Zum Seitenende Übersicht Artikel Home & Impressum
First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.
***
I have frequently criticised the reliance on overly complicated climate models with too many parameters to tamper with. For a completely unrelated, but easier to validate field Bohk-Ewald et al. have just confirmed the superiority of simpler and easier to understand models. Another important result of their comparison is, that nearly all kinds of model tend to over-emphasize the most recent trend in their forecasts and extrapolations.
***
I have been regularly banging on about authorship for some time now and have only just found out – in Ioannidis et al. – that my demands have been in place (if ignored) in the medical sciences for some time now:
***
Cancer is the largest current medical problem and its importance is continuing to rise in an aging population. Vazquez et al. with their elucidation of the mechanism behind the remarkable cancer resistance in elephants may have opened to door to important advances.
***
There can be no reasonable doubt that carbon dioxide and other human impacts have influenced our climate. But that alone does not make current climate phenomena exceptional or unprecedented. As Gao at al. say: “[W]e identified numerous mummified Adélie penguin carcasses and phases of rapid sediment deposition at ~750 and ~200 yr BP, indicating two multi-decadal mass mortality events. [...] Since such atmospheric conditions correspond to present-day observations, and are expected to persist if climate change continues, the mortality events revealed in this study could become an increasing threat to penguins.”
So decadal conditions like today's have occurred several times before. Of course the current event might persist in the longer term, but then again like those before it might not.
***
Climate has frequently been discussed – and discounted – as the reason for the Neanderthals' demise already. In all those cases severe climate has been treated as a state and the cold phases around 40 ka ago have in no way been exceptional. In a novel approach Staubwasser et al. have now looked at climate cycling. Cold and milder phases enforce the repeated retreat into refuges and the repopulation and reconnection of dispersed groups. It might have been the readvance into the depopulated areas that gave modern humans the edge over Neanderthals and that advantage might have accumulated over several cycles.
***
Glencross & Boz ask the important question, if the frequent cases of healed cranial trauma in the Early Neolithic may be not so much an indication for early warfare but rather of ritual in line with other evidence for skull reverence.
***
Bail et al.'s result looks surprising at first. but is it really? My default position tends to be, that people holding opinions different from mine have arrived at them honestly and with good intentions and deserve to be taken seriously. I remember several instances of that stance being shattered by reading contributions and comments from the other side in the original. How can that be? Thinking about it I remember many cases of utter nonsense, hate speech and coarse language from people ostensibly on my side of the argument. I have always discounted them as the idiots they are or at least present themselves as. If anything the echo chamber increased my doubts and made me more critical of my own default position. On the other hand, being honest with myself, I do not give the other side as much of the benefit of the doubt but rather tend to take everything I see as typical of the Left. Modern social media tend to give the loudest shouters even more prominence and more of an advantage that they have always had anyway.
Zum Anfang Übersicht Artikel Home & Impressum