February 2007 Archives
The Younger Dryas — also referred to as the Big Freeze— was a 1,300 year-long cold climate period, between approximately 12,700 to 11,500 years BP, i.e. around 10,000 BC. Its end marks the start of a warm, interglacial period, the one we live in.
What was it like during the Younger Dryas? Parts of Greenland were about 15°C colder than today. In the UK, evidence suggests mean annual temperature was below freezing. The Younger Dryas ended under just four to five decades; some data suggests an even more rapid transition, just a few years. No human activity has been blamed for that.
Why does it matter? The last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago, allowing humans to subsequently develop agriculture, civilization, industry, aviation, and information technology. People who worry about Global Warming
, and especially those who claim that it's caused by mankind, need to realize that Earth climate has wildly fluctuated over thousands as well as millions of years, and that a major reason we enjoy immense prosperity, freedom, and progress today is that the climate is relatively warmer!
The last glacial period lasted 100,000 years; the Northern hemisphere was largely covered with heavy, three to four km-thick ice sheets, and sea level was about 120m lower than at present. Always remember that we are enjoying an interglacial period of the present ice age. This ice age began 40 million years ago with the growth of an ice sheet in Antarctica; over the last several million years, cycles of glaciation with ice sheets have advanced and retreated on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales, within the current ice age. None of these cycles and changes can or should be blamed on mankind.
Trivia: the three “Dryas” periods (younger, older, oldest) are named for Dryas octopetala, a marker species detected in peat bogs and core samples of glacial ice. It's an arctic-alpine evergreen shrub, with large white flowers.
Copperheads were a faction of Democrats in the North who opposed the American Civil War, wanting an immediate peace settlement with the Confederates. The name Copperheads was given to them by their opponents the Republicans, probably derived from the venomous snake (the American copperhead) that strikes without warning...
By all accounts, Copperheads were traitors to the Republican-led effort to end slavery.
To my surprise, in Fifty Degrees Below (p. 56), Kim Stanley Robinson has a major character (sympathetically portrayed, pro-environmentalist Senator Phil Chase) declare that Abraham Lincoln was no Republican
, Republicans hated him, Copperheads were Republicans, and that
[they] did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.
Bizarre and ridiculous. It doesn't even seem to fit in the plot or storytelling. Is Robinson undermining the character by making him speak falsely, or is he trying to revise the history of Copperheads in the name of an irrational hatred of Republicans?
Someone tells me items A and B measure 160 and 240. I chat internationally with my brother, and he says that to his knowledge item C is comparable to B but measures 5.4. It took me two days to realize that I live in a country that refuses to cooperate with the rest of the world in using the International System of Units (SI aka metric system). Always ask what units the measurements are in!
Millimoles per liter (mmol/L): Some medical tests give results in millimoles per liter (mmol/L). A mole is an amount of a substance, containing a large number (6.022×10
People in America who need to communicate with the rest of the world should know that to convert cholesterol levels from their mg/dl to the standard mmol/l, one should divide by 39. So A and B are 4.1 and 6.2 mmol/L.
