What’s the weather doing where you are?
Is it only in extreme conditions that we think of climate change and that the whole world’s connected?
I notice change more in my garden since taking time-lapse sequences. (Begun 29 April)
Italian parsley has grown high and gone to seed, hiding the poas beneath. Everything is green after recent rain. I think of the changes in grass seeds that Christine McMillan animates, showing us more closely the changes happenig around us.
Animating the dress dummy along the garden path, I was thinking of our connections with Antarctica. She rotates, like a machine, and I imagine her driving the climate changes here and there. Headless and handless, she has no clue of her impact on the world. I can identify with her, feeling the limits of my own capabilities and vision.
Last night I heard wind raging outside the bedroom, and thought of the high winds reported in Melbourne and at Mawson over the last few days. I felt a strong sense of our interconnectedness, through the atmosphere we share.
Final frame from a time-lapsed drawing:
a dress dummy shadow
turns over ice.
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Photo: Sue Walker
Ice fields of Canada
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Dear Lisa,
I’m here in Melbourne but have just returned from the Icefields in Canada and was very stirred by the incredible landscape, glaciers and skies.
Melbourne today was strangely warm and waiting as if some kind of storm or rain will come but we know it’s unlikely. Gardens are green one day and dusty and thirsty the next – how they survive is a mystery. No need to read the forecast any more which is strange for Melbourne – it always seems much the same these days – warmer than usual and dry.
Lisa I’m sure I’ve said this in the wrong place but hope you can use it.
Sue
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Photo: Sylvia Shard
Overlooking the valley of the North Saskatchewan River, Canada
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Photo: Paul Brown
Early morning contrails over London Road Station
Brighton, UK.
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Photo: Robert Stephenson
Melbourne, Australia
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Christine McMillan, Grass seed performance
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Photo: Tracy Sorensen,
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Michaela Gleave, Cloudfield
Installation, Kudos Gallery
College of Fine Arts,
University of NSW 2007
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On Tuesday 30 October Margaret Brookes wrote:
Armidale NSW
In the process of house building the weather has been both a godsend and a curse…
Had a very stressful weekend…The insulation was installed in the house on Tuesday and Wednesday – on Wednesday night the heavens opened and it poured all night. It had not rained much for three months. On Thursday morning there were four large puddles on the floor in the house. For the next three days Mike and I have crawled over every inch of the roof several times. Our first thought was that the water was backing up over the edge of the tin. So we spent the day creating a wall along the 30 meters of the up side of the tin. Didn’t get finished.
The plasterers arrived at 7:00AM on Friday. They said ‘use us or loose us’. So we went ahead – with plastic boxes strategically placed in the roof. The only house where the plasterer has been told to install the ceiling with plastic boxes all over it! As they put up the sheeting we continued our work on the roof. Crawled into bed with really sore knees and exhausted on Sunday night having plugged every thing we could think of.
On Sunday night/Monday at dawn it threw it down again – the lightening woke me up at 4:00 am. The sky and wind reminded of tornadoes in Canada. Rushed over to inspect the house and again there was a drip on the floor where a box had not been installed above.
The plasterers came again on Monday, 7:00 am , and we again went up on the roof. We checked all of our work – took off all the 30 m of flashing and nothing had breached the wall. It had to be getting in somewhere else.
Then the plasterer asked us to pull the flue for the boiler up out of the way so he could put sheeting up there. We found the problem. It was the fault of every trade who stuck something on or through the roof. The chimneys for the toilet vents, the chimney for the gas boiler, the cables for the solar power and the internet cable, (i.e. everything that had a rubber boot on it) had not been sealed with silicon. When you push a pipe down through a rubber boot it causes the rim of the boot to fold inwards. This makes a nice catchment ledge for water. So water was literally running down the pipes and cables from all the unsealed boots. We have now sealed them. We will also now go round all the other fixings on the roof and make sure they all have large globs of silicon sealer on them (eg where the solar panels are screwed and bolted to the roof).Hope this will solve the problem.Thank goodness it did rain when it did with such a vengeance before we had everything completely covered with plaster.
I am a physical and emotional wreck!
The building site is a mud bath as it continues to rain heavily each day. All this water and we still don’t have hot running water.
