The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[Vman455]

Originally Posted by freebeard

The belief in a flat Earth was limited to mostly Europe for a limited time. A misinterpretation of the four corners mentioned in the Bible.

Where the modern interpretation of a disk under a dome came from I'm not sure, but I suspect James Blish's Cities in Flight.

That is simply not true--many, many cultures across the world and throughout history have believed in a flat earth. Post-Roman Western Europe was not one of them, aside from a few individuals (similar to today). A spherical globe played directly into the church's belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, and Medieval Europeans held strange ideas about the "Antipodes"--the surface of the Earth below the equator, which many thought was a fantastical, upside-down world. For several hundred years, letters from "Prester John," an imaginary Antipodean Christian king, would periodically circulate across Europe, promising that he would invade soon from the south, crush the Muslims, end the Crusades, and restore Christian rule to the Holy Land. By the time Columbus came along, Portuguese exploration in the Southern Hemisphere had mostly laid those myths to rest, but Columbus, not to be outdone, came up with his own--that the globe was half the size it actually is.

Here's the Wikipedia summary:

Knowledge of the sphericity of the Earth survived into the medieval corpus of knowledge by direct transmission of the texts of Greek antiquity (Aristotle), and via authors such as Isidore of Seville and Beda Venerabilis. It became increasingly traceable with the rise of scholasticism and medieval learning.[55] Spread of this knowledge beyond the immediate sphere of Greco-Roman scholarship was necessarily gradual, associated with the pace of Christianisation of Europe.

In fact, I just found another page that discusses this:

The myth of the flat Earth is a modern misconception that Earth was believed to be flat rather than spherical by scholars and the educated during the Middle Ages in Europe.[1][2][3]

During the Early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint, which had been first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent, despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere. [4][3]

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[5] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".

[freebeard]

That is simply not true--many, many cultures across the world and throughout history have believed in a flat earth. Post-Roman Western Europe was not one of them, aside from a few individuals (similar to today).

Okay, but I still don't know why the idea has re-emerged today.

Perhaps I should re-read Hamlet's Mill, it's been a few decades.

Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend is a nonfiction work of history and comparative mythology, particularly the subfield of archaeoastronomy.
Author:Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend
Subject:Mythology and Astronomy

[redpoint5]

Whenever there's an idea with 2 extreme possibilities, people will be found on both sides. There should be an axiom that describes the opposite of Occam's razor, because that's the philosophy conspiracy theorists adopt.

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

It might break 80 F here today. This is easily the coolest summer I can remember. Should be in the high 90s now, but we haven't even broken 90 yet this year.

We know why this is happening - the jet stream is weakening because of the melting Arctic ice - and high pressure areas are moving much more slowly - and this can trap cooler air, or warmer air in place, in a different way than we have seen before.

It doesn't change the world average, that you happen to be in a place that is cool.

[NeilBlanchard]

An excellent discussion on food production and our climate crisis:

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/07...global-warming

https://www.eenews.net/special_repor...ipe_for_change

https://weather.com/news/climate/new...earths-warmest

https://www.eenews.net/special_repor...ies/1060240849

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by Redpoint5

Whenever there's an idea with 2 extreme possibilities, people will be found on both sides.

...of a bell-shaped curve.

'2 extreme possibilities' suggests a multivariant reality is already reduced to a single dimension. Even Plato's cave had a two-dimensional field as a conceptual space.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

...of a bell-shaped curve.

'2 extreme possibilities' suggests a multivariant reality is already reduced to a single dimension. Even Plato's cave had a two-dimensional field as a conceptual space.

It wasn't a good explanation as some things exist within a spectrum rather being an either/or. Flat Earth is a binary fact though; it either is what we would consider to be flat, or it is not.

Imagining something existing within a bell-curve is a necessary reduction of infinite complexity down to something actionable.

Any of our descriptions of the shape of Earth would lack an infinite amount of detail. Still, some descriptions are more correct than others despite the missing infinite amount.

[RedDevil]

Yesterday evening the wind turned west.
Today it did not. Midnight right now, and sweltering hot. We still have the windows closed even now.

We got a new record: 40.7 degrees Celsius, at Gilze-Rijen, 3 miles from where my kids were having a Scouting summer camp.
I got them home this evening. We had a terrrible traffic jam for a bridge that was deformed by the heat, so instead of 4 lanes of highway traffic only one was allowed, alternating between both directions, while trucks sprayed the bridge deck with water.
I don't like traffic jams during record heat waves. We have A/C, I burned through some extra fuel today. I saw some erratic drivers today, probably due to them not having A/C. I also saw 3 ambulances and 3 tow trucks.

This was a biggie. Over half the country experienced temperatures way above what the exceptional record was until yesterday.

This is not weather, I won't have that at over 51 north, this is manmade climate change.

[redpoint5]

Except that any 1-point in time measurement is weather, by definition. People on here keep telling me that my daily observation of "record low" high temperatures is simply weather, and that the global averages over time is what matters. I'm inclined to agree.

[RedDevil]

How many 1 point measuring points in a row that show extremes do you need?
If weather was random we would not have a record number of weather records several times this decade.

The top temperature bar has been raised by over 2 degrees Celsius in 2 days.
Indigenous species die and Mediterranean imports thrive. Weather? Bah.