Understanding climate change and fimbulwinter by watching your shower

Just yesterday a CNN announcer said that Trump needs to learn the difference between climate and weather. But actually, it’s trickier than that. Another guy in Ireland looked forward to the coming warm Riviera in Normandy, but actually what is coming to him relentlessly and relatively soon is more like the fimbulwinter of the Ragnarok prophecy, just for Western Europe (which depends on the Gulf stream).

People who are not trained as mathematicians jn subjects like chaos theory tend to assume that tomorrow will be like yesterday, that trends will always keep going in the same direction. Their subconscious minds have often not had the kind of experience which lets them really appreciate, emotionally, what may come next. When things push into the initial election of Obama, say, some people get full of euphoria and wishful thinking, imagining that that is the beginning of a trend, when in reality it is more like a swing going all the way up one way, leading to momentum in the opposite direction. Likewise the election of Trump, and the recent midterms.

Today I still plan to do simple concrete things, like helping my wife with taxes and organizing physical objects around the house, but the “voice of God” (oversimplified description of something real and important) had some exact words which I feel I should pass on [adding some side comments; I apologize for not remembering how to be more concise].

When right-brained, concrete thinkers (including autistic people or people who actually practice “be here now” mindfulness all the time) take a shower, they “just take a shower.” In the shower, they do not think great thoughts about the future, the coming day, the grand world, science, or people they know. They really look at those weird controls which turn the water on or off and change the temperature. [Comment: water. Temperature. What do water and temperature have to do with the Gulf Stream or global warming. Can you imagine any possibility of a real connection?] They feel the water, its flow and temperature, on every part of their body, and notice when they like it and when they don’t. They notice parts of themselves adjusting to the flow, and they notice when they have to change the valve a little to make it better. Unless they are very lucky, they notice it doesn’t work best just to turn it on initially and forget it. If they travel, like us, they notice that showers tend to be different, and that different showers require different adjustments. They do all this without words or mathematics; they just do it directly and physically, the same way that a raccoon would, if raccoons took shower. [Comment: we once had a Jacuzzi in our backyard, but a family of raccoons started to use it, and one of their kids, not knowing mathematics got stuck. Not long after, we decided just to build over that little bit of land.]

Left brained people (like what Temple Grandin calls people with Williams syndrome) liberate their thoughts and their spirit from the here and now. Usually on earth they rely mainly on a great flow of words to express grand thoughts which they tend to be very proud of. They sometimes forget about the importance of reality testing, but many of them question the concept of reality itself. They hardly notice the shower, because they have more important things to think about. In discussing climate change, they tend to notice other people more than they notice the sun or the sleet on their faces, let alone what icebergs are actually doing.

Sane people fully integrate the left and right brain, to a degree which is rare on our planet, in part because humans are only part of the way through a major transition in the evolution of intelligence, and in part because our education systems and culture do not bring us to our full potential.  People with second order sanity notice not only the sleet on their faces but the flow of spirit or qi, but those who talk about those things without a firm attainment of first order sanity tend to be confused or even dangerous.

And so… taking a shower is a great example or testbed of some of the basic principles of nonlinear systems, chaos and control.

When I get frustrated that the shower water is suddenly too cold or too hot, I always remember Norbert Wiener’s classic book Cybernetics, and the insanely complex elaborations which engineers sometimes write down which basically just express what Wiener said about overshoot and undershoot and time delay. I even remember what the great chemical engineer, Tom McAvoy, taught me about sticky valves in big chemical plants which he taught the big companies how to control. [See www.werbos.com/Mind.htm or html for a link to chapter 10 of HIC, which I coauthored with him.] Really, it is like the swing, where moving too far in one direction may work at first, and then immediately cause an opposite motion. It may cause excess mass in one part of the plant, and not enough in another. The flow of water in the North Atlantic and the Arctic is just like that, a mathematically precise mix of inflow and outflow balancing each other, warming some places and cooling others… and then reversing if we don’t REALLY wake up and really do the best we can in a rational way to save western Europe, and avert the rest of the ragnarok prophecy.  

[I previously posted a more technical substantive summary of the fimbulwinter threat at
https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/01/response-to-policy-options-for-new-us.html.
as usual, I started from math and physics and tried to translate step by step..]

[OK: duty done. Back to earthy things. Notice that I don’t object to “be here now;” it’s just that we need to be effective in our focus AND capable of shifting it consciously, and we need to use our whole mind when we make sense of what we see in the here and now. Levitin has a nice best seller grounded in neuroscience which explains part of this. Actually, the science of taking a good shower is more than just this simple early stuff, but “the voice of god” did not ask me to get into such details today.]
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I was bemused by Trump saying that Senator Klobuchar "looked like a snowman" at her presidential announcement in Minnesota, a place we have been to recently. In fact, her announcement on CNN looked a lot like my little video of "happiness in Iceland"! Could she or other folks we know in Minnesota somehow cool things down? Way beyond the scope of this blog...