"When you see a 'Magic Eye' picture, you realize that all the little
squiggles that you thought were individual squiggles are actually
distributed pieces of a higher-dimensional object that seems to emerge
when you do that crossing-your-eyes thing. In a Magic Eye picture, the
cup or flower is distributed throughout the mesh of fuzzy little patches
of the image. 'The object is already there'. Before we look at it.
Global warming is not a function of our
measuring devices. Yet because it's distributed across the biosphere and
beyond, it's very hard to see as a unique entity. And yet, there it is,
raining on us, burning down on us, quaking the Earth, spawning gigantic
hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are
distributed pieces: the raindrops falling on my head in Northern
California. The tsunami that pours through the streets of Japanese
towns. The increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure on
the ocean floor. Like the image in a Magic Eye picture, global warming
is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift
to see it. Convincing some people of it's existence is like convincing
some two-dimensional Flatland people of the existence of apples, based
on the appearence of a morphing circular shape in their world."
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