Every New Beginning Comes From Some Other Beginning’s End

Thanks for 3½ very rewarding years – and to Semisonic for this closing line from "Closing Time"

It Has Been a Great Run – Thanks So Much for Reading These Essays

Less Heat – More Light was a new beginning when it went live in May of 2021. The forced isolation of COVID, a challenge to present climate change in five minutes at a college class reunion, and the process of writing a book by the same name all led to the chance to realize a long-cherished desire to try writing popular science essays. Retirement from more than 4 decades of college teaching (the other beginning’s end) emptied the calendar, and using that time for this project eased the transition out of the classroom.

Across 45 months and more than 100 postings, your feedback and interest have made the effort more than worthwhile. It has been fascinating to see how readership has varied across topics. Alternate energy posts and simpler explanations have been the most popular, but topics as diverse as solstice reflections and spreadsheet applications have also been accessed frequently.

And the site has met the goal of helping to keep in touch with friends and colleagues post-retirement.

This is all good, but it’s…..

Time for This Beginning’s End

Why now? In announcing this fall’s approach to reposting previous essays I said it felt like new posts were becoming repetitive. I’ve been using the term “settled” to describe the state of climate science – still interesting questions out there but we know enough to know where we are headed and why. The recent post suggesting that even the warmest-ever year (2023) was completely predictable made this point once again.

We also know what we can do to alter our climate trajectory, or at least to prepare for it, but seem collectively unable to make the commitment. The next steps are political, not scientific, and this site has tried to steer clear of that domain, beyond pointing out our need to solve our cognitive dissonance on the topic!

I am going to round out this site with three more reposted essays, reflections that try to capture the approach taken in creating and populating Less Heat - More Light. I hope they will be of interest.

Keeping the Site Live and a Thanks to Substack

Some of the most rewarding responses to this site have been from teachers and others who have used the essays in the classroom and public presentations. I will keep this site live as long as Substack allows and in the near future will update and post a complete index to all essays, highlighting those that have been read most frequently. It will be wonderful if these essays continue to be useful for understanding weather and climate.

As an example, “atmospheric rivers” are in the news again, bringing flooding rains to California, so maybe this essay might be of interest. And the Polar Vortex broke down again recently, leading to its reappearance in the media as tongues of super-cold air pushed south from the arctic.

I will add a big thank you to Substack for providing the forum that allows this kind of in-depth treatment of serious topics with the option of making them available for free. In a world dominated by all kinds of tricks to maximize corporate profits, Substack’s free subscription policy is a welcome breath of fresh air. I am so glad they resisted the push by X to buy them out!

Substack, Wikipedia and public data websites like those from NASA, NOAA and several universities and European agencies allow us all to see directly how we are changing the planet. Please continue to support them. Models are interesting, but accurate measurements are the bedrock that underlie all we know about climate change.

A (Somewhat) New Beginning?

Building on that theme, perhaps the most unusual thing about these essays is the extensive use of figures, graphs, tables, and numbers. I feel strongly (as all my former students know) that being able to understand and present data in the simplest and most straight-forward way is crucial to being able to understand climate, and to challenge those who would use numbers incorrectly to confuse and obfuscate.

Essentially all of the analyses I have carried out and presented on this site have used publicly available data sets organized, summarized and presented with commercial spreadsheet and presentation software. I have said many times here that we owe a great deal to the dedicated scientists and technicians who collect, curate and post these data sets. If there is a new danger in the changing political context, it might be a threat to discontinue or corrupt some of these key measurements.

In this vein, one thing I might do in the next couple of months is create and post summary spreadsheets containing all of the most important data sets that have been used to write these essays. Think of this as a curated, integrated and accessible data archive.

There might be some text with some of these posts, if the stories get interesting.

I also mentioned earlier that I plan to gather some of these essays into print-ready form and turn them into actual hard copy! The goal is to preserve them for the long term as everything on the web is ephemeral. If those hard copies happen, I will let you know.

And This New Beginning’s End

So this is not the last post on this site. There will be three edited reflections added over the next three weeks and I will post a complete index organized by topic at some point, but I’m not planning any new essays. I will post those data sets (colleagues and friends know how much I enjoy playing with spreadsheets) and any updates on possible hard copy productions.

Otherwise – One more big thank you for reading these essays – I wish us all good luck in the climate future that awaits us.

And I will close by including here the very first post and introduction to this site from May of 2021. I hope you feel that Less Heat - More Light has met the goals set out for it at the time of this new beginning.

John Aber (john.aber@unh.edu)

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Less Heat – More Light

The Science of weather and climate, without the politics

May 19, 2021

The climate debate tends to generate more heat than light. Readers, regardless of where they look, are confronted with opinion and doubt, charge and counter-charge. You hear that the science is incomplete or unsettled, or that the critics are tied to corporations or lack expertise in climate science. The back-and-forth holds little useful information for the reader.

Rarely do media presentations present substantive information that might allow readers to decide for themselves what they think on the issue. In terms of climate stories, there seems to be a focus on reporting the most extreme events, possibly with a nod to a link to a changing weather and climate system, but climate change is not about individual extreme events. Climate is a long-term story of gradual, if powerful, changes.

As an environmental scientist, I often get this question: “Do you believe in climate change?” My response is to gently suggest that this is not the right question. Science is not about beliefs. As Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson has said – the good thing about science is that it is true whether you believe in it or not! I might rephrase the question as: “Does the evidence you have seen convince you that climate change is happening?” The answer to that question requires some access to real evidence.

The language of science is numbers, and that can be a barrier to telling an important story. My goal with this site is to attempt to tell the story of weather and climate based on some of the most important climate-related information acquired by the science community over a very long period of time. It’s a story built on measurements and numbers, but also on the important process of give-and-take, argument and consensus, that defines how science happens. And while science tries to take the personal out of the story, and rely just on observations, there will be some human stories of interest here as well.

With luck, I might also be able to share with you the fascination that I have felt throughout my life for how weather works. Even without the climate change context, how the oceans and atmosphere interact to redistribute the unequal distribution of the sun’s energy as delivered to the surface of our planet is just a fascinating subject – at least for me. I hope I can convey some of that fascination to you.

There will be straightforward assessments here about the state of climate science and where the science says we are headed, but I will not put forth any suggestions about what we should do about climate change – no policy dictates or political suggestions – just information. Yes, I know all the arguments about how any information has a biased source and that all science is arbitrary. I disagree strongly with those assertions. More on that in a future essay.

One of the first posts here will be about one role I think scientists, and myself as a scientist, can play in the discussion about climate change – and yes, I hold out hope that we might actually have a discussion rather than an argument! Hence the title of this site, with the clearly intended double meaning.

But first, in the next post, I will offer “Climate Change in Four Easy Steps” – a look at the history of our understanding of the interaction of greenhouse gases with climate. You may be surprised at just how long we have known the basics.

Then there will be short and hopefully interesting essays on the science of weather and climate, on how and where creative science gets done, how we might communicate science broadly, and some insights on the research enterprise gained from a couple of decades as both a professor and a university administrator. There will also be an essay or two about how climate science fits into a world with many other pressing social concerns. We’ll start there, at least, and see where this takes us. I Will try to post a new essay every week or two.

Many of the topics and approaches presented here reflect years of teaching Introduction to Environmental Science, and many of the insights I will try to present derive from excellent questions posed by the students in those classes. A colleague who teaches non-fiction writing at my institution (The University of New Hampshire) once said that good science teaching is an exercise in creative non-fiction. I like that description, and will try here to be both accurate and interesting.