Posted on 04/28/2007 3:01:17 PM PDT by blam
Civilization depends on a stable climate
By JOHN KRIST
April 26, 2007
If you were to able to travel back in time 50,000 years, abduct a paleolithic hunter from a river valley in southern France and haul him back to 21st century America, would he stand out in a crowd? Depends on the crowd. He probably wouldn't blend in very well at the New York Stock Exchange. But dress him in shorts and flip-flops, hand him a backpack and he could probably stroll across any college campus in the country without attracting attention.
Human beings who lived 500 centuries ago were fully modern, virtually indistinguishable from us in fundamental ways. Their brains and bodies were physically the same as ours. They created sophisticated art - murals, paintings, sculptures - and buried their dead in a fashion that suggests they possessed ceremonial or religious traditions. They had developed the technology and navigational skills required to travel across broad expanses of ocean.
Paleolithic hunter-gatherers did not, however, domesticate plants or animals on a large scale. Nor did they live in large, sedentary communities. No one did until about 10,000 years ago when, suddenly and in multiple locations around the globe, agriculture and cities appear in the archaeological record.
The relatively abrupt and simultaneous rise of farming and urban settlement patterns suggest that the capacity to develop such innovations had been part of humankind's intellectual and behavioral bag of tricks for a long time.
That capacity had lain dormant, however, awaiting some sort of catalyst to unleash it.
There's a pretty good theory as to what that catalyst might have been. If valid, it's potentially bad news for the well-groomed, suit-wearing descendants of paleolithic cave painters.
This was one of the secondary but intriguing points made last week during the penultimate in a series of global warming programs at UC Santa Barbara.
Thursday night's lecture and panel discussion featured journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert, who turned her award-winning series of articles on climate change for the New Yorker into a book featured this spring in a campus-wide reading program.
At about the same time that agriculture and urbanization appear in the archaeological record, the Earth entered a period of climate stability not seen at any time in the preceding 400,000 years. That's the span of time for which scientists have the most detailed record of global temperatures and atmospheric conditions, derived from the isotopic signature of frozen water and the chemistry of trapped air bubbles in ice cores pulled from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
What those ice cores reveal is a pattern of profound climatic instability during most of modern humanity's time on Earth. Every 100,000 years or so, the climate would begin to cool, probably the result of a recurring pattern in Earth's orbit around the sun. Ice sheets would grow, glaciers would advance and sea level would drop. Eventually, however, the climate would begin to heat up, at first slowly and then rapidly, the warming continuing until terminated by onset of another ice age.
Roughly 10,000 years ago, however, the pattern changed. Temperatures reached approximately the same high point that they had reached before each of the three previous ice ages, but then held fairly steady, with minor fluctuations.
And it is in that brief window of temperature stability that modern civilization was born and has flourished. It is entirely plausible that until then, human populations were forced to move so frequently to follow climate-driven shifts in food and water supplies that they could not develop social and technological systems requiring permanence.
About 150 years ago, modern humans began unintentionally tinkering with the climate system, setting in motion a trend toward warmer temperatures - higher than any in the experience of our species - that threatens to end this period of stability. The consequences may prove merely inconvenient for the richest nations, but for hundreds of millions of people in countries that lack the wealth and institutional capacity to adapt, the changes are likely to prove disastrous as food supplies collapse, fresh water becomes scarce and low-lying lands are inundated by rising seas.
There's a grim symmetry to this theory - that human beings had to wait for a period of climate stability before they could develop the technology to destabilize the climate. And it offers a rather dismal prognosis for the future, which Kolbert expressed this way:
"An organism that depends on stability, but produces instability, can only survive for so long."
Unbelieveable.
GGG Ping.
BTW, Only the Neanderthals were in France 50,000 years ago. The people who would become the Europeans were still over in the Indus Valley, etc.
Even the worst-case scenarios of the GW alarmists is far better for civilization than global cooling would be.
http://www.nyas.org/ebrief/miniEB.asp?ebriefID=524
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Ruddiman2003.pdf
According to the author, Canada would have been covered with ice 5,000 years ago if it weren’t for anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and methane — from early agriculture.
“There’s a grim symmetry to this theory - that human beings had to wait for a period of climate stability before they could develop the technology to destabilize the climate. And it offers a rather dismal prognosis for the future, which Kolbert expressed this way:”
“An organism that depends on stability, but produces instability, can only survive for so long.”
