Krakatoa Day, 16th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): From what I've seen in my own personal experience,  few teachings of the Buddha are more misunderstood than the 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination. 

I'm not going to get into the whole thing here. Suffice it to say, the teaching presents a dozen conceptual links, from old age and death down to ignorance, each dependent on the link below it for its existence. The confusion starts because many assume that the chain is somehow causal, and each link somehow creates the next link above. 

Based on how I just framed it, you probably suspect that I don't agree with that view. The link just below the last or highest link on the chain, old age and death, is birth. You can't have old age and death without first having birth, but it doesn't feel right to say that birth is the cause of old age and death (although it's sometimes said the life is a fatal condition).    

No, I see each link as a necessary substrate to the link above it. For example, you can't have fire without fuel, but fuel doesn't necessarily cause fire. Other phenomena, like ignition and oxygen, are also reuired substrates. Similarly, you can't have old age and death without birth, even though birth doesn't cause old age and death.

We can apply that substrate model to the first three, bottom links of the chain: ignorance, samskara, and consciousness. I use the Sanskrit samskara rather than the various English translations, because those various translations, which include intention, impulse, mental models, mental formations, and even memory, cause a lot of the confusion. Is ignorance the substrate for intention or is it the substrate for memory? Does consciousness require impulse or does it require mental formations (whatever those are) as a substate?

I think it can be readily shown that the Buddha meant mental models or mental formations, which are basically the same thing, as are Erich Fromm's "mental maps." Ignorance does create our mental models and they don't spontaneously arise out of ignorance, but we form them to help us understand what we don't know. As Michael Pollan puts it, we form them to help us predict the behaviors of the world around us in order to keep us safe. And one of those mental models is that the thinker is a separate thing from the rest of the universe - "I" am somewhere inside this skull, and outside of it are "others." It's "me" that's experiencing these senses, storing these memories, and forming these models.

"Consciousness," in this sense, means an awareness of one's self.  And it's our mental model of a separate self that's a necessary substrate for consciousness to appear. The awareness is consciousness - we're aware of our self - and while the mental model doesn't create the awareness, it creates the object of awareness. So without the model, there's nothing to be aware of and hence no consciousness, just like no fuel means no fire.

The rest of the 12-Fold Chain can be viewed the same way - to the next step, name and form, and so on all the way up to birth and old age and death. But right now, I've been thinking mostly about consciousness.  

 

Day of the Doldrums, 15th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Are robots sentient? Are they conscious and do they have an inner self-identity? 

I'm not talking about your Roomba or one of those automatons on an assembly line in some food-processing plant. I'm talking about the synths, cyborgs, replicants, and androids that we see in science fiction. Yes, I know they don't exist yet, but if you were to meet Ash or Bishop from the first Alien movies IRL, would you consider it to have the same level of consciousness and self-awareness as a human?

You might think you have a ready answer in your head, but if you've never met one how would you know? You might think you're answer is "no," but if you were to actually encounter one is it possible you'd be swayed by it's personality and presence? Or if your answer is "yes," might you be turned off by some artificiality in its appearance and by its formulaic conversation?

If you saw the movie Companion (spoiler ahead), did you feel differently about the synth when she was in "girlfriend mode" than you did toward the end when her robotic arm was exposed and she was pretty indiscriminately killing people?  

Video games are another way to find out. No, games are not real life, and yes, they're scripted and often try to deliberately lead you to one conclusion or the other. But I argue that in the immersion that occurs over the 40 to 100 hours it takes to complete a modern game, your true feelings toward the robots will come out. You might go all "bad guy" against them in a game, like the Black Hat in the first season of Westworld, or you might respect their autonomy, like his white-hat alter ego. 

The Fallout games have a wide variety of robots and synths to help you figure just where your own personal uncanny valley lies, especially Fallout 4. Some robots are far from human, like the Mr. Gutsy's and Codsworth, who look more like a flying octopus than a person, or the Robobrains that look like giant Roombas with a glass dome containing what appears to be a human brain. The Protectrons are classic, 1950's Robby the Robot robots, and others are sleek, even sexy, bipeds, like the Assaultrons. Then there's the synths, who range from the first generation, who are obviously manufactured, to second gen characters like Nick Valentine, to third-generation models who are indistinguishable from organic humans. A subplot in the game concerns citizens of the Commonwealth becoming paranoid thinking their friends and families are being kidnapped and replaced with identical synths. There's even a human girl who becomes convinced that she herself is actually a synth.

