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Wednesday, October 22, 2003

You'll Freeze Right to the Bone What the end of the Ice Age meant to 'human cultural explosion." [The daily trudge] "Paleoclimatic evidence worldwide shows that a global change in climate took place 11,700 years ago, and in the North Atlantic a large part of the change took less than 20 years. It was a few thousand years before the completion of the transition from ice age to warm period; still, in just a 20-year period the climate of a large part of the earth changed significantly. There was no warning. A threshold was crossed, and the climate in much of the world shifted abruptly from cold to warm. This was not a small perturbation; our civilization has never experienced a climate change of this magnitude or speed. To get an idea of what happened, imagine that over a 20-year period the weather at your home became that typical of a place 400 to 600 miles farther south. What might be the mechanism for so rapid and large a climate change?" -- Kendrick Taylor http://www.americanscientist.org The piece at American Scientist from which that paragraph is an excerpt is really fascinating. Very quotable, hard not to just quote the whole thing. As Taylor says, we tend to think of climate change in terms of big cycles, 150,000 years or so. But his research persuaded him otherwise. Reading this, I was reminded of a novel I read back when I was in the grade school, Robert Silverberg's Time of the Great Freeze. It's been close to 40 years since I read that book, but I remember the horror it inspired in me then. It's no less horrifying now. We've seen gradual changes in temperature over the last century or so, and they seem to be accelerting. Could we reach a tipping point that would drastically change things sometime soon? 8:56:10 PM  Permalink  comment []

Christian Urban Legends. The fact that no one crucified Santa ruins my day [FARK] 8:38:59 PM  Permalink  comment []

Bush's War Plan Is Scarier Than He's Saying. By Sydney H. Schanberg, The Village Voice Global wars, space control, and projection of U.S. power around the world -- all are part of the "statement of principles" of the Project for the New American Century -- signed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others more than six years ago. Sydney H. Schanberg gives one of the clearest explanations yet of the Bush administration's plan for global domination. [Utne Web Watch] 6:35:40 PM  Permalink  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.