Much of what you say is beyond doubt DB, the trouble over here is that government is by the fanatics and delusioned.
Living in a rather remote area I am spared the visits of the various party supporters after my vote. To be honest, I miss them, time and again I have had them walk away having had their arguments torn to shreds, politics here are run on the basis that the electorate have short memories.
Global warming.
Moderators: MichelleH, Minimalist, JPeters
I cant say that it is worse in the US Digit, altho there's many who would say that Bush is worse than Blair.
Archaeology reveals Native Europeans evolved with a very diverse diet with over 100 wild plants and animals. Neurology shows how necessary this is for maximal mental development.
History shows how empires routinely rely on monoculture, Ancient sages from Pliny to Lao Tzu are universal that the most rational life is to be lived tending a garden, unaware of the nutritional benefits. And we see how, as the empire organizes agriculture to ever higher levels of efficiency, the creativity of the classical phase withers. Republics become tyrannic, altho they may, as Gibbon notes, take pains to maintain all the outward forms of representational institutions.
Its hard to look at the archaeological record and not be concerned; as to which is worse of, the EU, UK or US, there's no telling. If any of these major currencies crash, they all will.
People bemoan the loss of the Roman republic, but Augustus replaced a very corrupt government run to promote what we now call 'special interests'. Diamond, in "Collapse" mentions how Tokugawa and Trujillo did what republics could not; Japan &* the Dominican Republic still benefit from their decisions. A tyrant does not havta be a Hitler or Stalin. Putin is doing arguably better than any of his "democratic" predecessors. Catherine the Great was not elected, nor could she have been.
Catherine, Victoria, & Elizabeth give Americans hope that Hillary will be able to clean up the mess. if it lasts that long.
Archaeology reveals Native Europeans evolved with a very diverse diet with over 100 wild plants and animals. Neurology shows how necessary this is for maximal mental development.
History shows how empires routinely rely on monoculture, Ancient sages from Pliny to Lao Tzu are universal that the most rational life is to be lived tending a garden, unaware of the nutritional benefits. And we see how, as the empire organizes agriculture to ever higher levels of efficiency, the creativity of the classical phase withers. Republics become tyrannic, altho they may, as Gibbon notes, take pains to maintain all the outward forms of representational institutions.
Its hard to look at the archaeological record and not be concerned; as to which is worse of, the EU, UK or US, there's no telling. If any of these major currencies crash, they all will.
People bemoan the loss of the Roman republic, but Augustus replaced a very corrupt government run to promote what we now call 'special interests'. Diamond, in "Collapse" mentions how Tokugawa and Trujillo did what republics could not; Japan &* the Dominican Republic still benefit from their decisions. A tyrant does not havta be a Hitler or Stalin. Putin is doing arguably better than any of his "democratic" predecessors. Catherine the Great was not elected, nor could she have been.
Catherine, Victoria, & Elizabeth give Americans hope that Hillary will be able to clean up the mess. if it lasts that long.
Any god watching me hasta be bored, and needs to get a life.
This is a classic attempt by a headline writer to say something that the story doesn’t say.
If you read the headline, you would think the Alps are warmer now then they used to be. “Frozen Wine”
But mid-way down the story is the quote that “In his lifetime he reported very cold winters and very mild winters.”
Frozen wine, yellow fog: Medieval records help scientists understand climate history
By Bradley S. Klapper
Associated Press
Published: September 16, 2007
EINSIEDELN, Switzerland — A librarian at this 10th century monastery leads a visitor beneath the vaulted ceilings of the archive past the skulls of two former abbots.
He pushes aside medieval ledgers of indulgences and absolutions, pulls out one of 13 bound diaries inscribed from 1671 to 1704 and starts to read about the weather.
"Jan. 11 was so frightfully cold that all of the communion wine froze," says an entry from 1684 by Brother Josef Dietrich, governor and "weatherman" of the once-powerful Einsiedeln Monastery. "Since I've been an ordained priest, the sacrament has never frozen in the chalice."
"But on Jan. 13 it got even worse and one could say it has never been so cold in human memory," he adds.
