It is Friday the 8th of July 2022 in Australia and as I look outside there is not a cloud in the sky. This, it must be said, is surprising.
Last Friday it began raining and it simply continued to rain more…and more and more. One statistic that was publicised was that across four days Sydney received more than London receives in a year. Let that sink in. London is famous for its rain. Ok, drizzle. But you get the point. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/sydney-floods-more-rainfall-in-four-days-than-london-gets-in-a-year-bbc/YIVB3RVMIQXYXDAE273OUU2Y3Q/
We were told by experts a couple of decades back that the rain that falls would not fill out dams due to climate change. We’ve had the opposite. Climate change is real - as real as the weather, earthquakes or the movement of tectonic plates is - but attempting to predict (prophecy!) in fine grain detail what the effects will be is not science. It’s rather like knowing continental drift is a thing that causes earthquakes - but predicting earthquakes still eludes us. So too with “climate change is going to cause…droughts in the next 20 years” - or “is a cause of this particular hurricane” and so on. That is pure guesswork. We simply do not know the effects of a warming world in fine detail and what we do know does not allow us to make precise predictions. The overall affect of climate on weather is not well understood. At all. Far less - by orders of magnitude - is it understood what people will do about any of it ahead of time. And what they will do will have an effect…on the effects of climate change.
But Sydney, the state of New South Wales (NSW) and indeed the entire East coast of Australia taking in Victoria. NSW and Queensland is now very used to floods after year upon year of floods for around the last 5 (or more) years in some places. We do sometimes get close to running out of water nonetheless. And why? Lack of storage for growing cities. People don’t want to build dams because: environmental concerns. But I digress.
This week was dark, dreary and relentless in terms of the weather. Sydney can get cold - the further west one goes, the more likely one is to wake up to a layer of frost on the ground (or one’s windshield). Even near the coast the twilight before sunrise can hover near zero degrees Celsius at times. So this week - the sheer amount of rain (almost unprecedented in how heavy and how persistent), the thickness of the clouds (it was dark even in the middle of the day) and the cold really did make it feel like a London winter - but just with more rain and no chance of snow. It was in a word: depressing. When the community is battling floods and politicians begin hurling blame at one another for not doing enough and people are losing homes and we know what this all means for costs (and hence taxes) things can look bleak. And I generally love a rainy day - or rainy night. Perhaps because I am a Sydney-sider and we are blessed typically with a vast majority of clear skies or, my favourite - those sunny days populated by big fluffy white clouds moving swiftly across the blue ocean above. But this week: none of that. Just dark grey skies and sheets of water so dense visibility was sometimes 10% of what it normally would be. It was tropical, if not apocalyptic in scale.
But to add to this weather was my own sense of being “under the weather”. I was inside the entire week working as I typically do from home anyways. But I knew I had something: flu or covid or just plain cold, I don’t know. I wasn’t coughing or sneezing. But I did have a fever but worse I felt weary. So tired and just generally down. And there seemed no reason for it. Happily I’ve a home gym, happily I can get deliveries - so I isolated and thought: well if it lasts longer than the rain then I’ll leave to get tested. But it has passed entirely - just as the clouds clear.
The difference is stark. And, of course, closing the blinds to ignore the rain outside, and looking within to know there’s nothing psychologically wrong with me - whatever sense of malaise I had could quickly be put aside by doing something. In my case it was exploring the livestream functionality of Youtube (so much fun) - recording and editing podcasts and working on other (confidential!) projects. I was still having fun. But the world can throw at one non-ideal circumstances. A best friend once advised me “You can reflect or you can dwell” - which I’ve remembered ever since (thanks Adam). It works for the past and for present circumstances when things seem as if they’re not going well. If the rain continued: my “work flow” would be utterly disrupted. When I “read” I need to walk (with the audiobook) for a first pass before I begin to read the thing in text and take notes. Like many I consume much audio these days - podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube lectures - but it works best when I’m walking. The torrential rain was more than an umbrella alone could handle and, as I say, I was simply feeling weary whether viral or something else. I barely had the energy to get out of bed, sleeping as I was extra hours each day.
One wonders what effect the weather has. Are some people more prone? It’s well known the effect of light and things like vitamin D on overall health. I was getting zero sunlight and it just seemed to go on and on and on. I lived in London for almost a year back in 2003. The winter was fun at first - there was reasonably heavy snow in London that year and I arrived in December of 2002. But once I got to work (teaching casually) things went downhill. I grew to detest the place. The darkness. The cold. The grey. The sleet and drizzle. It was relentless. Did the sun over come out? I stayed through the summer of the following year and that was “chalk and cheese” of course. The United Kingdom is a wonderful place. But I doubt I could live there. I love a genuine change of seasons. 4 of them. A distinct hot Summer. A genuine warm days, cool nights, leaves turning Autumn. A cold - sometimes dreary - winter where there can be snow if you want to travel to it, but where anywhere sitting by the fire with a tea or port with a good book can barely be beat. I actually generally prefer the winter. But Spring is my favourite time in Sydney. It warms swiftly, everything smells alive. The breeze is strong, but it’s not a gale and the skies are blue as those fluffy clouds fly by. The brief summers of Northern European countries just don’t cut it and the constant heat of the tropics are even worse. Sydney is hard to beat for its weather. But if you’d arrived this week - as many did - you saw the worst of it. Not this year but in about a decade. I’m glad it’s over and I’m no longer under it.
Links to over 4 hours worth of live-streaming content can be found here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsE51P_yPQCQx7tQSucLA3gYHvPdu1Yri Those livestreams are still all about the “timeless” - but allow me to conduct question and answer sessions with greater efficiency and in depth, off the cuff and so on which is both fun and perhaps allows me to go into greater detail without being concerned about how tedious things could otherwise get. People should tell me in the chat if that happens, I guess. And that chat feature - which is live - is a real bonus there too. An easy way to ask questions and chat to other listeners. All livestreams so far will be knit together and put into one mega-podcast episode to appear in the usual feeds.
The next regular episode of ToKCast should be out in some days and is the next in my installment all about Steven Pinker’s book “Rationality”. This one is almost entirely focussed on (so called) “Bayesian Reasoning”. It was a lot of fun not least because I disagree so deeply with most of what Pinker says in that chapter about rationality. In so far as I am capable of “getting fired up” - I do so. I should say much of Pinker’s book is very good. But these sections on Bayes’ Theorem used as a tool for reasoning…are far wide of the mark. I explain many of the reasons why in that podcast.
Until next time.
Weather and being under it