Category Archives: Climate Change

Spaceship Orion

21 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by in Climate Change, Seasons, Space Travel

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I was learning how to play a new song this week, ‘Spaceship Orion’ by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. It’s an old tune I’ve always liked. To me it’s a companion piece to another song I have long known, Neil Young’s classic ‘After the Gold Rush.’ Both songs are about humanity flying to some distant planet, seeking a new home, once earth has been met with ecological disaster. Neil Young’s song is perhaps more optimistic about that future, ending with the lines ‘Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the Sun,’ while the Daredevils end their song with the repeated lines ‘It can’t be like home, it can’t feel like home to you there.’

Of course not. For one thing, it’s imaginary. How many books and stories and movies have there been about humanity setting up new colonies on distant planets? How often we’ve been run through the whole speculative drill about families in suspended animation, whole populations enduring multi-year flights to the ends of the galaxy, waking up to a planet with sufficient atmosphere, water, and acceptable gravity, waiting there for us? The fact that to this point no planet has been found that even remotely fills the bill does not deter the science fiction writers. It’s just not going to happen, I think anybody with their head on straight can see that.

This has always been my problem with the ‘space program,’ with ‘exploring space’—as if exploring something infinite has any practical meaning. What a huge waste of money. Sure, putting satellites into orbit has had some practical value; but manned space flight? It is as much science fiction as science, and always has been. Boys playing with rockets. And now, I fear that it feeds into some dangerous political fantasies. Our current White House regime holds to three interesting ideas, which considered together, make for a scary scenario.

First is protection of the wealthiest in America. The recently passed tax ‘reform’ bill does just that, while offering weak and temporary sops to working Americans. Wages remain stagnant despite what is touted as a red-hot economy, while inflation is ticking up, led by gas prices. To the top economic tier, a great economy means they are making more money, while to the rest of us, it means less value for our income. An extremely rich upper class trailed by a weakening middle class and increasingly desperate lower class is becoming institutionally cemented into our society. Anyone who would mention this or opine that it should be otherwise is, of course, a socialist.

Second is denial of climate change—or at least of man’s role in it. David Brooks wrote a piece years ago (when he still had some cred in conservative circles) about the things conservatives actually believe that they won’t admit. Climate science was one of those things. Most conservative politicians are educated people, they understand basic science and can see the signs all around them. But they can’t admit it, either out of deference to their energy company sponsors or to jolly along the average benighted southern voter. When the occupant of the White House takes America out of the Paris Climate Agreement and works to weaken any environmental laws we do have, the applause from his side of the aisle in congress is deafening.

Third is a fixation on space things. New policy directives call for a return to the moon and eventually flights to Mars, for renting space to rich guys who love rockets. In several of his recent disjointed ramblings, the Dissembler in Chief has mentioned how rich guys love rockets; this left many wondering where he was headed, what he meant—as if he ever really means anything. Where this comes from is anybody’s guess: so here’s mine.

A scenario of many of the science fiction stories about inhabiting the moon, Mars, and beyond posits a happy future on extra-terrestrial colonies—for a lucky few. Those lucky few are, of course, the wealthiest. This seems like outlandish speculation, except the idea of all our official resources being focused on the happiness of a tiny percentage of rich people is rapidly becoming reality. Further, we can officially deny the effects of climate change, but in private, keep a weather eye out for those changes. If our toadying to the energy companies and their campaign donations leads to increasing environmental straits, we ought to have a plan. And so that plan, being promulgated even as we speak, is to intensify our efforts in space, particularly manned exploration of other planets. We must prepare to set up those colonies for rich people if/when everything goes south. Yes, the whole idea is still as much science fiction as science, but I’d bet anything that our administration in Washington is more informed by movies like The Martian and Interstellar than actual science.

Let’s face it. Earth is the only planet where humans will ever live. Let’s work to save it, and stop with these science fiction scenarios in which only the blessed few may thrive on a distant orb. I like the song ‘Spaceship Orion,’ but I realize it’s only a song.

