LYRICS
Woke up this morning
The way I usually do
Start of exploring
Learn something new
The Earth is spinning round and round
Giving birth to up and down
’til Man’s damn plan
Turns upside down
Liquid fossils
Stole from the store
We did fools bills
Forever more
… and our kids will pay
For our Judgement Day
Anticipate…
… a long wait
At the Pearly Gate
Look back on the day
The way I usually do
Have to say
“Take gravity’s view”
The Earth is spinning round and round
Giving birth to up and down
’til Man’s damn plan
Turns upside down
- Up-or-Down-Part-I.mp3 (unplugged to save energy)
- Up-or-Down-Part-II.mp3
- Up-or-Down-Part-II-Instrumental.mp3
- Up-or-Down-Casio-WK-3500.MID
Chords: E A C D / D A C E C E / E A C B7 E; Part II @ 130 Beats Per Minute
Instrumentation: Vocals (TC-Helicon VOICELIVE and MiniNova Vocorder), Ibanez Acoustic Guitar, Ibanez RG Series Electric Guitar (Boss Digital Delay), Fender Jazz Bass (Boss Digital Delay), Keyboards (Korg PS60, Casio WK-3500, Yamaha PSR-740, MiniNova, MicroKorg)
Gravity causes an attraction between Man and Earth. We call the pull on Man toward Earth “down”, and Man’s pull on Earth “up”. For some unknown reason, Man insists on turning the world upside down.
Human induced climate change is an exponential component of an unordered system (chaos theory). That means global warming is accelerating at a rapid rate in a complex way.
How fast are humans causing the climate to change? When we started our experiments in the 1990’s, we thought the time scale was in millenniums. If climate change were happening on a linear basis, we would have been correct; however, by the late 90’s we were convinced climate change was non-linear.
Doubling time is the amount of time it takes for a quantity to double in size (exponential growth). By 2020, there was enough data to see the doubling time of some anthropogenic climate affects had gone from 100 years to 10 years. For instance the rate of sea level rise has gone from about 1.5 millimeters per year to over 3 millimeters. We expect to see the doubling period to continue to shrink raising the possibility of sea levels rising a foot/year by 2050.
At what rate is climate change accelerating?
A: Rapidly
As described above, we do not know the rate of acceleration other than to say it is more rapid than previously thought. In the summer of 2023, the extreme temperatures left most climate scientists shocked. The average earth surface temperature recorded record highs for months reaching over 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement calls for keeping temperatures below 1.5 degrees. Scientists concur that a rise of 2 degrees will trigger feedback loops and tipping points. Triggering these tipping points results in the CO2 stored in nature to be released at an exponential growth rate. How extreme the acceleration will be depends on tipping points toppling other tipping points in what is known as The Domino Effect. Toppled tipping points will continue to shrink the doubling time and exponentially increase the rate of global warming. Though we do not know how much carbon is stored in nature, it would be reasonable to assume that the temperature could be pushed from 3 degrees to 6 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Humans can not thrive above a rise of 1.5 degrees. Humans can not survive if the temperature rises 6 degrees.
About the 2023 wildfires in Hawaii, Governor Josh Green said, “For perspective, we’ve had six fire emergencies this August, we had six fire emergencies between 1953 and 2003. That’s how- how fast things are changing. I know that there is debate out there whether we should be talking about climate change or not. Well, let’s be real world, climate change is here we are in the midst of it with a hotter planet, and fiercer storms.”
About the catastrophic die-off of 10,000 emperor penguin chicks in the Antarctic, Dr. Caroline Holmes of the British Antarctic Survey (an expert on Antarctic sea-ice) said, “What we’re seeing right now is so far outside what we’ve observed previously. We expected change but I don’t think we expected so much change so rapidly.”
Some areas of the world are now warming so fast, it is becoming more difficult to measure the change from “normal” or average. Jeff Boyne, National Weather Service meteorologist and climatologist, said, “There are climate normals that are updated every 10 to 15 years, because the planet is warming so fast. The ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) regions are warming so fast that those normals are being updated every 5 years.”
“It’s so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind-blowing,” says Walter Meier, who monitors sea-ice with the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “September was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist, absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” said Zeke Hausfather, at the Berkeley Earth climate data project.”
— from Climate Change: Rate of Acceleration Brouse and Mukherjee (2023)
What Can I Do?
There are plenty of things you can do to help save the planet. Stop using fossil fuels. Consume less. Love more. Here is a list of additional actions you can take.