If history were a bajada, the decades since World War II would be a climb up a nearly featureless rise, chasing the low overcast that conceals mountains in our future.
We can look back in biographies and films and memories and say that the country and the world have changed a lot, even as we look down that steady rise of seven decades and see people in the past living about the same as they do now, and believing much of what they do now. The world has changed a lot and it hasn't changed much at all.
We can see repressive events from the 50s and 60s we now disown because we think we've outgrown them even as we hear similar murmurs of prejudice.
We can watch the face of America become more inclusive even as white faces struggle to retain dominance.
We can witness the conquest of leisure time by communication devices invading hearth and hand and exposing us to more information even as we know less and less.
And we can wonder what it must have been like to look for a phone booth instead of a lost cell phone.
But we can see it all, quite clearly, and feel comfortably familiar with it all, as if the parade of American time since the end of World War II was a long running play with many costume changes, the actors remaining the same and regurgitating similar lines over and over again. A visit to a second hand clothing store will suffice to throw us back decades in pretension, and a young pop singer can start a trend by dressing like Cary Grant for a young audience that can rent Cary Grant movies to watch on their mobile devices, thinking it cool to dress up instead of dressing down like their slob boomer parents.
Time has become a digital non linear editing bin, with easy access to any clip, providing the ability to assemble fragments in any order, mashing them up into transcendence of place and era.
Nearly seventy years have passed since the end of World War II. There's nothing one can point to in this bajada of history and say, on that day the world changed irrevocably. Over the course of seven decades, that day never happened. The collapse of two towers in Manhattan came very close, but over time all blended with two foreign wars that seemed too much like previous foreign wars, and the wounds smoothed over into familiar scars that came to resemble tattoos.
A lot did happen in those seven decades, of course, although most of it seems in retrospect even to those who lived through it like little more than gossip about times that refuse to be completely gone.
Here is a thought experiment: Think of someone who was celebrating the end of World War II, maybe a sailor and a nurse kissing in Times Square and photographed by Life Magazine, who might pause after the picture was taken to regard the previous seventy years, going back to 1875. That young sailor and nurse in 1945 have an equidistant timeline backward to frontier America and forward to our times, right now. They could not have forecast the subsequent 70 years but they could take stock of what the country had been through up to the moment of their embrace.
Count the Great Divides: The end of the frontier, the turbulence of industrialization and labor organization ending American innocence, the Great War to end all wars, a decade of roaring greed and licentious hypocrisy, ended by a devastating depression, itself ended by another global war that dwarfed the previous war only two decades earlier. If that sailor and nurse had kin threading through those seventy years, they could count a lot of endings and new beginnings in their family histories, especially the one that prompted their kiss.
We cannot say the same a decade and a half into the 21st Century. We cannot find Great Divides that separated time with a sharp ax of sudden change, chopping off yesterdays from the present, dismembering nostalgia, making memories five years past seem like lifetimes ago.
When will the next Great Divide, long postponed, mark the end of our current time and the beginning of the next? When will the world suddenly never be the same, all our yesterdays irrelevant to our tomorrows? When will we cross a harsh and horrible mountain range and enter a new land, never looking back?
Monday, January 20, 2014
Thursday, January 16, 2014
The Schedule For Climate Change
For the first time, a scientific journal report has furnished a schedule for climate change in the form of a stunningly clear visualization. Here it is:
This illustration of data recently appeared in the journal, Nature (links below). It provides a view we can extend into mid century, telling us the pace of change for the average global air temperature.
The pace of global air temperature increase is an oscillation that before the industrial revolution was a full cycle swing up-and-down about an average, that spanned half a century. Ever accumulating heat has turned this rhythm into a stair step climb toward a hotter world. The shorter term El Niño / La Niña cycles ride the back of this long term, intermittent upwelling of deep cold water in the eastern tropical Pacific, that is triggered by extreme La Niña conditions.
The cold water once cooled the world through a quarter of a century, followed by a quarter century of warmth. It was a back and forth pace, a climate pendulum.
In modern times, this ocean based cooling phase, like an air conditioner laboring against a hot summer night, barely masks the relentless heat accumulation from the growing greenhouse gas blanket humans have thrown over the planet. The pendulum has been turned into a ratchet. When the cold, deep upwelling switches off again, the world's air will warm much faster, as it did during the last quarter of the 20th Century.
There still is "noise" in the record; that is to say, we can't yet account for the exact weather consequences year-to-year of the sea surface temperatures that influence the wrap of weather around the globe. But the beat of long term climate (by human measure) has been revealed as a clear signal.
We can now view the decades up to mid century with greater certainty. We are due for about fifteen years of a climate regime that allows denial to thrive, followed by extreme panic.
The argument that the pendulum has been turned into a relentless rachet will fall upon denial deafened ears. If the air temperature rise has "leveled off", then the deniers will say the data shows they are right, there is no global warming. We are likely due about a couple of decades of this resistance, the air temperature data not helping the case for climate change without the kind of qualifications that make public attention drift.
