Daisyworld's WunderBlog
With Respect to Time
Posted by: Daisyworld, 11:41 PM GMT en Enero 24, 2013 +4
With the passing of yet another year on the Gregorian calendar, the resident climatologist here at Wunderground.com, Dr Richard Rood, started a new blog series where he discusses the role of time and human perceptions of time with respect to anthropogenic (manmade) global warming.

When he discusses this concept of time with regard to climate change - short and long term - it seems to me to coincide with the lifespan of an individual human being, or of only a generation or two. However, from my point of view, the problem with modern humans understanding the time aspect of climate change is a residual effect of the "me" generation. Up until a few thousand years ago (after the end of the last ice-age), the primary human lifecycle was to be born, to live, to procreate, and then eventually die. Somewhere about four to six thousand years ago, there was added to that process the need to make a name for oneself (pharaohs, Caesars, etc.). Eventually, that need trickled down to the commoner, and a few hundred years ago, the lifecycle was augmented to being born, go to school, go to college, find a career, procreate, establish a family, make a name for yourself, retire, then die. In the 21st century, this is now a packaged lifecycle; it's what's expected of each individual in the industrialized world. Due to the fact there's so much for any one person to experience within their lifetimes and the globalized concept of life, we've lost the ability to think about our own mortality. We fail to realize that this world will soon belong to the next generation, and the generation after that, and even the one after that.

Today, there are so many individuals, so many sources of person-specific stimuli, and many, many industries surrounding the concept of "me", that maybe there's an over-inflated sense of self in the world. This jaded thinking forces us into into the belief that NOW is more important than LATER.

Whenever I find myself slipping into this line of thinking about only the here and now, I try to coax my thoughts back towards the long term. I do this by thinking about The 10,000 Year Clock: A new-age project to build a monument to time; a giant mountain-side clock that ticks once a year, with a century hand that advances once every 100 years, and chimes once a millennium, designed to do so for the next 10,000 years. I try to imagine myself following the journey of that clock, staying with it over the course of ITS lifecycle, and wonder how the world will change over ITS lifespan.

What will happen to this planet over the next 10,000 years? This is a proverbial blink-of-an eye in geologic terms. With the advent of human-induced global warming, what would I see from the clock's perspective? What heights or depths will the human race come to realize? How will the rest of the biosphere ebb and flow in reaction to those realizations? What kind world would I be standing in after the globe spins on its axis, and the sun rises and sets exactly 3,652,422 times over that period?

Once in that frame of mind, I find myself wondering: What kind of world is our species about to enter?
Categories:Climate Change
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The New Normal: Is Sandy just the tip of the iceberg?
Posted by: Daisyworld, 2:37 AM GMT en Octubre 31, 2012 +1
I hate to be a cynic in these times of strife, looking at the big picture rather than focusing my sympathies on individual suffering at this hour, but this is one of those cases where I can't help but speak out on a larger topic. With over 7 million people in the dark from power outages, a devastated northeastern seaboard, and countless lives affected by flooding and storm damage, it's hard not to be angry. Not at nature, mind you, nor at the subjective pass/fail j...
Categories:Climate Change Hurricane Sandy
Updated: 2:43 AM GMT en Octubre 31, 2012   Permalink | A A A
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A Tale of Two Cities: Evaporation Rates and Flood Risk
Posted by: Daisyworld, 4:16 AM GMT en Julio 10, 2012 +2
Within the time-frame of a month, the regular news has served us two helpings of "natural" disasters that set me thinking. Those disasters are the June 20th flooding in Duluth, MN, and the weekend flooding of the Black Sea town of Krymsk in the Krasnodar region of Russia. While the Duluth flood thankfully caused no loss of human life, the Krymsk flood killed over 170 people. Flood mitigation aside, the situation of both towns had peculiar similarities to one another...
Categories:Climate Change
Updated: 4:22 AM GMT en Julio 10, 2012   Permalink | A A A
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The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Posted by: Daisyworld, 3:21 AM GMT en Junio 28, 2012 +8
About a year has past since I gave up on the cascade of anti-science reverberating across the media echo-chamber, tossing in the towel on my attempts to actively engage climate change denialists on the subject of global warming. Since shedding that yoke of personal responsibility, much has changed with respect to my view of these denialists. In the past, I've fumed at the incredulity of their media campaign against science, not to mention the audacity of their profo...
Categories:Climate Change Politics
Updated: 4:25 AM GMT en Julio 17, 2012   Permalink | A A A
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8,000 Years in Retrospect
Posted by: Daisyworld, 11:56 AM GMT en Mayo 02, 2012 +5
One of the more confounding phenomena in climate science is the rise in global temperatures that ended the last ice age 11,000 years ago. Previously, it was assumed that this rise in temperature was mainly due to changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun (called Milankovitch cycles) rather than an increase in carbon dioxide, which - in the vast historical accumulation of climate data - appears to have been the result of rising temperatures rather than the cause; c...
Categories:Climate Change
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Daisyworld was one of the first climate models that effectively demonstrated that rudimentary biological feedbacks can affect the global climate.

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