Or should that be “burns” – or “floods”?
Andrew Revkin at the New York Times follows up on the popular post of a cello composition set to 130 years of temperature change with this: the animated “sonification” of 600 years of global temperature data.
The project was conceived by S. Julio Friedmann, the chief energy technologist at the lab, and the animation was created by Michael Loomis, a longtime programmer at the lab with a penchant for data visualization.
Friedmann sent this explanatory note: “I had a number of reasons for doing this. Chief was that I found that many people simply didn’t understand — internally, viscerally — the relative timing, magnitude, and rates of the climate changes.”
Note again the flattening of the chart in the mid-20th century – and what subsequently follows, where the red line appears on the screen capture above.
Juxtapose this perspective with the lack of one from those making decisions on major new infrastructure for the production and transporting of fossil fuels on a vastly expanded scale, whether coal ports, pipelines or highways. What are they expecting from subsequent generations who will be faced with the dilemma of, on one hand, having to pay off their construction and maintenance costs with, on the other, the almost certain knowledge that continued operation may well exacerbate the impacts of climate change – and the huge expenditures required to deal with the consequences?
Do they expect a quiet acceptance, a resigned compliance, a passive participation in a civilizational threat that may ultimately be suicidal? How do decision-makers personally reconcile the risk they are incurring with a moral responsibility that supersedes any mandate they have from senior governments or shareholders?
What tune do they sing to themselves?
