In March 2021 I wrote about A Copper Mine in Ancient Israel, which seems to data from the time of David or Solomon. It now seems that Wood cut to fuel King Solomon’s ancient mines caused environmental collapse – study.
I was reminded tonight of the Gaia hypothesis. It was quite a thing in the 1970s.
The Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of Earth, posits that Earth and its biological systems behave as a huge single entity. This entity has closely controlled self-regulatory negative feedback loops that keep the conditions on the planet within boundaries that are favorable to life. Introduced in the early 1970s, the idea was conceived by chemist and inventor James E. Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis.
This had a natural appeal in the early days of the environmental movement. I was skeptical back then, thinking of it as new age wishful thinking, and impossible to test. I was wrong: Its origins are far darker. Here is the abstract of Gas Guzzling Gaia, or: A Prehistory of Climate Change Denialism:
Continue readingWhat were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?
The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet.
Their papers showed that the growing amount of greenhouse gasses that humans were putting into the atmosphere would cause much greater warming – warming that would exert a much greater influence on global temperature than any possible natural or human-caused cooling effects.
IRONY ALERT: Washington man thanks public employees for saving his home while wearing "Less Government" shirt #1u pic.twitter.com/GCUkOyDnF4
— chuckwestover (@chuckwestover) August 23, 2015
Climate Change Deniers Present Graphic Description Of What Earth Must Look Like For Them To Believe
From The Onion, not the GOP. Maybe next week….
Figuring the odds of Earth’s global hot streak
First, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration calculates global average temperature going back to 1880. That’s 135 years. So if no other forces were in play and temperatures last year were totally at random, then the odds of 2014 being the warmest on record are 1 in 135. Not too high.
2014 Was The Hottest Year On Record Globally By Far
As the JMA graph shows, there has been no “hiatus” or “pause” in warming. In fact, there has not even been a slowdown. Yes, in JMA’s ranking of hottest years, 1998 is in (a distant) second place — but 1998 was an outlier as the graph shows. In fact, 1998 was boosted above the trendline by an unusual super-El Niño. It is usually the combination of the underlying long-term warming trend and the regional El Niño warming pattern that leads to new global temperature records.
What makes setting the record for hottest year in 2014 doubly impressive is that it occurred despite the fact we’re still waiting for the start of El Niño.
Be careful what you wish for.
Australia has hottest spring on record as temperatures soar
Continue reading
Globe Sets Fifth Hottest-Month Record of 2014
NOAA says 2014 likely to be globe’s hottest year despite U.S. cold.
The U.S. is a big country, but it still only covers about 2% of the Earth’s surface area. Our temperatures just don’t make much of a difference on a global scale.
The link between atmospheric CO2 and rising global temperatures cannot be dismissed as a case of “correlation and causality.” Continue reading
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 