Playing the game, I had to problem smashing, shooting, or otherwise destroying the Mr. Gutsy's and the Robobrains, and the Assaultrons were so aggressive and deadly I'd kill them without remorse before they first killed me. But I got squeamish about harming the synths, even first generation, unless first attacked. Were they like people with memories, desires, hopes, fears, and an inner life, or were they just machines useful only for whatever purpose they were manufactured? I'd no more abuse Nick Valentine than I would any human NPC in the game.

There's a pivotal scene in the game Detroit: Become Human where your feelings and attitudes towards synthetics are really put to the test. In the scene, two detectives go to the home of the inventor of the game's exact-replica synths. The inventor is similar to the Oscar Isaac character in the movie Ex Machina. The manipulative genius tells them he has information about the murder they're investigating, but will only share it if one of the detectives first shoots a beautiful female droid point blank in the head to test his theory about attitudes toward androids. You, as the player, have to make the choice to pull the trigger and kill what looks and sounds like a person and possibly solve the murder, or walk away empty handed but having spared a "life." The game could go either way - you're truly free to choose. What would you do - pull the trigger or hit the road? 

If you haven't played these games, you might think you know how you'd respond in these situations, but when playing the games, it feels different after actually encountering the entities in question, interacting with them for days and weeks on end. Especially in  the Detroit game, as the beautiful android in jeopardy is also the voice and face of the game's AI that has been assisting you the whole game.

What I'm saying is that the game experience can give you a more honest, visceral indication of how you'd actually respond than the theoretical, intellectual answer you might think you have.

FYI, I spared the woman in Detroit. Fuck that asshole inventor and his manipulative head games - I'm not breaking so much as a piggy bank much less killing a droid for his egotistical amusement.

 

Day of the Palisades, 14th of Spring 526 M.E. (Castor): I'm thoroughly enjoying my reading of Michael Pollan's A World Appears. I'm reading it very slowly, as every few pages I come across one statement or another that makes me want to put the book down and think for a while. Meditate on it a little, and then come back and re-read it again to make usure I got it right before moving on.

According to Pollan, in just one of many fascinating observations, there's a leading model of perception known as the Bayesian mind. "The Bayesian brain hypothesis," Pollan writes, "holds that perception is less a matter of taking the world in through our senses than a matter of generating a continuous stream of predictions about what's happening in the world based on our prior experiences and the laws of probability." 

"Our senses exist," Pollan writes, "mainly to refine, or error-correct, our minds' best guesses as to what we're experiencing." In other words, our minds don't exist to interpret our senses, our senses exist to interpret our minds. 

This is a most worthy addition to the set of ideas I've come to rely upon in my understanding of samskara, mental models, and subconscious thought. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm wrote, "Man needs a map of his natural and social world, without which he would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently. He would have no way of orienting himself and of finding for himself a fixed point that permits him to organize all the impressions that impinge upon him."

"Whether he believed in sorcery and magic as final explanations of all events, or in the spirit of his ancestors as guiding his life and fate, or in an omnipotent god who will reward or punish him, or in the power of science to give answers to all human problems - from the standpoint of his need for a frame of orientation, it does not make any difference. His world makes sense to him, and he feels certain about his ideas through the consensus with those around him. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. But the map was never entirely wrong - nor has it ever been entirely right, either. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living."

Fromm found it impressive that he could find no culture or individual in which there did not exist such a frame of orientation. "Often an individual may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that he responds to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as his judgment guides him. But it can be easily demonstrated that he takes his own philosophy for granted, because to him it is only common sense, and he is unaware that all his concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference."   

Fromm's description of our "mental maps" is strikingly similar to the Buddhist samskara (mental formation) and to Pollen's description of the Bayesian mind. A person develops mental models based on their prior experience, including what they've been taught and what was impressed upon them, and then can predict the likely events of the near future based on that model. In the Bayesian model, we don't perceive the object per se as much as a potential for a certain outcome, be it danger or pleasure.

For example, two different people might see the same dog at the same time. One person might perceive a chance of getting bit or at least aggressively barked at. The other person might perceive a "good boy," a loyal and nonjudgmental friend. The difference is based on prior experience and what they've been taught. Similar are the differences when two separate people see someone of a different gender, race, or religion, or an immigrant, or a homeless person. We're perceiving imagined potential, not the actual phenomenon. We're constantly sizing everything up, categorizing our surroundings and what we encounter as either "dangerous" or "pleasurable," and frequently ignoring the rest that don't fall firmly into either category.

