Observations placeholder
Bryson, Bill - On climate as an agent of change
Identifier
018658
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
In the same way that there is an observable pattern in the way species are introduced and subsequently evolve, there is also an observable pattern in the way an increment/configuration is preceded. In other words there is a pattern which marks out how it starts.
Increments of species introduction are preceded by 'environmental' changes. By a change in the functions of inanimate objects.
All increments geared towards species change are preceded by some form of climate change, or change in the rotation of the earth, the sun's output, the earth's temperature, its weather, its atmosphere, its angle of tilt to the sun, its distance form the sun, and all the changes which have taken place in these all serve to create environments in which new types of life with new functions can flourish. Every 'event' physically via the inanimate is but a precursor of the change to the introduction of a new species.
Elizabeth Kolbert
… No known external force, or even any that have been hypothesised seems capable of yanking the temperature back and forth as violently and as often as these cores have shown to be the case.......... Greenland ice cores have shown the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees centigrade in 10 years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions
A description of the experience
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
We are, to an almost uncanny degree, the right distance from the right sort of star, one that is big enough to radiate lots of energy, but not so big as to burn itself out swiftly.
Had our sun been 10 times as massive, it would have exhausted itself after 10 million years instead of 10 billion and we wouldn't be here now.
We are also fortunate to orbit where we do. Too much nearer and everything on Earth would have boiled away. Much further away and everything would have frozen.
In 1978, an astrophysicist named Michael Hart …. concluded that the Earth would have been uninhabitable had it been just 1% further from or 5% closer to the sun..................
… in the long run, ice ages are by no means bad news for the planet. They grind up rocks, leaving behind new soils of sumptuous richness, and gouge out freshwater lakes that provide abundant nutritive possibilities for hundreds of species of being................
[The objective of the configuration that produced the Reptilia species seemed to be based on size. Oxygen levels in the Devonian and Carboniferous periods were higher than they are now (35% as opposed to 20%) and animals in general grew to enormous sizes aided by the change in atmosphere...]
… a track was left 350 million years ago by a millipede like creature over a metre long. In Carboniferous forests dragon flies grew as big as ravens. Trees and other vegetation likewise attained outsize proportions. Horsetails and tree ferns grew to heights of 15 metres, club mosses to 40 metres..................
… For a long time it was thought that we moved into and out of ice ages gradually, over hundreds of thousands of years, but we now know that has not been the case. Thanks to ice cores from Greenland we have a detailed record of climate for something over a hundred thousand years … It shows the Earth … has lurched violently between periods of warmth and brutal chill. ..................
Ice ages tend to wipe out evidence of earlier ice ages, so the farther back you go, the more sketchy the picture grows, but it appears that we have had at least 17 severe glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years or so. Before 50 million years ago the Earth had no regular ice ages, but when they occurred they were colossal. A massive freezing occurred about 2.2 billion years ago. Another ice age or super ice age, Cryogenian, occurred after this