We're Having a Heat Wave...

[Greg]

I thought I'd post this without comment see what happens. :D

http://www.riversendtech.com/images/global_temperature_horizontal.jpg
Earth's mean temperature through all the history of higher life forms.
The Holocene marks the advent of the human species. The Triassic and Jurassic were the Age of Dinosaurs.
MYA = "millions of years ago". Chart by me. Data from a paleontologist whose name escapes me at the moment.

[Miros1]

Well, I don't think your horizontal scale is very even. The entire scale from the beginning of the Cambrian to the end of the Tertiary should be about 8 or 9 times the size of the Tertiary...

[shorty943]

Not verticle enough either.
Right now it is below zero C, where I am.
Global warming be shucked, it's freezing here.

[Greg]

I think the original had a logarithmic time scale, which reflects the relative accuracy of the data more than anything else. Now that you mention it, though, the logarithmic scale tends to obscure some interesting time-dependent data. The length of time that dinosaurs ruled the planet is much more interesting on a linear scale.

Recorded human history: ...........10,000 years
Dinosaur dominance: .........160,000,000 years

I kind of puts the whole thing into perspective, y'know? :thinking:

As James P. Hogan said, "Intellect is a relatively recent innovation."


Added: There's an article in the Wikipedia about the timeline of evolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution) that lays out the development of life forms on a more linear scale. It's still not there, though. The most interesting time, from the Cambrian explosion up to now, is squished into a little patch at the end of the chart.

[Greg]

Not verticle enough either.
Right now it is below zero C, where I am.
Global warming be shucked, it's freezing here.

Take heart, Shorty! Just hold out for another 30,000,000 years and it'll be a lot warmer! :rofl:

[Greg]

There's one item about that temperature chart that mystifies me: I would have expected to see a dramatic temperature change at the K-T boundary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous-Tertiary_extinction_event) between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary. (That's when all the dinosaurs suddenly died out.)

I'm guessing that if it happened, the temperature drop didn't last long enough to leave a significant trace in the fossil record.

[shorty943]

Take heart, Shorty! Just hold out for another 30,000,000 years and it'll be a lot warmer! :rofl:

Uhuh, funny man. Oh, isn't that when the sun is supposed to go KABLUEWEE?

Actually, from what the boffins are now saying about the Atlantic Circulatory Current, it looks like it might be a touch warmer. JUST BEFORE THE ONSET OF A NEW ICE AGE.

Oh God, my broken bits are hurting just at the thought of it.

Stay warm friends.

Greg, any more news on the flooding in Northern Texas? I heard it on the late night news, here in Aus.

[Greg]

Naw, the sun has another four and a half billion years before the big show starts.

I've seen a few film clips of flooded streets but not much other than that. It doesn't appear to be a widespread disaster; just another good ol' Texas gullywasher. We do tend to have lively weather here!

At the moment I'm more worried about the weather in Florida. They're hoping to land the Space Shuttle tomorrow but the forecast has thunderstorms within 30 miles of the landing strip.

[Greg]

Oh... and about the Atlantic Circulatory Current, we're coming up on a solar minimum next March. After than the sun will be building up to its maximum shenanigans so the weather is likely to become even more lively over the next few years.

[shorty943]

Triffic, last week our East Coast lost a few thousand acres to the Pacific in a rage, now the Met boys say, "brace yourself, she's coming around for another temper tantrum".

Not so good in Florida? Hm, what's the East Coast looking like, and do they have enough oomph to go around again? Edwards AFB isn't it?

Those crews, really do hang it out over the edge don't they? My prayers and best of luck to them. They are kind of heroic to me.

[Greg]

They can extend the flight for another two days if they have to. The crew really likes it when that happens because they finally get some serious zero g play time! :D

Yup, being an astronaut seems to be simultaneously the best job and the worst job in existence today. Ernest Shackleton could have written the advertisement: "Long hours. Low wages. Extreme hazards. Small chance of fame in case of success."

What they don't tell you is that the job involves seemingly endless hours spent in review meetings and even more hours invested in training that you hope to God you'll never need. Through it all, they somehow manage to keep a positive mental attitude going almost all the time.

[shorty943]

Good news. The thermometer stayed above freezing last night. 3 degrees C minimum, up here on the hill. Down on the river they got -1.

