Earth Day Recap 1997-2025

 

AI  makes it very easy to summarize big data sets, in this case over 25 years of diary entries. I first started noticing the change in February of 1997 when there was a long stretch of days that were in the 60s and 70s. It begs the question whether anomalous weather events are just freak events and have normally occurred in history over the past couple of centuries in the same frequency as they are happening today. If everyone kept a weather diary and we were able to collect them and summarize them using AI, you would see patterns, which you could compare to scientifically collected data.

The AI-generated analysis:


12/8/1997: All the politics of the Global Environment Summit in Kyoto is a testament to the notion that man will dash any hopes that the environment can be saved.

11/29/1998: Some are making the dire prediction that within 200 years the melting ice sheets will raise sea levels enough to inundate Florida (re: Antarctica documentary)

7/1/2004: Article in LA Times: "Earth may soon be ‘unlivable.’ A 26-year-old wonders why that isn’t front-page news.

8/1/2004: Coolest summer in Chicago I have ever experienced. (Global warming is actually producing local cooling)

2/20/2006: More scientists agree that global warming is inevitable regardless of attempts to stop it. The only reason to dispute it is for capitalist reasons.

2/15/2010: The Coldrums,11th consecutive day of below normal daytime temperatures.

2/28/2010: Even if there were global mandates, natural events would be the ultimate arbiter as to the direction of global mean temperatures. Given that warming or cooling can have a lag of 50 years or more, you wouldn’t know how to attribute the change, whether it be from our own efforts or whether nature did it on its own. Nature may also have a plan for balancing CO2, making human causation insignificant or unverifiable. That said, any action we take now may be smart for other reasons, e.g. re-examination of energy consumption and conservation, adaptation, migration patterns, etc.

4/15/2010: Climate scientists think that the melting ice cap and shifting ice sheets may be causing seismic activity, including more frequent earth-quakes. I think this is going to change the climate change equation, as the earth may cool. But volcanic ash will only mask rising CO2 levels, and in the interim, nothing will be done to adapt to climate change.

7/1/2010: Global warming could be happening. That’s enough of a reason to be doing something, but never nothing at all. That way if it isn’t as bad as we predicted, we can attribute it to what we did to surmount it.

12/20/2010. Deluges in the southwest. More evidence of climate change. While Chicagoans typically are buried in snow, Californians get buried in mud.

3/28/2011: It really doesn’t make any sense to see the ultra-long view of the world, climate change, and so on, because the world wasn’t as populated as it is now. You always have to adjust predictions based on the sheer weight of the humans on the earth and all the things they are doing to it.

6/1/2011: Climate change: persistent high pressure zones, feed-back loop of scorched forests no longer in carbon cycle.

2/7/2012: Tom Skilling: It’s been 106 years since a winter’s progressed this far without a reading under 5 degrees (re,unusual winter temperatures)

10/28/2012: As in all the months, climate change was becoming obvious, either with very cold or very warm temperatures in Chicago.

9/2/2019: I became interested in climate change in the late-1980s when Sting started the Rainforest Foundation.

10/31/2019: Snow on Halloween, a first impression in my lifetime in Chicago.

7/12/2021: Does music have anything to do with climate change? https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/lee-barry/episodes/Does-music-have-anything-to-do-with-climate-change-e14rfha/a-a66jmvv

9/1/2021: There was an article I read a few days ago about mysterious delays in the ocean system just beginning to show since 1990. It takes 30 years for things to move to the point where you start seeing the effects, sort of like the lag of the seasons. There’s warming taking place but it’s not evident in the atmosphere.

10/12/2021: One of the other interesting things about climate change is that it changes the surface of the Earth and how we view it.

12/15/2021: Warm but cloudy, 65 degrees. Another tornado train on the move...First tornado reported in December in Minnesota. I suspect it is the jet stream that has been distorted by a warming atmosphere.

2/22/2022: After having poured over my diary entries and noted weather conditions, I realized that there can be wide swings, but what I have noticed is that patterns tend to persist over weeks in some cases, which at least to me seems abnormal. You can have a 60-degree temperature at this latitude in any month and wouldn’t really be that abnormal. Odd, but not abnormal. 60s in summer can happen but it doesn’t last long because of the sun’s heating. If those extremes persist then you could say it’s climate change. But if you have 70-degree temperatures in December and January, then we’ll know it’s global warming with certainty because everyone will be experiencing it and not looking at the numbers, whether it be temperature or CO2.

6/16/2022: Third day of scorching heat. I keep thinking back to when I wrote Hot New Earth and it seemed simply a cool topic to write a song about, thinking perhaps we’d do something about it eventually.

7/2022

One of the most interesting books about the LA psychogeography is The Ecology of Fear, by Mike Davis, published in 1998, right around the time when climate change was getting more media attention, perhaps (partially) because of Al Gore. Perhaps if Gore never had a role in government, we might not have had the awareness we already have, and it takes those governmental roles to keep it in the public consciousness. But 1998 was also pre-internet, when free speech exploded, and anyone could call themselves a climate expert just because they have an opinion.

