Re: Cold Reality

James,

I live in north Alabama, in the middle between Mississippi and Georgia, about an hour from the Tennessee border. Over the past 4 - 5 years, we have been transitioning into a real four season climate, which we did not have before. Oddly, most local people are not aware of this until you mention it, once they think about it, they agree things are different. Certainly, the local weather people appear oblivious. (For your foreign readers, all temperatures below are in Fahrenheit.)

For these last few years, the summer months of brain busting heat have turned into weeks. We did not break 100 this summer, nor did we dwell in the high 90s for weeks on end. It’s been very up and down.

This year, for one week in July and two weeks in August we had multiple days each week with lows in the 60s, as in down to 65-66 each week. I’ve lived here since 1987 and that has never happened before.

The second week of October we had two days with freeze warnings, which is a month to six weeks ahead of the normal pace of fall here.

For work related reasons, I had to do some research on temperature extremes locally, and in the late 1880s the record low was minus 12, and in wee early 1900s the record high was 108. So whether a genuine ice age is returning or this is merely a swing in the broad range of normal, things are definitely changing.

Don Quotays

…

Don, remarkably mild summers with cool nights in July have been the norm in the Mid Atlantic for 3 years.

2022 planting season was a month late in Missouri and the Mid Atlantic.

The first week of July I experienced cold nights in Newport Kentucky.

Glaciers are growing in The Rockies. But the only glacial coverage in mainstream is the reduction of some glaciers in the Pacific Northwest.

The nation is seeing record cold and snow. It seems that we are looking at a 30 year cooling trend. Now, we have not yet experienced the “Deluge” that kicked off the Little Ice age between 1316 and 1321, 5 straight years of rain so strong that it crushed grain crops. If that happens and over half the year in grain growing regions sees rain, then this could be an ice age rather than a generation-long cool spell.

With a slight variation in temperature, American transportation has ground to a halt. Everywhere a grain civilization popped up, it went down in a few hundred years from climate change: Mayan, Toltec, Cahokian, Mississippian, Roman, 7 Bronze Age Empires, High Middle Ages. I note with a sense of irony that modern technology seems as prone to slight weather events as agrarian grain economy was.

I think if Western Civ had remained robustly industrial, and not gone to a delicate information based system, that it would be more sustainable in the face of the same cooling that destroyed previous civilizations, probably to include Antedeluvian Atlantis and Egypt.

I wonder, if the extreme short-term seasonal thinking of Western Civ ultimately comes from the colonization of the Arуan mind by middle eastern garden and grain social models, and the submissive assimilation of the Arуan mind by the Anatolian civilizations.

Consider that the Sacae/Scythian/Asagae/Sarmation horse culture, which brought numerous empires to their knees, survived from 1750 B.C. to about 1200 A.D. when Mongol and Turkish hordes that had adopted the Scythian pastoral model, finally drove them into Western Civ, where they survived until WWII as Cossacks? Contrast that with the normal 220 year rise and fall of empires and dominant nations.

Might it be that the supra annual thinking of the pastoralist, who manages herds of animals to include horses that live for decades as well as shorter lived meat animals, all of which live in longer cycles then grain crops, have contributed to a longer lived society? These barbarian societies across the world, occupied most of the planet for thousands of years of continuity, as they saw civilization after civilization fail in their small containment regions.

For instance, the Bronze Age lasted for less then 2,000 years in a tiny zone. But the Swordfish Hunters thrived for 4,000 years over thrice the space, the Jomon for 20,000 years, Asiatic migrant Amerindian bunting tribes for 10,000 years. All of these barbarian cultures outlasted every civilization two- to ten-fold. They were crushed by Industrial Civilization, that evolved out of the synergy of the pastoralist over agrarian high civilization.

The pastoral view is the hunting view, a world of migration, of generations, not of a mere spring to life and fall into death of Persephone in the cold hands of Hades.

Perhaps Civilizations fail so rapidly, compared to tribal societies due to seasonal sub-annual thinking rather than generational supra annual thinking?

Tribes tend to last for thousands of years until they are colonized by a civilization or exterminated by other tribes. I suspect that Homer’s view of ancestors that were far more powerful than his heroes is related to the internal social rot implicit in civilization, the social toxin of static, hierarchical social control—the pyramid scheme of civilization corroding the quality of men in favor of the quantity of men.

I also see in Beowulf, Gilgamesh, The Odyssey and the Iliad evidence that these heroic ages had been preceded by higher civilizations. This is suggested by Plato, by massive ruins that predate known agriculture across the world, and also the image of automobiles, here in the Pacific Northwest, that are devoured by black berry bushes in a mere five years. Look at how much more cheaply industrial civilization built than the ancients, how their ruins have lasted for ten thousand years and our abandoned structures are unrecognizable after a hundred. Note also, that the construction materials used in information age building are even more vulnerable to time and the elements than the relatively fragile architecture of the Industrial Age.

The more advanced modernity becomes the shorter lived is every aspect. For instance coin gives way to paper, which gives way to a magnetic trace that can be erased by a single solar flare and will not store on hardware for even half the lifetime of the person whose financial record that is.

A final speculation is that, as the migratory and animal life cycle focus of hunting and herding societies produced the longest lived cultures, and the grain civilizations produced the shortest lived cultures, perhaps this difference is due to civilization adopting harvest-based inventory methods of social control; departing from the understanding of the living in favor of the curation of the dead?

For control of people is more like farming animals than grain. Perhaps the obsession with funerary tombs in Egypt, which was the most decadent and frail-bodied early society, unable to win wars beyond its borders, is a reflection of civilization being a death cult?