Shackleton's advert could also fit Navy life, or service life in general. Most Astronauts are servicemen and women any way.
Our Navy advert goes,"You'll be cold, you'll be homesick, you'll be frightened, but, the pride of the fleet, is you".
The attitude goes with the training.
Was it Chuck Yeager said, "I've never been scared in my life, but, that airplane sure impressed the hell out of me". That's, "the right stuff".

[Greg]

It could have even been used to advertize for aerospace engineers! :lol:

I've never heard the origin of the phrase "the right stuff." I figured that Clancy must have had some source for it but didn't know what it was. I tried searching the web for it; no luck

[Greg]

I'm wondering if somehow the movement of Earth's contentinental plates is related to the climate cycles.

This image shows how the continents have been moving around since the days of the dinosaurs.

http://www.sunsims.com/images/180px-Pangea_animation_03.gif
The Earth just won't hold still.
Image pilfered from the Wikipedia.
Where the heck was Australia while all this was going on?

All this land movement would obviously have a profound effect on the local weather (most notably in Antarctica) but since ocean currents are a strong driver of global temperatures, it might also have a big effect on the whole planet.


Tonight on David Letterman, Bruce Willis said he's more worried about global humidity. That was just before he jumped off a seven-story building and hit the sidewalk. These facts are of no significance whatsoever.

[Miros1]

I think the poles wander around too. I remember being very impressed as a kid that they'd found evidence of glaciation in the middle of the Sahara and evidence that the magnetic pole had been in the vicinity at about the same time. I've since given away that encyclopedia, so I can't check the facts.

If you look at the image carefully, Australia was snuggled up against Madigascar, then wanders off across the proto-Indian Ocean.

[Greg]

I see India and Antarctica snuggled up against Madagascar, but not Australia.

[Miros1]

Hum, that was India... will have to research this...

[Greg]

Yeah. We seem to have misplaced Australia; but I know we left it around here somewhere!

[shorty943]

Google:- Gondwanaland. We're over here see? Yoohoo, yes, over here.

We split off at the same time as India, it's just that the graphic artist forgot to include earth rotation. The boffins think we were all part of Antactica or something. Not sure. But, we are still moving north.

As for Polar relocation, that has happened many times over earth's history.

A French theory has the sun as a giant AC\DC thing that changes polarity every few thousand or hundred thousand years.
It has something to do with the ancient Mayan Calender, that just stops dead in about 20 years, and then only turns back. And the fact that they think the sun changes polarity from positive to negative and back again. That would set up some mighty gravitational upheavals, throughout the entire solar system and beyond.
If the theory is sound, that explains the polar relocations.
Spooky huh?

[Greg]

Oh, there you are! You were just hiding around the edge of the globe.

The map in the picture seems to be centered on the Prime Meridian. I had to stare at it for a while to figure that out, but it makes sense to have some reference point while everything is moving around, and the Prime Meridian makes as much sense as anything.

[shorty943]

Oh, there you are! You were just hiding around the edge of the globe.

The map in the picture seems to be centered on the Prime Meridian. I had to stare at it for a while to figure that out, but it makes sense to have some reference point while everything is moving around, and the Prime Meridian makes as much sense as anything.


Harumph. And why not the International Dateline I ask. That way, we could see each other, and them quarrelsome lot up north can't bother us.:)

[Miros1]

Seems to me most maps of that type start by jamming South America and Africa together along the Atlantic Trench, which is fairly close to the Prime Meridian. If you used the International Date Line, there'd be almost nothing to see for most of the plate movement...

[Greg]

Yeah, the International Date Line is kinda crooked, and if you're looking down on it from an equatorial plane, you'll see a whole lot of water.

[shorty943]

Yeah, it got bent, because somebody, didn't like living in yesterday.
Something about Guam, and I think the Fiji Islands. They are pretty close to the same meridian, but Guam is in US time (yesterday), and Fiji is on our time (today). Bah Humbug.
Always the same. It seems, some small section of population is disgruntled, and everybody else, has to change to suit the few.
What do you think of this "daylight saving" rubbish?
Ooh, I just gave away my feelings.
The cows still need milking morning and night.
The crops still need working, no matter what the pseudo time.
It seems the only people, who benefit from daylight saving, at least here in Australia, are the office girls, who get an hour more at the beach after work.
Has it worked out similar there, with your experiment in towing the US 1,000 Nautical Miles East?

[Miros1]

Siberia and the Aleutian Islands too...

