I launched this Substack page in 2023 on Earth Day, and before I knew it, it was Earth Day again. The Climate According to Life had completed it’s first trip around the sun. It is now one Earth-year old.
In northern latitudes Earth Day also means spring, and in my part of the world we had a rager: stretched blue sky, white pear blossoms fluttered by warming breezes, fresh pale green exploding from the ground and trees. It was one of those days that just seemed to leap out of itself, birds of all kinds singing their heads off. Bad things are happening on Earth right now, horrific things, but this vital unfurling, this wholesome and indomitable urge, persists, It seems a miracle in a sense, that the antipode to our troubles, the clear expression of what isn’t wrong, and could be ours, lives so near to us, and yet we fail recognize it’s example, to respect it, to protect it, to follow its lead.
That blind spot is what I’ve basically tried to address with this Substack page. The writing has been mostly around climate, to show that there is another way of seeing the climate, one more grounded and empowering, but the subject has always been life. It’s life that holds the answers and its life that so desperately needs our reverence and restraint. It troubles me sometimes to find myself making arguments for life on the practical basis of what it means for the climate. That feels too much like the cultural default right now, to sell environmental care based on what it can do for us.
But these arguments need to be made. The climate is indeed collapsing, and by that I mean the Holocene normal, the wetter, more richly vegetated, biotically stable climate the indigenous peoples lived and flourished within before we civilized came along with our “better ideas.” As goes the biosphere, so goes the climate, and so goes our only protection from the harsh physical reality that extends forever just outside our thin and fragile atmosphere. Making these connections is vital and that’s what a living climate understanding does. It makes the connections between life and climate.
But there’s another level to this science, as I am discovering. That level is a bit more mysterious, possessing what feels like a portal, or bridge-like quality. At least that’s been my experience. Across these facts and concepts I’ve stepped viscerally closer to life. I walk with greater wonder now, and I want to learn more. And there’s so much more to learn. Whereas the mainstream climate narrative is an extreme reduction, reducing the entire climate to a single variable, CO2, the living climate narrative is a great expansion, a multilevel immersion into a fabulous complexity.
Interestingly, the phenomena of complexity is precisely where this year of The Climate According to Life ended up, as I just returned from a conference called Embracing Nature’s Complexity. It’s subtitle was “communicating the value of water-and climate-regulating ecosystems” and was put on a by a group of scientists who, though committed as anyone to the scientific method, have elected to embrace the complexities of nature not only in their study but in their narrative. That’s significant. In a fast-paced media environment, the impulse is to reduce complexity, to package it into soundbites and catchphrases, but as we see, we keep drifting further and further from our subject: life as a whole. Perhaps this embrace of complexity will help reorient us.
So where does this point The Climate According to Life in it’s next trip around the sun, till the next Earth Day? In general, I can say that I want to focus a little more on the Life in The Climate According to Life. After all, the point of this work is to hold up and defend living beings and ecosystems. And though environmentalism finds itself in disarray at the moment, it is starting to regain its focus, and this living climate understanding can help with that.
More specifically, I want to…
…follow up on the Embracing Nature’s Complexity conference, drawing out some of the themes and explaining some of the remarkable science being developed.
…explore some of the science coming out of Russia on biotic regulation from Anastassia Makarieva and the late Victor Gorshkov.
…explore the implications of words overheard from some Lakota, that the mountains seemed to be getting a kind of “Alzheimer’s,” as if they are losing memory. Is loss of complexity also loss of memory? Are we stupefying the land?
…consider Earth’s climate from the viewpoint of space. What do we see when we look at Earth’s living climate in the context of it’s purely physical neighbors?
…consider Earth’s climate from the standpoint of evolution. How have life and climate evolved together?
…dive into forests. Forests are ill-served by a CO2-only framing of climate, with their critical role in gathering and recycling moisture largely ignored. How can we look past the forest-as-carbon-sticks model and see them again for the complex, interrelated, living communities they are?
…report on emerging forest defense movements. In my home-state of Washington, a movement has sprung up around “legacy forests.” These are forests that although cut once, were cut long ago, before the industrial model of clearcut-scrape-spray and convert to plantation. Those older cuts were “sloppy” with small and hard-to-get-to trees, along with shrubs and ground cover, left behind. Now there are little islands of mature complexity rising among the timber cornrows, and people are finding them, fighting for them.
…explore nature as a source of psychological wellness and social sanity, looking at the work of Susan Masino, neuroscientist and forest research, who argues for proforestation, protecting existing forests, as a critical means of climate healing.
…look at how the spiritual and psychological benefits of nature can be brought to those people traditionally marginalized from direct encounter with healthy, living landscapes.
Those are just some of my priorities. As you can see, the canvas is wide. All that’s required is time in my chair. Which brings up the practicalities of livelihood. The Climate According to Life earned $3,950 in its first year, more money than I’ve ever made in a year of writing in my life, and I am immensely grateful to everyone who pitched in. Obviously though, it’s not enough to live on, especially for what is essentially a full time effort. So if are you able to “upgrade to paid,” you will directly help spread this message, and have my sincere gratitude.
If you haven’t had a chance to explore this site, you might want to tour the archives. I’d particularly recommend my three-part profile of the late Spanish meteorologist Millan Millan. There you’ll get an intimate look at how land and atmosphere interact to create rain, as well as a historical perspective of how science went from a “two-legged,” land disturbance plus atmospheric CO2 perspective, to a one-legged, CO2-only orthodoxy. My profile of another key scientist, Roger A. Pielke Sr., will give you similar insights regarding the Florida everglades, and show how ecology and climate are like two words for the same thing. In Burning for Water, I look at the drying out of forests in the Western US through the lens of the Lakota phrase, “Mni Wiconi,” water is life. Earth is a Round Bridge explains some of my own personal motivation, my quest to find the place where science and poetics dissolve into each other. And Another Mediterranean Climate Mystery looks at the devasting droughts in Central Chile from this living climate perspective. You’ll also find poems, film reviews, interviews and some of my writings on the humanitarian catastrophe still unfolding in Gaza.
And just to be clear, none of these ideas absolve us from the urgent need to sop pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. That’s a given.
Another Earth Day has come and gone, but of course, every day is Earth Day, not because of this rolling orb circling the sun, but because of the life upon it. Here’s to another year of getting that much closer to it.
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
Galileo Galilei
Believe = religion
Think = opinion
Know = science
Here is what I know.
What do you know that’s different?
GHE theory fails because of these two erroneous assumptions:
Earth is warmed by GHE/GHGs preventing it from becoming a 33 C cooler, 255 K, -18 C ball of ice.
Wrong.
&
Earth’s surface radiates “extra” LWIR energy as a black body creating an upwelling, looping, trapping warming effect.
Wrong.
Earth is cooler w the atmos/WV/30% albedo not warmer.
YouTube: Greenhouse Effect Theory Goes Kerbluey (terminated)
Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics use bad math and badder physics.
YouTube: Atmospheric Heat Balances That Don't (terminated)
Kinetic heat transfer modes of contiguous atmos molecules render a BB surface model impossible.
Search: “Bruges group kerbluey”
Consensus science has a well-documented history of being way wrong and abusing those who dared to challenge it (Bruno drawn & quartered) & the current consensus is wrong about GHE & CAGW.
GHE theory & CAGW climate “science” are indefensible pseudo-science rubbish forcing alarmists to resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.