The Bayesian model seems to exist in the sweet spot of the Venn diagram of samskara, potential, and subconscious thought.

 

Maelstrom, 13th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): To "borrow" (plagiarize? steal?) from the Upaya Zen Center's "Special Statement," Water Dissolves Water finds itself grieving the tragic loss of life in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ukraine, Gaza/Israel, and the thirty other wars and genocides raging on our planet at this moment. We stand upright and open as we call not only for a cease fire, but a ceasing of war in our time. Our hearts cannot turn away from the truth of pervasive suffering, sorrow, and death as a result of war. And for this, we urge that this be a time of deep dialogue reaching past differences, of recognizing that the terrible cost of war passes through generations, that the impact of war on our earth is inestimable, and that we must realize our basic humanity and sanity for the sake of all at this time and those who are yet to be born.

 

The Silent Guest, 12th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): As I said yesterday, war is by definition a failure and nothing good comes from it, despite mankind's enthusiasm for the activity. 

During the first days of the Stable Genius' war on Iran, 167 people were killed when a missile struck a girls’ school in Iran , apparently because the Pentagon was using outdated targeting data. One of Iran's hundreds of counterattack missiles hit a makeshift command center in Kuwait, killing six US troops and wounding dozens more. None of those tragic deaths needed to or should have happened.

Due to a lack of foresight and planning, tens of thousands of US citizens were stranded in the region as the State Department tried to figure out a way to evacuate them. Due to a lack of foresight and planning, the U.S. has allowed Iran to effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's oil passes. 

The air strikes that killed the Ayatollah also killed many of the successors favored by the Stable Genius. In his first address regarding the war, the Stable Genius told the Iranian people to “take over your government” although no viable opposition party yet exists and with no indication of how that takeover should be done. 

The first six days of the war alone reportedly cost $11.3B, and it isn’t clear if that figure includes the cost of the military buildup or the cost of our missile defense. The ultimate toll of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz on the world economy remains to be seen. 

I could gloat over these failures of my country, but I don't want to see us fail in this effort. I don't want the U.S. to lose this war. I want the the U.S. to end this war - just stop it, right now. The Stable Genius, not content in just destroying the U.S., is harming the world order in miscalculations and mistakes that will be felt for decades. It's already too late to stop the harm now, but we can still stop now before the harm gets even worse. 

Stop the war. Now.

 

Fourth Ocean, 11th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Fourth ocean of the year 526, first ocean of this spring. 

So how are you enjoying the war? War is never the answer - war is usually what happens when all other options are exhausted. War is by definition a sign of failure - failure of imagination, failure of leadership, failure of diplomacy. 

I had to add the word "usually" to the paragraph above, because the Stable Genius apparently started bombing Iran with no clear purpose or goal in mind - there was no impasse reached, no breakdown in communication or negotiation, no intolerable threshold crossed. Some say it was done as a distraction from the most recent, shocking revelations in the Epstein files. Some say it was a payback to the Saudis and Arab states for their generosity and contributions to the Short-Fingered Vulgarians' various financial enterprises. Some say it was because Israel told him to and the SG/SFV thought he was supposed to do whatever Bibi tells him. 

Some simply admit they, and the Stable Genius, don't know.

Now the Iranians are threatening shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz with sea mines and drone attacks in the most predictable response to being bombed one can imagine. Last year, the Iranian Parliament voted to shut the strait when the Stable Genius first bombed Iran, so it doesn't exactly take supernatural abilities of prognostication to foresee the the threat to the strait this time around. 

Any military commander worth their salt would know to secure the Persian Gulf first before commencing a war on Iran.  Any teenager with video game experience would have know to secure the Gulf first. But the Short-Fingered Vulgarian and his black-out drunk Secretary of Defense like to cosplay as tough-guy warriors and went straight to the "fun" part - bombing missions - and now literally the whole world is quite literally paying the price for their stupidity and recklessness as global oil costs skyrocket.

People on social media are saying the Stable Genius will be remembered as the worst president in American history. I don't believe that. I think the Stable Genius will be remembered as the worst leader in world history.

