clothing for Latourian women

Earlier today I was walking fairly rapidly down the street near this Club. In a window, I saw a female mannequin labelled with a sign that said “irreduction”. I walked another 20 meters or so before it hit me: “What?! No way!”

I turned around and walked back to look. But no, it actually said “reduction”. I was merely seeing things.

the timeline

Got caught in the rain, so I went out to get a copy of the Irish Times. Accidentally, I ran across an interview with Lovelock done at his Dublin hotel. It went into a bit more detail about the timetable he imagines.

Complete melting of the Arctic ice may take 30 years. That’s the point at which the Arctic Ocean will start absorbing extra sunlight for the first time in millennia. Ocean temperatures and thus land temperatures will rise worldwide. That will have the following disastrous feedback effects…

*The Canadian and Siberian permafrost will melt, releasing lots of extra carbon dioxide and increasing the problem all the more.

*Algae will die off from excessively hot water, eliminating a CO2 absorber.

*Tropical forests will die off from excessive heat, eliminating another major CO2 absorber.

The result will be a permanently hotter climate, with a maximum of 1 billion humans distributed much more heavily toward the Arctic. Many major areas of human population in 2009 will be vast windswept deserts in 2100, including most of Europe and Asia, though oases will still exist near mountains (so perhaps Switzerland would survive as a fertile mountain oasis surrounded by European desert).

He’s 89, but does say that he worries about his grandchildren and one great-grandchild, and counsels them on where to live. A couple of them live in Australia. Somewhat to my surprise he said that’s not a bad choice (surprising because he was harping on recent drought conditions in Australia last night). But Australia has a low population density, and he seems to think that’s a survival key.

Oddly, in the newspaper interview he seems to take the view that “hey, stuff happens; this is how evolution works; we’ll probably get through this stronger than ever, but our population is going to drop way off; it sounds horrifying to those of us who grew up with the current climate, but younger people may find it exciting, just as I found it exciting to live through WWII”.

ADDENDUM: He does think it’s probably out of our hands by now, and we’re doomed to drop to 1 billion by 2100. However, he does hold out hope for the one technology I mentioned last night, which turns farm waste into charcoal. Charcoal, he says, is as durable as gold, and if buried will keep a lot of CO2 underground and out of the atmosphere.

Dublin roundup

The hotel really is a charmer. The room is gigantic, and has a 3rd floor (in the American system) view over the Green. It won’t be the quietest room I’ve ever had, but my new Zamalek flat in Cairo on Brazil Street is a noise machine and I’m already used to it.

The only hassle is that the Club is all booked tomorrow night for a wedding, so I have to move out tomorrow for one night and then return for the final three.

I decided not to go back to campus today. It’s too gloomy and foreboding with rain for the seaside, but I want to reflect on tomorrow’s lecture in silence a bit more. I’ve seen the room where I will be speaking, which is something I find very important. It’s always a bit unnerving not be able to visualize the space in which you will be on the spot for a couple of hours.

Wandered down a side-street to look at books. I picked up a Levinas collection, just because I had never read his rearks about de Waelhens, and since de Waelhens was the Ph.D. advisor of Lingis that whole scene is my own indirect connection to Levinas. And by the way, the stock price on Levinas is still far too low. The reason is that most of his defenders defend him for unconvincing reasons. Levinas has become associated in the public mind with pious, finger-wagging drivel, and only a certain percentage of the intellectual public enjoys that. In fact, the Levinasian ontology is brilliant: the stuff of science fiction. It’s just ignored in favor of injunctions about being nice and treating the Other with respect, which perhaps we don’t need philosophers to know how to do.

Then walked across the river to Soup Dragon. Thanks to Tom Sparrow for the tip. They had about 6 vegetarian selections. I chose the mushroom and lentil, and yes it was tasty. But knowing that fungus is a closer cousin of humans than plants, mushrooms are about as close to outright cannibalism as a vegetarian ever gets.

Then crossed over the river again and found my 2002 hotel. It has sentimental value, because that’s where I received my first-ever copy of a book authored by myself, and that’s a great moment for any author. From Ireland I was going straight back to Iowa that time, and thought I would drive into Chicago to pick up the books from Open Court. What happened is that they ended up printing it 3 weeks ahead of schedule. Carolyn Madia Gray, then the marketing director at Open Court, was kind enough to FedEx me a copy in Dublin. In fact, I am now sitting in the very cybercafe from which that entire transaction was arranged. I was able to follow the shipment on the FedEx website going through London. Then it showed up at the hotel only minutes before I left on the train for Galway.

