August 15, 2019 Night

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Good evening! Cloudy, sticky and 71 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ Calm wind. The dew point is 62 degrees. The skies will clear tomorrow around noontime.

I went over to John Wolcott’s house for a couple of hours to keep going through his files. 🗃 While I didn’t find anything remarkably interested, we are getting down on the boxes, and I expect this project to rap up by autumn. That said, next week with the Pine Bush Dinner and Hike, 🌲 and the fact I’m going up to the Adirondacks for four days, I doubt I’ll be able to do more next week. 🔍 Although maybe if I stay in town next weekend, I can go over to his house. We’ll see. I only stayed until 7:15 last night, as I wanted to get packed for camping.

Heading up to the Adirondacks tomorrow to beat the heat. 🗻 Going to be hot weekend with the humidity but the potholers should be nice. I took off Monday and Tuesday, I might come back Monday it depends on the weather. I don’t have a camping permit so I’ll have to move to a new site for the second half of the trip if I stay all four nights. ⛺ I packed enough water and clothes for four nights but I could certainly change my mind.

Tonight will be scattered showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 61 degrees at 6am. One degree above normal, which is similar to a typical night around August 13th. Maximum dew point of 63 at 10pm. Calm wind becoming south around 6 mph after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. In 2018, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It was sticky. It got down to 69 degrees. The record low of 41 occurred back in 1972.

Tonight will have a Waning Gibbous Moon 🌖 with 97% illuminated. The moon will set at 6:52 am. The Last Quarter Moon is next Thursday with scattered t-storms. The Harvest Moon 🌝 is on Friday, September 13th. The sun will rise at 6:02 am with the first light at 5:32 am, which is one minute and 4 seconds later than yesterday. 🌄 Tonight will have 10 hours and 7 minutes of darkness, an increase of 2 minutes and 32 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will have a chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 2pm. Partly sunny ☀ , with a high of 81 degrees at 4pm. Typical for Tomorrow. Maximum dew point of 67 at 5pm. South wind 6 to 8 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. It was very sticky. The high last year was 88 degrees. The record high of 97 was set in 1936.

In four weeks on September 12 the sun will be setting at 7:10 pm,🌄 which is 46 minutes and 31 seconds earlier then tonight. In 2018 on that day, we had humid, partly cloudy, rain showers and temperatures between 74 and 66 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 74 and 53 degrees. The record high of 94 degrees was set back in 1947.

Looking ahead, Last Sunset After 7 PM 🌆 is in 7 weeks.

Marie Antoinette Overlook

The Arrogance of the Anthropocene – The Atlantic

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The Arrogance of the Anthropocene – The Atlantic

So what to make of this new “epoch” of geological time? Do we deserve it? Sure, humans move around an unbelievable amount of rock every year, profoundly reshaping the world in our own image. And, yes, we’re currently warping the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans violently, and in ways that have analogues in only a few terrifying chapters buried deep in Earth’s history. Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages. If 100 million years can easily wear the Himalayas flat, what chance will San Francisco or New York have?

The idea of the Anthropocene is an interesting thought experiment. For those invested in the stratigraphic arcana of this infinitesimal moment in time, it serves as a useful catalog of our junk. But it can also serve to inflate humanity’s legacy on an ever-churning planet that will quickly destroy—or conceal forever—even our most awesome creations. What paltry smudge of artifacts we do leave behind, in those rare corners of the continents where sediment accumulates and is quickly buried—safe from erosion’s continuous defacing—will be extremely unlikely to be exposed at the surface, at any given time, at any given place, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years in the geological future.

Conservationists Want You to Stop Building Rock Piles | Smart News | Smithsonian

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Conservationists Want You to Stop Building Rock Piles | Smart News | Smithsonian

While building rock piles probably isn't the biggest threat to the environment ever in most places, I have certainly seen places where the amount of rock piles have become  a nuisance -- I'm thinking along the Appalachian Trail at Pine Cobble. I guess if you have nothing better to do then stack rocks, at least knock them back down when your done.