Overcast with a sharp-chilly wind this Thursday morning on California’s north coast — maybe more rain today, but the chances are slim. We did get some good totals from that last couple of days, especially here on the shoreline were storms can pass right over us.
According to the NWS preliminary rainfall totals, my little town (Mckinleyville) high on the list with more than two-and-a-quarter inches of valuable precipitation.
Some of the interior spots, though, didn’t get as much downfall as usually expected, some places, way-less than us here on the Redwood Coast.
Weather has become way-part of the narrative.

Now apparently, an added attraction to all the organic/inorganic horrors out there nowadays, during the past six month’s earth’s magnetic field has been weakening.

(Illustration: Salvador Dali’s, ‘Galatea of the Spheres,’ found here).

Last July, Scientific American published a story on the magnetic field based on data collected by a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite array called Swarm — three separate satellites floating in tandem.
Result: Weak spots in the field over the Western Hemisphere, as it strengthened over areas like the southern Indian Ocean.
And maybe a reversal of earth’s north and south poles — maybe.

Last week, Scientific American published another article on the weakening magnetic field — replayed the same information, with some updates like this:

The European Space Agency’s satellite array dubbed “Swarm” revealed that Earth’s magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than previously thought, decreasing in strength about 5 percent a decade rather than 5 percent a century.
A weakening magnetic field may indicate an impending reversal, which scientists predict could begin in less than 2,000 years.
Magnetic north itself appears to be moving toward Siberia.

The UK’s Daily Mail also has a good piece on the SWARM data from last summer.

One major concern here is real knowledge — a lot of data for links to certain conclusions is dark, as in: ‘Geophysicists do not yet fully understand the process of geomagnetic reversals…What triggers these disturbances is unknown…’  so forth and so on…

Mankind’s biggest problem is mankind — we think our shit don’t stink. But it surely does. And even if the smell is pointed out to them.
Greg Mitchell this morning at Pressing Issues did some pointing way-back in 1983 — and some interesting points:

“More than a severe disruption of the world economy is at stake,” I wrote (in 1983).
“The very survival of Earth’s highest forms of life may be on the line.”
But, I advised, “Something can be done to prevent — or at least mitigate — this threat. On a global basis, humankind can cut down its burning of fossil fuels, stabilizing the excessive accumulation of carbon dioxide in the earth?s atmosphere that creates the hazard known as the Greenhouse Effect.
“There is no sign, however, that we have the slightest interest in doing this.”

Back then, scientists felt sure the warming would soon come — they accurately projected a one degree global rise in 20 years — but that normal temperature cycles were probably masking the trend, and “the lack of clear-cut evidence for a major warming effect may have terrible consequences, for it has already undermined efforts at getting governments of the world’s nationals to deal with the threat of such an effect.”
So what was our own Congress doing about it then?
About as much as it is now.
But there was sort of an excuse.
Climate change, as noted, was still somewhat speculative.
One top scientist told me, “To really KNOW anything you?ll have to wait another thirty years, so we won’t be able to convince Congress of anything until 2010.”

Now more than 30 — and even worse.

And bad is the fantasy of a future, and worse, a ‘no worries‘ attitude — the worse brainic response to tomorrow-land with reference to the magnetic field thingy, came from last week’s Scientific American‘s piece cited above, and Gary A. Glatzmaier, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz:

“A thousand years from now we probably won’t have power lines,” he says.
“We’ll have advanced so much that we’ll almost certainly have the technology to cope with a magnetic-field reversal.”

Dude, we need to first make it past the next 20 years, or 10, or maybe even five. Life has become way-similar to that rear-view mirror adage of ‘Objects are closer than they appear.’