 

Day of the Rains, 10th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): To be sure, Dogen arrived at the conclusion that grass and trees are conscious not from a deep botanical study of arboreal structure and functions or from reading philosophical essays by David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel.    

To Dogen, everything is everything. To Dogen, everything was mind and since everything was mind, everything has the same substance and nature as everything else. The self is mind, mountains and rivers are mind, grasses, trees, and even land are mind. And because they are mind, they are living beings. "The sun, the moon, and the stars are mind itself. Because they are mind, they are living beings and they have Buddha Nature."

When we look at the world, we see self and others, we see mind, we see man and nature, mountains and valleys, life and death, and the conscious and the insentient. But when all is mind, there is no self and others, no man and nature, no mountains and valleys, no life and death, and no consciousness or unconsciousness. But because it is like this, there is self and others, man and nature, mountains and valleys, life and death, and the conscious and the insentient. Still, sunny days, while adored, cloud over and rain arrives when it's least welcome.

It was a surprisingly sunny and warm 82° outside today. I walked a 5.6-mile Monroe and as I always do, I stopped and laid my hand on my favorite tree on my route, a spectacular Pennsylvania ash. There's a spot on its trunk where its braided bark is worn down, and every time I pass it, I put my hand for a minute or so on that exact spot. Every single time. The spot almost perfectly matches the size and shape of my hand, if I hold my thumb and index finger apart and the other three fingers together. 

I doubt the tree is aware of my presence or my touching it, but I become aware of the tree, more than I would by simply walking past. Laying hands on that one particular tree has become a part of my routine, and my walks wouldn't feel the same without it. My routines become my rituals and my rituals begin to feel sacred.       

Day of Mourning, 9th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): 

Students of the Way, the reason you do not attain enlightenment is because you hold onto your old views. Without knowing who taught you, you think that mind is the function of your brain – thought and discrimination. When I tell you that mind is grass and trees, you do not believe it. . .  When it is said that mind is grass and trees, you should understand that grass and trees are mind. (from Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Book 4, Chapter 7).

I've started reading Michael Pollan's A World Appears, his new (2026) book on the subject of consciousness.  Talk about up my alley - my personal area of dharma research has long been samskara (mental models or schema), consciousness, and the self, and the introduction, at least, of Pollan's book reads like a review of themes I've been discussing here since at least 2007, when I first mentioned philosopher David Chalmers and the "hard problem" of consciousness, Thomas Nagel's "what's it like to be a bat?" thought experiment, and Giulio Tononi's ideas about neural connectiveness.  

Pollan contends that consciousness extends beyond humans and even brains, and that even plants may be conscious in their own way (Dogen's mind of grass and trees). He notes that people most likely to ascribe consciousness to non-sentient things such as plants are those who've tried psychedelics and those who practice meditation. I was an enthusiastic consumer of psychedelics for a period in my life (roughly 1971 to 1976), and I've been a regular practitioner of Zen meditation for the past 26 years, so according to Pollan, I'm likely to recognize consciousness far beyond the grey human matter.     

His prediction is correct, at least as far as this one-man sample set is concerned. You will never convince me that my cat, Eliot, doesn't have consciousness - an interior experience and a sense of self identity. And if my cat is conscious, then so too are dogs ("Does a dog have Buddha-nature?") and many other organisms - consciousness likely extends way beyond mammals and charismatic megafauna, in my opinion. 

Trees and other plants obviously lack brains and nervous systems and do not experience pain or possess emotions like animals. However, evidence suggests they possess a form of plant sentience, allowing them to sense and interact with their environment and react accordingly. Roots act like decentralized "mini-brains," sensing water, nutrients, and obstacles to navigate the soil. 

Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory portrays trees as deeply conscious, social, and intelligent beings, rather than mere inanimate objects. Through his fictional characters, Powers provides evidence that trees communicate, share resources, learn, and form complex, sentient networks that constitute a form of forest-level awareness. "If you link enough trees together," Powers claims, "a forest grows aware." Some have described forests as a collective, intelligent superorganism.  

Physically, trees even sort of resemble neurons, and while a single neuron doesn't possess consciousness, a network of neurons, e.g., a brain, can, just as a single tree might or might not be conscious, but a network of trees, e.g., a forest, may. An aspen forest in Utah has recently been recognized to actually consist of a single organism - a massive, 106-acre colony of over 40,000 genetically identical trees sharing a single root system. Considered one of the world's largest, heaviest, and oldest organisms at roughly 13 million pounds and thousands of years old, it is a single, connected entity.