Launceston, Tasmania
Everything is green in our yard too. Some carrots from last year have decided to thrive. Yellow flowering climbing roses cover the barbeque area, and poke out from the top of a tall tree.
Last night there was a brief yet dramatic storm of thunder and lightning here. The horses over the back fence went into a panic. The birds all vanished, and were still in hiding this morning.
Today the rain continues and has been deafening on the tin roof I work beneath. It sometimes seems like the shed will be blown away, leave just a few pieces of steel and some men attached to it.
Right now it is getting sunnier, so I look forward to eating my lunch in solitude, in my toasty little car.
Blue Mountains, NSW
The weather is extremely variable at the moment in the Blue Mountains. Literally “four seasons in one day”.
Last night we were awoken at 2am by a screaming, howling wind and showers battering the house. Had to get up to close some windows that had been open because it was hotter early in the evening.
This took about 10 minutes. Back to bed. Just settling in when the whole thing stopped. Calm, silence…
Bathurst, NSW
It’s been raining here! The world seems soft and inviting. I’ve been listening to rain drumming on my tin roof – what a beautiful, nostalgic sound! My clothes on the line are damp. With the dought here in Bathurst, this bit of rain seems unusual, a treat, too good to be true. My pigface flowers on the front verandah are in orange flower. I have pigface in memory of pigface around Carnarvon, WA, where I grew up. Lots of sand dunes, succulents, salty air … nothing like frosty Bathurst in winter. My pigface is happy enough, but it’s not quiet the right climate here for it.
Canada
Sylvia rides a horse through Autumn leaves in Canada.
Dear Lisa,
Your site is so beautiful! You capture the movement of things like nothing I have seen before. Very inspiring.
I am in Canada and leaving for Mexico in a couple of days. I have been riding a horse here lately. We had a beautiful Autumn with richly coloured leaves on the trees overlooking the valley of the North Saskatchewan River.
Can I send you a photograph of the location here in Alberta, Canada? Maybe I’ll send it as an attachment to an email and you can put it up on the website somewhere if you like, maybe the other website where you have the more general responses to place.
I am extremely busy putting the finishing touches to a book that has to be with the publisher before I leave Wednesday. So I don’t have a sketch. But I’d like to send you one of those too very soon!!
Sylvia
Sydney.
weather is sunny here, btw I’m having this gig.
It’s at 8pm on Nov 7, at Bar Me.
$10 at the door.
Shall be night and maybe cloudy when this is on; but is always cloudy when I sing.
Sydney
I’m at my office today looking out the window. The trees are waving in the breeze, rocking to and fro. The red and white roses opposite dance around in the breeze. It’s warm and sunny outside. The wind is warm, strong and whooshing around me with a life of its own.
Woy Woy, NSW.
The last two nights have felt the hottest so far this season, back to one blanket. Rain was around, a few spots overnight, but blown away now. I collected some runoff from the few mls last Friday to water plants, and noticed how the native plants in the bush and in my pots shot up in response. Better than the usual grey water rations. This morning too I saw how despite the hot dry times lately, the native cayratia clematidea (slender grape-vine) has come up in several places around the backyard. I’ve got rid of most of the lawn and over a few years the native groundcovers are coming back. It’s hot here now, maybe up to 35 degrees. The mother and baby possum have been munching on the grape vine leaves that shade this room on the north side where I type. And I was woken by the call of a juvenile barking owl a few nights ago, a different, lighter call than the regular barking owl adults. The bush stone-curlews next door are still on the nest and we should have a chick or two after tomorrow. Weather and wildlife here in Woy Woy, NSW.
It’s wonderful that those rare bush stone-curlews are surviving the next door playground!
Writing from Kandos after spending the day at Glen Alice. This morning before 9 the flies were hovering around our faces, then a light breeze came up and only one fly per person then. You develop a rather relaxed way of waving the flies away. There is so much contrast, it’s wonderful to see rain. The end of our mountain burnt last summer and is now just looking like it will hold together, the trees are sprouting and there is a light shimmer of green over the hill.
The wind continued to gain in strength: ‘a good drying day’. We discussed on the way home how lucky were are living so close to the bush: national park. We live close to a clean water supply, we are edged by trees on the eastern side, but we share our air with the rest of the world.
