We are all gypsies now…

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No, the Indie is big on global warming. And indeed big on anything that will give its readers a heart attack on first sight. The day after the Shackleton obituary, they ran another front page global warming doom shock story. Not a peep about Shackleton and co in it, of course.

I’m not sure why I buy the rag. But I’ve been through every single broadsheet over the years (Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent) and have ended up thinking exactly he same about them all.

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Did I say I had anything against pot?

I was simply pointing out that Carl Sagan was a well-known devotee of that particular herb, and not well-known as a devotee of the bottle.

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Many moons ago, so many that I don’t care to count, there was an American semi-comical band known as Red Ingle and the Natural 7, which made a certain song immensely famous.

Hillbilly was their style,a little like some of Spike Jones stuff: however if they were new today, they would probably be grouped under the title ‘Way out Left’ . The song was “Cigareets and Whusky and Wild Wild Women”, and one has to be a certain age to remember it, unless one is an anorak: which makes me…… ?

BTW could it possibly be that my sighting, on the 9th Inst.in my Daily Rubbish, about the possibility of a reversal in Global warming predated the one in the Inde. of the 11th Inst.? If so : naughty lax Inde.reporter! Shine on Harvest moon. If anyone should have the slightest interest, I could post the words to the Ciggie aria! LMK

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OT: Carl Sagan actually theorized that the best way to deal with global warming was to instigate an artificial (and peaceful) nuclear winter. Don’t tell me that man wasn’t a drinker!

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Some scientists have been reluctant to talk about the overall global warming effect of all the greenhouse gases taken together, because there is another consideration – the fact that the ‘aerosol’, or band of dust in the atmosphere from industrial pollution, actually reduces the warming.

As Professor Shine stresses, there is enormous uncertainty about the degree to which this is happening, so making calculations of the overall warming effect problematic.

Lovely name that, for one of the fry scientists: Professor Shine.

And it could well be that Melissa, jetting off to some Alpine ski resort, may have helped to put just enough extra aerosol into the atmosphere to defer our imminent frite.

I knew we could count on Melissa.

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…In 1947, [nobel laureate] Harold Urey had published calculations which predicted that the heavy isotope of oxygen (18-O) would be fractionated from its light isotope (16-O) as a function of temperature. He suggested that this would provide a method to estimate temperatures in the geological past…

Among his team was Cesar Emiliani, who, because of his background in micropalaeontology, went on to apply the techniques developed to tiny micro-fossils… Emiliani is often thought of as the founder of palaeoceanography…

Shackleton made oxygen isotope measurements on shells of fossil foraminifera…and saw a fatal flaw in Emiliani’s work…

Another very important application was to place within a known timescale the fluctuating oxygen isotope signals that Emiliani and Shackleton had defined, by generating a long core record that extended to a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field seen in sediment cores and known to be 780,000 years ago.

This set the stage for the most important application of the oxygen isotope method: the reconstruction of the history of global ice volume through the ice ages. Milutin Milankovitch in the 1920s had hypothesised that ice ages were caused by changes in distribution of solar radiation at the Earth’s surface in turn driven by changes in movement in the Earth’s orbit…

The result was the famous 1976 paper in Science (“Variations in the Earth’s orbit: pacemaker of the ice ages”) where they showed that the three periodicities with which the Earth’s orbit changes (100,000, 40,000, and 21,000 years) were all present just as predicted.

This clear recognition of orbital control is now revolutionising the whole of stratigraphy…

All very interesting, but I noted that Shackleton had discovered some mistake in his predecessors work, and that this is a new science, barely 30 years old, and still having revolutionary effects. How much faith ought we to have in these new sciences, particularly when their founders have already been shown to have made mistakes? Not very much, I suggest.

True, it is Science, but it’s a developing science, and very likely one that is strapped for research cash. I mean, who is really all that interested in ice ages? Nobody much – until you predict that the next ice age is imminent any day. I bet that guarantees research grants. The same is true of Lovelock. Another new science, and another new (but opposite) imminent doom-laden scenario.

Do we freeze or do we fry? I don’t know. Instead I suspect that we’re caught in a protection racket turf war between freeze science and fry science.

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Welcome, geek-pie. Your style of penetrating, analytical debate is just what’s needed on this site.

Tell us: Did they actually beat him up?

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This “factual report”, based on supposedly scientifically proven periodical solar radiation arrhythmia, extracted from some Continental climatologists studies, stated that a mini ice age would in fact have begun by that date .

I don’t normally suffer from delusions : I read my Daily Rubbish, along with millions of others, and I find that I am torn between two disparate branches of an incomplete and argumentative science. To fry or to freeze , that is the question.

HELP!

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