As for my theory about where the Occupant in Chief is headed with his space talk, you may think it’s a little far-fetched. Maybe I’m being paranoid and getting carried away. After all, setting up colonies for rich people, while denying the opportunity to the vast run of humanity, would require having some kind of enforcement in place, some kind of Space Force, and I haven’t heard anybody suggesting that we start a Space Force. Have you?

Leaves

24 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Climate Change, Morning, Seasons, Spring

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Leaves. I am finally seeing leaves sprouting on trees everywhere when I run in the morning. Clusters of pale catkins on the tree out my window. Tiny spikes peeking out of the cypress branches. Trees in the distance seen as more green than gray, even in the dim light of a cloudy morning. Spring has had a tortured birth this year, Persephone held back by her tyrant lover, Demeter sorrowing in clouds and rain and weeks of chilly days.

But it’s all over now, I feel confident in saying. No, I don’t. Not confident at all, because this is the third or fourth time since early March that a few warm days strung together have played us for a fool, and I would be dismayed, but not at all shocked, to see frost on the windshields by the weekend. The past few years have been like this in the Great American Midwest. It is perhaps too facile to note that our climate is changing. Will we ever return to normal weather patterns, or is it too late? Maybe we just need to accustom ourselves to new realities. It would worry me, the dire warnings from the science community and the evidence of my own eyes—but thank goodness we have conservative politicians to tell us otherwise.

A few years ago, when I left the ranch, I began the process of getting used to new realities. No more stepping out the front door in the morning to an overwhelming chorus of bird song, to watching sunrises over the barn and fog rolling in over the west pasture, whole herds of deer grazing and dozens of turkeys dancing in the rain. I live in the city now, and watch for other signs of morning. Yes, I see the sunrise, and hear bird song—these things still happen, albeit in ways less immediate, less abundant. As I run in the early morning, the dusk to dawn streetlights click off in turn, starting from the east and moving west. Morning has come. Crossing the Watson Road bridge, a starling flits past me, singing on the wing, as happy as a starling anywhere. At Shop ‘n Save the Budweiser truck backs into the loading dock, beeping loudly, and the Tastykake truck pulls out, drivers who rose long before dawn to get the day’s commerce underway. Traffic picks up, and I negotiate with inattentive drivers at each crossing. They don’t intend to even pause at stop signs, why would they yield to me?

It has taken stores longer than usual to lay in their supplies of bedding plants, of mulch, gypsum, topsoil, and manure. The huge parking lot ‘gardening centers’ are just now opening. I have no gardening to do, only three small pots with herbs in my window, but I still get that springtime feel, things quickening, springing to life, when I see a family loading the SUV with bags of fertilizer and trays of little marigolds and begonias, cucumber and tomato seedlings.

And today, this week really, I am finally seeing leaves on trees. Someone said to me a few days ago that if she had to, she would trade all the flowers in the world for all the trees, and I’d have to agree. They are the lords of the spring, of the summer. Yes, it is still a cloudy week, with not much sunshine predicted for days. But it is hard to be gloomy when everywhere are signs of life.

The Flattening, or Remoteness of the Seasons?

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Autumn, Climate Change, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Winter

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I have not written anything here in a while. There is a certain irony in the reason. I began writing this blog in support of my work on a book, which I call The Varied God, and which I have been working on for more years than I care to count. Over the past several years, there have been periods of time when I have written more blog posts than pages of the book. Writing a blog is more fun and more gratifying. I can count the number of people who read my posts, and carry on conversations with people who respond to them. That doesn’t happen with chapters of an unpublished book.

In the past few months I have been working on the book more, and it has been going well. I am working on Chapter 5, and since there are seven proposed chapters, that feels like real progress, especially since much of the research, and some of the actual writing for Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 is done.

Chapter 5 is about the influence of the seasons on art—music, painting, literature. There is a lot of it, because the four-season motif has been very popular for most of history. There are some outright masterpieces, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Haydn’s Seasons oratorio, and some really schlocky pop stuff, like Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post illustrations.

