Climate is a complex thing. I doubt anyone would debate that. Still, it appears that those scientists advancing the idea of global warming, are pushing an overly simplified view of climate. In my last few posts on the subject, I have looked at the Sun’s influence on the Earth, and the idea held by some dissident scientists that it, and not carbon emissions, is responsible for global warming. Yesterday, Vincas pointed me at an article that presents yet another possible cause.

In a study released Wednesday, scientists are not debating that the average temperature rose some in California between 1950 and 2000. In that they agree with global warming activists. They claim that the cause of that warming is not greenhouse gasses, but urbanization itself.^[1]

It appears that cities do not cool as much during the night as farm or wild land does, and that suburban areas fall somewhere in the middle. As California has grown more urban, it has thus cooled less each night, leading to a higher average temperature.

Even given a constant input of energy, this would lead to significant warming, fewer cold days and more warm/hot days. It would, in effect, act much like an oven, because each day’s warming would be building on that of the day before rather than starting from scratch.

I wonder how this would work out in practice then. We do not want cars, they cause greenhouse gases. We also do not want people living close together, because that causes warming also. I suspect that most people would realize that mass transit breaks down as your population density is reduced. The only alternative is for us all to become Amish.

Spent a long time out at the datacenter yesterday with Vincas. We managed to get rex up with a grsec non-modular kernel, but we were less successful with gabriel et al. After some failed attempts, we did get it up with a 2.6.19.2 kernel though. Hopefully this will be the last long downtime for a long while, though we do need to migrate /home to the coraid at some point.

I replaced my wordpress theme today. The new one looks very very similar to the old one, I know, but the code behind it is more capable. The new theme handles something wordpress calls ‘widgets’ to make manipulating the side bar easier. I also think I understand the css a little bit better now, so my edits to the provided style.css were less arbitrary and hackish.

I am not 100% pleased with the result, but I feel that it will be more possible to move forward from here than it previously was.

And promptly on the heals of that first allergy attack of the year, I get a really nasty cold. I have had a miserable weekend. I think I am starting to recover (at last) though.

As my allergies kick into high gear, I know that spring has officially come.

Yesterday in science news, I read something quite exciting. Scientists have discovered “a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.”^[1] I cannot believe that this is the only such subterranean water mass. Even if it is the biggest, this marks proof that there could exist substantial amounts of water that we simply do not see. How much have they looked for bodies of water like this? What if the water were even further down, would it show up differently, be harder to detect? All sorts of questions.

One thing is certain though. An ocean’s worth of water is decidedly non-trivial. Even spread around the world, it must be the case that so much water would make at least some difference in the sea level. How much? Could this be a more rational explanation for where some of the water for the Flood came from?

Oh, and I have marked this as “plate tectonics” because that is what the article is concerned with. The idea that this sort of water could help “lubricate” the plates, making it possible for them to move and shift and so on. They could be right. I do not know. Even if they are, I persist in thinking that earthquakes must have other causes. But that is an entirely other topic.