I went to the Hunter Valley on the weekend, there are so many wineries, and large function centres, so many people, I was really surprised at how developed it was.
Christine McMillan: Grass seed performance
Photo: Tracy Sorensen, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Brighton, England
Hi Lisa, I’m in Brighton, England and it’s getting cold though today is pretty mild. We had two days of heavy frost with the puddles of water on the flat roof below me frozen solid. Pretty much the usual October weather for this time of year I think . Though last year at this time there was an amazing Indian Summer – very warm with everyone in teeshirts.
Melbourne, Australia
The weather is fine down here. In Melbourne, the weather forecast of ‘fine’ means no rain. It can be cloudy, windy, cold, but still ‘fine’. When I was a kid, fine weather was what we wanted, but these days we want rain-weeks of it. When the weather bureau says it is going to rain, it often doesn’t. Over the weekend dark clouds flew overhead without offering a drop. I don’t know where they were going. People down here are getting a bit cagey about the lack of rain. A bloke I met this morning said he heard some radio talkback of people getting angry at the weather bureau for not ‘delivering’ rain when it was forecast. I have thought about walking around naked outside instead of taking a raincoat when rain is forecast as a way to challenge the heavens.
The local gardens have replaced large areas of lawns with mulch, sports grounds are being offered government incetives to switch from grass turf to artificial turf. I saw an ad yesterday for plastic grass that lasts twenty years, but think we will stick with what we have in our yard. Dusty, sandy soil held together with weedy grass blends which is the sort of stuff people would pull out to accommodate a soft perfect lawn when the rain was plentiful. These days the weeds will have to do. Our fruit trees are getting water from our shower and the passionfruit vine is in flower surviving onnot much water at all.
From the office window today (30th Oct) its 22 degrees at 11am, variable wind, clouds full of promise and a dusty dry asphalt down below my window. (photo in e-mail)
a bush stone-curlew chick has hatched, with one parent shepherding the hatched chick, while the other continues sitting on the nest. Three of the students saw the chick this morning, told the teacher and I went over straight away. While I was there the parents each removed the egg shells from the nest to discourage predators. This is one of only two breeding pairs in this area, down from seven pairs a few years ago, so local extinction is close.
I am sent this extract from a discussion from a recent CSIRO Forum:
“…Dave Rutledge gave a talk at the recent Peak Oil conference in
Houston.
The slides, and a video of a similar talk are available at
http://rutledge.caltech.edu/. He argues that peak coal and gas are also
near and so, to quote his web pages: “We will see that trends for future
fossil-fuel production are less than any of the 40 UN scenarios
considered in climate-change assessments. The implication is that
producer limitations could provide useful constraints in climate
modeling. We will also see that the time constants for fossil-fuel
exhaustion are about an order of magnitude smaller than the time
constant for temperature change. This means that to lessen the effects
of climate change associated with future fossil-fuel use, reducing
ultimate production is more important than slowing it down.”
The same writer suggests:
In other words we need to aim to leave as much carbon in the ground as
possible. This will however be hard to manage if it gets more and more
expensive. When we get affordable alternatives to fossil carbon, then we
won’t feel the urge to extract every drop.
And here’s another reason to leave some in the ground. Have a look at
the 3rd slide from John Church’s presentation to Greenhouse 2007:
http://www.greenhouse2007.com/downloads/keynotes/071002_Church.pdf. It
shows the sea level over the last 140,000 years. The last 7000 years of
stable sea level is very unusual. The last time it was this high was the
previous interglacial which is fairly flat for about 7000 years before
falling off a cliff. Well I guess it isn’t that dramatic, about 1cm sea
level fall per year, but that’s a lot of ice building up somewhere every
year. You have to think it was pretty cold. Any return to normal, as
opposed to inter-glacial, climate would significantly reduce the number
of people the Earth can support. So we should leave carbon in the ground
for our descendants, just in case they need to create a lot of
greenhouse gasses one day…..”
Sydney
It’s been very hot for the last few days, after some dramatic thunderstorms during last week which even brought hail to parts of sydney. Summer has arrived, the heat and humidity alternating for the moment, and a strong bite already to the sun.
