Rainfall Short Quotes

Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.

Locally, changes have been even more dramatic. Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as fifteen degrees in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.

We are living in a simulation, I told myself, as the trolley stopped a block from my apartment, but this fell so far short of, well, of the reality, for lack of a better word. I couldn’t convince myself. I didn’t believe it. There was a scheduled rainfall in—I glanced at my watch—two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I’ve always loved rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.

Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its way down to the groundwater, however, it may not see sunlight again for many years—thousands if it gets really deep. When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. In the ocean the residence time is thought to be more like a hundred years. Altogether about 60 percent of water molecules in a rainfall are returned to the atmosphere within a day or two. Once evaporated, they spend no more than a week or so—Drury says twelve days—in the sky before falling again as rain. Evaporation is a swift process, as you can easily gauge by the fate of a puddle on a summer’s day. Even something as large as the Mediterranean would dry out in a thousand years if it were not continually replenished. Such an event occurred a little under six million years ago and provoked what is known to science as the Messinian Salinity Crisis. What happened was that continental movement closed the Strait of Gibraltar. As the Mediterranean dried, its evaporated contents fell as freshwater rain into other seas, mildly diluting their saltiness—indeed, making them just dilute enough to freeze over larger areas than normal. The enlarged area of ice bounced back more of the Sun’s heat and pushed Earth into an ice age. So at least the theory goes. What is certainly true, as far as we can tell, is that a little change in the Earth’s dynamics can have repercussions beyond our imagining. Such an event, as we shall see a little further on, may even have created us.

Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. if it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its way down to the groundwater, however, it may not see sunlight again for many years- thousands if it get really deep. When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. In the ocean the residence time is thought to be more like a hundred years. Altogether about 60 percent of water molecules in a rainfall are returned to the atmosphere within a day or two. Once evaporated, they spend no more than a week or so- Drury says twelve days- in the sky before falling again as rain. p265

If Earth did freeze over, then there is the very difficult question of how it ever got warm again. An icy planet should reflect so much heat that it would stay frozen forever. It appears that rescue may have come from our molten interior. Once again, we may be indebted to tectonics for allowing us to be here. The idea is that we were saved by volcanoes, which pushed through the buried surface, pumping out lots of heat and gases that melted the snows and re-formed the atmosphere. Interestingly, the end of this hyper-frigid episode is marked by the Cambrian outburst—the springtime event of life’s history. In fact, it may not have been as tranquil as all that. As Earth warmed, it probably had the wildest weather it has ever experienced, with hurricanes powerful enough to raise waves to the heights of skyscrapers and rainfalls of indescribable intensity.

A first question to ask before considering how farming affected the human body is why did farming develop in so many places and in such a short span of time after millions of years of hunting and gathering? There is no single answer to this question, but one factor might have been global climate change. The Ice Age ended 11,700 years ago, ushering in the Holocene epoch, which has not only been warmer than the Ice Age, but also more stable, with fewer extreme fluctuations in temperature and rainfall.2 During the Ice Age, hunter-gatherers sometimes attempted to cultivate plants through trial and error, but their experiments didn’t take root, perhaps

I rolled away from him with a gasp of laughter and hopped out of bed. “I need a shower.” Jack followed readily. I stopped short as I flipped on the switch in his bathroom, an immaculate well-lit space with contemporary cabinetry and modern stone vessel sinks. But it was the shower that left me speechless, a room made of glass and slate and granite, with rows of dials and knobs and thermostats. “Why is there a car wash in your bathroom?” Jack went past me, opened the glass door, and went inside. As he turned knobs and adjusted the temperature on digital screens, jets sprouted from every conceivable place, and steam collected in white drifts. Three rainfall streams came directly from the ceiling. “Aren’t you going to come in?” Jack’s voice filtered through the sound of abundant falling water. I went to the glass doorway and peeked inside. Jack was a magnificent sight, all bronzy and lean, a sheet of water glimmering over his skin. His stomach was drum-tight, his back gorgeous and sleekly muscled. “I hate to be the one to tell you this,” I said, “but you need to start exercising. A man your age shouldn’t let himself go.” He grinned and gestured for me to come to him. I ventured into the maelstrom of competing sprays, battered with heat from all directions. “I’m drowning,” I said, spluttering, and he pulled me out of the direct downpour of an overhead spray. “I wonder how much water we’re wasting.” “You know, Ella, you’re not the first woman who’s ever been in this shower with me—” “I’m shocked.” I leaned against him as he soaped my back. “— but you’re for damn sure the first one who’s ever worried about wasting water.” “How much, would you say?” “Ten gallons per minute, give or take.” “Oh my God. Hurry. We can’t stay in here long. We’ll throw the entire ecological system out of balance.” “This is Houston, Ella. The ecological system won’t notice.

Light can pass through the translucent eggs, and chemicals can diffuse into them. But vibrations are what really matter. They pass into the eggs and into the embryos, which can distinguish between bad vibes and benign ones without any previous experience of either. A bite from a snake will trigger hatching. Rain, wind, and footsteps will not. Even when a mild earthquake rattled Warkentin’s pond, the embryos didn’t react. By recording different vibrations and playing them back at the eggs, Warkentin showed that they’re attuned to pitch and rhythm. Falling raindrops produce a steady pitter-patter of short, high-frequency vibrations. Attacking snakes produce lower frequencies and more complicated patterns, with prolonged bouts of chewing punctuated by periods of stillness. If Warkentin edited gaps of stillness into rainfall recordings to make them feel more snake-like, the tadpoles found them scarier and were more likely to hatch. They can clearly sense the world before entering it, and they can use that information to defend themselves. They have agency. They have an Umwelt.

In the West, however, climatic differences far more striking than these may occur within the same state, even within the same county. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, a farmer can raise a number of different crops without irrigation; there is usually a summer drought, but it is short, and even if he decides not to depend entirely on rainfall, a few inches of irrigation water—instead of the hundred inches used by some farmers in California and Arizona—will usually do. Two hours away, on the east side of the Cascades, rainfall drops to a third of what the Willamette Valley ordinarily receives; not only that, but the whole of eastern Oregon is much higher than the section west of the Cascades, and lacks a marine influence, so the climate is far colder as well. It can be forty above zero in Eugene and ten below zero in Bend, a two-hour drive to the east.

His breath came short, so he looked to the sky. Right then mammatus clouds sagged like pockets of rainfall, the framing sky detonated like it could no longer hold blue.