Diaries of day-to-day weather details from the age before 19th-century standardized thermometers are proving of great value to scientists who study today's climate. Historical accounts were once largely ignored, as they were thought to be fraught with inaccuracy or were simply inaccessible or illegible. But the booming interest in climate change has transformed the study of ancient weather records from what was once a "wallflower science," says Christian Pfister, a climate historian at the University of Bern.
The accounts dispel any lingering doubts that the Earth is heating up more dramatically than ever before, he says. Last winter — when spring blossoms popped up all over the Austrian Alps, Geneva's official chestnut tree sprouted leaves and flowers, and Swedes were still picking mushrooms well into December — was Europe's warmest in 500 years, Pfister says. It came after the hottest autumn in a millennium and was followed by one of the balmiest Aprils on record.
"In the last year there was a series of extremely exceptional weather," he says. "The probability of this is very low."
The records also provide a context for judging shifts in the weather. Brother Konrad Hinder, the current weatherman at Einsiedeln and an avid reader of Dietrich's diaries, says his predecessor's precise accounts of everything from yellow fog to avalanches provide historical context.
"We know from Josef Dietrich that the extremes were very big during his time. There were very cold winters and very mild winters, very wet summers and very dry summers," he says, adding that the range of weather extremes has been smaller in the 40 years he has recorded data for the Swiss national weather service.
"That's why I'm always cautious when people say the weather extremes now are at their greatest. Without historical context you lose control and you rush to proclaim every latest weather phenomenon as extreme or unprecedented," Hinder says.
Most historians and scientists delving deep into archives seek accounts of disasters and extreme weather events. But the records can also be used to obtain a more precise temperature range for most months and years that goes beyond such general indicators as tree rings, corals, ice cores or glaciers.
Such weather sources include the thrice-daily temperature and pressure measurements by 17th-century Paris physician Louis Morin, a short-lived international meteorological network created by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1653, and 33 "weather diaries" surviving from the 16th century. In Japan, court officers kept records of the dates of cherry blossom festivals, which allow modern scientists to track the weather of the time.
Early records often are only discovered by chance in documents that have survived in centuries-old European monasteries like Einsiedeln, or in the annals of rulers, military campaigns, famines, natural hazards and meteorological anomalies. In Klosterneuberg near Vienna an unidentified writer notes a lack of ice on the Danube in 1343-1344 and calls the winter "mild," while the abbot of Switzerland's Fischingen Monastery laments the late harvest of hay and corn in the summer of 1639 when "there was hardly ever a really warm day."
Scores of similar clues are pieced together year by year to determine temperature ranges, says Pfister, whose team of four uses old "weather reports" to work back as far as the 10th century.
Pfister has found that from 1900 to 1990, there was an average of five months of extreme warmth per decade. In the 1990s, that number jumped to an unprecedented 22 months. The same decade also had no months of extreme cold, in contrast to the half-millennium before.
Even in the last major global warming period from 900 to 1300, severe winters were only "somewhat less frequent and less extreme," Pfister says. Over the past century, temperatures have gone up an average of 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is often attributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.
Global warming is one of the world's top issues today because of fears of massive hurricanes and flooding. For most of history, though, it was the fate of farms and the fear of famine that encouraged careful weather observation.
The Einsiedeln abbots — princes within the Holy Roman Empire until 1798 — were powerful leaders who ruled over large swaths of central Switzerland's mountainous terrain. Agriculture was the primary source of income for the region and natural disasters such as floods and avalanches posed an omnipresent threat.
Debts accrued and honored, accidents, local conflicts and business transactions also fill Dietrich's accounts, "but most days start with the weather," says Andreas Meyerhans, who cares for the monastery's precious documents.
The diaries — written in German sprinkled with old Swiss dialect and margin notes in Latin — are "unique" because of the exceptional everyday detail they provide, Pfister says. He adds that centuries of weather records make it clear that people need to adapt when extremely hot or cold weather becomes more frequent. While the lives of earlier generations were ruled by the weather, "in the second half of the 20th century people slept and became completely unprepared for natural disasters, because they happened so rarely."
In Einsiedeln, Hinder reads from a barometer flanked by the Virgin Mary, and worries that humanity is in trouble.
"God still controls the weather," he says. But, he adds, people must do their part by taking better care of the planet.
That last line is pretty good doublespeak for a priest!
If you read the headline, you would think the Alps are warmer now then they used to be. “Frozen Wine”
But mid-way down the story is the quote that “In his lifetime he reported very cold winters and very mild winters.”
