A Dialectics of Climate Change?

Dialectical Materialism is the only methodology capable of grappling system-wide qualitative change.

Multi-Factor Cyclic Systems

and their Forms of Stability & Change

The current crucial climate debate surrounding what was always called, until recently, "Global Warming", is complicated by the multi-cycle nature of our world's weather systems, as they are affected both externally, primarily by the Sun, and internally by the composition and movements of Earth's atmosphere. 

This too is modified both from within as well as from the outside, influenced by both natural and Man-Made systems, and occurring usually at tempos so very different, at least initially, to the actual life-spans of individual human beings, BUT nevertheless entirely capable of succumbing to cataclysmic overall, planet-wide transformations - though more often only suffering from recoverable Crisis Interludes.

Such complications are then used to demote all such negative interludes as being solely due to quite normal oscillations to-and-fro of any complex, multi-part varying system - but one which, nevertheless, self-corrects to a "normal-settled-stability" - and is consequently "Nothing to worry about".

And such a conclusion is the only possible one, if and only if, the usually assumed Principle of Plurality, is true: for it allows ONLY Fixed Laws, and Stability as its inevitable outcomes in almost every varying Interlude.

So, the problem is, that without the appropriate philosophic stance, for a real changing and developing Reality, it will always be impossible to know where the situation actually is dynamically, and whether the current crisis is temporary or terminal!

The problem is, of course, dialectical, involving the unavoidable causal interactions of multiple simultaneous factors, which can, and indeed do, wholly dissociate in what is termed an Emergence or Revolution, of what appeared to be a wholly stable, even permanent situation.

The best Mankind will ever be able to do in such situations, is monitor those crises, both as they occur now, and as they have in the past, as ultimately providing sufficient evidence of some interpretable forms, as are generally left behind in the resultant surfaces of the ground, which are later turned into permanent records, sometimes revealed, but also ever more often fairly deeply buried beneath our feet.

Geologist researching past cataclysms in Greenland

Clearly, Philosophy, is NOT as the idealists see it - merely the Discipline of Human Thought - but, on the contrary, it is the Discipline for our Understanding of Everything, including Material Reality, and its indisputable ongoing Development.

But, crucially, the long established stance, in both all the Sciences, and in most Reasoning, has, for millennia, been what we call Plurality, which can only ever deal with a trajectory of merely Quantitative Change, whereas, for example, the whole clearly evident Emergence of Life, from NON-Living Matter, simply must totally refute such a simplifying stance, as being wholly inappropriate - for actual Qualitative Changes would MOST certainly have occurred, in such dramatic developments, which would have to physically and chemically explain such Qualitative Changes - always totally impossible via Plurality.

Indeed, though the development of the very first Intellectual Discipline - Mathematics, was made possible only via the invented special relational-premises of the Greeks, they were Totally Pluralist, and could never be the basis of any other Intellectual Disciplines, which just have to handle Qualitative Changes causally, rather than merely descriptively, and after the fact, so enabling at least the overall trajectories of such changes to be made sense of.

But, as distinct from damaging total calamities, the vast majority of natural situations are NOT straightforward avalanches of Change, but always involve whole sets of multiple simultaneous and interacting processes - usually significantly always involving whole sequences of differing Cycles, though, at the same time, of similar Qualitative Changes, resulting in very unusual trajectories involving both long-lasting interludes of "Balanced Stabilities", which were preceded in their final formation, by a series of multiple Crises, and always, at some terminating stage, are totally dismantled in a general, everything-involved dissolution, which then rather quickly builds a wholly new Balanced Stability upon the changed products and properties of that Dissolution.

Emergence theory is an extension of Dialectical Materialism by this author (Jim Schofield)

Now, the Earth, as an affected body within the Solar System is NOT as Newton might have believed, majorly determined by Geometry and Gravitation, but also subject to other influences and past collisions, to maybe cause its Spin, its axis Tilt, and its capture of a Moon, plus an evidently constant Solar Wind of energetic Charged Particles from the sun, and whatever caused it to develop an internal Magnetism and extensive Magnetic Field.

And, just to concentrate upon its Global Atmosphere, with constant angular momentum throughout, but with different radii beteen the Equator and areas closer to the Poles, the surface will be moving at very different speeds an affecting the local atmospheres differently.

While the different angles of the Sun's rays onto its curved surface as well as the Day/Night on/off nature of that Radiation will all affect various areas of the Atmosphere differently too!

Finally the Earth's Orbit around the Sun is elliptical rather than circular so there will be Yearly variations in the radiation reaching earth at different times and places.

Indeed, all of these will be modified by the Earth's Spin, there will be multiple cycles, all of them constantly repeated but at different rates and different amounts of external heating from the Sun!

And the Question must arise, "Why is the Weather usually so ordered, within a season, and what might both make this happen, and, alternatively sometimes appear to approach chaos?"