Rising Temperatures Music

One of my major challengers in writing my climate change music: explain that winters won’t disappear any time soon

February 24, 2016 — Leave a comment

In general for the public, the concept of climate change is that the world is warmer than a few years ago thus winters will no longer exist and it will be summer all over the year. This is one of my biggest challengers, how to explain with my music this common misunderstanding of climate change.

First the change of seasons are a combination of different factors, but the main factor is the position of the Earth in relation to the sun. The world is getting warmer and there are different theories about who is the responsible for that (CO2, sunspots, etc.). However this does not mean that it will be only summer all over the globe all the time. Winters won’t disappear any time soon.

I’ve been reading some people comments about the misunderstanding of cold temperatures and climate change. For example when a cold temperature is recorded somewhere and someone says that climate change is not happening because of that specific low temperature. Unfortunately,  things are more complicated than that.  The seasons won’t easily disappear. What it is expected to occur is that in some places winters/summers for example will have more severe temperatures. Droughts and blizzards are more expected. However, in other few places it will be less severe and in others it won’t change.

Glaciers are a great example of those changes. Most of the world’s glaciers are melting and losing mass. However a few of them are gaining mass and some of them are with relatively unchanged mass. In addition snow is still falling on the places that the melting glaciers are located but the warmer temperatures are melting more quickly the snow.

Those are some examples of what I have to consider when writing my music. How I should incorporate those factors. Honestly, that is the fun part!

Doing the Climate Change Progressive Rock Opera and the Plan B

January 20, 2016 — Leave a comment

Last year I wrote in my instagram post: “Part A,B,…J?H? 11bars? 6bars? Wait, normal songs only have A, B and maybe a C. Am I being too progressive?” The whole Alphabet ? Sometimes it is easy to imagine that the composition of the album is the hardest part. Indeed, that is probably the most important part, but reality hit me hard and doing almost everything by myself take time. In my last post I set a deadline for a possible release of the first song of my progressive rock opera. December of last year, that was my initial plan A and it was kind of reasonable. However I’ve found more difficulties than I expected. First after composing a song, and if the song is technically ready to record (technically because until the music is released it can be always improved and rearranged), it does not mean that the hard work is done. Recording is the next step. As so far I am recording all the instruments and programming the drums, it is a lot of work. Does that mean that I will give up? Of course not, but it is taking more time than I expected.

I remember when I was watching the documentary Rush: Beyond the lighted stage and they mentioned that Rush tried to record “La villa strangiato” in one take but they couldn’t. Taking apart the comparison with the semi-gods of progressive rock and the time they recorded that song, I had to take similar approach. Instead of release the first song with almost 20 min long, I will divide the song in two parts. However live I will play the song without cuts. I’ll post more details about the recording process soon and I am sure it will worth it the wait.

The Climate Wars

May 26, 2014 — 5 Comments

Eric Pooley’s Book.

 

In 2008 the BBC released a documentary called Earth – The Climate Wars. In this 3 part television documentary the Scottish geologist Dr. Iain Stewart covers some aspects of the theory about global warming, the battle between the scientists who believe that climate change is caused by humans and the sceptics scientists, and challenge of predict the effects of global warming. It is a really good documentary. 

In the first episode Dr Iain Stewart traces the history of climate change from its very beginning and examines just how the scientific community managed to get it so very wrong back in the Seventies. Along the way he uncovers some of the great unsung heroes of climate change science, as for example the secret organisation of American government scientists, known as Jason, who wrote the first official report on global warming as far back as 1979. He shows how – by the late 1980s – global warming had already become a serious political issue. It looked as if the world was uniting to take action. But it turned out to be a false dawn. Because in the 1990s global warming would be transformed into one of the biggest scientific controversies of our age.
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The Sound of The Arctic Ice Death Spiral

April 13, 2014 — 2 Comments

Much of the Arctic Ocean is covered by sea ice which varies in extent and thickness seasonally. The Arctic sea ice extent has been shrinking (during the summer) and growing (during the winter) over decades (achieving the maximum in April and the minimum in September). However a sea ice loss has been observed in recent decades. For example the average ice extent for March 2014 was the fifth lowest for the month in the satellite record which supports the idea of sea ice decline.

Monthly March ice extent for 1979 to 2014 shows a decline of 2.6% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 average. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

In 2012, Peter Wadhams published a paper talking about how fast sea ice decline is happening:

Arctic sea ice extent had been shrinking at a relatively modest rate of 3-4% per decade (annually averaged) but after 1996 this speeded up to 10% per decade and in summer 2007 there was a massive collapse of ice extent to a new record minimum of only 4.1 million km2. Thickness has been falling at a more rapid rate (43% in the 25 years from the early 1970s to late 1990s) with a specially rapid loss of mass from pressure ridges. The summer 2007 event may have arisen from an interaction between the long-term retreat and more rapid thinning rates.

But what is exactly the Arctic ice death spiral?   Continue reading

Can We Hear The Sound of Our Warming Planet?

April 4, 2014 — 1 Comment

Does it sound weird for you? Great you are not alone. I had the same reaction but guys from University of Minnesota combined music and environmental data.

It is not new that our planer is warming.  Ok, lets stand on the shoulders of giants (I hate when someone uses those quotes and I don’t know where it came from). In 2010 J. Hansen and his fellows scientific friends published an article at Reviews of Geophysics. They used the Goddard Institute for  Space Studies (GISS) (NASA) analysis of global surface temperature change. Yes, there are different groups of scientists doing different analysis of global temperatures. So when you hear someone saying: “scientists said that average global temperature is rising”, it is a specific group using some specific data (not always they work together). However these analysis are not totally independent because they must use much the same information (same satellites,  meteorological stations, etc). Roughly speaking, they complete each other. Continue reading