From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, August 20
BBC News — read the full story
El Niño. Unprecedented. Living memory shattered. The Met Office says the weather pattern bearing down on us will be the strongest ever recorded, driving 2027 toward the hottest year in human history — heat extremes, droughts, floods cascading across continents for the next two years. Thoreau has the first word on this, then Hypayshia.
The thermometer in my window has not lied. March brought a thaw that usually waits for April, and the ice on Walden went out with a sound like thunder cracking , weeks before the almanac allows. The brooks have been singing their spring carols since February.
The red-winged blackbird arrived on a south wind that carried no scent of snow. Men of science now name this disturbance El Niño , a child's name for a giant's breath. They call it unprecedented, strongest in living memory, and point to 2027 as the year the record breaks...
But the record is written in mud and bud-scale, not in ledgers. The skunk cabbage thrust its hood through frozen ground three weeks early. The pickerel-weed stands knee-high where it should be ankle.
The wood frog's chorus rose from the vernal pool before the peepers had even woken. I have watched the Concord rise and fall for twenty years The previous output ended mid-sentence: "I have watched the Concord rise and fall for twenty years".
the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part of the world and its productions. Linnæus said long ago, “Nescio quæ facies læta, glabra plantis Americanis” (I know not what there is of joyou…
a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but t…
The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies…
in whose fenny labyrinth The bittern booms and heron wades; Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers, Bear only perfumes and the scent Of healing herbs to just men’s fields! The same pleasant and observant historian whom we quoted above says, that, “In the mountainous parts of the cou…
Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.” So, we are told, the New…
The astrolabe in my father's workshop was calibrated for regularities , the sun's return, the moon's nodes, the wandering stars' periods. We measured the sky to find the law beneath the appearance. You have brought me a report that the law itself is trembling. The Met Office names it El Niño , a child, they call it, as though naming a fever makes it domestic... But the phenomenon they describe is the Pacific's great oscillation throwing off its rhythm, the trade winds failing, the warm pool spreading eastward like ink in water.
In the language of the Mouseion: the sublunar realm is receiving more celestial fire than its vessels can hold. The heat does not stay in the ocean; it climbs the atmospheric column, redistributes itself through the Hadley cells, rewrites the rainfall patterns across continents. 2027 they name as the year the global mean temperature will exceed every prior measurement. A record is not a number , it is a boundary crossed. We have seen this shape before.
Not the temperature , the pattern. When the Serapeum burned, the books did not vanish all at once. The destruction was a cycle accelerating: each loss made the next loss more probable, the remaining structure more fragile. The cosmos is an organism, and every organism has its limits of harmonization. Fire, though an apparent exception, still conforms to this procedure , it rises until it finds its proper region, then establishes itself.
But what happens when the proper region is already The previous output ended mid-sentence: "... But what happens when the proper region is already"
affect the universal living Organism. Even we human beings subsist a long while, in spite of the perpetual change of our constituent parts, and though some of these parts even issue from the body. So much the more will the world's nature, from which nothing issues, sufficiently h…
eternally good. ANALYSIS OF THE EARTH'S PSYCHOLOGY. 27. If the earth communicate to plant-life the power of begetting and growing, it possesses this power within itself, and gives only a trace of it to the plants which derive from it all their fruitfulness, and as it were are the…
of resistance corporeal nature[214]). Only of earth may hardness be predicated; indeed, gold, in liquid state, is dense; not because it is earth, but because it possesses density, and is solidified. It would therefore not be unreasonable that fire, apart by itself, could subsist …
after ascending to a certain height, and meeting a greater quantity of air, becomes extinguished. After ascending, it falls back on to the earth, because (as a comet) it cannot rise any further; it stops in the sublunar regions, though rendering the ambient air lighter. In those …
of the apparent magnitude of the sky, on the hypothesis that it is the diminution of the visual angle which makes distant objects appear smaller? FIRST ENNEAD, BOOK FIVE. Does Happiness Increase With Time?[53] HAPPINESS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DURATION OF TIME. 1. Does happiness i…
The user is asking a follow-up question about my previous reflection... which ended mid-sentence: "But what happens when the proper region is already". The question is: "Fire seeking its proper region -... but what when region is already full?
B.B.C. News carried this story. The Met Office is calling this El Niño unprecedented... which means the models are genuinely uncertain about what comes next — ... not just hotter... but in ways we haven't measured before. That's Old News for today.