Frozen wine, yellow fog: Medieval records help scientists understand climate history
By Bradley S. Klapper
Associated Press
Published: September 16, 2007
EINSIEDELN, Switzerland — A librarian at this 10th century monastery leads a visitor beneath the vaulted ceilings of the archive past the skulls of two former abbots.
He pushes aside medieval ledgers of indulgences and absolutions, pulls out one of 13 bound diaries inscribed from 1671 to 1704 and starts to read about the weather.
"Jan. 11 was so frightfully cold that all of the communion wine froze," says an entry from 1684 by Brother Josef Dietrich, governor and "weatherman" of the once-powerful Einsiedeln Monastery. "Since I've been an ordained priest, the sacrament has never frozen in the chalice."
"But on Jan. 13 it got even worse and one could say it has never been so cold in human memory," he adds.
Diaries of day-to-day weather details from the age before 19th-century standardized thermometers are proving of great value to scientists who study today's climate. Historical accounts were once largely ignored, as they were thought to be fraught with inaccuracy or were simply inaccessible or illegible. But the booming interest in climate change has transformed the study of ancient weather records from what was once a "wallflower science," says Christian Pfister, a climate historian at the University of Bern.
The accounts dispel any lingering doubts that the Earth is heating up more dramatically than ever before, he says. Last winter — when spring blossoms popped up all over the Austrian Alps, Geneva's official chestnut tree sprouted leaves and flowers, and Swedes were still picking mushrooms well into December — was Europe's warmest in 500 years, Pfister says. It came after the hottest autumn in a millennium and was followed by one of the balmiest Aprils on record.
"In the last year there was a series of extremely exceptional weather," he says. "The probability of this is very low."
The records also provide a context for judging shifts in the weather. Brother Konrad Hinder, the current weatherman at Einsiedeln and an avid reader of Dietrich's diaries, says his predecessor's precise accounts of everything from yellow fog to avalanches provide historical context.
"We know from Josef Dietrich that the extremes were very big during his time. There were very cold winters and very mild winters, very wet summers and very dry summers," he says, adding that the range of weather extremes has been smaller in the 40 years he has recorded data for the Swiss national weather service.
"That's why I'm always cautious when people say the weather extremes now are at their greatest. Without historical context you lose control and you rush to proclaim every latest weather phenomenon as extreme or unprecedented," Hinder says.
Most historians and scientists delving deep into archives seek accounts of disasters and extreme weather events. But the records can also be used to obtain a more precise temperature range for most months and years that goes beyond such general indicators as tree rings, corals, ice cores or glaciers.
Such weather sources include the thrice-daily temperature and pressure measurements by 17th-century Paris physician Louis Morin, a short-lived international meteorological network created by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1653, and 33 "weather diaries" surviving from the 16th century. In Japan, court officers kept records of the dates of cherry blossom festivals, which allow modern scientists to track the weather of the time.
Early records often are only discovered by chance in documents that have survived in centuries-old European monasteries like Einsiedeln, or in the annals of rulers, military campaigns, famines, natural hazards and meteorological anomalies. In Klosterneuberg near Vienna an unidentified writer notes a lack of ice on the Danube in 1343-1344 and calls the winter "mild," while the abbot of Switzerland's Fischingen Monastery laments the late harvest of hay and corn in the summer of 1639 when "there was hardly ever a really warm day."
Scores of similar clues are pieced together year by year to determine temperature ranges, says Pfister, whose team of four uses old "weather reports" to work back as far as the 10th century.
Pfister has found that from 1900 to 1990, there was an average of five months of extreme warmth per decade. In the 1990s, that number jumped to an unprecedented 22 months. The same decade also had no months of extreme cold, in contrast to the half-millennium before.
Even in the last major global warming period from 900 to 1300, severe winters were only "somewhat less frequent and less extreme," Pfister says. Over the past century, temperatures have gone up an average of 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is often attributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.
Global warming is one of the world's top issues today because of fears of massive hurricanes and flooding. For most of history, though, it was the fate of farms and the fear of famine that encouraged careful weather observation.
