Hot & Cold Running Science
Here's a little quiz. What do you think will happen to the car at the end of this repeating clip?




Do you think it will go up like this?



Or down like this?



If you chose Up (A), congratulations! You are either a six-week-old kitten or a Professional Climatologist!

If you chose Down (B), you are more likely a full-grown mammal with some experience of the way the world works.

Granted, the last hill is slightly taller than the previous ones. So a full-grown human with some knowledge of history might ask if we've been on a taller hill before, and if so, what happened then? Well, we have been on a taller hill before, around 1000 AD. And some interesting things did happen in that period. Northern countries became more friendly to human habitation. Mohammedans took over most of Europe. After several decades of dillying around, Christians picked a strong Pope, and Christianity finally fought back. (Sounds familiar, for some reason.) Christians were also starting universities, and the Renaissance was just popping up. Was Africa uninhabitable? Not 'ardly. There was a high civilization in Mali, of all places. How could that be? Well, for one thing, Karl Marx wasn't born yet, so Africans hadn't been hopelessly ruined by his evil philosophy.

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Here's a set of graphs scanned (atrociously) from a 1976 National Geographic, at a time when science was still science. That is, scientists were capable of reading graphs, asking questions, and waiting for the data before answering the questions.

At that time, the consensus was that we were heading for a cooling trend, because the last little piece of the graph was going down. But that consensus was not a Religious Axiom, and there was no Inquisition in academe.


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  ¶ 8:28 PM