A book I was reading about seasonal art used the phrase ‘flattening of the seasons,’ which I found interesting. It is the same phenomenon which I have observed but labeled the ‘remoteness of the seasons.’ What I mean, and what the other author meant, is that at one time most people lived an agrarian, largely rural existence. Their lives were necessarily ordered by the procession of the seasons. But as industrialization proceeded and more people migrated to cities and suburbs, we paid less attention to seasonal change. We didn’t have to. Throughout the 19th century, and even up until about the middle of the 20th century, we experienced a great nostalgia for nature and the seasons. Many people made careers of writing books, articles, even newspaper columns about the seasons—Edwin Way Teale, Hal Borland, Rachel Carson, Henry Beston, to name just a few.

But now, most people, and I fear it is predominantly younger people, don’t even have that nostalgia. The seasons are remote from their lives, so remote that they don’t even dress warmly in winter, they just dash from one heated indoor environment to the next. We eat pretty much the same foods all year, do the same things all year. That’s why I use the phrase ‘remoteness of the seasons,’ and while I don’t want to argue the appropriateness of the phrase ‘flattening of the seasons,’ I think it has come to mean something else.

Last week I put up a Christmas tree. It was very warm out, and did not feel ‘Christmas-y’ at all. Autumn was slow to come this year, the trees holding onto their leaves for so long. At the Botanical Garden the other day I noticed a ginkgo tree had dropped all its leaves, but they weren’t the usual golden brown. They were just a tired shade of green. Once the days got chilly enough to feel like autumn, we had another week of temperatures in the 70s. Many people have noted that we are losing our autumn and our spring. We just jump from winter to summer and back again. This is, I fear, an effect of the climate change that isn’t happening. This is, to me, what should be called the flattening of the seasons.

There need to be two terms with separate meanings. Remoteness of the seasons means the phenomenon of people experiencing the seasons less fully because modern amenities have made them irrelevant in day to day existence. Flattening of the seasons means the gradual loss of a full four-season climate règime.

Both scare me.

Anticipation

02 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Climate Change, Running, Seasons, Spring

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Though I now live within the boundaries of a major city, I am fortunate in having a paved running path out in front of my apartment building. It is called the River des Peres Greenway, because for much of its length it hugs one of St. Louis’s well-known features. I am reluctant to say ‘geographical’ feature, or even ‘man-made’ feature, because it hovers somewhere in between. The River des Peres is not, contrary to reasonable expectation, a river. It is a drainage canal which human endeavor has enhanced with stone embankments and bridges across it, which in heavy rain handles most of the runoff for south St. Louis. ‘River des Peres,’ as someone once put it, is the fanciest name ever bestowed upon a sewer.

The Greenway is fairly new, and it gets plenty of bike traffic and many runners. I only cover a few miles of it and don’t really know how far it goes, but I am familiar with the plantings that civic planners incorporated into its design. There are long stretches of prairie style wildflower beds, which sprout black-eyed Susan and coneflower in summer. There are many kinds of trees, mostly too new to be impressive, but welcome just the same. At one end where I run (down by the Metrolink station) there are flowering crabapple trees, which are beautiful in spring. At the other end, where I turn around to head back home, there is a quiet (or nearly so) little hollow that is always wet, where ducks paddle and court, and where rows of cypresses are growing.

Cypresses, if you are unaware, are one of the few deciduous conifers. In summer they look mostly like pine trees, but they lose all their needles in winter and stand as bare as maple or oak trees. There was one lovely little cypress in the front yard at the ranch and I learned to look to it as an indicator of spring’s arrival—though it was a painful process. The tiny needles are not like leaves; they come slowly, and can be well developed before you notice they are there at all—especially if you’re running by. Then all of a sudden, boom!—there stands a lovely green cypress tree.

