Libya: the state of progress

The National Transition Council (NTC) is emerging as the centre to which the world, via the UN and the unfreezing of its foreign assets, is conferring legitimacy and power. 

The NTC is headed by Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the justice minister who escaped from the Gaddafi government and organised the protests in Benghazi which grew into a violent revolution. The NTC comprises about 30 human rights lawyers and Jalil has shown leadership by insisting that he be tried for his part in the Gaddafi regime as well as threatening to resign if any of the 40 rebel forces (katibas) engage in revenge attacks.

After being in Benghazi since the start of the revolution the NTC are beginning to move into the capital, Tripoli and only a few centres of resistance remain (Sirte, Bani Walid, Jufra and Sabha). How long they keep fighting depends, possibly, on how much they trust their enemies to treat them humanely.

What are the chances of a stable representative government with law and order prevailing once military conquest is decisive enough to make this tenable?

Proposed timescale for establishing a new government.

The following times are taken from whatever date the NTC declares victory.

• 30 days – interim government formed by negotiation within this period.
• 8 months – multi-party elections.
• 20 months – by when a new constitution is to be agreed.

Causes for hope:

• The NTC was appointed in consultation with tribal and revolutionary leaders.
•  The UN is unfreezing funds, the IMF has recognised the NTC and oil revenue could resume within months.
•  There is a lot of political and diplomatic support on tap from the West.
•  The attack on each town was typically done ‘democratically’ in the sense that the invading rebel force coordinated its action with an internal uprising.
•  A substantial number of checkpoints have been dismantled.
•  Rebels with no jobs to go to may join a national army rather than engage in insurgency.
• The old army, police and civil service are to be kept on. Police are already returning to their posts in large numbers. (This avoids a major mistake made in Iraq, where these sources of order and administration were cast out onto the streets.)

Causes for concern:

•  Some African immigrants and pro-Gaddafi mercenaries have been killed by rebels. Presumably they were rogue attacks rather than in any way systematic and so the consensus is that Jalil should not resign.
•  Huge quantities of weapons, missiles and bullets have gone missing (including tens of thousands of SAM missiles). These will inevitably fall into the hands of insurgents and terrorists worldwide – not just disaffected Libyans.
•  Katibas were the revolutionary forces derived from various towns, sects and tribes, and were privately organised and funded. They appear reluctant to submit to a unified command. 
•  ‘Revolutionary committees’ used during the revolt were informers and these may find it difficult to regain the trust of their neighbours.
•  Many of the fighters became exhilarated, as is all too obvious from the constant firing of AK47s into the air. Some may be reluctant to settle down to the dull, hard work of reconstructing Libya. It is much easier to destroy than to create.
•  Electricity and water supplies are sparse and unreliable.
•  Civil servants are not yet being paid.
•  Other Arab regimes will be keen to finance insurgency.

If an Islamic form of a democracy can be achieved this would be a model for other countries in Africa and the Middle East, although there could be a high price to pay in human suffering if the existing monarchs and dictators are to be disposed.

On the other hand, it is possible that the groundswell of pressure for change from the world as a whole and the majority of people living in these countries could be so large, that their rulers would flee without resistance or seek a stake in a political system which they can see is inevitable.

Let us pray.

Main sources: Economist, BBC website, BBC World Service

John

Author, 2077 AD

Cosmic weather and climate change

A previous post showed the complex range of interacting factors which climate change models have to take into account. One of these was clouds. Depending on the type, amount, thickness and height these can have marked cooling or warming effects on the atmosphere.

The water vapour in the air is a dry colourless gas until it encounters ‘condensation nuclei’, microscopic particles floating in the air which cause condensation of water vapour into its liquid form in the same way that steam forms in bathrooms. Steam, fog and cloud are not water vapour – they consist of microscopic droplets of water which grow when the dry vapour comes into contact with the condensation nuclei.

One source of condensation nuclei now appears to be cosmic rays. Recently  CERN, an elementary particle physics lab near Geneva, has precisely simulated the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere (CLOUD, cosmics leaving outdoor droplets). The condensation nuclei created in the simulated atmosphere form about 10 times more readily when bombarded with simulated cosmic rays than when left unbombarded. So it appears that cosmic rays, mainly protons from supernovae (exploding stars) within our galaxy, typically thousands of light years away, play an important role in forming condensation nuclei and this must have a significant effect on cloud formation. 

But the cosmic rays from the depths of space do not hit the Earth’s atmosphere regularly over time. They are modulated by the solar wind and its associated interplanetary magnetic field, much weaker than our own magnetic field which offers a strong protective shield known as the Van Allen Belts. (Without these Belts life is unlikely to have evolved.)

The solar wind varies with the sunspot cycle, 11 years on average. The more active the sun the more we are protected from the cosmic rays, so the fewer will be the condensation nuclei, which means less cloud formation, which in turn means ....? No-one is sure because we don’t understand enough about the role of clouds in global warming/cooling. (Although it is fairly certain that low clouds have a cooling effect and high clouds have a warming effect.)

Apart from the cosmic rays there are other sources. Dimethyl sulphide aerosols, emitted into the air by phytoplankton in the ocean, and sulphuric acid and ammonia aerosols also affect cloud formation in ways which are not fully understood. There is also some evidence that the intensity of the cosmic ray stream itself varies over very long periods according to the position of the Earth in the Milky Way (i.e. the spiral galaxy of which the sun is part). 

