On Microclimates

It is clear you have not read any of my posts.

Thanks for the clarification on the point that you can't tell effect from cause and that you do not believe that someone can attach to an idea and use it for their own ends that don't have anything to do with that idea. And yet you report that you were raised by fundies who use exactly that strategem.

Reply to
Doug Freyburger
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Change that is not caused by humans. There's been a lot of it in geological time. Enough to ask if the human contribution in the current trend is large or small. And that's independent of the real issue that you point out in the graph - If global warming isn't really a good thing.

The graph also shows that life in general has done very well during the warmer geological periods. We're all doomed - The history of life thriving during warm periods proves it! We're all doomed - Humanity evolved during the recent swings and highs. Our prehistoric ancestors have already been through several ice ages and warming periods. The "we" part is specific parts of human culture not humanity in general and not life in general.

Independent of the size of human contribution to global warming that's the interesting point - Earth's life thrived under warming conditions. Ancient humanity thrived under warming conditions. Therefore global warming *must* be *entirely* human caused and we're all going to die as a result of it! It's political BS at its finest. It ignores what has actually happened during prior warm eras.

Even glancing at the graphs tells a different story. Life and humanity have thrived under warmer conditions across geological time. Except for folks living in Florida which will eventually be innundated, exactly how again is life and humanity thriving a disaster? Last time I checked there are planes, trains and automolbiles capable of evacuating Florida in a lot less than the several centuries it will take for it to flood. We'll need to replant the citrus groves elsewhere, completely disasterous.

The degree of human contribution just doesn't matter in real terms - Life in general and humanity in specific has thrived on Earth during eras of warmer climate.

Is it bad just because it's different? Really? I look at those graphs and I don't buy it. I look at those graphs and I wonder why I support green energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear. Because fossil fuels are limited resources, that's why.

Reply to
Doug Freyburger

Take a look at your last posting. Forty three words in one super long disjointed sentence. Your postings are difficult to read and rather cryptic. I wonder how you ever graduated from any school writing the way you do.

I will not respond to your rantings until you learn to write.

Reply to
Nad R

Food for Climate Skeptics

"The frigid winter now ending may be, unhappily, no fluke. The warming trend that had dominated world climate during most of the years since

1880 appears to have come to an end. Murray Mitehell, Jr., of the U.S. Weather Bureau reported that mean annual temperatures have dropped in both Northern and Southern hemispheres by 0.2 degree Fahrenheit since the early 1940s. In many areas climatic conditions have already returned to those that prevailed in the 1920s. The downturn has allayed fears about the 'greenhouse effect,' in which a rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, due to increased use of fossil fuels, was supposed to be trapping more and more solar energy. But the reasons for the cooling are unknown."

-- Daytime temperatures had fallen during the 1940s and 1950s as aerosol haze created by industrial pollution reflected sunlight.

Scientific American, March, 1961 (reprinted in the March, 2011 edition)

The Soviet Union was never a Socialist, much less a Communist country any more than the colonialists who threw tea into Boston Harbor were Indians. The Soviet Union was a dictatorship under Uncle Joe, and an oligarchy afterwards. Any social benefits were incidental.

To what end is this power of which you speak? My view is that it is the power to keep corporate sponsors to fund election campaigns, which is contingent on legislation which increases corporate revenues. 87% of corporate stock is owned by 1% of the population. By and large, it is the extractors of fossil fuels (which are responsible for the release of CO2 into the atmosphere) which are the most vocal deniers of Global Warming.

Reply to
Billy

My new signature thank you.

Bill who has about 20 F. low for four more nights before a break. 40 F. high right now. Started some caladiums this morning.

Reply to
Bill who putters

I will use smaller sentences.

Sequence one.

1) Per geology life thrives in warm climates.

2) Per archeology humans thrive in warm climates.

3) The cause is irrelevant given those two points.

4) Because global warming should be beneficial what's the fuss about?

