Doomsday 2021

Some late-night thoughts that hopefully won’t color the weekend in shades of gray and black…

I checked in on the Doomsday Clock this week.

The clock was devised by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. They started the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945 and the Doomsday Clock came in 1947. They took the idea of doomsday/apocalypse and represented it on the clock as midnight. They would evaluate nuclear threats to humanity and set the clock so that it represented a countdown to midnight. They reset it every year.

I last checked the Doomsday Clock in November 2019 and it was 11:58 pm. Two minutes to Doomsday. 2020 had enough doom and gloom so I never checked.  Today the clock is 20 seconds to midnight. And seconds matter. That’s the same place that it was set in 2020. I suppose that is a glint of optimism – things haven’t gotten worse – though it is not really optimistic.

The Doomsday Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons. In 1947, nuclear war was THE threat to the planet. But climate change and disruptive technologies in other domains have been added to the calculation.

The Bulletin did not ignore the pandemic.

“Humanity continues to suffer as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the world. In 2020 alone, this novel disease killed 1.7 million people and sickened at least 70 million more. The pandemic revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly. In this time of genuine crisis, governments too often abdicated responsibility, ignored scientific advice, did not cooperate or communicate effectively, and consequently failed to protect the health and welfare of their citizens.
As a result, many hundreds of thousands of human beings died needlessly”

The clock is reset in January each year. Things have been better, but never worse. It is the closest to Doomsday it has been in the history of the Doomsday Clock.

Image: Janet Loehrke, USA TODAY

 

I think I will take a look again in January 2022. But maybe I will only report back to you if there is some improvement. After all, Paradelle is supposed to be where I escape. But I know that there is no escape from Doomsday.

The Moon Is Wobbling

Besides extreme heat this summer and wildfires, American coastlines have been facing increasing high tide floods. On that last item, NASA says this is due to a “wobble” in the moon’s orbit working in tandem with climate change-fueled rising sea levels.

Since not all have been reading the journal Nature Climate Change, I’ll fill you in on what NASA and the University of Hawaii reported: upcoming changes in the moon’s orbit could lead to record flooding on Earth in the next decade.

Get ready because flooding in American coastal cities could be a lot worse in the 2030s, which is when the next moon “wobble” is expected to begin. This flooding can cause significant damage to infrastructure and even displace communities.

Guess what – this lunar wobble is not a new or impossible thing. It is a natural occurrence and was first reported in 1728.

We know the Moon affects tides and its orbit is responsible for periods of both higher and lower tides about every 18.6 years. In the past, they haven’t been all that dangerous. Global sea-level rise pushes high tides higher. Scientists are more concerned than in the past. With sea-level rise due to climate change, upcoming high tide floods are expected to be more intense and more frequent than ever before.

The Earth in Time-Lapse

The Earth is changing. It has always been changing. That isn’t controversial. What is questioned by some people is how much humans have affected those changes.

Google along with Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab have developed a time-lapse feature that can be used within Google Earth. You can see changes to our planet since 1984. Timelapse in Google Earth uses 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years.

This is an interactive 4D experience, and you can explore Timelapse in Google Earth at g.co/Timelapse and use the search bar to choose any place on the planet.

On this day after Earth Day, what can you expect to see change in those 37 years? Google says five things you can observe are forest change, urban growth, warming temperatures, sources of energy, and Earth’s beauty and how fragile it can be.

For a quick introduction, look at this short video.

Earth Day 50 On This Different Planet Earth

Tomorrow is Earth Day #50. I recall the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. I was a high school student and one of the 20 million Americans (10% of the U.S. population at the time) who took to the streets, met on school campuses and held events in hundreds of cities to demand a new way forward for our planet. That first Earth Day is credited with launching the modern environmental movement and is now recognized as the planet’s largest civic event.

Much of that will not happen this year. That is partly because of the global pandemic we are experiencing, but part of it because too many people just don’t care.

The theme for Earth Day 2020 is taking on an enormous challenge — climate action. Action on climate change is seen as the most pressing topic for the 50th anniversary and the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and the life-support systems that make our world habitable.