The Einsiedeln abbots — princes within the Holy Roman Empire until 1798 — were powerful leaders who ruled over large swaths of central Switzerland's mountainous terrain. Agriculture was the primary source of income for the region and natural disasters such as floods and avalanches posed an omnipresent threat.
Debts accrued and honored, accidents, local conflicts and business transactions also fill Dietrich's accounts, "but most days start with the weather," says Andreas Meyerhans, who cares for the monastery's precious documents.
The diaries — written in German sprinkled with old Swiss dialect and margin notes in Latin — are "unique" because of the exceptional everyday detail they provide, Pfister says. He adds that centuries of weather records make it clear that people need to adapt when extremely hot or cold weather becomes more frequent. While the lives of earlier generations were ruled by the weather, "in the second half of the 20th century people slept and became completely unprepared for natural disasters, because they happened so rarely."
In Einsiedeln, Hinder reads from a barometer flanked by the Virgin Mary, and worries that humanity is in trouble.
"God still controls the weather," he says. But, he adds, people must do their part by taking better care of the planet.
That last line is pretty good doublespeak for a priest!
As far as I can see KB he is singing from the same hymn sheet as the rest of us. I don't know of anyone who says that climate change isn't happening, the dispute as I understand it is, are we causing it?
First people deny a thing, then they belittle it, then they say it was known all along! Von Humboldt
Thanx for such an informative post.
<"God still controls the weather," he says. But, he adds, people must do their part by taking better care of the planet.
That last line is pretty good doublespeak for a priest!>
the USDA website has the field crop report. which is good news for Yankees, and bad for just about everyone else. Damn Yankees are still lucky.
Outside of losses in TX & OK (flooding), the wheat harvest looks great at a time when Canada's was hard hit by record heat and drought. Australia had similar problems, as did China. The US corn crop will be 155 bu/acre, near the record set in 2004, but at a time with record corn prices. If it were not for luck like this, the dollar would not be worth a dime.
It'll be interesting to see when someone feeds the dendochronology into a computer with the weather record KBS reported. See how long luck can last.
<"God still controls the weather," he says. But, he adds, people must do their part by taking better care of the planet.
That last line is pretty good doublespeak for a priest!>
the USDA website has the field crop report. which is good news for Yankees, and bad for just about everyone else. Damn Yankees are still lucky.
Outside of losses in TX & OK (flooding), the wheat harvest looks great at a time when Canada's was hard hit by record heat and drought. Australia had similar problems, as did China. The US corn crop will be 155 bu/acre, near the record set in 2004, but at a time with record corn prices. If it were not for luck like this, the dollar would not be worth a dime.
It'll be interesting to see when someone feeds the dendochronology into a computer with the weather record KBS reported. See how long luck can last.
Any god watching me hasta be bored, and needs to get a life.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070916/ap_ ... Ze3lsPLBIF
The Northwest passage is now open. This long sought passage (Lewis and Clarke) may make the Panama Canal obsolete by 2070.Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Center, said that Arctic ice has shrunk to some 1 million square miles. The previous low was 1.5 million square miles, in 2005.
"The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected," Pedersen said in an ESA statement posted on its Web site Friday
I am putting this here because they mention the farming possibilities opened up by global warming. But be advised, that is a small part of a far ranging prediction of the farming future and study of farming history.
It is something I found very interesting, well documented, and very much full of a faith in the human sprit. Things all to lacking in today’s world of continual crises creation.
Everything from the Earth’s population stabilizing at a sustainable level to the size, and reason for and benefits of, the “dead zone” at the mouth of the Mississippi.
And all related to the great rivers of the world, their history and economic importance.
http://www.cgfi.org/files/Great-Rivers-White-Paper.pdf
It is long, (80 some pages) but I think worth it.
It has history, politics, and philosophy.
It is very pro modern technology.
It will make you think.
It is something I found very interesting, well documented, and very much full of a faith in the human sprit. Things all to lacking in today’s world of continual crises creation.
Everything from the Earth’s population stabilizing at a sustainable level to the size, and reason for and benefits of, the “dead zone” at the mouth of the Mississippi.
And all related to the great rivers of the world, their history and economic importance.
http://www.cgfi.org/files/Great-Rivers-White-Paper.pdf
It is long, (80 some pages) but I think worth it.
It has history, politics, and philosophy.
It is very pro modern technology.
It will make you think.