Sequence two.

1) So scare mongers must do it for other reasons.

2) Scare mongers must not care about the actual topic.

3) Scare mongers tend to be collectivists.

4) Collectivists tend to dislike capitalists.

5) So scare mongers are using the topic in a political campaign.

Sequence three.

1) Global warming is real.

2) Human causation is a matter of recent concensus.

3) Across history, recent concensus in science has often been wrong.

4) Why care since the predicted result is beneficial?

Sequence four.

1) Fossil fuel is limited.

2) Green power includes wind, solar, hydroelectric and nuclear.

3) Wind is expensive but dropping slowly in price.

4) Solar is expensive but on an exponential curve.

5) Exponential curves can have good results, just not today.

6) The installed base of hydroelectric is nearing the maximum.

7) Hydroelectric damages cute fishees.

8) Nuclear is politically unpopular.

9) That's yet another sign the scare mongers aren't honest about their goals.

10) Developing green sources is still good because fossil fuel is limited.

Conclusion.

It's not about what you claim it's about. So you make up stuff about what my stance is.

Reply to
Doug Freyburger

I realize that this is sarcasm, but let me point out the home, for Homo sapiens is the Olduvai Gorge [Latitude: 2?59S], which is very near the equator.

Possibly.

Reply to
Billy

See article reproduced in one of these posts.

October 2006 Scientific American Magazine

Impact from the Deep

Reply to
Billy

Rats! The article has to do with rainfall, not temps. But still, it is an interesting article that relates to gardening and agriculture.

Scientific American March, 2011

A Shifting Band of Rain

By mapping equatorial rainfall since A.D. 800, scientists have figured out how tropical weather may change through 2100

By Julian P. Sacks and Conor L. Myhrvold

THE FIRST INDICATION THAT OUR EXPEDITION WAS NOT GOING AS PLANNED was the abrupt sputter and stop of the boat's inboard engine at 2 A.M. The sound of silence had never been less peaceful. Suddenly, crossing the open ocean in a small fishing vessel from the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific Ocean seemed an unwise choice. A journey to a scientific frontier had led us to a different frontier altogether, a vast darkness punctuated by the occasional lapping wave.

We are climate scientists, and our voyage (which ended safely) was one of many intended to help us do what at first glance seems impossible: reconstruct rainfall history back in time, across an ocean. By tracing that history,we can gain a better understanding of how the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, rising air temperatures and changes in tropical precipitation are likely to alter future climate patterns. We have traveled far and wide to numerous islands across the Pacific Ocean.

----- IN BRIEF The tropical rain band that wraps the globe north of the equator migrates as atmospheric temperature changes, altering rainfall patterns worldwide.

Data from sediments in Pacific island lakes show that the band is at 3°N to 10°N, as far north as it has ever been in the last 1,200 years.

At current warming rates, the band could shift north by five degrees by 2100, drying out farmland for millions of people in Ecuador, Colombia, and elsewhere.

Multiyear drought conditions in the southwest U.S. could persist as that area becomes more like the semiarid region of northern Mexico.

-----

Some present-day climate patterns are well known, such as the El Nino and La Nina circulations in the Pacific. A lesser known but equally important pattern is the primary precipitation feature on the planet: a band of heavy rainfall that circles the globe in the tropics and migrates north or south seasonally with the angle of the sun. The area in which it moves is known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).

Any change in the earth's temperature, as a result of incoming solar radiation or greenhouse gases, can affect the rain band, which provides the precipitation that feeds equatorial agriculture. The band also plays a central role in the monsoons of Asia, Africa and India and the large convection cells that transport heat from the equator toward the poles. The frequency and intensity of El Nino and La Nina events and the strength and duration of hurricane seasons in the Pacific and Atlantic can all be influenced by variations in the band's position. Changes in rainfall resulting from a permanent shift of the band would dramatically alter the equatorial environment, with effects reaching worldwide. And we have good reason to believe the band is shifting.

