For climate control Earths, scale is the ultimate problem. In human terms, climate means patterns; stable, more or less predictable cycles; baseline states you can count on. If you live in a temperate zone, you might get some cool days next summer, but you’ll be really surprised if it snows. You may travel in search of a particular climate — beach weather, dry and mosquito-free desert camping, hot days and cool evenings in the south of France — or to escape one you don’t like, just as Canadian snowbirds flock to Florida each winter. In human terms, these patterns are places. They’re where you live, or where you spend certain kinds of time. On the scales of ordinary human life, there’s no such thing as a global climate. Rather, there are multiple climates: local and regional patterns and differences.
Yet from a God’s-eye perspective (or that of a scientist) all those patterns are connected in one gigantic system, driven by colossal forces: gravity, the sun, orbital variations, axial tilt. They are shaped by atmospheric chemistry that’s evolved over eons and has been altered dramatically by living things. As James Lovelock once put it, the atmosphere is the circulatory system of the biosphere. 2 Every year, deciduous plants suck up immense quantities of carbon in the spring when they grow leaves, and spew it out again in the fall as their fallen leaves decay, oozing carbon back into the atmosphere. Now we’re adding more carbon — a lot more.
Control Earthhttps://placesjournal.org/article/control-earth/?cn-reloaded=1