The Daily Babble

Of Blogospheres and Atmospheres, Subtract Water

Although there's expectation that good bloggers post every day on topics of the moment, to feed their readers, this doesn't turn out to be how people use blogs, at least not exclusively.

Or not mine anyway. Although a discouraging number of hits come from people who seem to be surfing the most recent entries in the blogosphere at that moment, and judging from the blogs they've just come from, don't stay around to read much more than a line or two, there are also people who arrive with a purpose. And because they've shown up as the result of a search on some specific topic, they are often directed to the archives. The posts of past days, weeks or months.

Sometimes they've been directed errantly (Somebody asked "what does dreaming of a funeral mean?" and got sent here. ) But often enough they've come to the right place, even if all they're looking for is the true history of the Terrible Towel (archived on Blue Voice.)

It's true I don't get many comments, but (as Spencer Tracy said of Katharine Hepburn's anatomy in "Pat and Mike") what's there is cherse (choice.) Like a Bush's brain joke from Portugal. But I also get comments on old posts, including (for instance) a correction on a character's name in a Jane Austen movie. Or even on a post more than a year old, concerning the celebration marking Eureka's return of some land to the Wiyot.

So I try not to feel guilty when I'm not really in the mood to post yet another depressing proof of global heating--and today's is deeply frightening--or even when I berate myself for spending the time I do on writing that's maybe read by such a small number of daily visitors. Because what I've put out there in cyberspace is out there, and when people want it, they'll find it.

Now I feel like I have to say why that story is so depressing. Greenland's glaciers are melting far faster than predicted, which seems to indicate that heating is happening faster and the estimates of the future temperature rise are way low. It also means, as the story says, that sea levels are rising faster, which will add to storm damage on the coasts, and since the seas are hotter, the storms themselves will be more severe.

But that's not all. What the story doesn't dwell on is that the earth's supply of fresh water is rapidly diminishing, because a whole lot of it is in those glaciers. In 1996, the amount of water produced by melting ice in Greenland was about 90 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles in a year. Last year, the melted ice amounted to 225 times the volume of water that city uses annually.

Nobody knows how the climate crisis will play out in terms of the rain cycles, but it seems a safe bet that diminishing the fresh water supply is a very bad thing, not just for now but for a long time. And for all the vaunted advances of sciences, you can take all the gene technology and neuroscience and quantum computers combined, and it won't mean a thing because science has no idea of how to make H2O. Except of course by adding water.