Until recently, climate scientists did not know whether the current annual range of the band's midline?from 3°N to 10°N latitude over the Pacific Ocean?was its historical range. But now field measurements from latitudes bracketing the ITCZ have allowed our colleagues and us to define how the band has moved over the past 1,200 years. A large shift of five degrees northward?about 550 kilometers?occurred from about 400 years ago until today. Discovery of that shift led us to a startling realization: small increases in the greenhouse effect can fundamentally alter tropical rainfall. We can now predict where the ITCZ will move through 2100 as the atmosphere warms further. We can also predict whether rainfall may rise or fall across the world's equatorial zones, the probable effects across higher latitudes in Asia, Central America and the U.S. southern tier, and what those changes might mean for weather and food production. Some places are likely to benefit, but many others, we fear, will face dry times.

MEDIEVAL UNKNOWN

UNTIL WE BEGAN mapping rainfall history, scientists had little data about where the ITCZ had been during the past millennium. The band hovers near the equator, but it can be tens or hundreds of kilometers wide, depending on local conditions and seasonal sunshine. Because the zone is highly pronounced over the Pacific, that region is ideal for tracking its movement. And because the rain band girds the earth, Pacific trends indicate global changes.

Scientists can profile the sun's strength from isotopes such as carbon

14 in tree rings and beryllium 10 in ice cores and can reconstruct the historic profile of world-wide greenhouse gases from air bubbles trapped in tubular cores of ice extracted from polar regions. By comparing solar output and greenhouse gas levels with the ITCZ's position over centuries, we can infer how tropical rainfall might change in the 21st century in response to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Clever investigators have identified many different indicators of global temperature during the past millennium. Two periods stand out. Around A.D. 800, global temperatures were similar to those in the late 1800s. Temperatures then rose during the Medieval Warm Period (A.D.800 - 1200), reaching levels similar to 20th-century temperatures. They gradually settled and fell during the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1400-1850). In the past two decades the sun's output has remained essentially constant, yet both temperature and levels of carbon dioxide?the most abundant manmade greenhouse gas?have become significantly higher than at any point in the past 1,200 years.

Atmospheric scientists knew few specifics about past tropical climate, however, when we began our work. Seafloor sediments, which can provide exquisite records of climate on multithousand-year timescales, accumulate too slowly to record much information about the past 1,000 years. Many corals produce annual bands, but the creatures rarely live longer than 300 years, providing no records from 300 to 1,000 years ago.

Mapping rainfall would allow us to fill in the missing information about the ITCZ's position over the past millennium. Usually determining rainfall once it has hit the ocean is a lost cause. But small islands scattered across the Pacific have enclosed lakes and ponds that can reveal the history. In the past six years we have collected dozens of sediment cores from the bottoms of such waters in some of the most remote, exotic Pacific islands. The locations span a range of latitudes above, below and within the current band and fully across the Pacific. We can define where the rain band was during a given time period by pinpointing places that experienced intense rainfalls in that period at various latitudes. Simultaneous rainfall increases and decreases, northward or southward, indicate a common, oceanwide shift in the band.

Fieldwork is an adventure fraught with setbacks, equipment issues, language barriers and difficulty getting to the sediment-coring locations. For example, by the time we arrived in the capital city of Majuro, the local airline, Air Marshall Islands (affectionately known to locals as "Air Maybe"), had two broken planes in its fleet of two. The two-day trip mentioned earlier to test a local entrepreneur's modified fishing boat that looked alarmingly unseaworthy ended when the engines died on our overnight return from a neighboring atoll.

To retrieve an undisturbed sediment core, we push, pound and screw long tubes into a lake's bottom. Just about every site we have cored has a unique sediment sequence. Sometimes we find bright-red gelatinous layers several meters thick made up of cyanobacteria, as in the Washington Island lake. Other times the sediment is brown mud rich in hydrogen sulfide (read: it stinks!), containing mangrove leaf fragments and the occasional layer of bivalve shells, as in Palau.

