From: hyde@ac.dal.ca
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Still Waiting For Answers
Date: 14 Apr 92 16:45:14 GMT
Organization: Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

In article <2721@fedfil.UUCP>, news@fedfil.UUCP (news) writes:
> As opposed to a "scientist" of Hyde's stature, yes.  I'd have no apriori reason
> to assume the coal miner was lying, if nothing else.



	Five feet eleven, actually.  What do you want, a shorter
	scientist? Or is it tall people that lie?

> 
> Nonetheless, we know for sure that giant herds of creatures which absolutely
> require a much warmer climate inhabited these arctic areas only a few
> thousand years ago.
> 
> Bill Hyde actually has no problem with this part of the picture (he might
> try explaining it to Bishop and all these people who keep arguing for 
> cold adaptation of mammoths).  

	Indeed we do agree on this, Ted.  However I am not sure we
	agree on *how* much warmer it was.  I have tried to get
	an order of maginitude estimate from you at least once before.
	As to the cold adaptation of mammoths, I am following that thread
	with interest.  However, whether or not mammoths were cold
	adapted depends *only* on evidence from the mammoths themselves.
	I am not going to tell someone who has examined actual mammoth
	remains that they are wrong simply because of what I know of
	siberian climates in the holocene.

> The problem lies in a rationale.  Hyde is
> claiming that these regions just sort of were warmer three or four thousand
> years ago...  no particular reason, that's just the way it was.

	This is either a lie or you simply have not been reading
	my posts.  I have explained the orbital variations to you
	several times, and have even cited an actual figure
	(40 watts per square meter) to show just how much extra
	power siberia recieved in summer in the mid holocene.
	Solar power averaged over the entire planet is only
	340 watts per square meter, and is considerably less
	in high latitudes.  Thus 40 watts per square meter is a
	considerable increase.

	Kindly acknowledge reading the above.  Then, next time you
	claim I believe in climate change occuring for no reason,
	I will know whether you are lying or not.


> 
> The time period we're talking about is just beyond the fringe of the times
> which we know about, around 3500 years ago or so.  Many mammoth remains
> carbon date to about that age.  

	How interesting.  You are the one who claims carbon
	dating is absolute rubbish.  I guess it is only rubbish
	when it disagrees with your ideas.  By the way, could you
	give us primary sources for these dates? I really would like
	to know this date, but I'm afraid I can't trust the kind
	of secondary sources you often cite.


> We know the reason why Novo sibirsk is cold
> now, far far too cold for giant herds of giant herbivores, and we know
> that within all the time we know of right up to this fringe I mentioned
> that the weather of Novo Sibirsk and the Liakhovs has always been as it
> is now.


	Not quite.  It has been getting slightly colder over the past
	few thousands of years, though on this long term trend has
	been superimposed relatively minor perturbations like the
	little ice age and the climatic optimum which preceeded it.


> 
> We also know that standard science posits the notion that all change
> in geological forms occurs over huge expanses of time, 

	I'm afraid you are wrong here.  The main warming event by
	which the earth left the ice age lasted less than (we are not
	sure how much less than) four hundred years.  The planet exited
	the Younger Dryas cooling (a time of near ice age cold) in
	less than fifty years, possibly as little as twenty years.
	These are not "huge expanses of time".  References available
	on request.

	All of these events, by the way, carbon date to your
	"golden age".  Care to explain why North America was
	covered in ice while we were orbiting Saturn?


> and is inperceptable
> to earth creatures living at any one time.

	Hardly.  We have archeological evidence of people moving
	south in the Younger Dryas.  My current residence, the
	province of Nova Scotia, was I believe abandoned in perhaps
	as little as two generations as the cold increased.

> 
> We further know that the minute changes which might be caused by such things as
> the very slow precessions would not either act in such an enormous way or
> in such an instantaneous way.  The habitat of these arctic areas changed
> permanently and totally in the blink of an eye, as it were, as if somebody
> had thrown a switch.

	You have never given any evidence for this aside from your
	(so far unsubstantiated) "Birds-eye" claim.




						Bill Hyde
Department of Oceanography
Dalhousie University,
Halifax, Nova Scotia
hyde@ac.dal.ca or hyde@dalac