I’m fascinated by the way the whole globe is connected via the air space. There are some trees lining Devonshire Street in Surry Hills which release their seeds in fluffy packaging at this time of the year, floating like snow through the heat. I think it’s beautiful, drawing attention to the physicality of air movement, focusing the eyes on matter which we ordinarily don’t see.
In May of this year I released some glacier melt from Fox Glacier in New Zealand into the air of the Melbourne CBD as steam. I wonder how far along its journey this water has travelled by now. It would be wonderful to be able to track it.
What will we be experiencing in the landscape this time next year?
And the year after?
I will ask again then, wherever we may be.
Melbounre
Nice and sunny day. Great for walking to supermarket.
🙂
I’ve enjoyed reading other people’s climate stories, sharing my good fortune in having the bush and its wildlife over my back fence. The bush stone curlew chicks are a week old today, the school grounds still their haven in this busy urban place.
Dear Lisa
Have just returned from a field study trip to Thailand visiting sites on the Thai-Burma Railway and enjoying the benefits of cross-cultural learning! It is at the end of the rain season and hence we only experienced a light fall of moisture one evening which caused the morning to feel close and humid. The days were generally still quite warm with a gentle breeze every now and then that was welcome relief to the heat.
Dear Lisa, It’s not just because of extreme weather conditions that I am concerned for the environment“ I have always been concerned, but there are others which undermine any possible connectivity with the rest of the world.
Here in southern Victoria our beautiful volcanic lakes have cracked and dried, the soil blowing away and darkening the sky for miles. The government reports it is due to farming practices and dry years. But it doesn’t appear to be farming practices which have little changed over the last 150 years“ rather the government fails to mention that the lakes™ water sources are being diverted to large cities which cannot sustain their burgeoning populations. And the government is still encouraging city population growth.
The volcanic hills are being subdivided for housing“ right to their rims. Development is encouraged counter to policy.
We have also seen in the last year a plethora of increased storm action“ higher, more severe tides, stronger winds, and hotter days, but the government appears to be ignoring the threat to our coastline and coastal wetlands and is developing them.
Our spectacular coastline appears to be threatened by greedy developers who have no thought for the environment, and the Victorian State Labor Government appears to be giving away public land to these developers to maximise their developments.
There appears to be no connectivity between Victoria’s Labor Government and the long-term needs of the people. I see it in the environmentally conscious network across Victoria; so many people are trying to keep the government accountable“ at what cost to their own lives.
Our generation seem to have had too much. I can’t see how it can be sustained without irreparable environmental damage. We must learn to live simpler less consumer orientated lives.
Hi Lisa,
It’s November 20th today and in Launceston it feels unseasonally hot. The air is dense, despite the wind. There’s none of the coolness in the air I associate with Tasmania – it must be blowing from the mainland.
My arms stick to the desk as I gather my thoughts while typing; my feet are hot and I realise that I’m still wearing my winter shoes.
It’s currently 29.6 degrees (it’s 5pm on a Tuesday) but at 11:30 this morning it was 30.3C.
The birds were singing earlier, but they’re resting now – the warmth has silenced their song.
The university is quiet too. Apart from the leaves rustling outside my door. My office is adjacent to the top of a tree and I look out to the rest of the university through its fringe of leaves. They’ve been cutting down some of the trees lately – I hope they don’t take too many. The place looks barren without them. We drove home from Latrobe on Sunday via the Frankford Highway and were dismayed to see so many of the hills completely stripped of vegetation. Piles of logs sat neatly by the road, ready to be turned into … pulp?
Each morning this week the sprinklers have been on when I get to work – watering the lawn, and the road way – my children live in Queensland with stage 6 water restrictions yet here we’re watering the road. It makes no sense.
Will it make more sense once the election is over?
I don’t know about the elections, whether people think about the changing world.
I’m not sure things will make more sense until the personal pockets of the rich are hit.
More people attended the local Newtown Festival last Sunday than the Walk Against Global Warming.
About 35 degrees, my daughter in Adelaide said it was today.
Sydney is back to its usual sultriness, after a short time of bleak, unseasonable chilly air.
I am only learning what is usual and unseasonable in Sydney, having been here only five years.
I’m told of the usual thunderstorms, but only witnessed few.