As we slog through mud on foot and row across shallow water, we push a long pole into the sediment to test depths and to see whether obstacles lurk. It is not unusual to abort a core attempt because it hits rocks, ancient coral, sand or roots.

Because the rate of sediment deposition is highly variable, we do not know how deep we need to go. Generally speaking, one meter of sediment stretches back at least several hundred years: nine meters of sediment from Washington Island, for example, spanned 3,200 years. When possible, we try to hit "bedrock" at the bottom of a core: deposited sand, coral or volcanic rock marking the time when the lake first began accumulating sediment, so that we can obtain the most complete record of the historical climate.

THE SECRET LIES IN LIPIDS

RECONSTRUCTING RAINFALL is our goal, but we have to measure the ecosystem's characteristics in the present climate to know what the same measurements of the past environment reveal about the past climate. We therefore collect water samples at different depths to determine the chemical composition and hydrogen isotope ratio of the water, as well as traits of the algal and microbial populations. We trap phytoplankton, zooplankton and microbes on fine, glass-fiber filters, then immediately store them on ice so we can later analyze their lipid composition. Vegetation samples are collected from the immediate vicinity to evaluate their lipids, too.

After we carefully raise the cores out of the lake bottom, we have to get the samples back to the lab without disturbing the sediment. To avoid mixing a core's layers, we painstakingly "section" the uppermost sediments that are particularly soft into one-centimeter slices and store each slice in labeled plastic bags.

Once we have sectioned cores on site, we journey back to Seattle to our lab at the University of Washington, hauling stacks of ice chests filled with sediment and water and long cardboard boxes filled with the segments of cores that did not require bagging. By measuring the two stable isotopes of hydrogen in the lipids of algae preserved in successively deeper layers of sediment, and dating the samples back in time, we can infer the amount of rainfall that occurred when the flora lived [see box on opposite page].

WET REGIONS BECOME DRY

OVER SUCCESSIVE YEARS we have added more data to an increasingly accurate map thai pinpoints the ITCZ's historical locations, and we continually update it with our latest results. Although our findings from the most recent expedition?to Kosrae in Micronesia?will take a few more months to analyze, the results from many trips, : combined with data from colleagues, indicate that small changes in atmospheric heat were accompanied by large changes in tropical rainfall during the Little Ice Age, drying previously wet regions such as Palau and bringing abundant rain to previously arid regions such as the Galapagos Islands. When solar energy reaching the top of the atmosphere decreased by just two tenths of a percent for about 100 years, the ITCZ migrated south toward the equator by 500 kilometers.

That sensitivity does not bode well for our future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that because of primarily tailpipe and smokestack emissions, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration will rise to double pre-industrial levels by mid-century and triple by 2100, causing an increase in atmospheric heating two to three times larger than changes that occurred at the end of the Little Ice Age from increased sunlight alone.

During the Little Ice Age the rain band's midline remained south of 5°N. Today it hovers between 3°N and 10°N. Recent increases in greenhouse gases threaten to move the band's center another five degrees northward?550 kilometers?by 2100. This new location (8°N to 15°N) would significantly change the intensity of rainfall in many regions [see box on opposite page}.

Evidence for potential changes comes from our findings on the islands. Washington Island, located at 5°N, now receives three meters of rain a year, but 400 years ago it received less than one meter of rain and experienced more intense evaporation. Conversely, the highlands of San Cristobal Island at 1°S in the desertlike Galapagos archipelago were substantially wetter during the Little Ice Age.

Evidence from archaeologists is also helpful. They have concluded that on islands across Indonesia and the South Pacific, a marked increase in the construction of fortifications coincided with the last large southward shift in the ITCZ's position. The bulk of fortifications?stone structures to fend off intrusions from neighboring societies?were built from the onset to the end of the Little Ice Age. As the rain band moved south, islands left in its northern wake dried out, perhaps forcing inhabitants to flee to more southern islands, raising fears of invasion among local peoples there.