This time, there was a different sort of book waiting for me at the Club– that Lovecraft’s Favorite Weird Stories anthology, which I asked Amazon to ship to me here. That’ll make for good reading in the definitely “Weird” atmosphere of the club where I am staying.

analytic pedantry types

Oh, this is fun. Jon Cogburn’s blog is building on my typology of pedants. Cogburn himself points to Brandom’s use of italics in lieu of argumentation as a type of pedantry that neds a name. And int he comemnts section one Mark Silcox gives a concrete suggestion:

“Crispin Wright: Pedantry of Attrition. I.e., ‘here are seventeen different arguments for why you can have anti-realism without logical revision. Some of them suck, and others are really just iterations, but by the end of my book, you will be bludgeoned into submission.’ Posted by: Mark Silcox | April 15, 2009 at 08:55 PM”

*lol*

Also, I have to agree with Cogburn that Quine is just a dreadful writer. I’ve heard a number of analytic philosophers claim that Quine is an outstanding prose stylist, but I’m not even sure how to respond to a statement as idiotically off the wall as that one. Anyone capable of saying such a thing is hardly worth having a discussion about style with, since they clearly must believe that lack of precision is the only factor that makes a style bad.

But at least Quine is a better stylist than Sellars, who is the worst prose writer I know of in any tradition.

the day’s plan

It’s still gloomy and rainy, which again dampens any hope I may have had to go to the seaside today. Most likely I will return to UCD and “my office” to work a bit more on tomorrow’s lecture. And if I’m still on campus at 5:00, then sure, I’ll go see Horstmann’s lecture. (Not sure what he’s talking about today.)

But now is also the time to change hotels. Until now I’ve been on my own tourist budget on the south side of the river, but today I’m switching to visiting speaker accomodations at the Hibernian Club. This should be fun. It’s an old Gentleman’s Club. Women were not allowed in the old days, and it was lots of guys sitting around smoking cigars, according to my first taxi driver on this trip. By now, a normal percentage of women is there, and it’s a strictly non-smoking establishment. (Come to think of it, every place in Ireland seems to be no-smoking. The Liverpool fanatics next to me the other night kept leaving the pub for smoke breaks even during the match.)

However, the Club does still maintain its snooty dress code policy from olden times: gentlemen must wear jacket and tie in the dining room at all times. Peadar warned me of that somewhat embarrassedly yesterday afternoon, but I had already read it on their website. As I grow older, I start to appreciate these sorts of arbitrary little social rules, just as I loathed them as a high school student.

p.s. of course

p.s. Of course, he also has his critics. It’s also important to read attacks on claims of this magnitude, which is what I want to do next.

like a sledgehammer over the head

So, all I can think about this morning is climate change. I’ve had that fear in the back and sometimes front of my head like everyone else. But today is the first day when it is the #1 fact in my conscious mind for hours at a time. An 89-year-old man hit me over the head with a sledgehammer. I didn’t speak to any other humans after that lecture except to ask for directions on the street a few times. Just went to a pub and kept reading more.

What was the really chilling part for me about last night’s lecture? I think previously I allowed myself a bit of agnosticism about temperature fluctuations and the like. But if Lovelock is right, then what really dooms us is the disappearing ice cap. Once that is gone, the oceans automatically turn into a big heat sucker taking in 80% of solar energy. So the earth itself is now not on our side, but becomes as big a problem as thousands of coal-burning factories would be.

I’ll try not to post overly much about these things, but they’ll probably be on my mind a great deal in the coming months.

I forgot to mention one helpful technology he was really promoting last night… Some sort of device that allows farmers worldwide to turn bio-waste into charcoal, which can then be buried. This takes a lot of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, apparently. Better yet, farmers would do this voluntarily, because the device produces salable bio-fuel as a biproduct. The profit motive would make them do it even if responsibility would not.

Last night, he made it sound like Ireland and New Zealand are the only safe places for the year 2100. In the book there’s actually a slightly larger variety of options (he obviously likes large islands).

*very good places to live= Ireland, New Zealand, Tasmania, Taiwan. He didn’t mention Iceland, though I’ll bet it makes the list, especially since they are energy self-sufficient. If memory serves he also said Hawaii. Note: I still don’t quite get why all these island nations will supposedly not be ruined by rising sea levels, but Lovelock is obsessed with sea levels, so I assume he must have figured out that these islands won’t lose a significant portion of land mass to flooding.

*pretty good places to live= Japan, England/Scotland/Wales. In principle these are good as the ones listed above, but in practice they are carrying more people than they can handle.

*totally screwed= continental Europe, China, India

*moderately screwed= USA, Russia. These will suffer gigantic dust bowl conditions, but lower population density in these countries compared with the three just listed gives far greater margin for error

Northern Canada and Siberia should be good places to live.

Egypt would surely be totally screwed. The only reason our desert country can support –what, 75 million people despite being 98% desert? Is because of the Nile. This is why it is official Egyptian foreign policy to bomb any Nile dams constructed by countries such as Ethiopia or Sudan. The Egyptian public still feels a lot of rage toward Israel, but in a couple of decades they may not have that luxury, with water becoming a more immediate issue than Palestine. In my opinion there’s a far greater chance of a war between Egypt and its southern neighbors than between Egypt and Israel, at least over the medium term.