“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives…But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
A really great book.
If you need an update on the latest sea surface temperatures, this is from Zack Labe on Bluesky:
In 2024, CO2 emissions from fuel combustion grew by around 1% or 357 Mt CO2, while emissions from industrial processes declined by 2.3% or 62 Mt CO2. Emissions growth was lower than global GDP growth (+3.2%), restoring the decades-long trend of decoupling emissions growth from economic growth, which had been disrupted in 2021.
Natural gas emissions rose by around 2.5% (180 Mt CO₂) in 2024, making it the largest contributor to global carbon emissions growth. This increase was driven by higher consumption in China, the United States, the Middle East, and India.
Global coal emissions rose by 0.9% (135 Mt CO₂) in 2024. The increase was primarily fuelled by growing coal consumption in China, India and Southeast Asia, while demand declined in advanced economies, particularly in the United States and the European Union.
Here's a graph from Skinner 2012 that I've never seen before and I'm surprised I've never seen it before--the climate sensitivity from many climate events, warming and cooling, in the distant past:
Lake Winnipesaukee is the largest lake in New Hampshire, US, at 185 km2 (71.4 mi2) (8.4 mi)2. I still find it interesting because for about 6 years I lived high above it and close in a cozy mother-in-law apartment, with a screened porch, and the Lake spread out before me like...well, like a big lake. At least a good part of it.
Consequently, I can still spell "Winnipesaukee."
From CoPilot:
The name "Winnipesaukee" is derived from the Algonquian language and translates to "The Smile of the Great Spirit" or "Beautiful Water in a High Place".
The Lake freezes over in the winter, and people go out ice-fishing, etc. There's an airport runway on the ice over in Alton on the east end of the Lake--"the only FAA-certified, plowed ice runway in the continental United States." It doesn't (viz. can't) open every year, but it did open this year. Global warming is affecting the Lake.
A popular metric in that region is the Lake's "ice-out" date.
Ice-Out is declared when the cruise ship MS Mount Washington can make it to every one of its ports: Center Harbor, Wolfeboro, Alton, Weirs Beach and Meredith. It is also considered the unofficial start to the boating season as well as the end of winter in New Hampshire.
These day a local pilot flies over the Lake multiple times a day this time of year to declare Ice-Out. I wrote about him for Yale Climate Connections several years ago.
There is also an "ice-in" date, but it's not as popular because it means the start of a long, cold, dark winter and nobody gets too hyped for that. (In truth winter there sets in long before ice-in, which usually is announced in January or early February.) But ice-out is a ritual of spring, and soon your cabin fever will break. About mid-May, if you can just hang on.
Anyway...and please pardon me if I've written about all this before somewhere on this blog...this year's Ice-out was declared this morning at 7:02 am. (Seems suspiciously exact, but anyway.) The time series of Ice-Out dates is carried by Wikipedia. I had to look up the time in the local news, and I only have times since 2020. For earlier years there is ice-out data, but no time, so I took it as noon.
Here's the time-series of ice-out dates on Winnipesaukee since 1887. The red line is the 30-year moving average.
BTW, there was a year without an ice-out date--2001, when I was living there--because there never was an ice-in--the Lake didn't freeze over that year. This was before smartphones so I don't have pictures of it. I did take a lousy picture with a digital camera, but can't find it now. Any more it's kind of like life started only when smartphones became ubiquitous.
Ice fisherman lost some trucks.
Addendum: Once up there I saw a section of the lake surface freeze over in real time--a rolling edge of freezing, maybe traveling over a half-mile. Maybe a mile. Took about 10-15 seconds. I wasn't sure if I really saw that or not--I thought I did, but it seemed impossible--so I contacted a few limnologists--scientists who study lakes--and more than one told me they'd heard of such a phenomenon, but had never seen it, and called me lucky or fortunate or some such word.
So, spring is coming even to New England. There's hope. Here in Oregon it's getting into the 70s. (Fahrenheit. About 20 degrees Celsius.)
Have a nice day.
Gizmodo: "Elon Musk Is Annoying, Unfunny, and Should Probably Take a Drug Test, Trump Officials Reportedly Say: A senior official describes the billionaire as an awkward and obnoxious asshole."
“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light. He was still lanky, with big hands, protruding ears, and angular joints, but in the perfect health and strength of eariy manhood he was very beautiful. His dun-colored hair, like the others', was fine and straight, worn at its full length and kept off the forehead with a band. Only one of them wore her hair differently, a girl with high cheekbones and a flat nose; she had cut her dark hair to a shiny cap all round. She was watching Shevek with a steady, serious gaze. Her lips were greasy from eating fried cakes, and there was a crumb on her chin.
“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It's real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can't pretend that it doesn't exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we'll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we'll die. That's the condition we're born on. I'm afraid of life! There are times I — I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding — this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain . . . . If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could . . . get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self — ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality — the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness — that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.'"
“'The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,' said a tall, soft-eyed girl. 'Love is the true condition of human life.'
“Bedap shook his head. ‘No. Shev's right,’ he said. ‘Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will whether we want to or not.”
-- The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
