Nothing against Christians, or more generally monotheists, but after 9-11 occurred and the U.S. did not avoid launching war with Iraq, I finally called a spade a spade and went atheist (or as I like to euphemize it, "interfaith" for American ears...sounds less antagonizing). Hope that doesn't offend my gentle reader's sensabilities too badly. I finally tried to write an apology for my switch from a Christian to an atheist faith in my blog. In case anyone is still wondering where the old Paul went: (http://paulsuckow.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-god-exists.html).
In these decades I am far more concerned about the approaching effects of climate change on real life as we knew it around the time of our birth than I could ever become exercised about the conceptual soul's eternal verities. If you are a betting (wo)man, you should understand that we are fast approaching an overrun of a 50/50 point in the odds that human life will become extinct along with much, maybe half, of every lifeform humans have ever known. In toxicology and public health, a lethal dose of anything for 50% of subjects (LD50) is commonly shunned entirely. It's already not certain that we can avoid the vortex of natural reinforcement that will lead to a radically different planet from the one on which forests and crops and mammals and ocean life have evolved, and especially during the long ice ages thrived.
Not since the end of the Younger Dryas millennium have human civilizations endured a decadal rise approaching 8 degrees Celsius. And that was catastrophic for all civilization at the time, to the point that science is still largely written to say that "our" civilization began after the survivors of what I'll call the original "Noah" flood (around 6450 years +-25 before present) came down from the mountains into the Tigres-Euphrates valleys to establish male-dominated city-states like Ur. All literature except perhaps the largely unexplored oral traditions of Himalayan spoken Sanskrit lost the thread of human civilization to that point. We theorize that that sub-glacial outburst flooding from ancient Lake Agassiz was only the most recent and all things considered a somewhat minor global pulse of what has arrived during the progressive meltdown of the ice age (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz). It seems reasonable to consider the Semitic Noah/Nuh(a) story, Gilgamesh epic and similar accounts in other literatures to perhaps conflate local events as in Sumeria around 2900 BC with the much earlier collective memory of ice age losses. The current Wiki article about this currently gives no help (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah), leaving us with Science Channel reporting.
A synopsis of historical sea level rise:
Greater catastrophies in the deeper past may be linked with Sanskrit rememberances of advanced, global and presumably sustained ice-age civilization(s), long thought to have been purely mythical. Sea level rise of about 25 meters appears to have resulted from an initial antarctic icecap rapid disintigration called Meltwater Pulse 1A about 14,300 or 14,200 years ago. The geological record of that pulse is widely agreed upon, though most scientists smooth out the timeframe to inlude a 500-year runup to the rapid portion of the disintegration. A similarly vertical jump in the raw data seems to correspond with another period of rapid collapse, perhaps in the Northern hemisphere because some muddying in the data should possibly be expected from the assumed isostatic shifts that create uncertainty in the record (volcanism and massive technonic shifts in water/ice pressure overburdening the plates may have begun by then). The greatest ice sheet collapses of the meltdown diluted the oceans sufficiently with fresh water, truly massive amounts compared to current icemelt potential. The world ocean conveyor system seems to have been struck dead. Some insight into this can be found in observations of today's arctic deep water chimneys that have been shutting off one by one in the last part of the century, apparently weakening the Gulf Stream just enough to mask overheating of Europe and the northeastern U.S. seaboard from global warming.
Regions we call temperate today suddenly returned to cold, dry ice-age conditions for 1,300 years +-70, a period known as the Younger Dryas. Finally about 11,550 years ago a horrendous decade with an 8-degree C. global temperature climbout broke the spell. Interestingly, some of this may correspond to Plato's transcription of the ancient Egyptian account of the destruction visited upon the central territory of "Atlantis" around 11,600 years ago. For the next three thousand years ice and water-borne debris tore and formed the northern landscapes we know as post-glacial. The raw data appears to gain in volatility throughout this period of steady sea-level rise until a peak event around 8400 years ago calmed things down for a few hundred years, only to enter another millenial period of volatility with perhaps ten meters amplitude dampening slightly until what I would consider the last big flood event around 6450+-25 years ago.
Six mellinnia since we have seen a small upward sea level rise within the range of natural variability (roughly +-2 m). This year we are experiencing a similar measure of sea level rise to that typically experienced over the last century, but now up to about 1.8 mm of sea level rise from around 1.5 mm over the last century. This amount may rise non-linearily with any instability in grounded ice sheets as they continue to spead up and spread out due to continued mass loss (edge melt and loss of buttressing floating ice pack).
Almost no cultural transmission, save the Sanskritt of Himalayan survivors, crossed the entire meltdown period and into our own civilization. The Judeo-Chrisitan tradition always thought the Earth's creation to date back roughly 6,000 years, long known to be insufficient from scientific and even historical records (http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_date.htm NOTE: this religious tolerance web site is a reliable source of interfaith principals and helpful to understanding my current worldview).
