PLANET OF DOOM
I guess this qualifies as weekend readin’...

Kaymo has sent one of his regular bulletins on how just messed up Planet Earth is. Herein, if I read it right, is a succinct if still complicated account of how humanity has been involved in amateur planet-forming since prehistory without a fucking clue as to what the longterm effects might be. (Don’t I recall a theory that primitive hunter gatherers -- who used grass fires to drive their prey where they wanted them -- managed to set fire to half of prehistoric Australia? Anyone help me out here?) The riff also brings to mind the whole concept of the Earth as a complex living entity for which humanity is nothing more than slow-breeding, but highly pernicious viral infection. And how the only cure is for the planet to make itself uninhabitable to man.

This month Scientific American has an article by William Ruddiman that gives a good account of the bigger picture regarding global warming. Using ice core data and computer modelling Ruddiman lays out the current majority view of the situation. In a nutshell, Yes we're warming the earth and we may well bring on changes we will regret, but we have also staved off the return to an Ice Age, which would have got going several thousand years ago if our ancestors hadn't started farming and clearing the forests.

Perspective: Earth's poles are currently much cooler than they usually are-- thinking long term here. For example during the 500 Million year existence of Gondwanaland in the southern hemisphere, there was very little glaciation on Earth. However, the movement of Antarctica onto the southern pole in the Cretaceous era has been followed by the break between Antarctica and South America in the past 30 million years. Ten million years ago the break was wide enough to allow the Westerly Drift current to simply flow around Antarctica, permanently keeping out warmer water from the tropics. That brought on a cooling trend for the whole planet. More recently (about 3 million ya) North and South America joined together at Panama, thus changing the global circulation of warm water again and intensifying the cooling trend. The current round of Ice Ages began soon afterwards.

Milankovitch cycle: the temperature of the Earth is influenced by three cycles involving variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, plus shifts and wobbles in the tilt of the Earth's axis caused by gravitational interactions between Sun-Moon and Earth. These cycles are 100,000, 41,000 and 22,000 years long respectively, and the way they operate, combined with the lay out of the continents on the surface of the Earth determines global temperatures and glaciation outbreaks.

Beginning 9,000 years ago or so our ancestors started farming. Populations grew and with them came clearing of forests, burning of wood and the production of C02 and Methane. Increased levels of these greenhouse gases stopped the Earth slipping back into the next round of glaciation around 5,000 years ago. Instead, at that time farmers in south China and SE Asia began flooding lowlands near rivers to grow rice. Without human farming and forest burning we would now have small ice caps in Labrador and northern Quebec as well as in the northern Canadian rockies. Another incipient ice cap would be forming in Norway.

With the burning of fossil fuels the human component in climate change increased, and continues to do so. On the long term graph Ruddiman extrapolates a brief, sharp spike in temperatures, taking them back to a level not seen since the Paleocene, when forests grew up to the poles. Then, once we have exhausted the earth's fossil fuels the input of CO2 and Methane will fall dramatically and the Earth will slip back to the Ice Age rhythm. Within a few hundred years of that warm spike, the ice sheets will be moving south from Labrador and Norway again.
Unless, of course, human civilization gets off its duff and learns how to keep the planet reasonably warm, possibly by positioning orbital mirrors above the poles to warm them a degree or two. In the meantime, though, the fossil fuel warming spike means that coastal real estate is not a good long term buy, the Dutch are going to have to build much higher dikes, or else emigrate, and the vast, impoverished populations of places like Bangladesh are going to have to move.

The secret word is Slush

The email is byron4d@msn.com

The Killer Kitten is back.
http://photos1.blogger.com/img/79/3629/640/kitty%20killer.1.jpg

YESTERDAY.
Yesterday I posted a link from MrMR that I thought was to a highly amusing techno-gag about teddy bears, but in fact, the URL takes you too a big fun menu of gags, cartoons, and mini-games. I would recommend checking bear, antcity, shootanddrink, and spearbritney. But for the truly sick and infantile, you gotta go to penguin and poke-penguin. The link is right there. Under Friday. (Damn it. Here it is again... http://www.e7.pl/~casha/swf/bear.swf )

CRYPTIQUE – I also started playing Shanghai. I never used to do stuff like this, but I learned video solitaire on a crowded plane-ride back from Tokyo. This tile game seemed like the Fu Manchu version so I went for it. Played the kiddie version until I figured I’d figured it, and then went to the grown-up complexity and haven’t so far come close to resolving one. Maybe I’m missing a crucial piece of the rules.