Year 2, Month 1, Day 4: Can A Bacterium Experience A Car Crash?

The Tennesseean notes that climate change takes place so slowly that most people don’t know how to recognize it.

It is unsurprising that the effects of climate change are difficult to spot on a day-to-day basis. We’ve become desensitized to changes in the natural world, which happen in timescales too slow for our hurried, impatient, post-industrial selves. Climatologists have worked for decades to develop the tools to trace the slow transformations of Earth’s climate over millions of years, and they are unequivocal: the climate change that’s happening right now is moving much, much faster than normal. However, that’s still a lot slower than our perceptions allow, and therein lies a critical problem for humanity. The coming centuries will feature increasingly severe and unpredictable weather, affecting our agriculture, infrastructure and community life in ways we can only begin to imagine. If we are to survive and prosper, it’s imperative that we begin re-learning how to perceive the world’s transformations on timescales greater than those of our own puny lives.

Warren Senders