[Greg]

I suspect that any benefits of daylight-saving time, if there ever were any, were obviated by the invention of the electric light bulb. It would be very difficult for me to come up with a cogent argument for daylight-saving time. Its benefits are weak and anecdotal, while its costs are enormous and universal.

Basically, I'd say it's just about the dumbest thing people have come up in the past two centuries, overshadowed only by Prohibition, driving the Shah out of Iran, and giving away the Panama Canal.

[Miros1]

Actually, it kind of made sense during WWII, when people were under blackout restrictions after dark.

Even dumber than DST: The year they tried "year round" DST and I had to walk to school in the dark. Two blocks, uphill both ways, yadda yadda yadda...

[Greg]

Aw, if people want to get up early, they can just schedule their day to get up early. I don't see an advantage to forcing it on the whole country.

Yup, I remember double-daylight time. That was supposed to save energy. Didn't last long. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

[homerette]

I seem to recall hearing about a study done a couple of years ago that basically stated daylight savings was obsolete and not that successful in the first place. So what do "they" do? Bring it in a couple of weeks early and permanently screw up my computer's internal clock, not to mention mine. I'm not a large fan of daylight savings myself, couldja tell?

[Greg]

Since it won't go away, there must be someone out there somewhere who thinks that daylight-saving time is a good idea; however, I have yet to meet that person.

[shorty943]

Apparently Europe has come to it's collective senses.
But there are some clowns here, who think they can tow Australia, 1,000 miles East for ever.
Yep, some idiot, reckons we should have daylight saving 365 per.

We even run different schedules, in different states. A half hour flight from Sydney to Brisbane has you arriving half an hour before you left for 2 weeks. 3 months later, the same flight takes 1 1\2 hours.

Yes sirree, when our public servants screw up, they screw up, right royal, as the saying goes.

That's it, that's the problem. Public servant's, and there idiot interpretation of the world.
That's what is causing Global Warming. Bureaucratic Bungling. They've got the bloody thermometer, upside down.

[shorty943]

I've been thinking and watching this.

England is under water again, with the worst flooding in 60 or 70 years. One area in the news last night, had over 1 months rain, dumped in 1 hour.
Hungary, 500 people dead from heat wave conditions.
USA, massive wild fires and was it Nevada got browned out with big dust storms.

Some years ago now, I attended a lecture by Dr. David Suzuki. He mentioned the first warnings from over twenty years ago, saying that there were only a few years left before the changes where irreversable.
My feelings are, the "global warming" stage is already almost cooked, and we are actually now seeing the very first of the climatic changes. Of course these are not scientifically controlled findings, but merely the feeling in the bones of a farm boy\sailor.

[Miros1]

<snip>merely the feeling in the bones of a farm boy\sailor.

My knees and index fingers agree with you.

[Greg]

What has really changed it the availability of news around the world and the media's over-dramatization of everything that report on.

Two these, I'm sure of: Nevada has always had big dust storms (I lived there for almost 5 years), and at any time there are thousands of wild fires in the forests of the USA (my roommate in Seattle was a fire jumper). Throughout history, charlatans have made huge profits by over-dramatizing isolated anecdotal incidents. I don't see anything different going on today.

[mikedelaney16]

Just going back to DST briefly. During WWII, Britain and Ireland both had separate Urban and Rural DST. Farmers were an hour ahead of the city. Add to that the fact that the railways had their own version of time aka Station Time....

[Greg]

Was it like that prior to WWII, or just during the war?

[mikedelaney16]

Just during the war afaik. London and Dublin only synchronized sometime around WWI though, prior to that they differed by about 23 minutes. The station time thing was a problem until sometime after the war.

Oh, and we (The British Isles) tried staying on DST through winter in the early 70s so we could sync with those pesky Europeans. But like Rose said, still dark at 8:30 - 9:00 am. Yuck! A different plan is needed, one that would get Spain, France, the Benelux and Germany in their proper timezone with us with only a 30 minute adjustment. But we all know they (especially the French) wont go for that. Central European Time is way too convenient for them, almost the whole old 15 EU states use it. Not sure about the 10 new ones, they may be on UT+2 in winter.

Looking at the graph at the start of this thread makes me wonder about the motives for the scare mongering that's going on. Yes, there is a fairly clear indication of an uprise, but it may be far more closely related to natural cycles than governments and oil companies pay the media to tell us. Sorry, I just don't buy global warming as it's marketed, it doesn't add up.

