Food for thought.

[vr94ss]

I take things as they are written, if that is a character flaw then I'm guilty. Nothing implied just saying what it looked like to me, sorry about that.

I agree Persia was a great empire but Alexander's army was much better and they had been travelling for quite a while with no end in sight in the travelling and fighting. The Persians were in the homeland all they had to do was defend it. It should not have been all that difficult. It really seems that mismanagement was a pretty fair call for the fall of Persia.

Mycenae is a classic example of bad management. For a civilisation to have built over 800 years a military elite that rivalled anything else known at the time only to let is slip away in approximately 100 years is phenomenal. They controlled much of southern Greece and had many colonies yet dwindled into nothing in the space of 4 generations.

The Hittites are a very interesting group. There are new discoveries coming out of Hattusa (Hittite capital in Eastern Anatolia) that indicate the fall of the Hittites was an internal, and more to the point a family, issue. Yes they had military problems and lost territory to other groups such as the Sea Peoples and Assyrian's but the actual final destruction of Hattusa was done from inside the city by the cities own inhabitants who were never heard from or seen again in Western or Middle Eastern historical records.

I don't need to google fall of Rome I have studied the archaeology of it and there is no real evidence of global warming increasing disease causing a collapse of Roman civilisation but there is plenty of evidence of Roman mismanagement, as mentioned in a previous post. Allowing various groups to get to such a stage where they could, and did, mount an offensive against the Empire from within the Empire itself was the problem. The thing, as already mentioned, with the disease scenario is that all of the Empires population including the Germanic raiders living within its borders would have been subject to those diseases as soon as they come to an area that was infected with it. There is no evidence of this happening. Furthermore traders who travelled the trade routes, of which there were many, would have also spread the diseases but there is no evidence of that either.

We could go back and forth on this forever, for eg I would not say losing _one_ battle(Gaugamela, Alexander vs Darius III) mismanagement of an empire, you are free to. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree I will say one more thing that I forgot to mention in my last post and that is Malaria is not transported to other places by people and passed on to other people. There's a piece that must be in place, an Anopheles mozzie that needs a suitable climate/ecosystem.

 

[vr94ss]

@Aussie V8
Just a quick question out of interest, you say "I have studied the archaeology of it". Can you tell me of your studies?

 

[Aussie V8]

An extract from wikipedia (which I do not claim to be an authoritative source on anything).

Methods used to prevent malaria include medications, mosquito elimination and the prevention of bites. The presence of malaria in an area requires a combination of high human population density, high mosquito population density and high rates of transmission from humans to mosquitoes and from mosquitoes to humans. If any of these is lowered sufficiently, the parasite will eventually disappear from that area, as happened in North America, Europe and much of the Middle East. However, unless the parasite is eliminated from the whole world, it could become re-established if conditions revert to a combination that favours the parasite's reproduction.

The movement of people helps to spread disease and Malaria is no different. A small example, of 1 village, near Rome does not give us a cause of the collapse of Rome.

@Aussie V8
Just a quick question out of interest, you say "I have studied the archaeology of it". Can you tell me of your studies?

UNE: Aboriginal Studies, Archaeology, History, Linguistics, Palaeoanthropology, Psychology, in my BA.
Grad Dip Ed.
Now doing a Masters in Education to retrain for Primary School after teaching High School for the last 12 years or so.
USQ: Anthropology.
SCU: A little bit of IT which I will get back to next year sometime hopefully.

 

[vr94ss]

An extract from wikipedia (which I do not claim to be an authoritative source on anything).
The movement of people helps to spread disease and Malaria is no different. A small example, of 1 village, near Rome does not give us a cause of the collapse of Rome.

UNE: Aboriginal Studies, Archaeology, History, Linguistics, Palaeoanthropology, Psychology, in my BA.
Grad Dip Ed.
Now doing a Masters in Education to retrain for Primary School after teaching High School for the last 12 years or so.
USQ: Anthropology.
SCU: A little bit of IT which I will get back to next year sometime hopefully.

So you just acknowledged what I said. Unless the mozzie is there the disease cannot be transferred. That is the infection vector.

Sincere 'grats on your education. You mustn't live too far from me going by those UNIs, maybe one day we can talk.

 

[Aussie V8]

So you just acknowledged what I said. Unless the mozzie is there the disease cannot be transferred. That is the infection vector.

Which should indicate that Malaria wasn't an issue in the fall of the empire cause it didn't spread enough to cause an issue.

Sincere 'grats on your education. You mustn't live too far from me going by those UNIs, maybe one day we can talk.

I'm on the other side of the mountains near where people wear 10 gallon hats in January, slap their own butts and go yeeha cause they dance on their own instead of with a member of the opposite sex. Wanting to move back onto the eastern side of the Great Divide sooner rather than later. I'm up for a chat If we are ever in the same location.

 

[minux]

And here's the Met Office clearing up the crap the journalist wrote.
Met Office in the Media: 14 October 2012 « Met Office News Blog

Gotta love the mail.. they had an article exactly the opposite last year..

Global warning - Scientists claim extreme weather climate change linked | Mail Online

Skeptics must be in vogue this season :rofl2:



I prefer to believe stuff like this, not newspapers with sales agendas.

Has Global Warming Stopped - CSIRO (July 1st 2012)

An extract..

Ocean temperatures and sea level

Most of the heating caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect is stored in the world’s oceans.

This warming is clearly seen in changes in sea surface temperature, ocean heat content and sea-level rise due to thermal expansion of water (Domingues et al., 2008).

Figure 1 shows estimates of near-global ocean heat content for the upper 300m and 700m of the ocean for 1950 to 2003, along with sea surface temperatures.

Warming of the oceans is clearly evident, especially over the past decade.



And since you like charts...

Soo...back to this, just from the leaked AR5 draft report

"While the trend in global mean temperature since 1998 is not significantly different from zero, it is also consistent with natural variability superposed on the long-term anthropogenic warming trends projected by climate models."

Am I just reading it incorrectly or are the IPCC saying nothing has changed in 16 years?

 

[Aussie V8]

Soo...back to this, just from the leaked AR5 draft report

"While the trend in global mean temperature since 1998 is not significantly different from zero, it is also consistent with natural variability superposed on the long-term anthropogenic warming trends projected by climate models."

Am I just reading it incorrectly or are the IPCC saying nothing has changed in 16 years?

Yep you are reading it incorrectly.

su·per·pose (spr-pz)
tr.v. su·per·posed, su·per·pos·ing, su·per·pos·es
1. To set or place (one thing) over or above something else.

Natural variability is not significantly different but it is superposed (i.e. on top of or over and above) long term anthropogenic warming trends ......... Look at the chart it shows temps going up.

To add to that you took 1 sentence out of a leaked report of how many pages and try to use that to say nothings changed. Keep things in context for e better picture of what is being said. Do you have a link to that leaked report?

 

[vr94ss]

Yep you are reading it incorrectly.

Natural variability is not significantly different but it is superposed (i.e. on top of or over and above) long term anthropogenic warming trends ......... Look at the chart it shows temps going up.

To add to that you took 1 sentence out of a leaked report of how many pages and try to use that to say nothings changed. Keep things in context for e better picture of what is being said. Do you have a link to that leaked report?

Succinct, to the point, I like it.