There are some efforts to make Earth Day into a time for digital activities and education and that is good in his time of students learning digitally and at home. But for real change, we need to get out and make changes locally and think and act as best we can globally.

earthday.org/earth-day-2020

Isaac Asimov Predicted Some of 2019 Back in 1983

“It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future,” said someone clever.  It is difficult, and yet people keep doing it.

I have written that I tend to believe the predictions made by scientists more than those made by mystics. Of course, Sir Isaac Newton throws my theory against the wall with his predictions of the end of the world that he based on The Bible.

Scientists don’t always get it right, but sometimes science fiction writers do a good job of predicting. The best science fiction is probably fiction that is actually grounded in real science. Some of my favorite sci-fi writers, such as Philip K. Dick, have gotten it right and also a lot of it very wrong.

Isaac Asimov was born in Russia in 1920, but his family immigrated to the United States when he was three years old. His parents owned a candy store in Brooklyn and young Isaac spent a lot of time there – and reading the store’s popular magazines which included “pulp fiction” that included science fiction.

At 21, this very prolific writer wrote one of his most anthologized stories, “Nightfall.” The story was inspired by a conversation with his friend and editor John Campbell. Campbell had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and noted this passage: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!” Asimov wrote a story about a planet with six suns that has a sunset only once every 2,049 years.

What did Asimov predict back in 1983 for us living in 2019? (And why did he pick 36 years in the future to target?)

“The consequences of human irresponsibility in terms of waste and pollution will become more apparent and unbearable with time and again, attempts to deal with this will become more strenuous.” A “world effort” must be applied, necessitating “increasing co-operation among nations and among groups within nations” out of a “cold-blooded realization that anything less than that will mean destruction for all.”

Is that the climate crisis? It was obvious to some scientists in 1983 that things were headed in the wrong direction.

He was more positive that we would be dealing better with overpopulation, pollution and militarism.  We probably are dealing better with those issues, though we haven’t “solved” any of them.

Education – a career and life choice for me – was something he predicted “will become fun because it will bubble up from within and not be forced in from without.” I wouldn’t use “fun” as my main adjective for education today, but through MOOCs, alternate degrees, customized programs and other DIY educational paths there is more education “bubbling up” than ever before.

What about technology? Like others, he believed that the increase in the use of everyday technology will enable increased quality of life and more free time for many people.  He said that “… more and more human beings will find themselves living a life rich in leisure. This does not mean leisure to do nothing, but leisure to do something one wants to do; to be free to engage in scientific research. in literature and the arts, to pursue out-of-the-way interests and fascinating hobbies of all kinds.”

You can read his full essay at The Star. I was alerted to his predictions by an article on the always interesting Open Culture website.

Early Spring

Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog predicted another 6 weeks of winter, but on that day I saw a lone dandelion already blooming at the neighborhood park.  Maybe it was being bold, or being stupid, to bloom so early. It was covered by snow the following week. But according to estimates by the National Phenology Network, spring has already arrived in much of the Southwest and Southeast. It was about 20 days early for the Southeast. They track Extended Spring Indices which are models that scientists have developed to predict the “start of spring” at a particular location.

This weekend in Paradelle, we are enjoying temperatures in the 50s and 60s after a windy week in the 20s and 30s. Such is this time of late winter and early spring.

I have written a few times about phenology which is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life.

They use historical observations of the timing of first leaf and first bloom of certain plants (for example, cloned lilacs and honeysuckles) and daily observations from weather stations.

Many deciduous plants in temperate systems put on their leaves as temperatures warm in late winter and early spring. Using the Extended Spring Index models, scientists can look at how much the start of spring has varied from one year to the next at a particular location, and whether recent years are dramatically different from the past or not. The models can also be used to forecast when selected plants might bloom or put on leaves in future years.

I have been keeping my own bloom records for my home turf for about 20 years. Though my property is certainly its own “micro-climate” with variations due to shade, soil etc., I have seen earlier springs over the years for certain plants that are my own little “control” group.

The USA National Phenology Network developed Nature’s Notebook, a project focused on collecting standardized ground observations of phenology by researchers, students and volunteers like me.

I think their mission should be everyone’s mission, even if you don’t get as official as doing phenology: Gain a better understanding through considered observation of the plant and animals that surround you and how they relate to your environment and broader environmental change.

Spring is officially still a month away for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t already observing signs of it in your little corner of the world.