Is there any way to convert that graph to a more linear version so we can see how close it comes to a decaying sine wave. I suspect it's something rather like a drum beat, but with both frequency and amplitude decaying. Possibly with multiple waveforms.

[Miros1]

Was it like that prior to WWII, or just during the war?
That was so the Germans would drop bombs and they wouldn't land for an hour. Gave people time to evacuate.

[Greg]

I don't have the original source data for that graph but of course it would be possible to pick selected points and plot it on different scales. If it did turn out to be sinusoidal, that would imply that the temperature cycles are related to the orbit of something about something.

Global Warming Propaganda Amusement: Last week I ran across an oft-copied quote that said that humans produce more than 200 times as much CO2 as volcanoes. I kept digging, and found that the number they were using for the CO2 from volcanoes was much less than what they were quoting on a show on the Discovery Channel as the annual output of ONE volcano.

It was almost impossible to find out even that one datum. There seems to be a strategy to create as many web sites as possible, all political, and all quoting each other. So any web search for "volcano carbon dioxide" is a thousand times more likely to hit one of the political sites than any real scientific data.

Some of the sites are so incredibly similar that I'm wondering if there isn't a program out there spawning them, even to the point of setting up bulletin boards and posting messages.

Aaaarrggggh! Anybody want :grilledcheese:?


That was so the Germans would drop bombs and they wouldn't land for an hour. Gave people time to evacuate.

:laugh:

[mikedelaney16]

If it did turn out to be sinusoidal, that would imply that the temperature cycles are related to the orbit of something about something.
By the time you allow for:
Solar rotation.
Solar wobble.
Solar temperature variations.
Variations in Earth's orbit.
Earth's wobble.
Natural CO2 absorption and production variations by vegetation and oceans.
The effects of volcanos.
Man's activity over a couple of thousand years.

That should produce a fairly complex pattern.

Heck, aren't these the same people who just 30 years ago were predicting we'd be in an ice age 10 years ago?

Now, throw in the strange coincidences that seem to occur every time the price of oil drops below $65/barrel. Things like ill advised wars, unexpected shutdowns of pipelines, diplomatic difficulties with Russia...

Methinks someone is playing games with us.

[Miros1]

Aaaarrggggh! Anybody want :grilledcheese:?

Yum! We normally eat them on Saturday, but I can make an exception, especially if it has Miracle Whip on the outside...

[Greg]

:lol: I still haven't tried making Grilled Cheese with Miracle Whip! Does real mayonnaise work as well?

[mikedelaney16]

Have you ever tried using a blue cheese, like maybe stilton?

[Miros1]

:lol: I still haven't tried making Grilled Cheese with Miracle Whip! Does real mayonnaise work as well?

Someone said real mayo was great, maybe shorty?

Mike, I don't like blue cheese. I have been known to substitute feta in other recipes, so maybe I'll try that some day.

[mikedelaney16]

Mike, I don't like blue cheese.
I'm so sorry to hear that, you don't know what you're missing. :)

Anyways...
You guys do remember this is the Heat Wave thread, right?

So, when the Earth's mean temperature gets up around 22 deg C.

Where will we be able to grill cheese on a rock?

[Miros1]

Mt. Kilamanjaro.

[shorty943]

Someone said real mayo was great, maybe shorty?

Mike, I don't like blue cheese. I have been known to substitute feta in other recipes, so maybe I'll try that some day.


Ooh, no no no. Don't blame me. Mayo? Oh no.
Tis acceptable on shredded animal fodder, but grilled cheese?
Got to agree with the blue formic acid smelling stuff. Yuck.
Now Feta, crumbed and lightly fried in olive oil? Yum.

Commercial break over we will now resume normal programming.

Bloody global warming knocked out the local wireless broadband system yesterday.:laugh: Right in the middle of a download, bugger.

Now, to cook grilled cheese on a rock, may I suggest certain areas of Nevada or maybe the Maralinga area of my home state.
Both were used to test "the BOMB". Lots of hot rocks there.:p
Or the Montebello Islands, of the NW coast of Australia, Bikini Atoll, the French made a big mess in the Jebel Mountains, in North Afrika. Then there are the Pakistani's and the Chinese, and the Indians. All vieing to be the first to blow up the Himalaya's.

Greg, how are the launcher plans going? I reckon it's nearly time we went home.:laugh: