16 Comments

This is great! I like your emphasis on how it’s the life that is able to enable the cooling.. happy to see my drawing being used :)

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I love all your drawings Alpha Lo!

I would where them in T shirt to spread the word!

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Let’s do it! 🙌🏻

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I like your drawings too! They have a human quality which is nice with so many graphs and charts around.

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Ok, I just turned it into a tshirt, you can get it here. Its also available as a print, or a sticker https://pixels.com/featured/small-water-cycle-and-heat-alpha-lo.html

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Rob, what a great primer. Indeed, we are, aided by your research and willingness to articulate it, waking up.

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Nicely done.

May I republish this in The R-Word?

I don't seem to have your direct email. Could you send me a note so I have it in my records? jrivermartin at Gmail dot com . I want to point out a couple of minor typos.

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Thanks for this essay, which gets at the heart of some weaknesses inherent to human engineered, mechanized ‘solutions’ for climate changes and challenges. It’s valuable to highlight current interpretations and explanations of these processes, which have a long scholarship history that came to be known as “deep ecology” some decades back. My regards to you and your work👍🏽

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Great article Rob!

Love how everything is falling into place and time. Dr Millan work, @Alpha Lo scientific divulgation and analisis. You great story telling and writing to get even further.

I see a life movement in its dawn.

We I think about “small cycles, add and build to bigger cycles” it is true to weather and to ideas and thoughts!

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Thanks for all this Rob. This has been helpful for me.

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Fantastic and a great follow on to your Millan pieces.

I will find this very useful.

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Rob, can you explain how a sleeping person is different from the living systems you describe? I'm seeing such a person as a mini ecosystem. Is it because he or she gives off oxygen and not carbon? I'm kind of having to envisage a dead person under the blanket! Thanks!

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Hi Helen:

Sorry I missed this. A "sleeping person" would be an inanimate surface, rock or asphalt or such, that does not have vegetation. The sunlight simply warms the surface, which sends out long wave radiation which greenhouse gasses intercept, vibrate and warm the air. Yet if the sun lands on a vegetated surface, it absorbs the heat into evaporating water from it's leaves, sends it upward as a potential within the water vapor, which is released again when the vapor condenses to clouds and rain,, only higher in the atmosphere, having passed through roughly half the greenhouse gasses.

When the describe as a blanket as a sleeping person, they leave out how life is very much awake and keeping itself and us cool.

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That all makes sense. It is confusing when a sleeping person is supposed to represent a lack of life!

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Apr 3Liked by Rob Lewis

Great article.

On an adjacent level, I'd like to point out "Syntropic Agriculture" does the soil and land regeneration bringing a more stable water cycle and water table. That work brings increasing biodiversity and productivity in ways not fathomable by our typical agricutural landscape.

P.S. I've read some Alpha Lo articles before stumbling on this!

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Thanks, Tachikoma. Yes, Syntropic Agriculture is something I want to learn more about. And Alpha Lo is a vital voice.

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