So don’t blame the climate scientists if they have disagreements about the degree of global warming we can expect over the coming decades.  What cannot be denied is that most of them agree that man’s input to the weather system has caused much of the global warming since the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s.

Warming causes floods, droughts and storms. So the more we can do to stop it, or at least offset it, the better and to do this effectively requires the best possible understanding of all the influences – natural or artificial.

John

Author, 2077 AD

What is truth? (updated 2 Oct 2012)

Previous postings have expressed concern about the danger of claiming there is no objective truth. If this belief took hold civilisation would come to an end, to be replaced by paganism, where our world is at the beck and call of numerous arbitrary gods, or a kind of atheism, where all is pointless, with either view leading to a dangerous fatalism in which we have no free will and there is no incentive to understand the extraordinary reality from which nature and humanity have emerged.



Plato

But what is truth? It is not so easy to pin down. Dictionary.com has several definitions of truth. The one I’m using is as follows: the ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience. Ultimately, there can only be one truth. The definition refers to ‘the...reality’, not ‘a...reality’. Perceived experience includes not only that realised through the senses but that presented to us by scientific instruments and logical interpretation.

{Paragraph added 21 Sept 2012}. That  truth somehow exists is beyond doubt. Consider this statement: there is no  truth.  The statement itself is logically self contradictory because it is claiming to be  true. Relativism is, in the last analysis, ruled out completely.
 

Yet from generation to generation and from place to place at any one time in history different proclamations of the truth are made, because each assertion of truth is only an approximation. No-one has the authority to proclaim that he or she knows the absolute truth. However, he or she can claim to know the best approximation to it at a given stage in human history, although the adjective ‘approximate’ is usually omitted. We get closer to both scientific and spiritual truth as time goes on: our understanding of the universe, of God and our relationship to God evolves, as each generation ‘stands on the shoulders’ of previous generations.

Newton’s laws of motion  were superseded by Einstein’s because the latter have improved explanatory power – they describe a greater slice of reality in a coherent and simple way. They are closer to the truth and until more powerful laws are discovered we call them ‘true’. But only one set of laws is the truest at any moment in history.

Plato's Academy

What if someone comes up with a theoretical model that allows us to calculate all the phenomena that Einstein’s theory calculates? Would that be just as true? This is where Occam’s Razor comes in – the principle that if two theories are equal in explanatory power the simpler, more coherent one is regarded as the truest.

 So if Einstein’s theory was rivalled by one that explained and predicted phenomena equally well it would only be regarded as closer to the truth if it was also simpler and still coherent.

For the last few decades quantum physics, elementary particle theory and cosmology have been in a state of flux. There are no models which fit all the observations and hopefully someone will have the inspiration to look at reality in a different way and work out a mathematical model (a kind of metaphor) which shows how all the observations can be described, understood, interrelated and predicted.  

Some phenomena are modelled in ways which may appear to contradict the idea of one truth. 

For example, a beam of light behaves both as an advancing electromagnetic wave in some situations and as a beam of particles (photons) in others. Neither model is claimed to be the truest. It is just that the light is best modelled as waves or particles depending on its energy and what it is passing over or through or around (slits in screens, wires, glass, gas, vacuum etc.).  There is only one model (description) which is best adopted for a particular kind of situation and that model is the truest we have. 

So, if you are designing a telescope it is best to model light as a wave which is reflected, refracted and diffracted by the lenses. If you are trying to explain how a laser works it is best to model the light as photons interacting with atoms inside the laser.

In the future I believe that light may be represented in a new way - a single way which simply explains the observed optical phenomena in all situations and allows us to calculate results more easily than with the present models. In which case the model will be truer than existing models, i.e. one step in the direction of an absolute truth which will never be attained, at least in our present mode of existence. As a believer in a monotheistic Creator I have faith that one day there will be a theoretical model which encompasses both wave and particle aspects of light.

 So science is evolving. But spirituality is also evolving. In this arena one has to go with what seems reasonable or intutitively right or what is revealed by the godhead - it is outside of science. An example would be to make the reasonable assumption that the world was not created a week ago. There is no way this can be proved by logic. All the apparent evidence, such as old bank transactions,  till receipts, historical documents and astronomical observations could have been manufactured by some supercontrolling extraterrestrial agency to give us the illusion that the universe is 13.7 billion years old or indeed exists at all. No sane person would really believe this. It is a matter of resonable faith.
 

Many theologians today, having thought deeply about the accounts of Christ, His apostles and the Resurrection ; and re-examining scripture in  a historical context, have a very different theological model from some of the past ones, tainted as they were by seekers of earthly power, one which is loving and generous to all humanity - with the Holy Spirit active in all nations, races and religions, and ‘judgement’ being that which humans inflict on themselves individually or collectively by departing from God’s divine laws, and eternal life being a relationship to Christ which transcends physical death but starts here on Earth.

We still have much to learn; but considering the destructive power available today, in nuclear bombs and biological weapons, it is remarkable that we have not exterminated ourselves or been reduced to the barbaric remnants of today’s civilisation, one that has virtually eradicated smallpox, abolished slavery in the west, legislated against racial discrimination, emancipated women, introduced national health services and hospices, enacted incredibly effective aid programs, spawned innumerable charities and set standards of human rights worldwide. The doctrine of love is propagated worldwide despite pockets of sectarian hatred and death or the greed of power-hungry minorities. Today’s world, with all its imperfections, is surely nearer the reality envisaged and foretold by Christ than that of any previous time. 

To me that means spiritual evolution.

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John

Author, 2077 AD