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Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

businessinsider.com

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Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#41

Post by soperj »

ABCLAW wrote: post #20
soperj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will only see the comet lovejoy every 622 years, that doesn't suggest it's a problem at all, let alone a big one. The fact that the water levels are very low suggest there's a big problem, that we haven't seen them this low in 400 years suggests only that we've seen them this low before and that the world has survived that.

The planet isn't going to die if we irradiate ourselves into caves, but that doesn't mean irradiating the surface of the planet for shits and giggles is a good idea.

And this applies how?

Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#42

Post by soperj »

a_w wrote: post #19
soperj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uhhh... the fact that there was a time that was "this bad", means that at most it's record equaling.

I think it depends on when the record keeping of the event began. So in this case if they started keeping records 250 years ago and they haven't experienced this level of drought since then, then it is considered record breaking. It doesn't mean that there haven't been worse droughts say, 300 or 400 years ago. It just means that either the official record keeping doesn't go that far, or that there may not be scientif…

I get that. But clearly there are records there, records etched into stone in fact, that show that these events have occurred previously. That everyone turns this point into climate change denial is ridiculous.

Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#43

Post by mikeash »

soperj wrote: post #40
mikeash wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are not the record being referred to here.

Clearly not. When you just dismiss any records that are below the current drought, then all droughts can become record breaking.

That is not what’s being done. “The record” is a defined set of data that’s considered to be reliable. In this case, it covers the period starting when consistent, scientific meteorological observations were being regularly recorded.

Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#44

Post by Smushman »

sattoshi wrote: post #18

Our ancestors were not dumb people. This is terrifying as it didn't happen just once, but multiple times. We have a working model here. "If you see me, you will weep. So low was the water in 2018."

I get the feeling that droughts have happened before, are happening now, and will happen again; and we are just not able as humans to control the climate.

In fact I found this study that proves that history does repeat.

https://www.clim-past.net/9/1985/2013/cp-9-1985-2013.pdf

Thankfully, due to technological advancement though - it is nowhere near as damaging as it once was - in fact now these are barely a blip on the radar on human life. In times past, it is easy to forget that a simple drought halted all commerce, caused great famines, and without transportation and local food sources available, people were dying.

Just take a look at the history and see the trend lines for the evidence of improvement that advancements like electricity and internal combustion have given us:

https://ourworldindata.org/famines

Here's one for technology!

Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#45

Post by jtbayly »

adrianN wrote: post #38
jtbayly wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like in front of a glacier's path when it's about to start growing is a bad place to put something that you want to survive for future generations to read.

You'd have to carve it fairly deep into the rock.

Also, you'd have to anchor it really well if you didn't want it to move with the front of the glacier and reappear the first summer the glacier retreated by a couple of feet, instead of when the glacier shrunk to disastrously small.

Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#46

Post by evincarofautumn »

practice9 wrote: post #14

> "Neplac holka, nenarikej, kdyz je sucho, pole strikej." (Don't cry, girl, don't fret. When it's dry, just spray your field wet.) Is this some weird Czech euphemism?

I think they were just trying to make it rhyme in English by choosing approximate translations. The original says “[don’t cry] [girl], [don’t lament/wail], [when] [(there) is] [drought], [field] [spray (water)]”.

Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#47

Post by evincarofautumn »

holstvoogd wrote: post #34
WaltPurvis wrote: post #30

Pedantic quibbling: is "ancient societies" a proper designation for 15th century Europe?

only if you consider the 15th century the very distant past. へ‿(ツ)‿ㄏ

As far as some people are concerned, it was ~8–10% of the Earth’s entire history ago, instead of 0.0000001% of it.

Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#49

Post by ateesdalejr »

teh_klev wrote: post #21

Original article on Science Alert instead of this BI reheat with its annoying adblocker popup: https://www.sciencealert.com/sinister-hunger-stones-dire-war...

If you disable JS you don't need to worry about it. ;)

Re: Sinister 'hunger stones' with dire warnings have surfaced as water levels drop

#50

Post by l0b0 »

phkahler wrote: post #48

>> As Europe wilts in the sweltering, record-breaking harshness of summer 2018, strange things are happening. Obviously it's not record-breaking now is it? They were here before and left a warning in stone.

I was under the impression that stones sink…
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