Earth Day and Another Anniversary
And a thank you!
Celebrating a watershed event and thinking of the future of this site
Happy Earth Day!
I hope you can keep some part this day with others or in a quiet spot of your own in a way that is special for you and for how you feel about where we live. Like the eclipse, Earth Day is something that can bring us together. It was certainly a surprisingly large and communal event in 1970, on the very first Earth Day!
April 22 will always have a special meaning for me as it was that first Earth Day that steered me into a career in environmental science.
And it was a talk given in celebration of the 51st anniversary of that day, along with a college reunion panel and a very generous retirement gathering, that led to the first essay on this Substack site and a book by the same name. Today marks the third anniversary of those events with the posting of this 76th essay!
Thanks to you, this has been a very enjoyable and rewarding experience. I have long admired good popular science writing and well-constructed essays, and your interest in these essays has encouraged me to keep trying to approach those standards.
Readership and subscriptions continue to grow and I understand that some essays are being used in classrooms and presentations. This is all a wonderful surprise! Please feel free to use these offerings in any way that would help advance the discussion of weather and climate. Almost all of the graphics used in the essays are in the public domain.
Recent subscribers may not have seen some of the earlier essays. I like the look of the website that Substack has allowed me to build, but it is not easy to find essays there on any particular topic. So, here is one posting that I update continuously – a structured list of all the essays organized by general topic (see the image on the right below).
Under these headings, essays have discussed atmospheric rivers and climate oscillations, precise, long-term measurements and some of the amazing technologies that allow us to see the dynamic climate system in real time. Several essays have focused on both the inertia in the climate system and the momentum we have created to change it that foretell a relatively slow but inexorable rise in global temperatures, and all that implies for ice, sea level and storms.
Other essays have shown that there is a positive way forward; that we have enough energy available from sun and wind and other sources to meet all our needs if we choose to make the investments required to harness them. Our climate future need not be tragic.
A dashboard of indexes mapping our changing climate system was posted at the end of 2022 and updated at the beginning of 2024 – a yearly update seems to be frequent enough. A simple model emphasized that we are in this for the long haul; that there are no quick fixes or unexplained tipping points. This and other “quantitative reasoning” posts have been among the most frequently read.
Hopefully, these technical offerings have been tempered by occasional forays into history, philosophy, and even into folktales! To my surprise, Last December’s solstice folktale has been one of the most popular posts!
What’s Next?
The next two essays will focus on a climate fallacy (we should not have been surprised by the temperature jump in 2023) and a new website from NOAA that depicts graphically where sea level rise will take us.
Beyond that, I am open to suggestions and would enjoy hearing from you about how these essays are being used or ideas for new topics. There is a comment button at the end of this email/post. Direct emails are also welcome - John.aber@unh.edu.
One possible project would be to gather all the quantitative reasoning essays together, including spreadsheets and instructions, and make them available for use in the classroom. These were well received in my introductory classes.
Another I hope to pursue is to organize, edit, and actually print some of these essays arranged by topic, in something resembling a book. This idea is driven by the knowledge that everything on the web is ephemeral. Actually printing some essays for the grandchildren to keep might let them know, as they confront the future that we are creating for them, that we did indeed know what was coming. Hopefully, by then, we will have worked together to alter the arc of climate change for them.
Anyway – thank you again for your interest. It has made this project rewarding, satisfying and enjoyable! I hope it might have contributed to the discussion in some small way. I’ll return to the essay format in the next post in two weeks.
In the meantime, I hope you can celebrate Earth Day, I would enjoy hearing from you, and as they say on the 24-hour news cycle sites – Stay Tuned!
Happy “anniversary,” John!