Trees can use chemical, electrical, and hormonal signals to warn neighbors of danger, such as insect attacks, and share nutrients and communicate through underground fungal networks, often described as "fungal synapses" or humorously as the "wood-wide web." They can recognize their own species and even assist kin, indicating a sophisticated level of interaction constituting a form of intelligence.

Ethically, it's probably better to assume most all living things possess consciousness and govern oneself accordingly under that assumption, than to assume the opposite and inflict suffering where it could otherwise be avoided. 

Thirteenth-Century Zen Master Dogen recognized the mind of grass and trees. Powers and Pollan make a strong case for plant consciousness. This contemplative urban monk with former psychedelic experience does not disagree.

 

The High Winds, 8th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): Not to sound like Debbie Downer, but the overdrawn, polluted, fragmented, and invaded freshwater ecosystems across the country are in crisis. Marine and terrestrial ecosystems are also degraded, with reduced biodiversity. An estimated 34 percent of our country's plant species and 40 percent of its animal species are at risk of extinction. Human pressures are diminishing the clean water, food, health, livelihoods, and protection from storms and fire that healthy natural systems can provide.  

So the National Nature Assessment was set to say in a first-of-its-kind assessment of the health of nature in the United States. The assessment had started on Earth Day, 2022, when President Biden signed an executive order authorizing the report, but in January 2025, weeks away from completion of a first full draft of the assessment, the Stable Genius disbanded the effort. However, the researchers went ahead and completed it on their own and released a 868-page draft last week as the Nature Record, a new name to reflect a new, independent effort. 

The draft will be reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the same organization that would have reviewed the report had it remained under the auspices of the federal government.

The assessment was completed by about 125 researchers who were not federal employees, mostly working on a voluntary basis. The report primarily synthesizes existing research, so its individual findings are not new but rather a scientific consensus by which policymakers and the public can make informed decisions.

In addition to canceling the nature report, the Stable Genius has also taken aim at national climate assessments, which are mandated by Congress and have been published since 2000. He dismissed the authors and instead released a separate report by the Department of Energy that downplayed the threat of climate change. Scientists condemned that report, and in January, a judge ruled that the way the it had been commissioned by the government had violated the law.

Not reporting problems doesn't make them go away. If anything, willful ignorance of problems only allows them to fester and get worse. But I'm getting the distinct impression that the Stable Genius isn't interested in solving problems.

 

Day of the Roots, 7th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I propose that somewhere in a remote section of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, there is a colony of ants. Some of the ants claim the existence of highly intelligent beings, "humans" they call them, from somewhere outside of their nest, maybe even from beyond the mountains, but they have no proof. 

"If humans exist," the skeptical ants ask, "Why haven't they come visit our colony?" Surely, they reason, these intelligent humans would be curious about the customs and mores of the colony and would want to communicate with the ants. The believers counter that the humans would obviously want to do all that and more, but given the colony's territorial nature and the way they attacked the wasp that tried to visit, the humans are either afraid or intimidated to appear.

That's how I feel about both UFO conspiracy theorists and the Fermi paradox skeptics. The Fermi paradox is the contradiction between the high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, based on the billions of stars and planets in the universe, and the lack of evidence or contact with any such civilizations. 

I believe that given the countless, near-infinite number of stars and planets in the universe, there is lfe out there somewhere on some planet other than Earth. Statistically, if the right combination of amino acids started life here, it must also have happened sometime, somewhere else.  The vast majority of planets are not suitable for organic life as we know it, but there are probably millions (billions?) of other planets where the spark could have started. On some subset of those planets, intelligent life may have evolved, and a subset of those planets may have developed life far more intelligent than us.

But here's the thing - if a species was so vastly more intelligent than us that they managed to figure a way to overcome the space/time challenges of traveling millions of light years, have mastered quantum physics to the point that they can harness relativity to their own purposes, what interest would they have in this ant colony Earth? We're no more capable of learning what they could have to offer than those ants in North Carolina are of translating Shakespeare form English to Chinese, or solving quadratic equations. 

Look, I'm a compassionate person and I also have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals, but if I somehow realized that the North Carolina ants were about to engage in a vicious territorial war with an adjacent colony, a war that would end badly for both, my reaction still wouldn't be to attempt to communicate with the ants and intervene in the war. No, I'd think, "Oh, so that's what they do," and that would be that. So why do we think super-intelligent extraterrestrials would want to get involved with us and stop a potential nuclear war, even if it were disastrous to this planet?