When I was in college I had a few different roommates, and one of them was a real trial. He spent most of his days drinking and ingesting any pharmaceutical or herbal products he could afford with his wages and tips from his job bussing tables. Though he had a renowned sense of humor and could be fun to spend time with, he also tended to exhibit unreasonable and sometimes offensive behavior. One day he was in an extended afternoon session with a few friends, and one guy said that he noticed that day that the grass had turned green. This was something he observed every year, he said, the day the grass was green and he knew spring had arrived. A nice observation, a reasonable person might think, but not my roommate. He jumped all over the guy. For one thing, the grass is always green—it’s grass! And for another, any getting greener as spring comes on is a gradual process; they don’t just make it green overnight! Seriously, this went on for a while, and developed into something of a tense debate, with the parties involved eventually retiring to separate rooms to cool off and talk trash about one another.

Of course my roommate was right, not that there was any reason to make a big deal of it. A reasonable person just appreciates a poetically expressed sentiment and leaves it at that. But yes, grass is always green, and it grows more lush and deeper green as spring grows warmer. Just like the cypress trees are gradually putting forth new needles until even a passing runner can see them and think spring has arrived.

I wonder if all people have certain things they look to in their anticipation of new seasons arriving. Anticipation or dread, perhaps, since we anticipate the blessings of our favorite times of year and dread the extremes of our least cherished seasons. Everyone talks about spring’s first crocus or daffodils, the brilliant and short-lived forsythia blooms or Bradford pear blossoms. Here in Missouri we love our flowering dogwood—our state tree. But there are subtler things, more personal clues, like my watch on the cypress needles, or my old friend’s green grass.

I wonder if any of these will still be relevant in another five years. Already the system is breaking down in our time of climate change. Robins seem to be here as early as January. Azaleas bloom in the first week of February and then get hit with a hard freeze. I told myself this morning that the next time I run out on the River des Peres Greenway, my row of cypress trees would appear lush and green. I hope I’m right, but I haven’t checked the forecast to see if another round of winter is expected in April.

Dancing Squirrels

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in Climate Change, Nature, Religion, Seasons, Spring, Winter

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Yesterday morning I was writing at my desk, but distracted by squirrels running through the trees outside while the Swan Lake Waltz played on the radio. It didn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see a subtle choreography in their scrambling up and down tree trunks, back and forth over outstretched limbs. They all looked fat and healthy, and I thought, Ah Spring! Here at last!

We have had two springs already this year, interspersed with two returns of winter. I have felt rather sad and uncertain about the future since last November, like we are living in the end times for our world: this strange weather does not bode well and feeds the uncertainty.

Human societies have always had tales of the end of the world, and they are so often climatic. There was the great flood of Sumerian literature, as told in Gilgamesh, which was copied and some interesting details added to become the great flood in the Hebrew Bible. Ragnarok–the twilight of the gods in Norse mythology–is preceded by fimbulwinter, an unrelenting three year winter. This all arises from an ancient sense that life on earth is uncertain and is destined to end. People who raised crops for a living came to depend on the cycle of the seasons, and if there was any tardiness or latency in the return of spring it caused anxiety of an existential nature. This anxiety was dealt with mostly by appeals to the god or gods who controlled the season.

Now we understand that the seasons are inevitable cycles of nature, but the thought that the world will end in climatic holocaust is embedded in many religions. The practitioners of those faiths, taken with their own florid scriptures, hold a calm acquiescence, perhaps even an eager anticipation of the end. Evangelical Christianity or some other form of very traditional faith goes hand-in-hand with the kind of conservative political leaning that denies climate change. I don’t know how much of that denial is, at root, a belief that any cataclysmic change to earth’s ecology is part of a long-ordained divine plan, but I do know that Americans decided last fall against a government that might address the impending threat to our planet.

Even though I anticipate the coming climatic holocaust with foreboding, I don’t really spend my days wallowing in dread about it. Not many people do, as far as I can tell. Kind of reminds me of the great book On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, which was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. It shows people in Australia, the last continent not affected by fallout from the recent nuclear war, going about their business as usual, rarely acknowledging their awareness that the end is coming soon. What else can you do? As the old saying goes, when you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.

And so I spend my time cooking, writing stories, writing new songs, doing the things I’ve always done. Public discourse continues to rant about tax cuts, health care, equal pay, and many other things that will simply not matter in another few years. I am aware that I started writing about the charming image of squirrels dancing in trees, and was quickly diverted to a diatribe on the end of the world.

