from "The Dispossessed"

“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

"Henry Fonda for President"

Movie trailer, from an Australian director who posits that actor Henry Fonda was the embodiment of America itself. 

"Caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light."

 

Myanmar Earthquake Waves Traveling Through Europe

Very cool:

Sick Goal

Pardon me, I try to avoid blogging about hockey, but this is an amazing goal by Brian Rust of the [my] Pittsburgh Penguins.

 

Notice how Sidney Crosby--number 87 and one of the best hockey players in the visible universe--first whacks down a pass to him that was above the ice, controls the puck, then passes the puck while lifting it over the stick/blade of the guy defending him. Then Rust (#17) stretches and hits the puck after a bounce over the goalie. I've never seen a goal like this.

 
The Penguins, legendary in the '00s and '10s, have really lost it and are now ranked #28 in the league (of 32 teams). They will miss the playoffs for the third straight year. But it's worth watching because every game Crosby does something you've never seen before.

Last game Crosby set a record of 20 seasons scoring one point a game or better. (A point is a goal or an assist.) He beat out Wayne Gretzky, who had 19. Incredible consistency, since he joined the league at 18 years old. In fact, he's never had an NHL season where he's scored less than one point per game.

New Record Low for Arctic Sea Ice

The NSIDC says that Arctic sea ice just set a record for the lowest annual maximum. This is from their press release. I've abbreviated some of the units, which they choose to write out in their long-form, and made everything metric (because around here we don't dabble in the black arts):

On March 22, Arctic sea ice likely reached its maximum extent for the year, at 14.33 Mkm²..., the lowest in the 47-year satellite record. This year’s maximum extent is 1.31 Mkm²...below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum of 15.64 Mkm²...and 80,000 km²...below the previous lowest maximum that occurred on March 7, 2017.

But this is meaningless in the US now, because climate change doesn't officially exist. (They know it does, but practice fake denialism.) Trump recently said he thinks science don't know what's causing climate change.... NSIDC gets plenty of US federal government funding, so perhaps they won't exist for next year's annual maximum (not kidding), and maybe even the satellites will be turned off (also not kidding). After all, that's money that should properly be going to (more) tax cuts for billionaires (still not kidding). You don't know what you can't measure, and President Krasnov clearly doesn't want us to know.

Great Image of Venus

from "The COSPAR planetary protection requirements for space missions to Venus," María Paz Zorzano et al, Life Sciences in Space Research, Volume 37, May 2023, Pages 18-24.

note: orange represents a data gap. 

Is Ocean Heat Content Really Accelerating?

An article in the NY Times (free link) reports on a World Meteorological Organization report that says the 10 warmest years in the surface temperature records are the last 10 years. That's very bad. 

One sentence in the article especially caught my eye. 

This warmth is especially apparent in the oceans, where key indicators of climate change are now accelerating.

They don't say which indicators, but I assume ocean heat content (OHC) is a prominent one. 

I used to think, based on the data, that it was indeed accelerating. But from my amateurish calculations, it looks like the OHC in the 0-2000 meter range (top half) has stopped accelerating. It had a peak in the first quarter of last year, and the last three readings are below that. OK, ENSOs and whatnot. A very recent peak isn't important or interesting.

Here are the data:

The leading coefficient of the second-degree polynomial is now 0.037 ZJ/yr² (ZJ=zetajoules=10²¹ joules). But it has a 2-sigma uncertainty of 0.044 ZJ/yr², calculated by the standard linear regression (with no autocorrelation, which would only make the error bars higher (I think)).

The 0-2000 m acceleration is twice this coefficient, and in more typical units is 0.0046 ± 0.0055 (W/m²)/yr. So it's not statistically significant at the 2-sigma level.  

The 0-700 m acceleration is statistically significant at 0.0088 ± 0.0004 (W/m²)/yr.

I don't have data on the lower half of the ocean. I don't even know if it exists, though I have seen a few papers years ago that it's warming, though at a much slower rate. (Now I can't find them.)

Don't know if this means anything--the ocean heat is still increasing strongly, of course. I could calculate that, but I'm not going to right now because I'm tired. Maybe tomorrow. Likely the recent OHCs are messed up wonky because of the big El Nino than the small La Nina. 

Just wanted to put up my the little calculations, to justify the time it took to build the spreadsheet. (Really, I just like making spreadsheets & keeping track of the basic climate data).

Cheers.

How Tariffs Work

Early Blogger Kevin Drum Has Died

The blogger Kevin Drum has died. He was one of the first bloggers I ever read regularly, way back in the early-to-mid aughts. The NY Times has an obituary (free link), and there was a last post on his latest blog.

La Niña is Done

Source: Tropicaltidbits.com

Back in Charge

Roy Spencer's Comical, Sad, Desperate Arguments

Roy Spencer continues to make some very sad, desperate arguments in the name of climate denial. Arguments are that beneath him as a professional scientist. Arguments that show why he has no respect at all in the climate science community. 

In a recent post he wrote:

"The regulation of CO2 emissions (and some other chemicals) by the EPA has also mystified me. However many of the EPA’s ~185 lawyers worked on the 2009 Endangerment Finding, they must have known that regulating CO2 emissions from U.S. cars and light-duty trucks would have no measurable impact on global climate, including sea level rise (which was a major argument in Massachusetts v. EPA).

None."

Of course, by this argument no one should do ever do anything about CO2 emissions because, individually, all regulations are "too small" to solve the global problem.

But the sum over many small quantities can certainly be a big quantity.  

It's an intentionally deceitful argument that convinces no one except the hare-brained commenters on his site. And Roy knows enough to know this. Sad. It's a dumb argument and I'm wondering why he made it. This is exactly why people don't trust Roy or his "science."

He also wrote:

"Their reason for existence is to regulate pollutants (and it doesn’t matter if Nature produces far more of a “pollutant” than people produce)."

Another extremely, obviously vapid argument. Yes, Nature emits more CO2 than do humans. But Nature absorbs that amount of CO2 and even more, which is why only half (about) of anthropogenic emissions reside in the atmosphere.

 
Roy certainly knows this. So why pretend otherwise, to make such scientifically trashy arguments? Does he ever wonder why no real scientists take him seriously, and haven't for...decades? 

Maybe he give up on being a valuable scientist long ago, and is only looking for money for his opinions from conservative, denier think tanks in DC?

 
It's very sad to see a senior scientist making such shitty arguments, thinking they do any good whatsoever. They only ruin whatever respectability he had, which was very low to begin with.