9/11/2023: What is now becoming clear is that failed states (perhaps including the US) cannot (or won’t) respond to events in which rivals are involved. Climate change is the perfect storm of human cruelty and a vengeful Gaia.

5/1/2024: Again, a similar season with daily tornado outbreaks in the same regions. I recall reading something at one point where they were saying that climate change would diminish the frequency of tornadoes because of lower temperature differentials between cold and warm air masses.

6/1/2024: Heat wave begins—upper 90s for the entire week. (It’s not climate change, or the end of the world). It’s just a Chicago summer. But what is different everywhere is the impact of the built environment and higher atmospheric CO2 levels, even from 1995, when we had a string of 100s. 100s happened every year in fact, but they haven’t happened that frequently since then—a noticeable pattern that is evidence of climate change.

6/1/2024: Mere observation of climate changes is not going to make a big difference unless you record it. This was one of the things I did early on in this diary, noting unchar-acteristic weather, such as really cold weather in the beginning of June or really warm weather in December. If everybody started doing this we could record that information and declare it as the data that we recorded on our own, these are our own grassroots observations, then put that into a database and then take the real data coming off of collection devices and then compare them. And if there’s a similarity between the two then we can say that personal observations and process ob-servations have a connection, evidence these things are really happening.

8/1/2024: With climate change we are faced with the state of mind when the sun sets, and the next day (or season) arriving in complete contrast to yesterday.

9/13/2024: 2024 is turning out to be one of the least active hurricane seasons, even though it was predicted to be very active. Unpredictability could be evidence of climate change as well–that there are black swans that we can’t prepare for.

10/1/2024: As regards the conflation of the recent Gulf hurricanes with fossil fuel use, I’m wary that we’ll ever be able to ultimately say that CO2 levels have decreased, and therefore there are
now fewer destructive hurricanes.

Patterns make us patternistic thinkers. This is why we’ll never do anything about climate change (at least until the Spring)

Essentially, it’s an Overview Effect. Some people are transformed by it, as they would be by a psychedelic experience. But not everybody will have those experiences. The other thing that stood out for me was that the experience made [Shatner] realize more strongly that global warming is in fact an emergency (as if we don’t know it already on the ground (the Underview Effect), and why can’t this country do it—we’ve pursued all these military operations over decades and we should be able to do it.

10/1/2024: Turning the climate change ship around is now just as hard as turning the anti-science worldview ship around.

10/9/2024: Climate change was just becoming a popular issue in 1998 as I recall, and now the Three Gorges Dam has been weakened by floods as the result of climate change.

1/9/2025: Apparently, it hasn’t rained in LA since May. I would imagine all the “blue skies and golden sunshine” for over 6 months would drive you mad over time—just from the boredom it would produce. Here in Chicago, we can go weeks without a peak of sun, and then it changes. Sometimes you can get the California weather for a week and that’s enough. More and more I think this is climate-related, either from La Nina or stalled weather systems that pull the winds from the northeast. January is their rainy season, not the Santa Ana season which is in October. I had family that lived there from the 1950s and they would often talk about the various disasters there. This is a different pattern.

1/18/2025: And here we are 27 years later in the demon-haunted world Carl Sagan warned us about in the 1980s. At the time it was about climate change.

1/22/2025: Snowy, windy, 25 degrees. Typical dead of winter stuff in Chicago. But more climate change-related conditions in the south with Nola getting 8 inches of snow, more than what we’ve gotten for January. Cold air masses are always nearby from the poles, so in that respect not out of the question. I suspect it is the jet stream that has been distorted by a warming atmosphere.

February 2025

The main thing that’s different now is that climate change is in the equation and there simply aren’t enough cheap fossil fuels resources available for conventional wars.

I saw a documentary the other day about how climate change has affected the Panama Canal. Drought has reduced water available to run the locks, so ships have to go around the horn of South America, adding 3 weeks to journeys—not optimal for things that shift on a dime.

Will global warming increase the moisture levels within hurricanes, even though they may be predominantly of lower category? How will climate change affect art collections, especially those in harm’s way as in coastal areas? Can you show that the atmosphere is holding more water by measuring the levels of red and purple on global weather maps? Texas in at least 6 months of extreme heat and drought. Cattle ranchers are having to abandon their herds. Prediction: a collapse of the meat industry will force a radical change in agriculture.

For all the energy that goes into fighting wars it is going to be game over for climate change. Even if we start using renewables it’s not going to turn the climate around for 50 or 100 years, but it’s a good opportunity to do something about climate change and World Wars as well.

Beautiful weather, almost the same as last year, 60 degrees. Late February in Chicago is now consistently warm, as opposed to 25 years ago.,

Apparently the Department of Agriculture is erasing critical climate data and suppressing information that farmers, researchers, and policymakers rely on to prepare for climate-related disasters. More reason to diary weather events in your area, and create a new database of eyewitness observations.

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