a regular three-year drought cycle and it would rain next year.”[2] Even though people were aware of global warming, they presumed that what they thought they knew of the drought cycle was still applicable. Underlying this assumption is the more basic one that tomorrow will be like today and yesterday.

Problematically, the three-year drought-cycle presumption may have made California’s water-situation even worse. With the rain in December 2014, Californians generally may have taken longer showers and left their bathroom facets on while brushing their teeth under the mistaken assumption that drought must be ending. The following month was dry, so people watered normally dormant landscapes.

Even in trying to explain the elongated drought, people were getting it wrong in concluding that the cause was changing precipitation patterns. Global warming, evinced in California’s record average temperature in the winter of 2014-2014 of 45.6 degrees (F), is the actual cause. “The normal cyclical conditions in California are different now from what they used to be, and that’s not because the long-term annual precipitation changed,” Noah Diffenbaugh at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment explains. “What is really different is there has been a long-term warming in California . . . (a)nd we know from looking at the historical record that low precipitation years are much more likely to result in drought conditions if they occur with high temperatures.”[3]  Yet in spite of such evidence and that of the Earth’s atmosphere as warming above and beyond normal cycles, enough people cling to their antiquated knowledge as if they cannot be wrong that I suspect that a human tendency is involved.

“It’s a three year drought,” someone in Sacramento says. The sheer declarative tone has the ring of hubris because the person has not read anything on the drought. The assumption of knowing nonetheless is precisely where the problem lies, if I am correct in my theory here. The human mind may put too much stock in its own machinery and its output. Another Californian says in San Diego, “Southern California is suffering from a shift in the precipitation pattern.” Let’s say he has not read this; it is his conclusion, or one of his friends has told him. Even without reading anything on the science of climate change even in a newspaper like The New York Times, the San Diegan may dismiss Diffenbaugh’s statement out of hand. It is the sheer dismissiveness that strikes me as arrogant, even strange. The Californian may even say (as I have heard before), “I don’t need to read the science; I know it is in dispute.” Well, actually it is not, but such a person—such a mind—would not know it because it is closed off—a closed system—and yet it is utterly unaware of what it itself has done to itself. Like the light from the most distant star, the news of the deed has not reached the doer yet—the doer who presumes to know beyond what any actual learning can bestow legitimacy.

Abstractly, I hypothesize (i.e., propose) that the human brain contains a vulnerability in bringing to experience—structuring it rather than from it (i.e., a priori rather than a posteriori)—the presumption of knowing more than is actually known and furthermore not being capable of being wrong even about such “knowledge.” It is as if a person were to go to some neighboring houses and without entering any of them proceeding nonetheless to speak in a tone of definitiveness to the occupants about what they should clean up inside. The mere tone would ooze out arrogance and presumption, and yet the speaker could be oblivious to what he is projecting from his or her own mind onto experience and thus the world—structuring it as he perceives it.

Philosophers may recall Kant’s claim that the mind provides its own structure on space and time themselves—and not from experience. Such synthetic, a priori ideas as we bring to our perception of space and time are like the epistemological assumptions that we carry around with us all the time. In both cases, we have no clue that we are bringing these ideas to the dance because we have them constantly with us. Noticing them would be like fish noticing the water in which they spend their entire lives. That which is a constant for us can easily be invisible rather than transparent to us, and thus escape our notice. Yet as Kant points out, we can notice, through reasoning.

Probing a person on knowledge we know lies beyond his or her reach, we can see the problematic assumptions in the absurdity to which he or she will go to defend the purported knowledge. Like arrogance on stilts during an increasingly common flood from a storm surge in Miami, the presumption should be under water rather than held above as if it were Moses incarnate coming down the mountain with a new tablet. Unfortunately, the mind’s internal defense-mechanisms can block the reception of even such obvious feedback, so it is probably pretty rare for the mind to “see” the “water” in which it has always resided. If I am correct, the mind itself—hence not out of experience—structures knowledge in terms of presumptuousness. That is to say, the problematic assumptions are not in the knowledge; rather, they come from the human mind and are projected onto the purported knowledge such that learning or becoming informed are assumed to be optional rather than requisite. The mind itself presumes itself so entitled even though the assumption is untenable. The fallacious thinking should be under water (naturally oblivious to it) rather than looking down from stilts as if not only legitimate at water-level, but also an authority above.

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[1] Adam Nagourney, “Alarm Rises For a State Withered By Drought,” The New York Times, March 18, 2015.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.