Fall Samhain Moon
As Paul Douglas say, Minnesota is full of arm-chair meteorologists. And I’m one of them. My Davis weather system, now in its sixth year of operation, sends me information to a display that sits over the computer. Right now we have a 2 mph wind from the NNW; it’s 34 degrees, with 76% humidity, a dewpoint of 28% and a rising barometer at 29.94 millibars. We had .01 inches of rain overnight and the moon, waning, is half full.
When, for a two year period, I wrote a weather column for the Star-Tribune as one of several state-wide volunteers, the weather was even more central to my day. During the growing season, I watch it primarily for its effect on work plans. The longer term trends like drought and the changing frost-free window that defines our productive time I follow occasionally, the latter more carefully as spring or fall approach.
Weather is an example, and a fairly straight-forward one comparatively, of the complex systems not reducible to their individual atomic parts or their physics alone. It’s fairly straight-forward because weather is not alive, though it can act that way at times. It is, however, dynamic in the extreme, and the famous chaos effect example of a butterfly flapping its wings is a metaphor for the often far off events that impact our local weather.
Who could have predicted at the beginning of the industrial revolution, sometime in the mid-18th century, that those churning, whirring, creaking, whooshing machines would someday alter the weather forever? What’s starting right now that might have an equal impact? I’d guess private space-exploration and the field of biotechnology.
With complex systems the drivers are not easily discovered and are sometimes impossible to discover, at least early on, e.g. the industrial revolution.
