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I'm no climate scientist either, but I remember reading something "recently" (I'm 51; recently has become a pretty elastic term, but I think it was written within the past 20 years) looked at the predictions of a renewed ice-age and wondered whether the agricultural revolution — with all its forest-chopping and farming — has forestalled it.
I assume he thinks they just sat around feeling sorry for themselves.
If by Lapps you mean the Sami, they have largely been denied agency to go elsewhere.
I'm going to come right out and say it - the "4000 generations of humans" line is because he consciously or unconsciously considers that the only actual "humans" are the ones who come from a specific geographical region.
They do say you never convince scientists with the contrary opinion, you just have to wait for them to die off. I recall reading that there were still scientists who didn't believe in atoms late into the nineteenth century.
Plate tectonics didn't really become a thing until the seventies. I did a geology O-level at school in 1969 and the idea wasn't even mentioned then. About three years later, the BBC did a Nigel Calder science special, Restless Earth, that popularised the idea. (I still have the tie-in book.) I imagine it would have taken at least 20 years for the old guard to die off.
Plate tectonics didn't really become a thing until the seventies. I did a geology O-level at school in 1969 and the idea wasn't even mentioned then. About three years later, the BBC did a Nigel Calder science special, Restless Earth, that popularised the idea. (I still have the tie-in book.) I imagine it would have taken at least 20 years for the old guard to die off.
Yetis! That's why they're extinct now.
I don't think he knows anyone who lives in Africa. And if he couldn't survive with a possum skin cape and a flint knife, how can anyone else?
I had a prof who speculated that, bearing in mind this was at least 25 years ago, that melting the arctic and antarctic ice packs could lead to increased glaciation. In fairness to him, it was an intro course on environmental studies and he was throwing out a lot of ideas and thoughts to show how many unanswered questions were still out there to be explored and studied.
I was a little proud that my father, who taught Egyptology for thirty years, was still reading new research until the year he retired, sometimes things that were brought to him by students.
Oh I'm sure he knows plenty of people who lived in Africa and still insist on calling it 'Rhodesia.'
Ernst Mach held out against atomism into the 20th century. There was a kind of extreme positivism that regarded anything not directly observable (for some value of "directly observable") as a hypothesis to be avoided. The standard histories usually say that Einstein's explanation of Brownian motion in 1905 was a major turning point.
Several years ago I found an address Isaac Asimov gave to MIT students in the 1970s in which he seems to be endorsing the anthropogenic global cooling hypothesis. One of the points of evidence he gives is that global temperatures had been cooling slightly since the 1940s, and he attributes this to aerosols (smog). As far as I know, this is completely correct! Global warming did have a pause of about 30 years, with a very very slight declining trend, in the middle of the 20th century, and I think modern models attribute that to aerosols. But greenhouse gas emissions eventually powered right through (and some societies managed to reduce aerosol pollution).
...by the way, all subsequent "pauses" you may have heard of seem to be artifacts of some combination of noise, the El Nino cycle, and cherry-picking of data.
Greenhouse-gas emissions have probably put off the next ice age for many thousands of years. There's a minority position among climate-contrarian types that global warming is real, but it's good, because we would have otherwise been hit by the ICE DOOM by now (the position in Fallen Angels, if I recall correctly).
As far as I can tell the timing of the ice age is nonsense, it wouldn't have happened for thousands of years, but the basic principle of anthropogenic global warming killing it is sound.
I think the popularity of this position in the science-fiction community comes from a 1986 Analog article by George W. Harper called "A Little More Pollution, Please!" I recall T. A. Heppenheimer citing it as a good argument that AGW was a good thing.
As far as I can tell the timing of the ice age is nonsense, it wouldn't have happened for thousands of years, but the basic principle of anthropogenic global warming killing it is sound.
I think the popularity of this position in the science-fiction community comes from a 1986 Analog article by George W. Harper called "A Little More Pollution, Please!" I recall T. A. Heppenheimer citing it as a good argument that AGW was a good thing.
Waiting for "global warming stopped in 2015" future memes.
Before orbital forcing was accepted as the principal natural driver of glacial cycles there was a theory that they were driven by an internal oscillation - warming of the oceans leads to greater snowfall at high latitudes leads to growth of icesheets leads to increased albedo leads to atmospheric cooling leads to cooling of the oceans leads to less snowfall leads to retreat of icesheets leads to decreased albedo leads to atmospheric warming leads to warming of the oceans, and round the cycle again.
I was taught this as a hypothesis in the early '70s.
As I recall, in the '90s there was concern about global warming kicking off a Scandinavian icesheet. But the climate has warmed too much for snow accumulation in Scandinavia.
I was taught this as a hypothesis in the early '70s.
As I recall, in the '90s there was concern about global warming kicking off a Scandinavian icesheet. But the climate has warmed too much for snow accumulation in Scandinavia.
I disagree- from what I was told at uni and have read subsequently, Plate tectonics was the solution to the problems that they had been worrying about since the early 20th century, so by the late 60's it was agreed upon, except for stupid people who held out longer. Also school textbooks are often decades behind actual up to date research. Don't confuse public understanding of the topic with the actual professional researchers understanding.
If you read old textbooks, such as those by Arthur Holmes, they knew the problem, and had an idea of the solution, but Wegener's mechanism was horribly wrong, verging on the stupid, and they had nothing to replace it with, so being scientists, they had to wait until someone came up with a decent mechanism.
Robert Fripp used a clip of J.G. Bennett, one of his spiritual influences at the time, as part of the piece "Water Music II" on his 1979 solo album Exposure.(It appropriately leads into the album's version of Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood.") Bennett talks about a coming ice age being predicted by scientists, but also mentions the sea level rising as a result of that coming ice age, which would flood many costal areas. He also talks about this happening perhaps as early as 40 years in the future.
Fripp broke up King Crimson in 1974 when he became convinced the world was about to end, or at the very least the current system as we knew it was about to implode.
Fripp broke up King Crimson in 1974 when he became convinced the world was about to end, or at the very least the current system as we knew it was about to implode.
"We have plenty of animals to eat here and no competition for them!"
"IT IS COLD."
"But, no neighbors!"
"Because they went south. Where it is not COLD."
"If everybody you know jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?"
"IT IS COLD."
"But, no neighbors!"
"Because they went south. Where it is not COLD."
"If everybody you know jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?"
I seem to recall a Spider Robinson story speculating that the sudden loss of the internet would destroy civilization and kill millions.
I don't doubt it would fairly dire. But "collapse of civilization" seems excessive. We struggled along without it within the living memory of people who are not in any way old fogies, because they're my age.
I don't doubt it would fairly dire. But "collapse of civilization" seems excessive. We struggled along without it within the living memory of people who are not in any way old fogies, because they're my age.
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