Posted on 03/28/2006 5:52:41 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
~ wrong ~
I don't have to be a climate scientist to know this for a falsehood. Very clearly, irrigation came after the warming that ended the last Ice Age, not before.
Incorrect. Neither political party has demonstrated the political will or intellectual skill to address the problem effectively.
(Happy now?)
I thought I was pretty clear that this involved the warm-up circa 7000 BC or thereabouts, and not the period that involved the melting of the Antarctic and North American ice caps.
You were clear, but let me be clear in that this fails into the 'post hoc propter hoc' fallacy. You postulate that irrigation causes recent warming, yet it didn't cause the much larger, less recent warming. So, other than being coincidentally close in time, you have no reason to causally associate the warming and irrigation, as the association of irrigation and warming appears to be a one-time thing.
You also haven't show that irrigation doesn't follow warming, since it's obviously easier to irrigate with water than ice. Or that warming allowed more humans which allowed more irrigation. Or that warming made some areas drier thus needing more irrigation.
For your line of argument, you do have to decide what ended the ice age and show that it is not also responsible for the recent slower warming. After all, if you take ice out of the freezer, it doesn't all melt immediately, it takes time. Maybe we are just in the last slow stage of the post Ice Age warming. This is more plausible than the link to irrigation and so should be addressed in your argument.
He identifies global cooldowns that coincide with vast loss of human life, e.g. the great dieoff of American Indians in the 1500-1600 period. He also points to previous warming periods that coincide with the development of agriculture.
As you undoubtedly know from research into other interglacial periods we should have massive glaciers building up on Baffin Island by this time.
There are proposals to warm up the Sahara which will bring back the monsoons.
Of course weather and climate are not the same thing. Weather is a relatively short time period affair, with changes more or less averaging out over longer periods. The lack of complete averaging over those longer periods is climate change. Weather is also a geographically limited thing, while climate may also be, but for larger regions. Obviously the two are related and an understanding of one will help with understanding of the other. Weather is probably the more difficult theoretical problem, but climate has more unknowns, some of them quite likely of the "unknown unknown" variety.
Thank you, but I have a full education in meteorology and climatology.
In short, I already knew that.
What I'm saying is that water vapor/cloud cycle is elusive to all of our models, immediate, long range, climate.
If we were able to make it work in even one of these models, that technology could be, and would be to enhance the others.
It has not happened...and I work right here where it should be happening.
You, my friend, are "talking through your hat".
Water is water, whether in the solid (ice), liquid, or gas (water vapor) state.
I know you did, but others might not, and you didn't make it clear.
What I'm saying is that water vapor/cloud cycle is elusive to all of our models, immediate, long range, climate.
If we were able to make it work in even one of these models, that technology could be, and would be to enhance the others.
It has not happened...and I work right here where it should be happening.
Now I understand your point.
It's so much better when we explain what we mean, rather than standing on our particular expertise.
Oh crap! Now they're going to ban water.
Which I guess I didn't do too well either.
Different phenomena have different characteristic time scales. What's important in the short term, may or may not be so important in the long term. Alternatively, there may be an "outer loop" that controls the long term effects, and an inner loop which controls shorter term effects. (Oversimplifying of course, there may be multiple loops and their relationship may be more complex than just inner and outer, particularly if the system is nonlinear).
It may also be that the inner loop(s) must be stable for the outer loop(s) to be stable, or it may not. I've seen and modeled both sorts of system.
I'm sorry but your correction to my post is in itself, incorrect.
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary: "the liquid that ..."
water is a liquid
ice is a solid
steam (or water vapor) is a gas
The results are are actually caused by human measurement. Most temp reading are taken from inside or very close to cities. Many of these are taken at airports where temps can be upwards of 10 to 15 degrees different than a mile down the road. The culprit? Concrete, and lots of it. Cities act like heat sinks and are generally hotter than outside the city. Since cities around the world are growing, the range of where the measurements are taken has increased. In short, the data is terribly skewed toward the hotter side of things.
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