Man Is Not Irenic
Dolors & Sense
by Sanford Rose
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—9/12/11—Hurricane Irene was an oxymoron: The word “irenic” means peaceful, which Irene was anything but.
Man, however, is no more peaceful than a hurricane. Far from it.
He continues to war on his own environment, thereby creating the preconditions for the development of many more of Irene’s ilk which, in turn, are likely to exacerbate autochthonous human aggressiveness.
Big words, but also some science.
Global warming is anthropogenic. Man is principally responsible for the fact that the Earth is currently receiving more heat energy than it is radiating back into space.
A warmer Atlantic Ocean creates more atmospheric water vapor.
Water vapor has tremendous latent heat. That’s the heat it acquires when evaporating from the ocean. It’s a lot of heat because it takes a lot of energy to unbind the molecular structure of water.
When the vapor condenses and falls as rains, all that locked-in energy becomes available as fuel for a storm.
The more fuel, the greater the wind velocity.
The greater this velocity, the more destructive the storms. (And the relationship is non-linear. Increase the wind speed by 10 percent, and you increase the destructive potential of the storm by a third.)
The more destructive the storms, the greater the agricultural damage.
The less food people have, the more likely they are to fight each other. (There is a documented relationship between El Ninos, which parch crops, and African civil wars.)
Thus, the stress that man imparts to the climate, in a misguided effort to improve his life, ends up worsening that life.
That’s ironic, if not irenic.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)