Where art thou, climate change champions of the mainstream media?
You missed a story.
“Expect smaller brains with Global Warming”
It seems that colder climates created bigger brains that adapted to cope with cold, but some scientists now fear that global warming trends could be reversing this evolution. Who’d have thought smaller human brains would be a result of warmer climates?
And tragically, there are Canadians out there in touques who are completely unaware of the danger.
So, we add “our brains will shrink” to a growing list that includes precariously heated pre-schoolers, methane fireballs tearing across the sky, and my personal favourite – 4.5 billion dead by 2012.
You’d think we’d have heard more about that one by now.
It helps to illustrate how our betters in Canadian news circles keep their audiences so well informed on some stories and personalities from the global warming beat – and so well insulated from others;
Tory MP Tim Yeo has surely been the victim of a cruel practical joke. Yeo, a former environment minister, is well known for his campaign against climate change. He wants domestic flights to be scrapped and his website boasts of his commitment to the planet. Yet what do we find in the latest Bentley magazine?
Somebody calling themselves Tim Yeo, MP for South Suffolk, has been test driving the Bentley Continental Flying Spur. He sinks into the warm embrace of its leather seats and takes it on a golfing jolly. The Bentley does about 16mpg and has carbon emissions that rival those of a jumbo jet.
More: eco-phobia absurdity down under.
ET – ‘length scale of transportation’ is the critical distance over which one can move a sufficient plurality of goods to sustain a local economy beyond subsistence level. It constrains the establishment of fixed communities. It coheres with resource extraction and usage in your ecologic characterization.
A ‘buffered contact’ (a term pulled out of my hat for this discussion) is the third-party mediation (positive or negative) that constrains or modulates the interaction between communities. The feedback mechanism, as it where. Books are an example. The buffering, or delay, is important. Response to events cannot be too rapid, nor too slow. Such must fit the stability requirements of the system. We, unfortunately, are relearning that as a society.
Physics thesis – reductionist modality… the first bits are utterly critical as here one begins with “why”, follows up with “what” and then really digs down and discusses “how”.
…and to get back on topic, lest I get spanked by Kate: as scientist’s, we’ve failed to retain the pre-eminence of “why”, which drove the rise of the west, and have replaced it with “what and how” … What can I get out of this? How can it benefit me? Self-serving, selfish, consumeristic…
TG–we no longer have any problems storing nuclear waste–Ontario states that they will store it underground in S Ontario–because the ground is perfect for that and there are no earthquakes etc. to cause problems.
Posted by: George at March 26, 2007 4:47 PM
Forgive me if I chuckle a bit, George, but there are people in the Earth Sciences who would love to have your links to these earthquake forcasters.= TG
Green Party in Que garnishes less than 4% of the vote. In the media so-called hot-bed of Kyotoism.
So how cum the editors give the Suzukis 97% of the space ?? Whats the deal, Patricia Graham, editor of the Van Sun ??
Cause and effect are wrong here. Cool climate did not result in increased brain size. Bigger brains are causing Global Warming. I advocate lobotomies for everyone in order to save the planet!
Europe, that bastion of green puritans;
GERMANY: March 26, 2007
HAMBURG – The European Union biodiesel industry is working well under capacity despite top-level political moves to increase biofuels use to combat global warming, industry executives said.
Many new biodiesel plants have been built but many hardly have a market as several countries have been slow to implement promises to increase biofuel use.
“We have been promised a market but it is not yet there,” said Raffaello Garofalo, secretary general of industry association the European Biofuels Board (EBB). “It will come but in the short term we have to go through a desert.”
“We just cannot sell any biodiesel this year,” said BioWerk CEO Thomas Vahle. “The new tax means it is just not competitive.”
“The company, which operates a 250,000-tonnes-a-year plant in north England, has seen its stock price fall to around 15 pence compared with over 200 pence in May last year.”
“As vehicles consume more biodiesel than fossil fuels and need more engine overhauls, biodiesel must be cheaper, she said.”
//www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/41070/story.htm
This is an example of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing. Global Warming isn’t going to see us returning to a tribal, hunter gatherer exsistence. We’re still going be using computers, employing agriculture and calculating our taxes. All the wonderful things that keep our brains busy.
Evolution occurs over very long timeframes. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over its direction over a decade or two.
“Counter-examples: Egypt and China, both with much greater ecological stability and resource bases.”
Egypt and China are not and never were primitive societies. They were both early adopters of this whole written language thingy that were’re currently using (Egyptians invented the idea of an alphabet for instance). And from what I hear it gets hot in Egypt on ocassion.
It’s not a hot or cold thing its a agrarian society vs. hunter/gatherer thing.
JET and Tenebris had some good comments.
I recommend the link provided by Tenebris:
http://brneurosci.org/co2.html
The whole point is that IR absorption by CO2 is non-linear and runaway increases in CO2 does not at all mean runaway increases in the Earth’s temperature.
Wow… my first response to JET’s little piece was… What’s this? Is this true? I went to the site suggested by Tenebris and decided that if this turns out to be true, Al Gore and company have a lot of explaining to do. This topic needs more investigation and a lot more exposure. If atmospheric CO2 is absorbing all the energy that is available, and the atmosphere is warming then there must be more energy being made available from the sun.
You guys are letting all that science get in the way of what was a perfectly hysterical argument. Now cut that out……lalalalala……I can’t heeeaar you….