Of course, there are other factors at work. Trapped heat is still accumulating, even if the air temperature is being masked by an age old internal cycle of global air conditioning from belched deep ocean water. Trapped thermal energy is being converted to kinetic energy, which affects the weather in ways we cannot currently predict. The deep ocean itself is warmed in the process of cooling the air, which could affect the weather and climate through shifts in global ocean circulation. As there is a randomness to weather, the deniers have a line of defense on this battlefield, also.
Nature will return to validate scientific predictions with undeniable air temperature evidence as the 2030s dawn, global heating of the air resuming with the vengeance of forestalled truth. It is possible, and rather frightening, to consider that even during the air conditioning phase of the next fifteen years or so, the air temperatures might rise, the heat overwhelming the capacity of the air conditioner.
If the heating phase of the cycle that resumes around 2030 has been preceded by an overwhelmed air conditioned phase, then we are in very serious trouble for the quarter century following 2030. The unmasked warming of air, augmented by resumed warm sea surface temperatures, will race ahead so fast that the consequences will be immediately obvious, and could provide the trigger for a tipping point event. It seems likely that the methane rich frozen tundra, the ice cap of Greenland, and the West Antarctic Ice Shelf, will suffer rapid change from a relentless increase in air temperatures over a 25 year span. The frozen world is a frozen house of cards, and accelerated heating resuming in the 2030s could make it fall before 2100.
Another academic paper in a related science journal, Nature Climate Change, reports how game theory demonstrates the need for increased certainty before the majority of the public can reach a resolve to act. We now have increased certainty about the pulse of the planet's heat rise that allows the setting of planning and action horizons, gives us a relatively stable period (by the grace of Nature's planetary air conditioner) in which to respond, and makes clear what is in store.
Original sources:
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7467/full/nature12534.html
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n1/full/nclimate2059.html
This illustration of data recently appeared in the journal, Nature (links below). It provides a view we can extend into mid century, telling us the pace of change for the average global air temperature.
The pace of global air temperature increase is an oscillation that before the industrial revolution was a full cycle swing up-and-down about an average, that spanned half a century. Ever accumulating heat has turned this rhythm into a stair step climb toward a hotter world. The shorter term El Niño / La Niña cycles ride the back of this long term, intermittent upwelling of deep cold water in the eastern tropical Pacific, that is triggered by extreme La Niña conditions.
The cold water once cooled the world through a quarter of a century, followed by a quarter century of warmth. It was a back and forth pace, a climate pendulum.
In modern times, this ocean based cooling phase, like an air conditioner laboring against a hot summer night, barely masks the relentless heat accumulation from the growing greenhouse gas blanket humans have thrown over the planet. The pendulum has been turned into a ratchet. When the cold, deep upwelling switches off again, the world's air will warm much faster, as it did during the last quarter of the 20th Century.
There still is "noise" in the record; that is to say, we can't yet account for the exact weather consequences year-to-year of the sea surface temperatures that influence the wrap of weather around the globe. But the beat of long term climate (by human measure) has been revealed as a clear signal.
We can now view the decades up to mid century with greater certainty. We are due for about fifteen years of a climate regime that allows denial to thrive, followed by extreme panic.
The argument that the pendulum has been turned into a relentless rachet will fall upon denial deafened ears. If the air temperature rise has "leveled off", then the deniers will say the data shows they are right, there is no global warming. We are likely due about a couple of decades of this resistance, the air temperature data not helping the case for climate change without the kind of qualifications that make public attention drift.
Of course, there are other factors at work. Trapped heat is still accumulating, even if the air temperature is being masked by an age old internal cycle of global air conditioning from belched deep ocean water. Trapped thermal energy is being converted to kinetic energy, which affects the weather in ways we cannot currently predict. The deep ocean itself is warmed in the process of cooling the air, which could affect the weather and climate through shifts in global ocean circulation. As there is a randomness to weather, the deniers have a line of defense on this battlefield, also.
Nature will return to validate scientific predictions with undeniable air temperature evidence as the 2030s dawn, global heating of the air resuming with the vengeance of forestalled truth. It is possible, and rather frightening, to consider that even during the air conditioning phase of the next fifteen years or so, the air temperatures might rise, the heat overwhelming the capacity of the air conditioner.
If the heating phase of the cycle that resumes around 2030 has been preceded by an overwhelmed air conditioned phase, then we are in very serious trouble for the quarter century following 2030. The unmasked warming of air, augmented by resumed warm sea surface temperatures, will race ahead so fast that the consequences will be immediately obvious, and could provide the trigger for a tipping point event. It seems likely that the methane rich frozen tundra, the ice cap of Greenland, and the West Antarctic Ice Shelf, will suffer rapid change from a relentless increase in air temperatures over a 25 year span. The frozen world is a frozen house of cards, and accelerated heating resuming in the 2030s could make it fall before 2100.
Another academic paper in a related science journal, Nature Climate Change, reports how game theory demonstrates the need for increased certainty before the majority of the public can reach a resolve to act. We now have increased certainty about the pulse of the planet's heat rise that allows the setting of planning and action horizons, gives us a relatively stable period (by the grace of Nature's planetary air conditioner) in which to respond, and makes clear what is in store.
Original sources:
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7467/full/nature12534.html
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n1/full/nclimate2059.html
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