New Blue Ocean Event poll today on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum. Below you can read forum member Sam‘s full comment and clarification.

Some perhaps want (as in “desire”) a blue ocean event. Those here who may, don’t do so because they want it. They most often do so because it is now inevitable in the very near term, and they perhaps believe that a BOE might shock other people into understanding the severity of where we are, the urgency and magnitude of what must be done, and to actually do something meaningful. 

However, I think that the problem isn’t that at all. I don’t think anyone on this forum seriously wants or desires a BOE. The folks here understand what a BOE portends. It is the ringing of the bell announcing the beginning of the catastrophic changing of the climate of the world in ways mankind can barely imagine. 

Throughout our society and world, people process information differently. We are not all the same. Much of humanity processes information strongly through the lens of emotion, through fear, desire, and other emotional frames. 

A much smaller part of humanity uses emotion, but separates that from logic, reason, analysis and the like, and processes primarily through reason colored by emotion. 

An even smaller fraction takes this much further and processes information almost exclusively through reason with little involvement of emotion. Others go even farther, and not through choice but by genetic inclination, and simply lack certain emotions. Depending on which emotions they lack, you may find them as firefighters, or as sociopaths; extreme polar opposites.  

The mistake I believe is to presume that when people say, report, suggest, or predict things like a blue ocean event, that that means that they want or desire such a thing. That is a misinterpretation. Commonly that has as its origin the confusion that arises from trying to interpret someone else’s statements based on ones own internal setup. The same happens in reverse of course, with different wording and conclusions, such as someone processing information via logic concluding that another speaker is emotional and therefor irrational. 

More fundamentally, the error starts in presuming that everyone else is just like ourself in how they process information, in what their abilities are, and all manner of other ways. So therefor …. they said XXX, which must then mean that YYY. 

The BOE is coming. Nothing we (all of mankind) can do now will stop that, shy of some damn fool starting a large nuclear exchange and triggering a global winter for a decade. Even then, that will only temporarily delay the BOE. It won’t prevent it.

You should not read those words as me desiring such a thing. Neither should you read it as me fearing one farther off and choosing to try to scare people. Both interpretations would be and are entirely wrong. I mean by my words quite literally what they say, and nothing more. A BOE is coming. It will arrive very soon. And we now lack the ability to stop it. At the very best, using tragic means, we could delay it.

I believe, perhaps wrongly, that the much worse condition of a full year BOE might yet still be avoided. That will require the immediate concerted and united actions of everyone on earth. And those actions will have to be devastatingly large civilization ending scales of action to succeed. 

But, I do not see any chance that humanity will choose to take such bold actions. As a result, I see no chance that we will avoid the much larger catastrophes to follow as a result. 

I don’t desire any of those things. Desire has absolutely nothing to do with it. 

Sam

Arctic Sea Ice Forum

Due in large part to ongoing Collapse of Arctic Sea Ice our Frozen Earth is Going South.