Today desalination technology and shipping ease strict dependence on rainfall, but a move of the rain band five degrees further north would endanger the hundreds of millions of people who live near the equator and depend on subsistence agriculture, not to mention tropical biodiversity. Most nations in the current range are developing nations. They are likely to experience great population increases during this century and are unlikely to have the resources to successfully adapt. Rainfall declines, on one hand, and flooding, on the other, across decades or even a few years would reduce crop yields, leading to localized food shortages, political unrest and ultimately geographic displacement.

Areas directly in the ITCZ for the first time (10°N to 15°N), such as El Salvador and Manila in the Philippines, would receive more rain annually and would become more humid. Regions no longer under the rain band's direct influence (3°N to 8°N) would receive less rain and become more arid. Whether this drying effect would be countered in certain places by the strength of the Asian and Indian monsoons is subject to debate.

LESS COFFEE, FEWER BANANAS OVERALL, WET AREAS in northern Indonesia,Malaysia, the Philippines, Micronesia, Thailand and Cambodia would miss a good portion of the ITCZ rains they now receive. Crop varieties ideal for today's growing conditions would no longer thrive. For example, coffee plants, much like vineyards, need a lot of rain at the beginning of the growing season and require more than 1.8 meters in total to develop suitable beans.

In Central America, Ecuador and Colombia would be left in the ITCZ's wake and become drier. Colombia's increased urbanization may help it cope because its economy is no longer as highly dependent on agriculture. Colombia, however, is the world's third-largest coffee producer, and as in Indonesia, less precipitation could affect long-term coffee yields. Most growing regions for the bean, which are below 8°N latitude, would likely suffer by the mid- to late 21st century. Productive areas in the south and along the coast are most at risk because they will be the farthest from the rain band.

The future of Ecuador's banana industry may be bleak. Good bananas require warm temperatures and 2 to 2.5 meters of annual rainfall, but Ecuador is already well below the current ITCZ and barely meeting the minimum precipitation threshold. A shift would likely decrease rainfall to a meter a year or less by 2100, shutting down the country's banana industry. A large drop in banana yield can happen quite fast. In the Philippines at the beginning of 2010, roughly half of the plantations produced small and underweight bananas that were useless commercially, because of an abnormal dry season.

Subsistence agriculture would also be affected in all the aforementioned locations. Even if people gravitate toward cities, a lack of regional food sources is a recipe for disaster.

If the band continues migrating north at the average rate it has been over the past 400 years, substantial rainfall changes in the continental U.S. are likely, too. Some changes may have already begun. The south-western U.S. is enduring a severe multiyear drought that is likely to represent the new normal pattern in the 21st century should greenhouse gas levels continue to rise apace. Higher temperatures, and a continuing northward shift of the rain band, threaten to shift the subtropical dry zone that lies to its north, which currently stretches across northern Mexico, into this part of the country.

Scientists are unclear whether a northward shift would affect the frequency or size of hurricanes or monsoons. We also have yet to determine any possible effects on the patterns of El Nino and La Nina.

BETTER MODELS COMING

MORE WORK needs to be done before alarm bells can be sounded with confidence. Computer-based climate models have not accurately reproduced past and present rainfall patterns in the tropics. If modelers can use data from sediment cores and other sources to produce patterns that more closely approximate those that are known, the world could have greater confidence in their projections of future rainfall. This type of experiment is being pursued by our colleagues at the University of Washington and elsewhere.

We will continue to study sediments from tropical islands in the ITCZ, and to its north and south, to more precisely define the rain band's position throughout the past millennium and to predict where it will be in generations to come.

MORE TO EXPLORE :

Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations over the Past Two Millennia. Michael E. Mann et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 105, No. 36, pages 13252-13257; September 2,2008.

