To Know a Thing
I know my wife's name. I have seen her passport, I have seen her birth certificate, I have seen a thousand people call her by that name. (1,000 is a lot, but she's quite famous in her field.) She answers to the name, and she uses it in all her business transactions. It is on her bank accounts and credit card, etc. etc. etc. It is her name.
The evidence makes me certain.
It may seem like a silly thing to talk about. "Of course you know your wife's name, who wouldn't, right?" Wrong. There are people who have double lives, more than one family, and fool the lot of them.
It is a hard thing: to be certain.
I started to think about this last week because of the region where I live. If you have read this channel, you know I am a big gardener. Being a gardener means keeping track of the soil you grow in: type, texture, density, acidity, and most prevalent and frequent, how moist it is.
Something very disturbing came to mind last week, and I want you to think about it carefully, and for a long moment, before you agree or disagree.
You. Don't. Know. Almost. Anything.
There have been some great books written on this. (On Being Certain comes to mind readily, an old favorite in our household.) Last week, somehow hit home in a way nothing else ever had. It was a simple question.
"Am I in a drought?"
There are websites, you say, look it up, have done with it.
Yes, there are:
Pick a date, and you will find these sites don't always agree.
More difficult is that they are parsed by region, not city or town. There can be a wide variety of rain over a 50-mile radius.
Add to that the difficult question of what kind of drought do you mean. There is more than one definition. It's actually defined several different ways depending on what you're measuring, and meteorologists usually distinguish them.
Meteorological drought is a deficit in precipitation relative to the long-term average for a region and time period. (Really want to tear at your hair? The definition of "long-term average" isn't agreed on either!)
Hydrological drought is when the precipitation shortfall gives you low streamflows, depleted reservoirs, dropping groundwater or well levels. This tends to lag behind meteorological drought. It's more severe. It gets worse from there to agricultural drought, and then socioeconomic drought, when water supply can't meet basic public needs.
I have a phone application that tracks the rainfall in my town and tells me the rainfall to the nearest 0.01 inch.
I have a fire station I drive past frequently. They have a "warning level" sign outside, telling me the rules of when to water and when not to.
In fact, they started the problem. By complete coincidence, I saw a "one year ago today" in my Google Photos. I had a picture of one of their signs. I have no idea why I took it, but it said Level III, "...bans on all nonessential outdoor water use..." and I went back and checked the rainfall for that day the year before. We were down by 5.5 or so inches. We are down right now by about 4.9 inches on the same application, and the exact same firehouse says we are at Level IV status today.
It triggered a bullshit-o-meter in my brain that sent me down this path.
Massachusetts has its own definitions. Global monitors have theirs, different local websites have theirs. I have mine: it's running my fingers in my soil and knowing it got hard and crusted, and the plants are struggling. Many months it's a rain gauge or two on my back porch, and watching the bird baths on the property, which I fill only from rain if I can help it.
A simple question. "Am I in a drought?"
It was, and still is, very hard to answer. I have no access to raw data. What the websites are making their decisions on, what definitions they are using, are hard to come by. I don't know if they are right. They broadly, blatantly all disagree, so someone is either wrong, has a different meaning, or is lying, all of which are possible. I circled and circled on the statement: "I don't know anything about anything which I can't measure myself."
Then I calmed down some. That's not true. In theory, that is the premise of science. I tell you my methods, and you can repeat what I did exactly, and know that it is factual. Multiple people measure the same thing the same way at the same time under the same conditions, and you get an answer which is immutable. But I didn't know their conditions or their methods. I only knew mine.
This is a simple example to say the same thing I said before. You don't know things either. You believe them. You think them. You have evidence to support them. But really, you don't know almost anything. Not even about yourself. In years to come you will be confused by what you believe today and what you think you know now, and you will be quite convinced of very different things then.
Don't go through life so confident you know something. Don't be so confident the person you are arguing with is any more knowledgeable than you. They don't know what they know either. Approach these things as conversations, where perhaps you are wrong, perhaps they are, most likely you both are. About anything you care to imagine. Work to remedy it, work to know, and accept it will always be hard to do.
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