What a crock. There is no natural “stability” (mean average temperature) that the earth “reached” and can only UNNATURALLY fall back from.
There were any number of times, prior to man, when the earth was “stable and warm” for longer than it has most recently been warm. And there has been and will continue to be periods of much greater cold, and periods of greater “warming”, even if humanity immigrated off of earth today.
Oh how arrogant humanity is.
Well then, what the author said is true....he would blend in on a college campus, but not on Wall Street.... ;)
susie
...and he would make far more sense than the professors who "teach" there--and be far wiser than Elizabeth Kolbert and her disciples.
Modern man has actually accelerated global warming by bringing about daylite savings time. This additional hour of daylite every day over the years has really speeded up global warming.
Hey, it makes as much sense as their theory.
That is debatable.
Unless new ice cores have been collected in the last ten years to cover the entire time span (400,000 years), many who should know argue that the cores were not handled carefully enough to analyze gas concentrations. I have seen documentaries of these cores being handled where it would be impossible to study the 'in situ' gases.
The original cores were obtained primarily to study plant spores and dust; not gases. The simple act of handling them unprotected at normal atmospheric pressure after being raised from several-thousand meter depths makes any trapped gas analysis invalid.
A total non sequitur.
First of all, CLIMATE does not change all that fast. And even when climate is changing from cold to warm, or from warm to cold, those highly industrious social hive creatures known as humans can adapt with amazing speed. There is an enormous amount of effort directed at discovering a need, and filling it. When this effort is well rewarded, the original need is filled quickly, and new needs arise. One would think that the new conditions created by climate change would generate considerable opportunities to find these additional needs.
There are three possible responses to any challenge.
Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.
Photo of Elizabeth Kolbert, “climate journalist” and professional “global warming evangelist”:
“Elizabeth Kolbert...was a reporter for the New York Times for fourteen years before becoming a staff writer covering politics for the New Yorker. She and her husband, John Kleiner have three sons. They recently moved from New York to Williamstown, MA.”
http://www.bloomsbury.com/authors/microsite.asp?id=684§ion=2
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/04/10/roberts/
I don’t see any mention of science in her background...
In all fairness, not all of humanity; just a minor percentage of the most vocal and the most delusional. Some call themselves scientists, but have the temperament to be SS officers.
Man intuitively knows he cannot control natural processes. Hence the human sacrifices to persuade the gods for them to fix things.
Today, the IPCC report is 20% science and 80% politics; the politics of socialism, mostly. The political arm of the global warming cabal makes all the press releases.
The actual unedited scientific portion no longer is made available unedited.
Care to guess why?
Civilization (science, engineering, innovation in general, and even society and governments) makes it easier to survive the constant and inevitable changing of climate.
They get it backwards every time.
he author is proof that some Neanderthals have survived to this day. The article fails to mention that cold is the norm, and that the last 10,000 years has been warmer than normal. If there really were to be antrhopogenic global warming is would offset the return to normal cold, and the temperature would stay constant!
In reality, they do. I have seen as many as three in recent TV commercials for car insurance and they are articulate and witty. Are they merely 60's hippies in modern dress? They also have 60's hairdos and facial hair. Only neanderthals vote for RATs so that's the only way to test them for neanderthalism.
Try the Eurasian Step, Indo-European emigration has been always, East to West or East to South or East to East.
I am quite sure that a self-respecting Neanderthal would never vote for Democrats. Neanderthals weren’t that stupid! It takes years of brainwashing by public schools and MSM and decaying religion to be as stupid as modern folk.
There may have been a climate-change trigger to civilization. North Africa and the Near East used to be moister. As desert conditions set in, the human population was forced to move to the river floodplains, and there they found the idea conditions for sustained agriculture. That is what allowed the population density which made civilation possible. Then we got division of labor, writing, and other key inventions. From then on humans have flourished, and have not required constant climatic conditions. In fact, they have spead to areas with much less than ideal climates. They have traveled to new climates faster than climate has changed!
We have also survived warm periods, and cold periods (like the Little Ice Age). I think that the only thing we cannot survice is Liberalism and its relatives.
What’s the Eurasian Step? Is that a dance?
Perhaps you mean the steppe.
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