What are you gonna do? I think it’s likely that the squirrels will survive the coming changes. I don’t think you or I will.

Predictions

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Climate Change, Predictions, Seasons

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Yesterday I bought gasoline for $1.89 a gallon. Again I shook my head over the unexpectedly low price, and at my own lack of foresight. Several years ago, in a discussion with my family about gas prices, I boldly pronounced ‘You will never see gas under $2 a gallon again. Those days are gone!’

But then we had the collapse of America’s financial markets, the worldwide recession, the sudden increase in domestic energy production, and other factors that completely changed the picture, and we have seen gas prices under $2 a gallon many times in recent years. I have borne considerable ribbing on this score.

I, of all people, should know better. I try not to be a pontificator, for one thing, and I am particularly averse to predictions. ‘There’s nothing more unreliable than a prediction,’ is a favorite saying of mine. Most predictions in my life I have lived to see disproved. It goes without saying that the current presidential election cycle has offered up a few examples of predictions gone awry.

So Americans are once again driving wherever they want, as much as they want, in whatever vehicle they want, all fueled by cheap gas. And as usual, while we’re happy about our freedom, we don’t consider the true cost of our excess, which is, of course, adding to the problem of climate change. And here again I think about the problem of predictions.

When we set up benchmarks, we only give naysayers ammunition to defeat us. If someone predicts that the world’s average temperature will rise to X degrees by year Y, or that the Marshall Islands will be underwater by this year, or Florida will lose 15% of its land mass by that year, or that the polar ice cap will melt this much by the end of the decade, and those things don’t in large measure come about, it hurts the cause of warning people about the problem. ‘The experts said this would happen,’ the Climate Change Deniers sneer, ‘and of course it didn’t!’ But missing certain predictions doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t  exist: it only means that it is a hugely complicated syndrome whose effects we can only hope to track and report.

It is enough to report that the coastline of the Marshall Islands is creeping steadily inward, as is the coastline of Florida; that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have already happened in this century; even that I am sitting outside in shirtsleeves on November 1, a day that will run 10 to 15 degrees warmer than average, writing this down. I just drove from St. Louis to Columbia, a drive that takes me through many miles of wooded Missouri hills, and where there should have been a brilliant display of autumnal color, I saw only green trees fading, unable to enter their usual seasonal cycle in the persistent heat of summer. I am not an expert and I will not try to predict anything; I can only report what I see, and that frightens me enough.

When Seasons Begin

25 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in Astronomy, Autumn, Climate Change, Seasons

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Yesterday I spoke with my brother, and he told me that this past August was the hottest August on record, making for something like eleven months in a row now of the hottest months on record. This despite the fact that here in the Great American Midwest, it wasn’t a bad summer. I don’t know if the temperature ever hit 100°. People who don’t have the courage to face up to the reality of climate change will shrug and say ‘What global warming? It feels fine to me!’ It’s like saying ‘What increase in gun violence? I haven’t been shot yet!’

As with all scientifically verifiable conditions it’s not about what you see right in front of you, it’s what is statistically valid. That warmest August on record is a worldwide measure, not the measure for your hometown; and the fact that you can still sit comfortably on your patio in August drinking lemonade doesn’t mean that the Maldives aren’t rapidly being swamped by rising seas.

For me, one of the notable effects of climate change is in what feels like a shift of seasons. According to the date on the calendar, we should be in autumn. It started two days ago. But the temperatures have been in the 90s, the heat and humidity very summerlike. I see women out on the streets in wool skirts with big scarves around their necks. They are anxious to don their fall fashion finery, even if it means sweating beneath layers of warm clothing. Autumn is just not here yet, and it’s the last week of September.

Of course, we don’t expect the seasons to change automatically, as if someone throws a switch when the appropriate date arrives. We don’t even agree about which date to use. For a long time, in traditional terms, the seasons have been dictated by the dates of the solstices and equinoxes. But this can be an odd measure, since we can see a lot if wintery weather before the late December winter solstice, or be deep into spring well before the vernal equinox.

