from E B White

"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."

E. B. White

from the 2016 book The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen, which I'm reading now and gives a lot to think about.

E.B. White was a prominent US writer last century who wrote a great deal for The New Yorker magazine, and who wrote, among many other things, the famous children's book Charlotte's Web.

USA Wildfires

Data: National Interagency Fire Center

https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics

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Not sure how much I'm going to blog anymore. I have a really bad neck, with four fusions, since 2010, and it's gotten a lot worse this year as I try to sit at a computer for more than an hour or two. I'm not even doing enough work to earn a living. At this point even opiates don't help alot, and the more I work the worse it gets. And I just get tired. But I'll never be able to retire here, so unless I move to another country I'm going to have to be miserly about spending time typing unless it's for pay. I'll drop in every now and again to post something I find interesting, about science or literature or something else, but I'm also not that interested in climate change anymore. I was only ever interested in the science, not the politics, but as the science seems more and more established it's falling out of my Overton Window. I'm not interested in every nuance of the AMOC ocean stream and polar ice and carbon capture, and certainly not whether the world will seriously address the problem [added 5/30: I retract that; I was having a bad day.] (which they haven't yet in 30 years, despite Kyoto and Paris, aided by immoral, even evil bloggers like Watts and Steve what's-his-name and Chuck W and that guy in Montana whose name I'm not interested enough to remember.) Ed-something, I think. (He's full of shit anyway.) They are all completely wrong, of course, but all too shameless and arrogant to ever admit it. And, the corporations have won, putting endless profits over the survival of society. Republicans have won, even though they're destroying the country & the world. And I certainly don't want to write about Trump, the devil incarnate--I hope he brings about the collapse of the US as soon as possible--it's been coming on for 50 years, and America certainly deserves it--so US regions can secede and start again. But I don't care about that either--I'm not married, I don't have any kids, so I don't have any stake in the future. [added 5/30: I retract this too. It wasn't the best day for me to be blogging.] And lately I really feel that. My fault for not establishing stakes, a major failure, but it's too late now. I'm mostly here to see my 15-year old cat's life through to its end. I'd just rather do whatever paying work I can in the hours I have then read novels the rest of the time and watch hockey when it's in season.

Bizarro Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic Sea Ice is acting weird. Here's the volume as modeled by PIOMAS. {Really this is just an excuse for me to try datawrapper.de, because Excel charts have never looked good and by now look like something from the late 1900s.} But it is strange how the SIV has been basically flat for the last 15 years. (Arctic sea ice extent is just as unusual.) 

Here is a conference presentation screen capture I captured from the leading PIOMAS modeler in Sept 2014:

I think this was from a Cliff Maas blog post or comment I read in 2017, but can't find it exactly. The screen capture looks like it's from a conference. 

Anyway it's very wrong. Actually the decline, linearly regressed, is about 1/1.5, now 1/6.  

Lesson?: beware of making climate predictions unless it's about mean global surface temperature, and even then ENSOs mess you up.

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So why is there a "pause" in Arctic melting? This paper on ESS Open Archive (?) goes into it. It's not peer reviewed, which is unfortunate. Given that, here's the abstract:

So it's maybe worse, going back 20 years (to 2005). Could last 5-10 more years. (Not convenient, given my lifespan.) 

So, internal variability, which is nearly impossible to explain to deniers.

Conquering the Universe

"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."

Kurt Vonnegut

CO2 > 430 ppm

Atmospheric carbon dioxide has cracked the 430 ppm level at the Mauna Loa Observatory in on Hawaii. 

Here's NOAA's daily source for the data; the image above is from Daily CO2.

In fact, atmospheric CO2 at MLO peaked this year at 431.13 ppm on 27-April-2025. Last year it peaked at 428.59 ppm on 26-April-2024. That's only a 2.45 ppm increase, maybe a touch below the recent average, maybe due to the relative ENSO states. 2024 as a year (not a season) was somewhat on the La Nina-side, with this year slightly towards the El Nino-side. (I think.)

So, it's not clear if next year will break 435 ppm. Anyway the fascists might have stopped all US scientific measurements by then. (Yes, I know it's measured at many other places around the globe, but as far as I know none of them has the longevity of the Mauna Loa data.)

"They Haven't Started and We're Almost Done"

Suppressing the Costs of Climate Change

The fascists have decided to stop keeping track of the costs of climate change. Free link to NY Times story.

If you don't keep track of it, it's like it doesn't exist. This is hard for me to wrap my head around at the moment.

50 Years at 0.30°C/decade

The 50-year linear trend for the Hadley Central England Temperature (HadCET) is a very healthy worrisome 0.30°C/decade.

Without including any autocorrelation, because I don't feel like calculating it today, the 2-sigma uncertainty is 0.07°C/decade.

Over 50 years that's an increase of 1.52°C (2.73°F).

Also, the 10-year moving average reached a record high in April at 10.7°C. (That's an absolute number, not an anomaly.) 

HadCET is measured over a fairly broad area of...central England...bounded by an approximate triangle from Lancaster in the north of England to Bristol in the southwest to London in the southeast. Former homes of such famous people as Gollum (well, actor Andy Serkis), Blackbeard the Pirate and Charles the Darwin, son of Robert, a wealthy society doctor and financier, and grandson of Erasmus the Darwin, a (inhale) "natural philosopher, physiologist, slave-trade abolitionist, inventor, freemason, and poet" (exhale). 

Via Wikipedia.

Caught Only Half the Time

Meowthematics >> Mathematics
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