Invisible Currents: Climate, Time, Power, and Food in a Changing World

A web of interlocking forces shapes climate change. While public discussion often centers on the atmosphere, we risk overlooking the ocean—the vast, restless frontier at our feet that drives much of Earth’s climate.

“In the beginning, the new baby Earth was so hot that the water carried by these rocks was turned immediately to vapor suspended in its nascent sky. There would have been no ocean for many years. But then the planet cooled, and the steam cooled and then condensed. There was a primordial rainstorm, which became a deluge and then a flood, covering three-quarters of the planet in water. The oceans came from the sky.

Since then, sea and sky have never lost contact. The ocean absorbs and retains the heat of the sun. It moderates the climates of coastal regions, because water is much slower to warm or cool than land. And the ocean is an effectively boundless source of the water that makes clouds, rain, and snow. The seas are governed by the same physics as the sky: floating, sinking, moving, turning.”

Just as the oceans shape climate on a planetary scale, another unseen force—time—shapes our daily experience. From Nautil.us: What Poseidon Is Telling Us - Weather is what humans experience over the short span of our lives. Climate is a matter for the gods.

Time itself feels elastic—stretching in some moments, racing in others. One columnist argues that the wasted hours of doomscrolling on social media reveal deeper, scientifically grounded effects on how we perceive time.

“Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: While on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made many strong memories.

Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, you keep checking the clock, and this acute awareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of the experience, and so, in retrospect, it seems brief.

A sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.”

From the Free Press, Social Media Shortens Your Life. Here’s How to Get Time Back

An argument 

“China is an engineering state, which treats construction projects and technological primacy as the solution to all of its problems, whereas the United States is a lawyerly society, obsessed with protecting wealth by making rules rather than producing material goods. Successive American administrations have attempted to counter Beijing through legalism—levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime—while the engineering state has created the future by physically building better cars, better-functioning cities, and bigger power plants.”

From The Atlantic, A Nation of Lawyers Confronts China’s Engineering State

Roughly a third of all food produced worldwide goes to waste. The reasons are complex, but as Elaine Schwartz explains in EconLife’s, Why, Where, and How We Waste Food, clear data visualizations can help us understand where and how this waste occurs.