Not Yet Ready to Let Go
Category Archives: Weather +Climate
Snow. Snow. Then, Some More Snow.
Imbolc Valentine Moon
The snow has come down steadily, earlier it reminded me of the whiteout we mushed 
through in the Boundary Waters all those years ago. We may not get a lot of snow compared to some places, but when we have a winter like this one, it’s all still on the ground. After the storm, cold again. Not the deep bone chillers, but cold.
Right now the projection is for around 12 inches. That’s a lot of snow. And it’s heavy.
I know it seems improbable but there is a climate change explanation for this winter. As the polar ice melts in the Arctic, it changes the direction and intensity of the jet stream. The sag that has polar vortexed us for much of the winter might well be a direct result.
Tomorrow morning I have a meeting at 10 am in St. Paul. We’ll see whether that’s possible. I’m representing the Sierra Club, Margaret Levin in particular, at the America Votes monthly gathering. This is an interesting group focused on building a progressive America. Me, too.
The Week Ahead
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Weather has warmed up over 40 degrees from the last few weeks and it’s still cold. That’s about where we live. No volcanoes erupting to interfere with our lives though.
Today or tomorrow I’ll finish reviewing the edits made by Bob Klein to Missing. Then it’s off to the agents. I’ve probably taken more time getting to this point than a novel of this type warrants, but I’ve wanted to produce as good a book as I can. The first two or three books sold can determine success over all (that is, being allowed to continue publishing) and I want to present clean, focused stories.
Also tomorrow I’m going to resume my P90X workouts. I’ve taken a week + off to allow my chest to heal and it seems mostly calmed down now. Dave Scott, the handy-man I mentioned a bit ago, has installed the new pull-up bar, the Stud Bar (Tm). It will not pull out of the ceiling studs (aka Stud Bar) and I will not drop unceremoniously onto the concrete anymore. This last makes me happy.
When Kate and I discussed my attendance at an Ira Progoff workshop, I initially wanted to go to an event in early May. It was in Asheville, N.C. and the thought of contemplative work in the Blue Ridge mountains appealed to me. But, she rightly observed, this was soon after our Colorado trip for Gabe’s birthday and at the beginning of the growing season. Other dates and places I liked were either in the middle of the growing season or at the time of the honey harvest. That’s how we chose the end of March. No planting, no bees. And I can make Denver on the way home, wishing an early birthday to granddaughter Ruth.
Another way of saying Tucson was not on the top of my list for places to go.
The polishing begins on the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha this week. Back to the beginning with careful attention to commentaries, dictionaries and other English translations. The goal: as well spoken a translation as I can muster plus commentary notes.
(st. jerome, patron saint of translators. and yet another great beard model)
It’s also week 7 of the Climate Change course. This course has proved as influential for me as a weekend Kate and I spent in Iowa City with PSR, Physicians for Social Responsibility, a conference on climate change. That one propelled me into my work with the Sierra Club. Just where I’m headed now is not yet clear to me, but I’m for sure going to increase my activity level on adaptation.
Ice Cold. Superior.
Imbolc Valentine Moon
from the Updraft Blog: “Today’s MPR News weather spy Jay Austin is a professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and the Large Lakes Observatory. He sends along the news this morning that Lake Superior has completely frozen over, a month ahead of schedule for years when the big lake reaches complete ice cover.
Here’s the brief but attention getting email Jay sent my way this morning.”
Superior is completely ice covered
Flood Narratives
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Hmmm. I do like it when I’m scratching my head and I turn to the commentary to find, “Medieval and modern Latinists could make nothing of this.” Ah. At least I’m not alone.
Today I’ve started in the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha. This is an ancient flood narrative with parallels in Greek authors. In Ovid Deucalion and Pyrrha end up on the top of Mt. Parnassus and have to rebuild the human race after the flood. Right now Ovid is still describing the earth as the sea and extensive plains suddenly become water.
I don’t remember if I mentioned yesterday the image of dolphins swimming among the trees. Nice. Ships scrape their keels along the tops of hardy oak and mountain peaks.
There is controversial, but not crazy geological evidence for a flood in ancient, ancient times involving the Black Sea, sometime around 5,600 b.c.e. That’s this corner of the world and, of course, the Middle East is nearby, too.
Interestingly, in earlier translation work I ran across the Latin word, ararat. This is the pluperfect singular of a verb which means to plough or to till. It can also mean to cultivate land. Could the “flood” have been a period of wandering due to some natural disaster, maybe a flood, that resulted in Jews ending up on new land to farm? Don’t recall enough of my studies in Genesis to know if this is probable or not, but the Latin is suggestive.
I don’t know enough about the hebrew word or the Latin translation of it either. This is probably a coincidence, but it’s a weird one if it is.
Back on Tailte, Peering Into the Climate Future
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
After a frustrating morning with a balky computer, I got into Robert Klein’s work on Missing. He’s good. Careful, detailed. I’ve only rejected one of his edits so far and that one I understood what he did, but chose my construction over his. I didn’t get far, but I’ll keep at it.
