Tristan Gooley
speaker
256 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 13 Nov
Tristan Gooley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Now, both of those examples, I mean, the warmth on a cold day can be really practical and helpful. You know, if you're, I can remember waiting for a bus on a very cold day, and you can be really quite warm in a bus shelter, but sometimes not even understand why. It's just more fun when you understand why, that the sun is coming, is reaching in, heating things up, but then the heat doesn't escape.
So it just really just turns the temperature sort of a dial up and makes things much more comfortable in winter.
Yeah, and so much of my work is obvious in hindsight, but people can go their whole lives and not notice it. So, I mean, my work is rooted in natural navigation, finding our way just using nature's signs. And there are over 20 ways we can navigate using a tree, but I'm fairly confident that, you know, fewer than one in a hundred people will know more than one of those 20. So,
But once you explain that trees are bigger on the southern side and that the angles of branches are different, people go out there and they see it. And once you see these things and experience these things, you can't unknow that, if you know what I mean. Every time it's there, it sort of announces itself to you. And that's what I mean is you go like, wow, it's really not, it's not deeply hidden.
We don't have to peel back 10 layers to find this stuff. It is in front of us, you know, and I mean, I often say to people when they don't understand the strange line of work I'm in, and I don't presume people should understand it. It is quite odd what I do. But I say to them, pick anything that you've seen outdoors today, literally anything. And you can do this now, Mike, if you want.
And I will find a clue in it.
Yeah, so one of the cornerstones of natural navigation is that the sun is due south in the middle of the day. For everyone north of the tropics, which is almost all of the USA, all of Europe and lots of other places as well, the sun reaches its highest point when it's due south in the middle of the day, halfway between sunrise and sunset. And that's when it gives us most of its light and energy.
And of course, the trees need this light. It's their breakfast, lunch and dinner. So it'd actually be quite odd if trees were symmetrical, bearing in mind You know, light is what's feeding them. So what they tend to do is they respond to these stimuli like light, and they actually just grow more on their southern side.
So if you look at a tree from all directions, you walk around one, you'll very quickly realize that there's no such thing as a symmetrical tree. And on average, there's just more tree. There are bigger branches and more branches and more leaves on the southern side. I never knew that.
Yeah, if you ask anyone to draw a tree, it doesn't matter if they're five years old or 95 years old, they'll draw a symmetrical tree. It's sort of how we imagine a tree. But of the X billion trees on planet Earth, there isn't one symmetrical one. They are all asymmetrical. And one of the kind of core ideas of my work is that two sides of everything are different.
And if we ask the question, why is one side different to the other?
will tell us something about where we are it'll tell us something about either direction or or possibly what the wind has been doing and and through that we can start to build up a richer picture of what's going on around us so tell me some other things like that that i don't know well i'll put myself on the spot here you tell me one thing you've seen uh and we haven't prepped this i genuinely have no idea what you're going to say tell me something you've seen outdoors in the in the last few days
Well, I saw fog when I woke up this morning. It was foggy outside. Okay. So fog, the simplest way to think of it is it's a low cloud. There are different types of fog, but if you see fog early in the morning, it's a counterintuitive sign that actually the weather's probably going to be quite good because it's a type of fog called radiation fog.
And what happens when we see fog very near the start of the day is it's actually a sign that the sky's been clear overnight. heat has radiated out of the land, the land has grown very cold, and moist air when it touches cold land forms this blanket of fog in the morning. So if it's a still morning, and you walk out into fog, there's a pretty good chance the sun will be shining by lunchtime.
Yeah, the cloud world is like a lot of nature. It can be intimidating because people are maybe curious and they start to investigate it and then they start getting hit by too much Latin and they start realising there's a classification system and maybe I'm meant to learn the names of 20 different clouds. And I come at all of these things in a totally different way. Names are never important.
So, because we can look at a sign in nature, like a cloud, and worry about what type of Latin word and stuff like that. But actually you could go to meet an indigenous person on the other side of the world and they will be able to see the sign in it and you'll never agree what that cloud should be called.
So that's a really important point for me is that names are never actually the interesting part, but shapes and patterns are. So in clouds, what we do is we think about three main families of clouds. There are the blanket clouds, which, if we're going to use the Latin, is stratus, just from the Latin for blanket. And these are the long, flat, you know, they can cover an entire landscape.
And they're pretty dreary. And they just really tell you that there's not going to be much change over the next few hours. And if there's any change, it's going to be glacial in pace. Everything's going to happen very slowly. They are the least interesting of the three. The other two, the next one we look at is the bubbling up heaped clouds, the cumulus clouds.
And these are the ones that the easiest way for me to describe them is, you know, if you've seen the opening credits of The Simpsons or pretty much any other cartoon cloud, you've got a blue sky and these clouds typically have a flat bottom and they bubble up. They look like a, you know, a bunch of white soccer balls in a bag. And they are telling us something very specific.
They are saying that there is convection, there is warm air rising in that particular spot
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