Southward Movement of the Pacific Intertropical Convergence Zone AD 1400-1850. Julian P. Sachs et al. in Nature Geoscience, Vol. 2, No. 7, pages 519-525; July 2009.

Paleoclimates and the Emergence of Fortifications in the Tropical Pacific Islands. Julie S. Field and Peter V. Lape in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Vol. 29, No. 1, pages

113-124; March 2010.

Paleoclimate research at the Sachs Lab:

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Illustration by George Retseck (globes) and Jen Christiansen (graph)

Reply to
Billy

To my ear "facts are not all there" implies the existence of facts not put into evidence.

The last "ice age" (not counting the movie) was 11,000 years ago. We are in an "inter glacial period at present (The Holocene). The "mini ice age" from 1000 CE to 1450 CE was a small change unless you lived in Iceland, where even the Inuit were having a hard time of it.

Reply to
Billy

Correct! in my book of philosophy. I believe in evolution of man even though all the facts are not there. Someday the facts may be there. If a system has contradictions I will dismiss the theory as false. I believe all religions have contradictions therefore a false belief. I know for others, contradictions in a belief system does not matter.

I am not positive however I am not sure but was the ice age, 11,000 years ago caused by a super volcano or meteor impact, rather than the Sun. I am fairly certain the mini ice ages was caused by volcanos. I know the sun has a cycle every eleven years for sun spots. Not sure about long term temperatures. The earths magnetic field can flip flop changing the environment, but no sure about its effect on temperature.

I imagine when the Sun turns into a red giant in a billion years the Earth will warm up a whole lot.

Garden center today had some great spring sales today, free hotdogs, donuts and coffee. Soon to enjoyment comes.

Reply to
Nad R

Huh? Socialists?? Where did this come from? What agenda? What socialist approach? What has it to do with the Soviet Union?

and cooling can be > is real quite

How did the freakin' USSR get dragged into this?

Has someone been tampering with your food, Doug?

Who said differently?

Bill's approach: reduce CO2 emissions. This is a socialist approach that failed in the USSR? Please, tell me more.

In the 1970s there was increasing awareness that estimates of global temperatures showed cooling since 1945. Of those scientific papers considering climate trends over the 21st century, only 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming.[2] The general public had little awareness of carbon dioxide's effects on climate, but Science News in May 1959 forecast a 25% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the 150 years from 1850 to 2000, with a consequent warming trend.[3] The actual increase in this period was 29%.

Is the "soviet socialist approach" just "filler" for a sentence devoid of content?

Which themselves aren't pictures in the normal sense of the word, but analogical representations of reality. It simply means that any mathematical representation would have to account for certain, measured eccentricities.

Dougie wanna cracker?

I'm sure that "socialism" holds some sort of implied meaning for you besides the stated dictionary definition: socialism noun a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned OR regulated by the community as a whole.

Our entry into our latest wars wasn't regulated, it was staged. Our biggest oil spill avoided environmental regulations. The economic mugging of America, was caused by de-regulation.

So your a neo-liberal then? Nothing should interfere with profits? Not even democracy?

Power, to what end? To make this a better world for myself and my neighbors, or greed?

And while individual free-market environmentalists plant bushes and trees, install solar cells and wind generator, and compost, free-market power producers produce low cost energy from fossil fuel. Low cost if you don't count the social cost of remediation of the atmosphere, and water, not to mention eco-nuclear and containing radioactive releases.

It's called privatizing the profits and socializing the costs, here in the best of all possible neo-liberal worlds.

Reducing CO2 emissions, painting roofs white, and burying charcoal, aren't political acts but attempts at survival.

Can you back-up, and approach "Global Warming" without the political baggage?

If you like weekends (40 hr/5 day weeks), thank a union.

===

Reply to
Billy

Aren't you supposed to mark the topic OT when you talk about gardening? ;O))

How far are you from North Carolina where the Cook is in full gardening mode? Seems very strange.

