Extreme Winter Arctic Cold Does NOT Mean Less Global Warming
The December 2017/ January 2018 Arctic Freeze in North America can be interpreted as possible evidence for a planetary weather-control system with altered control mechanisms, and should not be misconstrued as evidence against an overall warming climate. The presence of more-extreme climate fluctuation may be revealing.
During the first few weeks of the present arctic cold spell gripping North America, President Trump is said to have commented, with what was likely to have been more than a bit of dismissive sarcasm, that some global warming would be in order to offset the cold (I’m paraphrasing). Since the onset of scientific certainty regarding climate change, this backhanded denial of overall climate warming has regularly been one reaction to such winter freezes among U.S. government officials. For example, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is widely known for having carted a snowball into the Senate chamber to put an exclamation point on the assertions of this “climate-change-is-a-hoax” political crowd.
Cybernetics: Complex Systems Fluctuate
Parameters in all complex adaptive systems fluctuate, often around some intermediate value that is sometimes referred to as a set point, using language commonly applied to a home thermostat. The core temperature of the human body is a useful example, much simpler that the planetary control of weather; but it’s a good way to introduce the general ideas because we all have personal experience of our bodies reacting to getting colder or warmer. Our body’s set point, stored in the brain’s hypothalamus, is known to be, in most cases, 37 °C (98.6 °F). This number represents the temperature of blood in the body’s core — blood inside internal organs such as inside the heart muscle or the liver. There’s some variability in this set-point value, which may differ among individuals by as much as 1 °C.
And while this core temperature varies with the weather, one’s level of physical exertion, and other factors, physiological control mechanisms tend to maintain it near that approximately 37 °C set point. In short, core body temperature fluctuates over time because sense-and-respond control mechanisms detect variance from that core temperature and respond by attempting to return core temperature to its set point, 37 °C. This is a core body temperature most favorable for the desirable speed (rates) of warm-blooded biochemical reactions (metabolism). Too cold and metabolism is too slow, particularly for the brain. Too hot and the risk of structural changes to delicate large molecules like proteins ensues. Without going into details, many of us are familiar from personal experience with these core-temperature-adjusting response mechanisms that, in physiology, are routinely known as negative-feedback controls.
When it’s too hot inside core blood, our skin sweats and becomes flushed, as more blood is shunted from the warmer core blood vessels to the blood vessels in the cooler skin where it can lose heat to the outside environment. Sweating itself also causes loss of body heat, energy being lost from the skin in promoting the evaporation of liquid water on the skin to water vapor in the air.
When it’s too cold in core blood, the opposite occurs, that is, blood is retained inside the core and only minimally shunted to the skin, so as to minimize skin heat loss. You might experience less warm blood in the skin as cold hands and feet. Depending on how much core temperature has fallen, you might also begin to shiver, and you can improve the situation by stamping your feet or running in place because muscles generate heat as they use biochemical energy to produce motion. An increased concentration of thyroid hormone in the blood is also a factor because it can increase the rate of metabolism of all body cells, which also generates heat.
Your thermo-regulation system is said to be fluctuating around its set point, exhibiting oscillatory behavior, also known as sinusoidal behavior (see image). This bears some resemblance to the situation in a thermostat-controlled home heating system.
Extreme and Destructive Fluctuation can Indicate a System in Altered Regulatory Competence
Suppose these controls are so challenged by temperature extremes that they are unable to return core body temperature to the set point? At the cold extreme, hypothermia can occur, as core temperature falls below 35 °C, exemplified acutely by someone who falls through thin ice into a 0 °C pond, or chronically in homeless individuals without adequate shelter and/or thermally insulating clothing. With the levels of US homelessness increasing this past year, cases of hypothermia might also be unfortunately expected to rise if this upward trend in homelessness continues into 2018.
At the hot extreme, heatstroke may occur, which, if prolonged as a core temperature 40 °C or higher can damage your brain, heart, kidneys and muscles. Because it has the most stringent requirements for running its metabolism, the brain is most sensitive to these extremes of temperature, and individuals often exhibit signs of disorientation and diminished mental competence in both situations: heatstroke and hypothermia. Without external intervention, death is usually the outcome, as illustrated by possibly as many as 70,000 European heatstroke deaths in the terrible summer of 2003. The forecast is that extreme heat is regularly expected for forthcoming European summers.
Such extreme fluctuation around a set point generally indicates a system in distress, one whose normal internal controls have become inadequate to cope with external physical situations. For example, the repeated cycles of “chills and sweats” often symptomatic of flu (influenza) represent an example of an impaired thermo-regulation system, which isn’t controlling body temperature as well as usual; this involves viruses, your immune system and your brain. In extremely stressful conditions, what might be normal oscillatory behavior for some body systems can also sometimes change into less predictable behavior. (One possible outcome is chaotic behavior, a mathematically described situation — known to occur in damaged hearts — that is not the same as random behavior, and that is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Extreme Weather and Our Planet’s Stressed Control Systems
Although the parameters are far more complex than for body-temperature regulation, and the control systems are more poorly understood and less predictable, the general idea of a complex system fluctuating more extremely than usual tends to reveal a system in some state of altered regulatory competence. If your home heating system begins to show less-reliable behavior, you would certainly try to repair it, possibly beginning with complete replacement of its thermostat.
With respect to Mother Earth, so many human-provoked changes have occurred in its subsystems — from the rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases engendering both atmospheric heating and acidified oceans (with acidic contributions by sulfur oxides from centuries of coal burning), to plastic pollution of those oceans, to deforestation, and wide-scale toxicity to ecosystems by industrial waste, herbicides, and pesticides. To propose that more-extreme fluctuation of planetary weather-control may point to a compromised ability of planetary feedback-control systems to restrict such excessive fluctuation is a reasonable, albeit disturbing explanation for what appears to be increased prevalence of extreme weather. From extreme arctic freezes four months after summer heat waves, droughts, and wildfires, as well as for other extreme weather events such as the succession of horribly destructive tropical storms of summer/autumn 2017, it’s conceivable that planetary control mechanisms have been altered by the cumulative environmental stresses of human occupancy on earth.
So, respectfully, President Trump and Senator Inhofe, the current freeze isn’t likely to be a sign that global warming is a hoax, but, in addition to being just short-term weather in a long-term system, could also be a harbinger of an altered planetary weather-control system.
It would be lovely if our politicians and their corporate masters could become better versed in science before running-out streams of 140-character drivel or pointing to snowballs as significant evidence of anything other than a local snowfall or an old freezer in need of defrosting.
