24 April 2016
Late Saturday night/early Sunday morning
Dallas, Texas
3. a.m.
I couldn’t sleep… woke up and went outside… industrial area freeway frontage where this hotel is located… needed to go get water… I know – but the tap water was making me not feel good so I went down to the gas station to get Ozarka spring water, where all the danger of late night has store attendants barricaded behind thick glass and sliding transaction trays.
Water is all I drink.
Nighttime…
Earlier I had finished a keynote conversation with Karenna Gore onstage at Earth Day Texas.
As I stepped outside I noticed that humidity had arrived. The last couple days had been bluebird; no clouds. Dry. Breezy North Texas prairie winds. Spring. Not hot yet.
The humidity had opened up the smells of the leaves of the live oak trees and the cottonwood trees’ bark. I was acutely aware of that change, and those smells. I knew them.
Daytime April Dallas cottonwood tree outside freeway hotel, I-35E. © J. Manos
I wondered how many people are bodily aware of the weather’s little details that tell part of a larger story.
Then I started thinking about this Op Ed in Saturday’s New York Times. [Excerpt below.] This chief meteorologist is basically sharing that all the knowledge we’ve had of Earth and Earth’s processes from the last several thousand years will be upended as the climate changes and new unstable processes assert themselves.
My creative designer has two young kids.
My son graduates from high school in a few weeks.
I thought about the kids. They will know a physical world far different from the world we grew up in. While we knew an America that was far different and changed (damaged) from its original indigenous state before settlement, basic things like climate and sea level and seasons and the way plants and animals acted became understood and taken for granted. Scientists, governments, institutions (Columbia University holds one lease that goes to the year 3000), and the public assumed these basic things would continue.
I remember as a kid in the 70s my first reading of something in a newspaper about “global warming” but it didn’t seem real.
It wasn’t until the 90s in NYC that I had my first personal thought about it. On a very warm winter day I was hanging out with my fellow drug dealer outside his apartment building on the Lower East Side. We stood there shooting the shit as we watched cars and trucks booming off the Williamsburg Bridge exit onto Delancey Street.
Image from “The French Connection”
Outside in January in NYC in t-shirts. He was a very book smart and news-wise drug dealer, even if he sometimes lacked common sense. He loved to watch the History Channel, and Blade Runner repeatedly. He grinned, his New Orleans mustache uplifting off his black American Louisiana lips and said, “I kinda like this global warming.”
Now… .bleh.
By WILLIAM B. GAIL APRIL 19, 2016
Excerpt from an Op-Ed Published in The New York Times.
“IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.”
“William B. Gail is a founder of the Global Weather Corporation, a past president of the American Meteorological Society and the author of “Climate Conundrums: What the Climate Debate Reveals About Us.””