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Articles to 2015-12-31

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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Marginal lands have always been settled by the poor and disadvantaged driven off the more favourable ones and the all too frequent climatic downturns have always hit the marginal lands hardest. We can see that back to the earliest Neolithic settlements and the same pattern very probably already held true for Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. We can also see that this very use of the most vulnerable areas has always resulted in a disproportionate and lasting amount of ecological damage. So if the rich and advantaged are to spend enormous amounts of money as urged by Dennig et al. it will be used far better to get those settlers out of there than in a vain attempt at stabilizing their local weather patterns.

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We already know how cats drink (Reis 2010), now Gart et al. supply the same for dogs. So finally we can rest easy knowing our pets won’t die of thirst after all.

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Zwickel is an undoubted expert in Biblical history so I’m surprised at the unquestioning conviction with which he states highly contentious and disputed positions. Especially in a magazine directed at the general public a bit of caution would not have come amiss. That said none of his positions are provably wrong either and certainly worth considering.

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In human history the heredity of social positions is seen as a marker for advanced social structure and thought first to occur at the boundary between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to see Goldenberg et al. showing it to occur with elephants.

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Gençer et al. sounds nice but only because they run roughshod over undesirable facts. Thermal photovoltaics relies on concentration which needs direct sunlight without an appreciable diffuse fraction. There are regions where this obtains, but all of them lie far away from those, where people live and where industry is concentrated. All American solar-thermal plants have gone bankrupt in spite of extremely generous tax allowances.

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At first I had many objections against Young et al. but reading more closely they convincingly answered most of them. The one question left open is why their Greenland temperature curve differs so much from the oxygen-18 derived ones as in e.g. Knapp 2016 from last week’s list.

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