remember, tuesday is soylent green day
It's so hard to remain ideologically pure when you know Soylent Green is made of people!
So, the RMN has been kvetching about global warming since it looked like Denver was going to get Goremania.
Guilty kvetcher here is Vincent Carroll, a twice or thrice-a-week Rocky Mountain News' editorial page writer and probably the closest thing the RMN has to a public voice:
Cold water on warming report
Perhaps you read The New York Times story reprinted last week in this newspaper about the National Academies report on global warming. That report "expressed high confidence that warming in the past 25 years exceeded any peaks since 1600," the Times noted, although the same analysts had "less confidence" regarding surface temperatures before that date.
Still, 400 years is a long time, right? Indeed, but as Roy Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, inconveniently pointed out in a column for the Web site TCSDaily, "most of the last 400 years was dominated by the 'Little Ice Age.' "
Context, context, context.
It's not entirely clear what point he's making, but what's there is just so lazy, like, Jughead lazy, that I can't help but feel sorry for him, frankly. Here's what Wikipedia - all of five minutes of research, if you can call it that - had to say about the Little Ice Age:
The Little Ice Age brought bitterly cold winters to many parts of the world, but is most thoroughly documented in Europe and North America. In the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, gradually engulfing farms and crushing entire villages. The River Thames and the canals and rivers of the Netherlands often froze over during the winter, and people skated and even held frost fairs on the ice. The first Thames freeze was in 1607; the last in 1814, although changes to the bridges affected the river flow and hence the possibility of freezes. The winter of 1794/95 was particularly harsh when the French invasion army under Pichegru could march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, whilst the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island's harbors to shipping.
The severe winters affected human life in ways large and small. The population of Iceland fell by half, and the Viking colonies in Greenland died out. In North America, American Indians formed leagues in response to food shortages.
... Many springs and summers were outstandingly cold and wet, although there was great variability between years and groups of years. Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of death and famine (such as the Great Famine of 1315-1317, although this may have been before the LIA proper). Viticulture entirely disappeared from some northern regions. Violent storms caused massive flooding and loss of life. Some of these resulted in permanent losses of large tracts of land from the Danish, German, and Dutch coasts.
Wiki isn't the do-all end-all, but it's probably a good place to start when you're not entirely sure what it is you're gonna write about, never mind get snide. I think they still say it in newsrooms - "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
Anywho, in essence, the environment - where we live, how hot or cold or wet or dry it is - helps make us who we are. The environment helps determine what societies will become and how, and crucially, whether they will last - just take a look at the more land-based societies in the 2/3rds world. Scholars from rad-lefties like Mike Davis to more mainstream voices like Jared Diamond have shown and said in great detail and at great length. To assume - or ignore - a change from a cool environment to a hot one won't - well, context, context, context.
Still, I do feel sorry for him. Carroll has to put his column out three or four times a week, and I have to assume that the sort of effort it takes to do so without straying into blasphemy takes considerable will, like I'm-about-to-come-think-of-baseball-think-of-something-else kinda will. So, Vincent Carroll, Tireless Cretin - The Lab salutes you.
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