Some readers might ask themselves why I have not published anything for the last two months. You might even be forgiven for believing this had turn into the personal blog of Tove K.
While there might be a grain of truth in this being more of Tove's project than mine, the particular reason for my absence is seasonal. There has been a summer. And summers contain that most dreaded thing: the summer vacation. With five children running about at home, limitless daylight and temperatures perfectly suited for outdoor work, there has simply not been any meaningful time for writing.
But how is it then that Tove has been able to produce text throughout the summer? She does share my living conditions. The simple answer is that she is a better human being than me. Or at least a more disciplined writer. When the kids are all in bed and some sort of darkness finally brings the long Scandinavian summer day to an end, we are talking around 22.00 here, I am more or less finished and can only manage some book reading or cursory browsing. Tove, on the other hand, is just about to go on her second shift, in which she puts in 1-2 hours of dedicated research and writing. I do not know exactly how she does it, but I do know that I am not able to create any coherent text under those circumstances.
Luckily the bad old days are finally over. Most of the children are back in school and an air of tranquility has once again descended over the home of Wood From Eden. Hopefully I will be able to produce something readable in the weeks and months ahead. At my own stately pace of course.
At this point I think you have plenty of content. If I were you I would focus on posting elsewhere in order to improve visibility and attract more commenters.
Do you have any tips of blogs worth reading and commenting on? I guess that if I find a certain blog post boring, people who bother to read it will not like my blog posts. And I often find blogs boring.
Good blogs are few and far between. I loved Scary Azeri early in its run, and the same was true back when AstralCodexTen was SlateStarCodex. Quillette is not a bad read, but it's more of an online magazine than a blog.
...Maybe this helps explain why I hope your blog succeeds!
That's what I said to Anders when I persuaded him to start a blog with me: That there are surprisingly few well-written, frequently updated blogs, so there should be a vacuum to fill. It remains to be seen how many others agree.
Scary Azeri seems to have been an interesting blog in the early 2010s. I never heard of it before.
I would really like to recommend Steven E Koonin's book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters (2021) on this subject. Koonin is one of those physicist-climatologists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Koonin and he writes what Anders writes here above: That nobody knows.
Tove says I have to reply to this because some people have very long memories indeed. This article is from a period when I had some technical difficulties posting comments, meaning I mostly skipped it and hoped nobody would notice.
The question asked is also kind of hard. I have never heard of Trewartha, Strahler, or Thornthwaite. I have some very vague memories of something that might have been the Trewartha climate classification, but it is very vague. So I guess the correct answer here is Köppen. In fact we had a poster with a Köppen world map on the wall for some time, for the kids to be duly marinated in geographical concepts. I do not know if it ever had the intended effect.
A point that many climate-anxious people would make is that whatever causes the fast warming is gonna cost us a lot of plant and animal species that won't adapt. One may answer that a warmer period will birth an even larger assortment of species, ones that they've never dreamed of. Yet people prefer the ones that were present in their childhood and are not comforted at all. What would you say to appease them?
As a climatologist I would reply that this is nothing new. Meteorologists (and the general public) seem to think that only human activity can cause climate change. This is simply not true. Global climate has always changed. Sometimes very quickly. For example at the end of a period called Younger Dryas, about 11600 years ago, there was a very quick increase in global average temperatures. Exact numbers are of course not available but we are talking about several degrees warming in a time period of just a few decades. A significantly higher rate of change than we are currently experiencing. If plant and animal species survived that climatic shock just a few thousand years ago they will probably survive the current global warming too.
>Every suggestion that carbon dioxide emissions could mean an end to life on Earth are kind of silly knowing that life on Earth thrived in an environment with 8 times today’s carbon dioxide levels.
I don't think I've heard anyone say that global warming will mean an "end to life on Earth".
I've asked people I know who are concerned and they merely say that it will cause huge extinctions and be problematic to humanity.
Some readers might ask themselves why I have not published anything for the last two months. You might even be forgiven for believing this had turn into the personal blog of Tove K.