I bring all this up because today The Guardian reported that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) institute is suggesting that space "weather" may be making radio signals from aliens hard to detect. Stellar activity, such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near “a transmitting planet,” can scramble such transmissions, potentially explaining the radio silence observed in SETI's searches.

“Plasma density fluctuations in stellar winds, as well as occasional eruptive events such as coronal mass ejections, can distort radio waves near their point of origin, effectively ‘smearing’ the signal’s frequency and reducing the peak strength that search pipelines rely on,” according to a SETI press release.

They are not incorrect about those challenges, although I do wonder why they're only realizing the problem now. But I disagree with any assumption that extraterrestrial intelligence has any intention on communicating with us. Especially that they're trying to but can't get through because of those pesky plasma fluctuations. 

For all that we know (and we don't know very much), extraterrestrials have already observed us, have garnered all of the data and information they want or need, and have moved on. They may even still be here, occupying some extra-dimensional space right here in our midst. 

How would we know?

 

Day of the Fronds, 6th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Oh, fun! There's another new climate-change study out! This one, as reported by the NY Times, found that previous studies of sea-level rise have underestimated just how high the water actually already is. It turns out hundreds of millions of people worldwide are already living dangerously close to the rising ocean than previously estimated.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that coastal sea levels are, on average, eight inches to a foot higher than many maps and models of the world’s coastlines indicate.  The discrepancies are most pronounced in Southeast Asia and Pacific nations, where coastal sea levels are up to several meters higher than commonly estimated.

The study concludes that scientists have often been working from the wrong starting point when calculating what land and populations might be affected in the future. In other words, they were underestimating where coastal sea levels already are. Of course, people who are exposed to tidal floods know exactly where the ocean is.  

The problem centers on a decades-old method that compares satellite-based measurements of land elevation to what scientists call the “geoid model,” which estimates average sea level based on the Earth’s gravitational field. This method, once considered state-of-the-art and commonly taught in graduate schools, doesn't take into account factors like currents, winds, and tides, which can also influence sea levels but are not included in the geoid model. Sea levels are most accurately estimated when all factors are considered and combined correctly.

Some 90 percent of the papers reviewed in the study relied only on the method of mapping sea levels using Earth’s gravitational field. Another 9 percent of the papers, most of which are relatively recent, did use both kinds of data, but failed to combine them correctly.

In general, the findings indicate that hundreds of millions more people — particularly in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Maldives, and other Southeast Asian and Pacific nations — are living closer to sea level than widely assumed by Western experts and policymakers. In other words, methods of studying sea-level rise that seemed to work relatively well for coastlines in Europe or the U.S. lead to bigger discrepancies in other parts of the world.

Day of the Lamb, 5th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Welcome to Spring. And with the new season, a welcome return of the Spring avatar, the Earth Mother. 

Speaking of Mother Earth, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the past three years have been the hottest three-year period on record. Greenhouse gas concentrations are hitting record-breaking levels even while the planet’s carbon sinks, the natural systems that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, are becoming depleted. The CO₂-induced warming has also been compounded by a recent drop in sulfur pollution that had provided temporary relief. 

The extreme heat in recent years was due in part to natural fluctuations such as solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, and the El Niño weather pattern. A previous period of accelerated warming was the result of the strong El Niño of 1998. The relative slowdown in warming that followed was incorrectly interpreted as evidence of a pause in global warming. The question now is how much of the current increased temperatures are the result of unforced variability (i.e., natural climate cycles).or forced responses (i.e., anthropogenic climate change).  

A recent study excluded the effect of natural factors behind the latest temperatures by applying a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets of the Earth’s temperature. The study found that even without taking natural causes into account, global warming accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2° C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35° per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is the highest since methodical measurements of the Earth’s temperature began in 1880. 

If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5° C limit of the Paris agreement within the next five years. One of the datasets, supplied by the EU’s Copernicus service, indicated the world will cross the 1.5° threshold this year if the rate of warming does not slow. Analysis of the other four datasets showed a breach in 2028 or 2029.

Global heating of 1.5-2° C may be enough to trigger near-apocalyptic “tipping points,” with the chances of catastrophe increasing at higher levels of warming. In the short-term, climate change will make heat waves hotter and allow storms to unleash more rain.