What an amazing sound...

I do like to point out the obvious.

30 years is used for calculating climatologies and as a standard for comparison. It's eminently practical, that's why it's used. The difficulty comes if you think that 30 years is what climate is.

Particularly if that something it’s a part of is a mouse.

The thirty year period is a sort of convenient compromise. For some variables it is longer than it needs to be, for others shorter. And yet, it’s become this weird magic number that somehow “defines” climate.

The thirty year period is a sort of convenient compromise. For some variables it is longer than it needs to be, for others shorter. And yet, it’s become this weird magic number that somehow “defines” climate.

I nodded off in a meeting and had a dream about sticking together the heads and tails of a bunch of worms that had got chopped in half. That became a new way for combining climate data sets.

diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2025/01/09/p...

In my own life, the things I enjoy doing that help give my life shape and meaning - reading, writing, doodling, programming, working with interesting people, puzzling stuff out, doing science, chatting, research - are all things that tech wants to automate away like they're some tiresome impediment.

Tying that back to technology, we currently have what may be a giant financial bubble associated with AI so not only does no one care if AI "success" improves quality of life, but we also have to live with the possibility that its "failure" will crash the economy, a lose-lose situation.

But what does “better” even mean?

We all have to work in the system as it is. If a high profile project like the carbon budget can’t get the attention it warrants, what chance does anyone else have? What then can we do to make the system better?

There’s a small irony that a paywalled article was written to expand reach, I guess. But the small irony is a signal of broader tensions between transparency and reach, value for money, timeliness, impact and so on.