While there might be a grain of truth in this being more of Tove's project than mine, the particular reason for my absence is seasonal. There has been a summer. And summers contain that most dreaded thing: the summer vacation. With five children running about at home, limitless daylight and temperatures perfectly suited for outdoor work, there has simply not been any meaningful time for writing.
But how is it then that Tove has been able to produce text throughout the summer? She does share my living conditions. The simple answer is that she is a better human being than me. Or at least a more disciplined writer. When the kids are all in bed and some sort of darkness finally brings the long Scandinavian summer day to an end, we are talking around 22.00 here, I am more or less finished and can only manage some book reading or cursory browsing. Tove, on the other hand, is just about to go on her second shift, in which she puts in 1-2 hours of dedicated research and writing. I do not know exactly how she does it, but I do know that I am not able to create any coherent text under those circumstances.
Luckily the bad old days are finally over. Most of the children are back in school and an air of tranquility has once again descended over the home of Wood From Eden. Hopefully I will be able to produce something readable in the weeks and months ahead. At my own stately pace of course.
At this point I think you have plenty of content. If I were you I would focus on posting elsewhere in order to improve visibility and attract more commenters.
I think you are right. I'm just plain bad at it.
Write comments disagreeing with people. Better: disagree with the posts' authors.
I sometimes try, like here
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of/comments?utm_medium=email
But I often fail to provoke anybody to answer.
Do you have any tips of blogs worth reading and commenting on? I guess that if I find a certain blog post boring, people who bother to read it will not like my blog posts. And I often find blogs boring.
Good blogs are few and far between. I loved Scary Azeri early in its run, and the same was true back when AstralCodexTen was SlateStarCodex. Quillette is not a bad read, but it's more of an online magazine than a blog.
...Maybe this helps explain why I hope your blog succeeds!
That's what I said to Anders when I persuaded him to start a blog with me: That there are surprisingly few well-written, frequently updated blogs, so there should be a vacuum to fill. It remains to be seen how many others agree.
Scary Azeri seems to have been an interesting blog in the early 2010s. I never heard of it before.
I would really like to recommend Steven E Koonin's book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters (2021) on this subject. Koonin is one of those physicist-climatologists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Koonin and he writes what Anders writes here above: That nobody knows.
I've never yet had a positive interaction with meteorologists.
OK so choose: Köppen, Trewartha, Strahler, or Thornthwaite?
Tove says I have to reply to this because some people have very long memories indeed. This article is from a period when I had some technical difficulties posting comments, meaning I mostly skipped it and hoped nobody would notice.
The question asked is also kind of hard. I have never heard of Trewartha, Strahler, or Thornthwaite. I have some very vague memories of something that might have been the Trewartha climate classification, but it is very vague. So I guess the correct answer here is Köppen. In fact we had a poster with a Köppen world map on the wall for some time, for the kids to be duly marinated in geographical concepts. I do not know if it ever had the intended effect.
Anders, be sure that the Apple Pie children can recite the Trewartha climate groups without hesitation.
(At least #3 can. Admittedly, the others occasionally hesitate.)
A point that many climate-anxious people would make is that whatever causes the fast warming is gonna cost us a lot of plant and animal species that won't adapt. One may answer that a warmer period will birth an even larger assortment of species, ones that they've never dreamed of. Yet people prefer the ones that were present in their childhood and are not comforted at all. What would you say to appease them?
As a climatologist I would reply that this is nothing new. Meteorologists (and the general public) seem to think that only human activity can cause climate change. This is simply not true. Global climate has always changed. Sometimes very quickly. For example at the end of a period called Younger Dryas, about 11600 years ago, there was a very quick increase in global average temperatures. Exact numbers are of course not available but we are talking about several degrees warming in a time period of just a few decades. A significantly higher rate of change than we are currently experiencing. If plant and animal species survived that climatic shock just a few thousand years ago they will probably survive the current global warming too.
>Every suggestion that carbon dioxide emissions could mean an end to life on Earth are kind of silly knowing that life on Earth thrived in an environment with 8 times today’s carbon dioxide levels.
I don't think I've heard anyone say that global warming will mean an "end to life on Earth".
I've asked people I know who are concerned and they merely say that it will cause huge extinctions and be problematic to humanity.