Friday, my yellow LiveStrong band broke. I’d been wondering how much longer I should wear it, and I figured that was an out. Then last night at dinner, Lissa asked me if I wanted to wear hers. Jeez. The cancer survivor gives you her LiveStrong band. You pretty much have to wear that.
Oh, yeah, one more unusual search string: global shit. Go figure.
It was with some pride this morning that I realized my blog is one of the top 10 hits on Google for dork freezer. But I am restive. I will not be satisfied until I’m number one.
Some other amusing search strings to come across the transom recently:
That last one is a particular gem, something it seems could only possibly come together with sufficient monkeys and time, which is in essence how it happened.
There’s a new paper in Science today by Arcturo Schmitnick of the Innsbruck Institute for Advance Studies suggestiing global warming may have a larger effect than previously understood on the world’s population of Gnomes. Schmitnick used a coupled GCM/Forest-Elf simulation to try to determine the geographical distribution of climate change patterns against what elfologists know about current Gnome populations:
In the simulations, a disruption of the Atlantic hypertroidal circulation leads to a collapse of the Northern European Gnome stocks to less than half of their initial biomass, owing to rapid loss of nutrient reservoirs. Globally integrated export production declines by more than 20 per cent owing to reduced upwelling of nutrient-rich deep water in northern lakes and embayments and gradual depletion of upper water nutrient concentrations. These model results are consistent with the available high-resolution palaeorecord, and suggest that global Gnome populations are sensitive to changes in the Atlantic hypertroidal circulation. Globally integrated Gnome production declines by more than 20 per cent owing to reduced upwelling of nutrient-rich deep water and gradual depletion of upper ocean nutrient concentrations. These model results are consistent with the available high-resolution palaeorecord, and suggest that global Gnome productivity is sensitive to changes in the Atlantic hypertroidal circulation.
This could be good news for KDE, at least with respect to the Gnomes who depend on fisheries for their liveliihood, though it’s less clear what will happen in the continental interiors, where Gnome forest patch agriculture dominates.
This, on the other hand, I find hilarious:
As a correspondent said, “I think it is homage.”
Via Schweeb (hat tip arslinux) comes an interesting discussion of the Celt and the Romans and climate change:
The extent and duration of the Pax Romana in Europe was greatly facilitated by climatic conditions that favored Roman – as opposed to Celtic – economic, social, and political organization. Not only were Roman patterns of settlement and land use in marked dstinction to those of Celtic polities, the were especially suited to the mediterraneanized cliamte of Europe.
I’ll definitely have to look into this some more, though I”m not sure I understands the connection between Boston basketball and global warming. My primary concern right now, though, is that it’s too cold to go for a bike ride. I fear global cooling and a coming ice age. But the Celtics will no doubt prosper, as they did in the Bill Russell era – guess there’s always winners and losers.
Reading Richardson Gill’s The Great Maya Droughts, I ran across a fascinating discussion of early Europe that shows why climate variability needs to take its place alongside great battles and intellectual ferment in our tellings of history.
Gill talks about the work of Carol Crumley, whose climate reconstruction shows how the Romans and the Celts each dominated large areas of central Europe when the climate was to their liking. The Celtic style of agriculture was more well suited to a cold climate. From 1200 to about 500 BC, much of Europe was cold, with great variability. This was the environment in which Celtic agricultural practices evolved, with a robust flexibility. By about 300 BC, the cold line had shifted north, bringing what we now call a “Mediterranean climate” to much of Europe. The Romans were good in this kind of an environment – few crops, urban living. So when the climatic line shifted north, the Romans went with it, pushing out the Celts and coming to dominate central Europe. Gill quotes Crumley:
The extent and duration of the Pax Romana in Europe was greatly facilitated by climatic conditions that favored Roman – as opposed to Celtic – economic, social, and political organization. Not only were Roman patterns of settlement and land use in marked dstinction to those of Celtic polities, the were especially suited to the mediterraneanized cliamte of Europe.
William Connolley notes that in some cases, the containers are shipped back to China full of trash:
“China is buying up everything it can. It is sucking in material from all over the world and it doesn’t give two noodles what it takes,” said one plastics recycler who asked not to be identified. “I know of 300 firms, mostly in China, offering to buy my plastics. I have three or four companies cold-calling me every day from China requesting material. They have very cheap labour to sort the material but the shame is that it is being done there and not here. They don’t care about the quality, or the contamination. No one checks what is sent or what arrives.”
The latest greenhouse gloom: modelling suggesting climate change, by influencing Atlantic circulation, could whack the ocean food chain.