The False Expectation Of Permanence

As yet another in a long (and growing) line of hilarious jokes, I posted on Twitter a short video of the changing location of the magnetic north pole, from the year of Our Lord 1590 to 2030 (projected). You can access the complete model on the NCEI’s website (a fun tool).

My posting was a joke because I wondered about all the different entities we can blame for these inconvenient changes. Lack of Diversity? Hate? Climate change? Terrence Tao not getting his summer bonus money? Sexism?

Should we “battle” geomagnetic change? Should we demand government step in and do something? Should we—and this is really dramatic—raise awareness?

I haven’t been able to figure how to download the latitude-latitude by date data on which this map is based (maybe one of you can). If we had the data, and as I have been pointing out ad nauseatinglyum in Class, we could correlate it with millions of other things. We would find many wee Ps, which would lead to great success in academia as we write papers like “Increase In Shipping Linked To Changing Geomagnetic North”.

Obviously, the number of ships afloat would correlate nicely with the magnetic shifts. Which a wee P would confirm. Or, if not shipping, then you will find something else. Increased levels of PFAS (the “forever” chemicals used in non-stick things). These slip (good pun!) into cracks in the earth’s surface and grease the core so that it spins faster. Whatever you like.

Because, just as obviously, we have to find somebody to blame for changes. We always do.

Here is a headline from an astronomy site: “It’s official: Saturn is losing its iconic rings and they’re disappearing much faster than previously anticipated”.

Now what was your first reaction to that? Probably a joke about Greta Thunberg, or something like “We used to have a proper universe”, as I saw many make. But wasn’t there just a small voice, however transient, that called you to worry? Wasn’t there at least the fleeting shadow of a thought that somehow this might be somebody’s fault?

The end of the last ice age was about 11 or 12 thousand years ago. Glaciers covered the land on which I now live. Consider that Our Lord himself wandered the earth 2,000 years ago. Socrates about 2,500 years ago. The first Egyptian Dynasty was some 5,000 years ago. Sumerian culture settled maybe 7,500 years ago. We’ve gone bacl more than half way to the last glaciation. It wasn’t that long ago.

We today call the presumed change of temperature of a fraction of a fraction of a degree “climate change”. But surely an ice age is better qualified to go by that lustrous name. Yet an “ice age” is merely an intellectual thing, a distant state for which nobody has any feel. It is an abstraction. It exists only in equations and charts. Not in any real life. It is theory.

It’s hotter now than then. I only have to chop my way through ice to get to the house for a few months, and not the whole, of the year. It’s not only hotter, but a lot hotter. The change in temperature from then to now was consequential to great degree. Yet somehow we now believe that micro-changes in temperature are monumentally more important—but we can only do this if we forget, and keep forgetting, half the globe freezing then re-warming. (And probably re-freezing again in the future.) Why?

It is partly scientism, partly the need to blame any ill event on someone (preferably rich), partly our lingering beliefs in magic, but I propose it is mostly because we’re so short-lived that we cannot comprehend or abide environmental change. “The days of our years in them are threescore and ten years. But if in the strong they be fourscore years: and what is more of them is labour and sorrow. For mildness is come upon us: and we shall be corrected.”

Every drought comes as a shock, every hurricane is unexpected, every blizzard a surprise, every earthquake an affront, every forrest fire bewildering, every red tide leaves us aghast. Every small tick of a thermometer is amazing.

We know all these happen, we know they are common, we know they cannot be stopped. We know change is the rule and stasis the exception. Yet we expect stasis. We demand it. Almost everything we do is premised on how it is now, in the quiet periods. We give a nod to the “unexpected”, but insist all things stay at some imaginarily defined state of perfection.

That’s best seen in “climate change”, where all act as if they believe they know what the ideal, perfect climate is, everywhere, and down to the micro-degree. Ask them to write it down and they cannot, though. But they know it’s there.

All things are in mad flux, seething with unstoppable change. It’s more amazing that things are as stable as they are. This is only easy to see if you step back in time just a little. Which being so short-lived is almost impossible for us to do.

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