My tomatoes have stuck their little dicots out. The second round of peas are starting to show themselves and the Romanesco broccoli is stretching for the grow lights.

If you like weekends, thank a union.

===

Reply to
Billy

Reply to
Billy

What are you referring to here?

Oh, come on, Doug. This is an ad hominem attack, that doesn't address Climate Change.

You're losing me too, Doug. Instead of attacking, perhaps you could clarify, and refrain from attacks.

Reply to
Billy

I was very tired when I wrote that last posting. I am going to take a nap and hope the fogginess of the mind goes away. It was a bit gibberish.

Reply to
Nad R

Billy, are you changing your opinion about Doug being a good guy?

From his postings, he sounds just like my family members. One has to dig a little deeper to reveal his true intentions on the environment of the planet earth.

If Doug had anything to with the construction or inspections of California's Nuclear Power Plants, I would be moving out of that state :)

Reply to
Nad R

This fit of pique is unworthy of you.

You know that the above are easily picked apart.

Citation please.

Qualified sentence. Doesn't show relationship.

I agree, but not in environmentalism. Follow the money.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"A well-researched and readable case against free-trade orthodoxy."

--Business Week

"A lively addition to the protectionist side of the debate...well written and far more serious than most anti-globalization gibberish."

-- New York Sun

"Bookstore shelves are loaded with offerings by economists and commentators seeking to explain, in accessible prose, why free-trade-style globalization is desirable and even indispensable for countries the world over. Now comes the best riposte from the critics that I have seen. Readers who are leery of open-market orthodoxy will rejoice at the cogency of Bad Samaritans. Ha-Joon Chang has the credentials -- he's on the economics faculty at Cambridge University -- and the storytelling skill to make a well-informed, engaging case against the dogma propagated by globalization's cheerleaders. Believers in free trade will find that the book forces them to recalibrate and maybe even backpedal a bit....Chang's book deserves a wide readership for illuminating the need for humility about the virtues of private markets and free trade, especially in the developing world."

--Paul Blustein, Washington Post

"Lucid, deeply informed, and enlivened with striking illustrations, this penetrating study could be entitled "economics in the real world." Chang reveals the yawning gap between standard doctrines concerning economic development and what really has taken place from the origins of the industrial revolution until today. His incisive analysis shows how, and why, prescriptions based on reigning doctrines have caused severe harm, particularly to the most vulnerable and defenseless, and are likely to continue to do so. He goes on to provide sensible and constructive proposals, solidly based on economic theory and historical evidence, as to how the global economy could be redesigned to proceed on a far more humane and civilized course. And his warnings of what might happen if corrective action is not taken are grim and apt."

- Noam Chomsky

"A smart, lively, and provocative book that offers us compelling new ways of looking at globalization."

--Joseph Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics

(Available at better libraries near you.)

What do you call recent? What do you call concensus?

Across history, recent concensus in science has often offended dogma.

The truth, or its best estimate, is always important.

nuclear. Make an argument. What we've had so (nuclear ) far isn't "Green".

Ask the Japanese about how expensive nuclear is.

Planting a garden is good. It just won't feed you on the day that you plant it.

Happily, tidal action can be harnessed without harm to fishees.

edible

You mean that those who may be affected by it, don't want it.

Spell it out, would you, please.

Developing green (sustainable) sources is good in any event.

We have a problem, let's just address the problem and not go psychoanalytical on it.

Reply to
Billy

In article ,

Last night here it was 20 F. and in Raleigh it was 41 F. for a low. We are in winter. Distance I'd guess about 600 miles.

I plan to plant late as a general rule as I have light issues aka tree work in the next two months. Trying to enhance the microclimate.

Reply to
Bill who putters

Planting through clear plastic will warm the soil.

If you like weekends, thank a labor union.

==

Reply to
Billy

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