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Fever is not a disease but a remedy – that much is trivial and long known, although medicines to lower it abound. Lin et al. have now supplied a mechanism. What I'm still waiting for in vain is a drug to help raise body temperature to help the immune system cope with infections.
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It was Ruddiman who suggested that humans have been influencing climate for at least all of the Holocene and have probably delayed the end of the current interglacial for several thousand years now. His ideas are now strongly confirmed by Koch et al. Among the implications is yet another confirmation that cold periods with low CO2 concentrations are the hard and bad times for humanity.
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The first time – after the Ice-Age scare of the sixties – that climate change become a topic of discussion was around 1990, when some exceptionally mild winters had trees and bushes sprouting in January. Projections for the future had much deceased diurnal and annual temperature spreads. Several cool summers seemed to confirm this until some of them became hot and dry again and there were some downpours in places where they incommoded population centres. Then the theme switches to extreme weather events. As before climate models had the current short-term trend grow and continue into the future. This year we have cold and snow in Greece and the Near East – rare but not unheard of. No sooner have we seen the pictures on the goggle box than Mori et al. come up with yet another climate model proving this too to be a predictable (though curiously unpredicted before it happened) result of Global Warming. As many better qualified people (Dyson in nature 427 (2004), 297) have said, with enough free parameters you can make any model yield any outcome you want.
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Lefranc & Denaire have unfortunately allowed themselves to be strongly influenced by Rück’s vicious anti Lüning and Zimmermann polemics. Their results do in fact fully confirm the old Hofplatz model while adding an Alsatian gridded arrangement of the farmstead sites. This grid is seemingly absent in the northern Rhineland, but the general model of house successions is the same.
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