(This is a lightly edited republication of a post I originally made as part of the now-defunct climate writing project, “Exquisite Climate”. This was originally published ~21 May 2021.)
(Preface: Apologies to anyone who may read this in a translated form, but the original text here is in English and makes reference to words and phrases in various Romance languages. I hope some of the points made here make you question some word connections in your native tongues.)
If you are reading this in its original English language form, and you are an English speaker, you may notice some tangled roots: “temperature” and “temporal”. If you speak a Latin-based language, you will notice similar things, but to an even greater extent: for example, “tiempo” in Spanish can mean “weather” or “time”, depending on the context.
The Latin origin, “tempus”, refers to “time” or “season”. Weather was a way to measure time -- it is a different time of year when it snows, when it is dry, when there are tornados. Observing nature gave our ancestors a sense of time.** This became particularly useful as we became agrarian or as we traversed the lands and seas.
Our ancestors relied on patterns in weather, and therefore patterns in time. In the industrialized world, time and weather are abstracted from each other. Our temporal societal patterns are arbitrary, built around laws mandating working hours and measured by machines called clocks.*** Our meteorological patterns, though…
The earth still spins about its axis the same way it did thousands, millions of years ago; our solar system’s sun burns bright. Humans cannot meaningfully relate the Sun’s death march towards becoming a red giant to meteorology (yet).**** But weather happens somewhere between the next galaxy over and in front of your face. We certainly have altered our skies up to the boundary of what is Earth and what is Beyond Earth.
What would your grandmother from 500 years ago think about the weather now? How would she plan for the future, even just a growing season from now?
The patterns are breaking. The checkerboard is tumbling down, the houndstooth is splintering. We are entering a totally different paradigm for weather, as the arrow of time maintains course. To borrow some condensed matter physics terminology, metaphorically we are approaching criticality: the fluctuations from the norm are wild and varied and unpredictable, and as the temperature increases, order flies out the planet.
We may no longer have rainy seasons but rainy eras, though this is no three-body problem. Will our descendants measure time the same way as we do, should they even survive a Chaotic Era?
How much will earth as we know it be broken? We are already associating disasters with seasons. Is this our first Fifth Season?
No quieres hablar del tiempo
Aunque esté de nuestro lado
** Of course, there are other living beings in nature, who also respond to changes in weather, and humans learn a lot about time (and future weather) from our cohabitants.
*** Of course, we are influenced by our circadian rhythms, which are influenced by sunlight, which is influenced by…
**** I am not an astrophysicist but welcome any pushback to this sentence.
References:
Origin of the English word “temper”
Maldita Dulzura by Vetusta Morla
Opening image:
“Blue over red”, Mark Rothko, 1953.
