MarkI-ZeroPoint <zeropo...@charter.net> wrote: Jed wrote:**** > > “Super volcanoes are unlikely.”**** > > ** ** > > For someone who is so keen on reading history, this statement is a > bewilderment to me. Surely you realize that the SCIENTIFIC evidence for > volcanic eruptions far more powerful than M.S.Helens is well established. > If what you are referring to is how likely it is to happen **in our > lifetime**, then I might agree. >
Yup. That's what I meant. What did you think I meant? Do you suppose I have not read books on geology, and I am not familiar with super volcanoes? Please give me some credit for doing my homework. When you read a brief comment by someone, it is a mistake to assume they meant something stupid when it just as likely they had something sensible in mind. For example, when Obama recently said "you didn't build that," the statement was taken out of context (by erasing the previous sentences) so that some people thought "that" refers to the small business. It is obvious he meant "you did not build the roads" and other infrastructure around your place of business. > For all natural disasters, their size/destructiveness is inversely > proportional to their frequency of occurrence; i.e., the more destructive > they are, the less often they occur. > Perhaps that is true of disasters caused by single, discrete event such as a large earthquake, tsunami, or meteorite strike. It is less true of disasters that occur as a series of events, or that can be triggered at any one of thousands of different locations, rather than in one geological fault. A good example is a virus crossing the species barrier, such as the 1918 influenza pandemic, or AIDS. The chances of this have been increased by various factors such as increased human population density, invasion of wilderness areas by people (which probably caused AIDS to cross the barrier), and bad techniques in agriculture such as crowding chickens together and allowing them access to wild birds. > The point being made here, so it can’t be missed is, people were NOT > present in any significant numbers, or at all, when ALL PREVIOUS MAJOR > CLIMATIC CHANGES OCCURRED, WHICH MEANS, THE EARTH DOESN’T NEED OUR HELP! > No one has missed that point. Anyone with a 6th grade level understanding of geology and dinosaurs knows that the climate has changed radically. (6th graders tend to know a great deal about dinosaurs.) All climatologists are aware of this fact. They base their theories and predictions on previous examples of naturally occurring climate change in the distant past, and in more recent examples such as the effect of the Krakatoa explosion. Are we helping to initiate those climate changes with our CO2/thermal > pollution and other man-made effects? Probably, but contributing how much > compared to the natural processes?? > According to climatologists, short term, potentially disastrous changes caused by people are occurring at greater speed and amplitude than the natural processes that are likely to occur over the the next few hundred years. In other words, human activity in the near term and on the time scale in question will greatly outweigh natural processes. You seem to assuming that the experts are unaware of what you wrote here. That it did not occur to them. I suggest you read more of the professional literature. You will see that they thought of this long ago. That does not prove they are right, but it proves that you have not carefully considered their arguments. You remind me of the people at Wikipedia who declare that cold fusion researchers never thought to check for recombination, or they never calibrated, so that is why the experiments are all in error. I suggest you review the literature first to see if your own assumptions are right before posting them. - Jed
