Back on 23 March 2010 and again in follow-up posts on 10 April 2010 and 20 April 2015 I used a rough-and-ready squiggly rattlesnake analogy while discussing global temperature changes.
Over a decade later I've just come across the following XKCD illustration by Randall Monroe to put a different perspective on the matter, which I present without comment (other than "wait 'til you reach the very bottom of the chart" - from around year 1850 onwards).
After a hiatus of several years, I've decided to keep adding posts to this particular blog of mine.
I was prompted to do so after reading the following post in Quanta Magazine merely refer you to it. It certainly is a very basic question.
Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis
A related basic question, I suppose, would be Why do we find greenery so welcoming and restful?
Perhaps The Color Psychology of Green gives some answers to this.
There's a recent article Don’t panic, the internet won’t rot children’s brains in The Conversation that’s very much worth reading in its own right.
However, in this case I’m pointing out that it has an excellent, to-the-point passage about the nature of science:
There’s no admission ceremony to become a scientist, no Hippocratic-like oath, no hand placed on a holy book while pledging to uphold this or that. There’s no need for any of this, because without following the fundamentals of science, you are, quite simply, not a scientist.
At the very core of science is the judgement of theories in light of available evidence. Scientists are humans. We have our own beliefs and prejudices, and at times it is near-on impossible to divorce ourselves from these.
That’s why the only kingmaker in science is evidence: objective, irrefutable observations. For every scientific theory proven through observations, there are dozens that lie shattered on the floor. And that’s how it should be.
And I’ll leave it at that, for you to ponder.
FOOTNOTE:
Not to be judgmental, but the above quotation has the spelling “judgement” and there’s an interesting discussion of this spelling over at The Grammarist
Scientists and other concerned about global warming have, in my opinion, not done a good job people trying to get the message across.
In particular, they often present arguments about warming that has occurred during the last century or so, showing alarmingly steep graphs of global temperature rises. In very few cases will you be shown what preceded the recent temperature changes, over a much longer period of centuries or millennia.
I have tried to point this out here in this blog -- see The rattlesnake's rattle (part 2)— and included a few illustrations that I was able to patch together back then (in 2010).
Well, I recently came across 2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility (PDF) in which some European scientists present tree ring–based reconstructions of central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years.
To expound on my point, let’s look at the following chart from the above paper:
I’d consider any trends that emerge from studying natural phenomena over several millennia are more likely to be meaningful than supposed trends obtained from results of measurements made only in the last century or so.
I have added a green ellipse around the part that is often used when discussing global warming, and I’d say that the accusation can be made, with quite some justification, that basing global warming arguments over such a restricted period (the art that’s circled, a handful of decades) is not very convincing science.
But if you consider the entire scope of this chart, it becomes much “safer” to argue that there indeed has been a sudden and significant rise in temperature during the last half century.
That’s what I was trying to get at in earlier blog posts, via my not-so-good analogy of the rattlesnake with its tail steeply raised giving us a warning that we cannot afford to ignore:
I'm only saying that most current discussions about climate change focus only on the the last few centuries and the very long-term changes should be discussed too.
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By the way, you’ll probably be fascinated by The Season of the Witch: Climate-Change and Witch-Hunt Through the Ages
This blog is all about asking Basic Questions.
Hopefully they will be “the right questions” rather than just any old questions.
Josh Kaufman has written a pertinent blog post:
How to Ask Useful Questions
Pythagoras was right! Here’s the definitive, rigorous mathematical proof:
See boring proofs at Wikipedia (or elsewhere).
View a collection of other interesting dynamic GIFs here.
I’ve always been interested in spoken languages, as a dabbler and non-specialist, since learning some Latin and French at high school and picking ups some basics of various European and Asian tongues while travelling around in my days at IBM.
Today, for no particular reason and while dabbling, I came across this Wikipedia article about the “thorn” letter which takes on the “th” sound in words such as “this” and “thing.”
I was struck by the following statement in the second paragraph:
However, in modern Icelandic it's pronounced as a
laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative
So there! Perhaps something to mull over and help one to doze off after a hefty Christmas meal … or perhaps not.
Anyway, may I take the opportunity to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
