How THEY handled rising sea levels

[kbs2244]

There is, for sure, some argument as to “if”

But the bigger argument is as to “why.”

[Digit]

Why what kb?

Roy.

[E.P. Grondine]

I agree fully with that last para EP...
Roy.

Great. At least the two of us have agreed on the foundation for a national energy policy that makes sense whether AGW is occurring or not.

Well, another day, and the archaeology bbs is still devoted to the AGW debate, so here goes...

Roy, please listen. You need to understand that when Benny moved the Cambridge Conference over from impact to AGW scepticism, it left all of us impact researchers in a lurch.

Do you know How THEY handled ancient impacts?

THEY DIED.

Now I'm really familiar with skewed science, as NASA's impact science was and remains pretty badly skewed against cometary impact. And that's one of the reasons you hear so much about Asteroid Apophis and so little about Comet Schwassmann Wachmann 3 in the press. It is also the reason why Benny was able to move from impact research to AGW so quickly. (Aside from the fact that "Cap and trade" was an economic disaster, he was inspired to do it by Michael Chrichton's book.)

You might enjoy my own book "Man and Impact in the Americas", as I also looked for migrations in response to long term climatic cycles in the data. I hope you can understand that if Benny thought that the long term climatic cycle was cooling, he would actually support in every way possible engineering on a terrestrial scale, including using CO2 to raise global temperatures.

While the CRU dataset has been sullied, US institutional datasets have not, to my knowledge.

It was not Russians, nor the government of Russia who hacked the CRU.

Somebody is using us, and its important to find out who.

[Digit]

The problem with your book EP is cost of purchase and shipping. Our state pension, plus the little extra private pension doesn't leave much over.
As I pointed out earlier, without some appreciation of impacts, and as Cog added, pandemics, we have a narrow view of man's past.

Roy.

[kbs2244]

Digit:

The “why” argument comes around to the question of weather or not we, as humans, can do anything about it.

The Earth may, or may not, be warming or cooling.
But how much influence does human behavior have on it, one way or the other?


My personal opinion is that if we cannot stop a simple, small, local thing like a hurricane, how can we expect to stop something as big as climate change?

[Rokcet Scientist]

My personal opinion is that if we cannot stop a simple, small, local thing like a hurricane, how can we expect to stop something as big as climate change?

Indeed! Haven't we learned from boxing? Don't take the punches! Duck and weave! Duck and weave!

This is one of those bottlenecks of evolution. And, being humans, we have the choice once again: to adapt or perish.

But fighting it is a misdirected waste of resources.

[Digit]

Agreed gentlemen, instead of wasting billions trying to prevent what we currently have no means of preventing we should spend the money on adapting instead. Oh why aren't we politicians!

Roy.

[uniface]

Possibly something having to do with elemental decency ?

[Digit]

Doesn't say much for our leaders though does it?

Roy.

[uniface]

You've watched them as long as I have . . .

[Minimalist]

Do you know How THEY handled ancient impacts?

THEY DIED.

Certainly true for the unfortunates who happened to be standing at Ground Zero but lately I've been giving some thought to the idea that the longer range effects of impacts ( and super volcanos and nuclear winters) have been overstated. We have all read the accounts of Toba driving mankind to a population bottleneck....but selectively not causing much problem for the megafauna and HNS...and most of us have scoffed at it. Similarly, there are questions about the meteor which took out the dinosaurs (large and small) but allowed mammals to survive and thrive. Why? Why are those same mammals now in the cross hairs of other meteors yet-to-come.

We live in an age of hype. In order to attract attention one can not simply propose an "event." One must propose a catastrophe to generate interest.

There are charts of impact craters all over the world. These things happened. No argument there. But life continues in spite of them so perhaps the immediate effect is more pronounced (by an order of magnitude!) than the long-term effect?

[E.P. Grondine]

Certainly true for the unfortunates who happened to be standing at Ground Zero but lately I've been giving some thought to the idea that the longer range effects of impacts ( and super volcanos and nuclear winters) have been overstated.

The effects of impacts have been understated, min. They include dust veils, climate collapse, and starvation followed by pandemic.

Similarly, there are questions about the meteor which took out the dinosaurs (large and small) but allowed mammals to survive and thrive. Why?

Actually, min, to the best of our knowledge it was multiple hits of a fragmented comet that took out the dinosaurs. Anything that lived in undergroud in burrows, such as snakes, alligators, turtles and mice (the mammalian ancestors, including us) survived.

"meteors" are rice sized to pea sized bits of comet that hit our atmosphere. "meteorites" are generally small pieces of asteroids that fall to Earth, though the term is also used to name the bits left over from larger asteroids when they impact the Earth.

There are charts of impact craters all over the world. These things happened. No argument there. But life continues in spite of them so perhaps the immediate effect is more pronounced (by an order of magnitude!) than the long-term effect?

Both the short term effects and the long term effects are quite severe.
Even for the smaller ones, if they hit in the right place.

[E.P. Grondine]

This is one of those bottlenecks of evolution. And, being humans, we have the choice once again: to adapt or perish.

With 6,000,000,000 people on this planet we are reaching the carrying load, and given normal human behavior that number is likely to go higher. We here in the US are but 300,000,000 of those 6,000,000,000.

Moving to sustainable economies is an adaptation mankind needs to make, and we here in the US had better figure out how we can help do it.

In any case, we have to stop using our atmosphere and oceans as dumps, and we need international co-operation to avoid some problems, such as fishing a fish stocks to extinction.

On the positive side, so far we've managed not to blow ourselves off the face of the planet.
But as we still have Antarctica to fight over, who knows?

Whether AGW is real or not, we here in the US need better energy policies, and they don't have to cost money, but will actually save money while improving our standard of living.

[Minimalist]

That just restates the dogma, E.P. Again, we have been given similarly dire pronouncements by the super-volcano crowd which assures us that the dust, ash, and gas would produce an equally serious nuclear winter scenario....yet, here we all are.

Arguing about it!

[E.P. Grondine]

That just restates the dogma, E.P.

No it doesn't. That is a statement of the facts as they are now known.

Again, we have been given similarly dire pronouncements by the super-volcano crowd which assures us that the dust, ash, and gas would produce an equally serious nuclear winter scenario....yet, here we all are.

Arguing about it!

The super-volcanic eruptions and their apparent lack of effect on HSS as we were evolving were covered in Chapter 1 of "Man and Impact in the Americas".

The problem now is that there are 6,000,000,000 of us living on the planet, so any effects on food supplies could be "not pleasant". As I understand it, the Russians were working on tech to get the volcanic dust out of the atmosphere, though there's no question that an eruption of Yellowstone would be a "very bad day".

But unlike the situation with impactors right now, we would have warning of volcanic eruption.
As it sits right now, our warning of a Tunguska class impactor would be nil.