Even today, our great global civilization(s) could be but a dull reflection of the those great ancients which developed during the stability of the long ice age up through the last glacial maximum (LGM). The world ocean had very gradually lowered to 400 feet (120 m) below recent sea levels by the LGM. Perhaps we should spend more time looking for answers to questions of sustainability underwater than in the pages of more recent and simply ignorant holy books.
In these decades I am far more concerned about the approaching effects of climate change on real life as we knew it around the time of our birth than I could ever become exercised about the conceptual soul's eternal verities. If you are a betting (wo)man, you should understand that we are fast approaching an overrun of a 50/50 point in the odds that human life will become extinct along with much, maybe half, of every lifeform humans have ever known. In toxicology and public health, a lethal dose of anything for 50% of subjects (LD50) is commonly shunned entirely. It's already not certain that we can avoid the vortex of natural reinforcement that will lead to a radically different planet from the one on which forests and crops and mammals and ocean life have evolved, and especially during the long ice ages thrived.
Not since the end of the Younger Dryas millennium have human civilizations endured a decadal rise approaching 8 degrees Celsius. And that was catastrophic for all civilization at the time, to the point that science is still largely written to say that "our" civilization began after the survivors of what I'll call the original "Noah" flood (around 6450 years +-25 before present) came down from the mountains into the Tigres-Euphrates valleys to establish male-dominated city-states like Ur. All literature except perhaps the largely unexplored oral traditions of Himalayan spoken Sanskrit lost the thread of human civilization to that point. We theorize that that sub-glacial outburst flooding from ancient Lake Agassiz was only the most recent and all things considered a somewhat minor global pulse of what has arrived during the progressive meltdown of the ice age (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz). It seems reasonable to consider the Semitic Noah/Nuh(a) story, Gilgamesh epic and similar accounts in other literatures to perhaps conflate local events as in Sumeria around 2900 BC with the much earlier collective memory of ice age losses. The current Wiki article about this currently gives no help (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah), leaving us with Science Channel reporting.
A synopsis of historical sea level rise:
Greater catastrophies in the deeper past may be linked with Sanskrit rememberances of advanced, global and presumably sustained ice-age civilization(s), long thought to have been purely mythical. Sea level rise of about 25 meters appears to have resulted from an initial antarctic icecap rapid disintigration called Meltwater Pulse 1A about 14,300 or 14,200 years ago. The geological record of that pulse is widely agreed upon, though most scientists smooth out the timeframe to inlude a 500-year runup to the rapid portion of the disintegration. A similarly vertical jump in the raw data seems to correspond with another period of rapid collapse, perhaps in the Northern hemisphere because some muddying in the data should possibly be expected from the assumed isostatic shifts that create uncertainty in the record (volcanism and massive technonic shifts in water/ice pressure overburdening the plates may have begun by then). The greatest ice sheet collapses of the meltdown diluted the oceans sufficiently with fresh water, truly massive amounts compared to current icemelt potential. The world ocean conveyor system seems to have been struck dead. Some insight into this can be found in observations of today's arctic deep water chimneys that have been shutting off one by one in the last part of the century, apparently weakening the Gulf Stream just enough to mask overheating of Europe and the northeastern U.S. seaboard from global warming.
Regions we call temperate today suddenly returned to cold, dry ice-age conditions for 1,300 years +-70, a period known as the Younger Dryas. Finally about 11,550 years ago a horrendous decade with an 8-degree C. global temperature climbout broke the spell. Interestingly, some of this may correspond to Plato's transcription of the ancient Egyptian account of the destruction visited upon the central territory of "Atlantis" around 11,600 years ago. For the next three thousand years ice and water-borne debris tore and formed the northern landscapes we know as post-glacial. The raw data appears to gain in volatility throughout this period of steady sea-level rise until a peak event around 8400 years ago calmed things down for a few hundred years, only to enter another millenial period of volatility with perhaps ten meters amplitude dampening slightly until what I would consider the last big flood event around 6450+-25 years ago.
Six mellinnia since we have seen a small upward sea level rise within the range of natural variability (roughly +-2 m). This year we are experiencing a similar measure of sea level rise to that typically experienced over the last century, but now up to about 1.8 mm of sea level rise from around 1.5 mm over the last century. This amount may rise non-linearily with any instability in grounded ice sheets as they continue to spead up and spread out due to continued mass loss (edge melt and loss of buttressing floating ice pack).
Almost no cultural transmission, save the Sanskritt of Himalayan survivors, crossed the entire meltdown period and into our own civilization. The Judeo-Chrisitan tradition always thought the Earth's creation to date back roughly 6,000 years, long known to be insufficient from scientific and even historical records (http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_date.htm NOTE: this religious tolerance web site is a reliable source of interfaith principals and helpful to understanding my current worldview).
Even today, our great global civilization(s) could be but a dull reflection of the those great ancients which developed during the stability of the long ice age up through the last glacial maximum (LGM). The world ocean had very gradually lowered to 400 feet (120 m) below recent sea levels by the LGM. Perhaps we should spend more time looking for answers to questions of sustainability underwater than in the pages of more recent and simply ignorant holy books.