I wrote a private post earlier about my anxiety as I approached this stage. It’s still there, but the anxiety decreased as I worked. I hope that continues to be the case.
As I mentioned on Great Wheel, my computer is running a climate model with its unused processing power. This is part of an Oxford Study to determine the results in a particular model if it is run many times with slight variations. These slight variation can be very significant (think butterfly flapping wings), but without running these complex models over and over, tweaking them in slightly different ways each time, it’s impossible to know for sure what a particular adjustment will do.
Climate and weather modeling are big users of super computer resources and the work on my computer is part of a massively parallel processing strategy to, in effect, mimic super computers without having to buy them. The concept is simple. Each home computer has many times the computing power necessary for almost, if not all, the tasks it performs and, in addition to that, most of them sit idle most of the time. By downloading parts of larger task onto many, many home computers use can be made of both the idle and under-utilized processing power. The first one of these projects was SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence, and I was part of that one, too.
They are resource intensive, however, so some of my computer frustrations might have come from it modeling global climate in the background. I’m 95% with the task the Oxford folks assigned to me (well, my trusty Gateway is 95% done) and it may be a while before I take on another one. This run takes approximately 350 hours of processing time.
I can and do shut it off at times.
Accentuating the Negative
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Again the even heat is so fine. Makes this feel like a work space instead of a commandeered backroom.
Most of the time today reading materials for the Climate Change MOOC and then listening a set of lectures by Richard Somerville. He’s a theoretical meteorologist which means that his work includes creating and running weather prediction and climate models. He is understandable and dispassionate. And all the more troubling for it.
(this “ski slope” graph shows the rates at which emissions have to reduce when peak CO2 emissions happen on three different dates, one already past. And we’re currently accelerating. again, see Great Wheel for particulars.)
It’s bugging me right now that I’m putting up all this negative information on Great Wheel, but the terrain ahead of us has become clearer and clearer the further I go in this course. The world needs to act soon and the developed world needs to show leadership. The EU has committed to emission goals that will meet the challenges and they have more people and a larger economy than we have. We need to act.
Then, we have to figure out the issue of sustainable development in the developing world, especially China and India, but in Brazil and Russia, too, the BRIC countries. And we really don’t have much time. In order to avert literal disaster (see Great Wheel for particulars) emissions worldwide have to peak no later than 2020 and begin then a very sharp reduction. By very sharp reduction I mean getting to a world with 80% less carbon emissions before 2050. 80%!!!!!!!!!!!
This, the Great Work of Thomas Berry’s work of the same name, is one on which we cannot fail. If we do, we consign our grandchildren (Ruth and Gabe) and their children to a world of currently unimaginable extremes in sea level rise, temperature, significant rainfall events, coral bleaching, ocean acidification and probably an increased severity of hurricanes and typhoons. You wouldn’t want to live in this world and your children’s children won’t want to either.
Oh. My.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Discovered, thanks to my copy editor, Robert Klein, that I had named one of my characters in an unintentionally humorous way. Two-arcas Merkin is a character who kills two arcas (bear-like creatures) and becomes known for it. Turns out, you may know this but I didn’t, a merkin is a pubic wig. First, I didn’t know there were such things. Second, as a result, I didn’t know they had a name. It’s the kind of thing I’m glad somebody caught. Geez.
(Russian ambassador and President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove)
The weather outlook in Denver is consistent with what I’ve experienced several times over the Stock Show trips: 50’s, high 50’s. Always seems weird, but northern moving Gulf air pressed east by the Rocky Mountains brings spring like temperatures to winter Denver often. Jon likes it. I don’t. I like my seasons true to themselves. Cold winters. Warm, wet spring. Hot summers. Cool falls.
Flying High
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Cool again, heading toward zero and minus land.
Just watched Aviator. Maybe a bit late since it was 2004, but, hey. It was still good. Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburne. Amazing. Worth watching the whole movie just to see her. She’s one of my favorite actresses and she was at top form in this role.
Leonardo DiCaprio, whom Kate and I saw in Wolf of Wall Street on Christmas Day, portrayed the enigmatic and chaotic brilliance of Howard Hughes, his obsessive-compulsive disorder eating into his effectiveness. In fact, he ended up so secretive that when he died aboard a plane in 1976, the Federal Government had to use fingerprints to discern that it was actually Hughes who had died.
And Things Were New
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
So much new. There’s always a lot of energy at first, Loki’s Children and the Great Wheel, a new workout regimen, getting back on the low carb horse, Climate Change MOOC, then there’s the slog, the keeping at it when the slump hits, a plateau and another push, then more. Right now I’m mostly in the energy phase, lots of excitement and eagerness.
There will come a time though when the effort seems too much, when the energy has gone from positive to negative, becomes a drain, exhausting. That’s when past experience helps.
Learning new tools for the Great Wheel. Diving into the difficulty of reading graphs, percentages, equations, maps, pushing my body in a different way. Listening to the ideas, the splinters of ideas, the ways forward as research and writing open up a new world.
In it now and glad of it.