Posts Tagged ‘wind’
“No great thing is created suddenly… If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”*
What is true of many blessings is also, Andrew Dessler explains, true of many curses…
If you’re struggling to understand why the impacts of climate change suddenly seem so awful, it’s time we discuss a key scientific term: non-linearity.
In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage. In this world, things slowly get worse over decades until, later this century, the accumulations of slow impacts becomes truly terrible.
But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event [as pictured above], for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.
As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.
Thus, the correct mental model is not one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from “fine” to “terrible” in the blink of an eye.
The key to this is recognizing the thresholds that exist in the systems around us. For example, when engineers of the 20th century designed the infrastructure that we live with today (bridges, dams, storm runoff systems), they designed it for the range of climate conditions that existed at the time, adding in a small margin for unforeseen weather extremities. But not too much of a margin — they wanted to keep costs down.
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The speed of us passing limits is mind bending. People who are impacted are often shocked and we frequently see people bemoaning the fact that some impact never happened before — this is the calling card of non-linear effects…
Rain, snow, wind, heat– we’re living in a non-linear world: “Why are climate impacts escalating so quickly?“, from @AndrewDessler.
* Epictetus
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As we steel ourselves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that Hurricane Camille, the 2nd most intense and one of only four Category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the continental U.S., came ashore along the Mississippi Gulf Coast near Waveland, MS.
“The wind has its reasons”*…
For Theo Jansen, it’s all about the wind…
Many of us hit the beach to enjoy some sunshine or catch a wave. But for Dutch artist Theo Jansen it’s all about the wind. Jansen’s been working with this limitless natural resource for 30 years to create a fabulous array of giant beach creatures—brought to life by the wind. With every gust, his wondrous seaside sculptures become more lifelike, ambling along the coast like creatures in their own right…
Jansen started designing them in the 1990s after reading about rising sea levels threatening the low-lying Netherlands—a country famous for the fact that one third of it is below sea level. He had a dream of creating a herd of wind-powered coastal sentinels, perpetually piling sand high onto the dunes to keep the water at bay.
What he ended up building took a different turn, with Jansen developing the idea to explore evolution as the primary creative force behind all life on Earth, capturing people’s imaginations in the process…
An artist’s moving tribute to nature’s powerful resource: “Fantastic Beasts Brought to Life by the Wind,” @HoeveMarie in @NautilusMag on @StrandBeests.
* Haruki Murakami
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As we feel the breeze, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that Richard Strauss‘ Also sprach Zarathustra (Opus 30) was first performed (in Frankfurt).
Bless you…
One of the first “sneeze guards” appeared in Johnny Garneau’s American Style Smorgasbord in Monroeville 1958.
In 1959, the restaurateur and inventor Johnny Garneau patented the “Covered Food Serving Table,” later known as the “sneeze guard,” a means of protecting food on display from bacteria and other germs that may be spread by sneezing. Today, it’s required by law that retail, self-service food bars have one—no salad bar shall be left uncovered…
At the time of his invention, he owned and ran a chain of American Style Smorgasbord restaurants in Ohio and Pennsylvania—a set price, all-you-can-eat buffet model based off of the the traditional Swedish “smorgasbord,” a celebratory meal, buffet style, with a laid-out table of food. The first example of a smorgasbord in America appeared at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Garneau’s “American Style Smorgasbord” restaurant was one of the first of many self-service restaurants that would pop up in the the United States in the ’50s.
“Being the germaphobe that he was, he couldn’t stand people going down the Smorgasbords smelling things and having their noses too close to the food,” Barbara Kelley, one of five of Garneau’s children says. “He said to his engineers, ‘We have to devise something—I don’t want these people sneezing on the food”…
The saying is that “necessity is the mother of invention.” It took a Midwestern restauranteur to realize that without something to protect them, everyone’s favorite buffet foods were defenseless from the attack of a 40 mph sneeze.
Read the full story, and peruse the patent, at “How the “Sneeze Guard” Changed Buffet Tables Forever.”
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As we reach for the hand sanitizer, we might spare a thought for Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, KCB, FRS, FRGS, MRIA; he died on this date in 1857. A career naval officer and hydrographer, Beaufort devised, in 1806, a simple scale that coastal observers could use to report the state of the sea to the Admiralty. Originally designed simply to describe wind effects on a fully rigged man-of-war sailing vessel, it was later extended to include descriptions of effects on land features as well. Officially adopted in 1838 (and in use to this day), it uses numbers 0 to 12 to designate calm, light air, light breeze, gentle breeze, moderate breeze, fresh breeze, strong breeze, moderate gale, fresh gale, strong gale, whole gale, storm, and hurricane. Zero (calm) is a wind velocity of less than 1 mph (0.6 kph) and 12 (hurricane) represents a velocity of over 75 mph (120kph).
A sneeze of the sort that spooked Johnny Garneau often measures an 8 on the Beaufort Scale: “Fresh Gale.”
Causa Mortis…
It’s no wonder, what with Fukushima and all, that there’s renewed worry about the safety of nuclear power. As that tragic episode demonstrates, it’s an altogether justified concern. But what of the alternatives?
The Lifeboat Foundation‘s Next Big Future did the homework, quantifying the inclusive mortality rates from the use of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass/biofuel, peat, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear to generate electricity. The detailed results, with supporting research, are here; that detail is graphically portrayed here…
By way of putting nuclear into context, Seth Godin summarizes the comparison:
There are objections one might raise to the research used (it doesn’t, for instance, take into account the implications of the long half-lives of radioactive contaminants, nor less-than- or indirectly-fatal effects like impact on the endocrine system). But in any case, the point is not, of course, that one shouldn’t be concerned with nuclear safety; the events of the last couple of weeks are ample evidence that it’s critical.
Rather (and graphically obviously) the point is that one should be even more concerned about– and active in addressing– the risks of fossil fuel generation.
The title of Seth’s post: “The triumph of coal marketing.” Indeed.
As we hustle to harness the wind, we might might recall that it was on this date in 1855 that Canadian physician, geologist, and inventor Abraham Gesner received the first U.S. patent for a process to obtain oil from bituminous shale and cannel coal for the purpose of illumination (No. 12,612); he called the product “kerosene.”
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