The Sudden Stop

LYRICS
No, it’s not the fall
No, it’s not the fall at all
Yes, as I recall
Recall it’s not the fall at all
That will kill you
It’s the stop
Not the drop
But the… stop!
[sudden stop]

The same holds true
How the climate crisis
Will be killing you
Do you know
Wind and floods flow?
As man fails (and flails)
Damage scales

Can you see
Exponentially?
@ V ^2
We phased, too
Velocity squared impaired
Some sum momentum
The act of impact
Velocity squared impaired

It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.

I said: Technically speaking it is the impact from the momentum that causes damage and deaths. Global warming causes an increase in mass and/or velocity (momentum) of things that are mass flow driven by heat, like wind and flood. The burning of fossil fuels and other human released emissions have impacted momentum’s impact. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. Warmer air allows for the creation of more massive raindrops. Warmer ocean temperatures create stronger hurricanes. Hail and tornadoes form in strong thunderstorm clouds with intense updrafts, high liquid-water content, and large water droplets.

Sidd added: It’s worse than that. Wind and water flow forces scale as the square of velocity, so as flow speeds increase (say due to more intense heating or heavier rain) the damage scales as the square of the velocity.

About “square of the velocity”, I asked Sidd:

is this Bernoulli’s Equation?

Sidd replied:

look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)

you will see that force is proportional to density times square of velocity (v^2)

So a twenty mile an hour wind exerts four times as much force as a ten mile an hour wind. And a forty mile an hour wind exerts sixteen times as much force as a ten mile an hour wind. A wind of fifty miles an hour exerts twenty five times and a wind of sixty miles an hour exerts thirty six times as much force as one of ten miles an hour.

Then you have the density term. Water is about eight hundred times denser than air, So the force exerted by a ten mile an hour flow of water is eight hundred times that of a ten mile an hour wind. So as flow velocities go up due to climate change, force and damage scale as square of the velocities. What is not clear is how much these velocities increase with climate change. But in a sense we are seeing this already as, for example, flood and sewage systems succumb and hillsides fall down, and so on. — from “Climate Change: The Equation” Brouse and Mukherjee (2023)

The Sudden Stop

What you can do today. How to save the planet.

Climate Change: The End of Times

A song about The Human Induced Climate Change Experiment

BANDS & PROJECTS