Back in 1780, in search of some kind of certainty, Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria convened a group of meteorologists he called the Societas Meteorologica Palatina, charged with formalizing how weather and climate were studied. This group decided that the meteorological seasons would be defined by temperature, and designated as three-month periods beginning on the first day of the first month in which that season’s temperature pattern prevailed. Spring would run from March 1 to May 31, summer from June 1 to August 31. Even though the group only lasted until 1795, meteorologists still recognize these seasons.

But you see the problem: according to the meteorological definition, autumn should have begun September 1, and here it is September 25 and it still hasn’t come. But even as I’m typing this I look out the window to see a breeze riffling the leaves, which are all tinged with golden brown. There is rain predicted for this afternoon, the leading edge of a cold front. By tomorrow, we’ll all be digging into closets for our woolies and scarves.

Did you hear that NASA recently announced some interesting news regarding the signs of the Zodiac? For one thing, the ancient Babylonians, who basically created the Zodiac, named 13 signs, not 12. One was dropped when annual dating was being formalized into a 12-month calendar. Not only that, but due to shifts in the earth’s axis, it no longer points to the same constellations it did those several thousand years ago. Meaning, of course, that the sign you may believe rules your life is possibly not your sign at all.

Things change. People who can’t face up to the reality of climate change often say that the changes we are currently seeing (if they acknowledge them at all) are the same kind of climate shift that has happened before on our planet. It has naught to do with human activity. Okay, let’s say that’s true. So maybe we need to reevaluate and decide anew when our various seasons start. Say October 1 is the beginning of Autumn, and January 1 the start of winter. But these things, like the seasons on our planet and our reading of the stars in the sky, should be long term: that old Babylonian Zodiac was created long ago, even before most of the books of the Old Testament were written. If we change the dates when seasons begin today, how long will that last? How long will it even matter?

 

Just Another Excuse

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Climate Change, Global Warming, Seasons

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The other night the TV weatherman posed an interesting question. Which season, he asked, do you think is warming the fastest here in the Midwest? Turns out it’s winter. Out west, it’s spring, but here our winters have been averaging a few degrees warmer every year.

This is of course an effect of the global warming that is not happening. The vast majority of the world’s scientists agree that global warming, or what they are now calling climate change, is the greatest problem facing our planet. Fortunately we here in America do not have to listen to scientists, because we have career politicians to keep us informed.

It is only a few days before Christmas and I have not worn a coat yet this year. Yes, sweaters and light jackets, but no heavy coats yet. This is unheard of, or nearly so, in the Great American Midwest. This is either cause for concern or jubilation, depending on who you talk to. Some people like the cold weather and miss it. Some hate the cold weather and remind us that it will soon get cold enough. January and February will be frigid and icy, just you wait.

I heard a botanist the other day saying that our climate here in Missouri is now mimicking the climate of Arkansas, the state due south of us. I’ve been to Arkansas often, and I note that the same crape myrtle that doesn’t bloom until August around here blooms in May there. So that is a significant climate shift. Except of course for the fact that it is not happening.

One thing I have often noted about people’s interactions with the seasons is that they are most compelling in their changes from one to the other. People who have a favorite season like the transition to that season most of all. Autumn is the favorite season of more people than any other, with spring close behind. Summer and winter are distant contenders. When you ask people what they like, they usually cite the change from summer to autumn, or from winter to spring. It’s change they like, the feeling of something welcome and new: cooler days after the heat of summer, warmer days after the chill of winter.

I’m the same way. I try to be creative in my life, and I find that creativity peaks when change is in the air. Lately I’ve felt a little stymied in my creative endeavors, and I am now choosing to blame the weather. Winter has been dilatory in arriving, if indeed he ever intends to get here. Those long, cold afternoons spent indoors with books and papers scattered about are a distant dream. I’m sure it will come though, just as sure as I am that once it does, I’ll be able to find another excuse for my lack of creativity.