Is 400 just the number after 399, or are we doomed, so we can stop arguing

Large herbivores @39. There may be a problem here. In the current fauna we can consider the largest whales at sea and elephants on land. Both of these have larger brains than humans, but interestingly, with lower neuronal density and lower specific energy demands. I ain't sayin' they're stoopid, but human brain is unique in these ways.

'Feeding your head' changed fundamentally with fire. Cooking food gives you a lot more recoverable energy per unit of food-acquisition effort. One can read that humans would have never become as now without this.

I may here be putting myself at odds with pure vegetarians or (more likely) raw food advocates. But I reckon that fire and 'the fire of consciousness' are not entirely separate things.

It might be quite a thing to be an elephant (assuming you can avoid circus employment). You get to kick lions and tigers out of the way. But, you spend your whole dang time eating or looking for plants to eat. You are mostly a big stomach, with all appendages in service of that. When your teeth wear down (the essential step one food grinders), you die.

You can't cook. So your future greatness will closely resemble your past greatness. You are stuck in now.

Humans in the future may tone it down on meat consumption, but the stove is not optional.

+++

Well, that was fun. But back here, whether Marcott carries the day depends a lot on getting that paleo T harmonized with paleo sea levels. If that can be sorted out, we may have a good enough picture of T in the old days.

 

I prefer the flavor of raw and undercooked food in most cases, but a lunch of sashimi does sit heavier in the gut than the Thanksgiving feast. Research with reptiles has shown the increased energy raw food takes to digest. Being "cold-blooded" means the difference in oxygen consumption after a cooked or raw meal is most likely due to the different energy use of digestion.

Plankton and plants might be closer to the sun's energy, but neither are nutritionally dense. Human brains need lots of energy. Meat gives the most energy for the effort to get it, and cooking it makes the digestion more efficient. Probably all of us should east less meat, but a healthy vegetarian diet today wouldn't be possible without the technology built by generations of meat eaters.

 

I posted it here because Bob suggested vegetarianism here. nothing' wrong with that, but if you want high population densities and everybody not spending all there time on food acquisition, cooking is the thing.

As Austin mentions, many foods common now are indigestible unless cooked.

 

Actually I was looking at the shortest path from sunlight to food. I'm perfectly OK if our 'advanced' GMO discovers someway to convert critters into hamburger . . . some sort of GMO larva comes to mind. <grins>

Of course our favorite is chicken which I understand is a high-efficiency, converter of flora into fauna. Interesting enough, everything new taste like too. In one respect, we are the dinosaur descendant eaters.

Bob Wilson

 

Have there been any captive or voluntary populations put on such a diet for a long term study? If cheap enough, it might be the type of diet inmates, submariners, or space travelers might be put on.

The only part new to me are the '5 cups of sweet potatoes'. Curious, I didn't know this before. I knew in WW-II, carrots were a major staple in some areas leading to an orange skin tint in some populations.

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack the thread. Of course the Irish have already shown the risk of monocultures.

Bob Wilson

 

We do need to take care when planning a diet to look deeper into what the food source provides in terms of nutrition; fats and proteins aren't created equal. We are lucky to be omnivores, but there is still the potential that we won't be able to actually make use of all the stuff the lab tests says are in a food. Then we have to balance that with what else is in the food, like the estrogen like compounds in soy.

 

Paleo T proxies for ocean temperature

Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years
Yair Rosenthal, Braddock K. Linsley, Delia W. Oppo (2013)
SCIENCE 342: 617-621
DOI: 10.1126/science.1240837

Pacific is not the global ocean but it is the biggest. I'd rather y'all looked at the publication than rely on my amateur summary. But here goes: in it you will find parts of the record showing 'generally flat', 'generally increasing', and parts with a hump about 8000 years ago.

I find the Paleo T proxies over this interval to show a variety of patterns. All of them. Their general story may become clearer later, and it should be hoped to eventually show concordance with sea level history.

Shorter instrumental T records have the most recent 50 years going up. It remains difficult to compare this half century with 10 millenia of paleo. I can't think of a way to convince people in any of the 3 camps:

1) Not now hottest
2) Probably now hottest but future 'much hotter' predictions are difficult to qualify
3) Will be much hotter by the end of this century

To consider the other 2. Feet of clay, Bob might say.

 

Soy (legumes in general) are a big deal because of N fixing bacteria. Of the many types of tofu available 'over here' only one seems particularly disgusting to me and only if I see it before final preparation. It is covered with fungal hyphae and something in my cultural training says 'don't be eating that'.

I agree that we ought to take agricultural issues to a different thread. But before departing let me bring to your attention the story that got me interested in human brain metabolism:

How Did Human Brains Get to Be so Big? - Scientific American Blog Network

 

For paleo CO2 and its consequences, Y'all should read

D.O. Breecker, Z.D. Sharp, and L.D. McFadden (2010). Atmospheric CO2 concentrations during ancient greenhouse climates were similar to those predicted for A.D. 2100. PNAS 107(2) 576-580. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0902323106

It teaches how 500 ppm CO2 (we'll surely reach) and 1000 (best to avoid!) might affect climate. Their paleo CO2 differs from the (not recently updated) 'Geocraft website', but this is what one would expect when somebody gets far behind.

Let us all be grateful that science does advance, and be kind to those whose understanding lags behind.

 

I have suggested before that sea-level rise has averaged a third of a millimeter per year over the last 8000 years. These are from coral records which are not global (they like warm water), but at least they are wide ranging.

There is another interesting thing - Roman fish tanks. You can read about them. 2000 (or 2500 years ago) these tanks were constructed with tops at sea level. High tides would refresh the water inside, keeping fish alive. But if the tanks were a bit too low, the caught fish would just swim out. Romans being good engineers, apparently built them correctly. Some still exist, and are about 1.2 m below current sea level. So for this limited area, archaeologists (at least one named Mourtzas) says sea-level rise since then has averaged two thirds of a millimeter per year.

Not global; far from it. But it is independent of corals, and tells a similar study. This apparent slow sea-level rise is persistently difficult to square with suggestions that paleo-T was warmer than now.

Whatever written records say about the Roman warm period (I have not read them), this co-located record says 1.2 m below current sea level. What to do?

 

No similar 'horserace' plots have yet been posted for this year.

However, digging out the data they do have to make my own, it appears that the 2016 line so far would be completely off this graph's top scale:
Jan: +1.04 C
Feb: +1.12 C
Mar: +1.15 C

(Technical note: This 'horserace' style graph uses year-to-date averages. Thus, there is no December to January continuity. And the left side has much more noise than the right side, because January points represent a single month, while December points represent 12 month averages.)

 

I am looking for cool-off in the next 2,3 years assuming el Nino effects control this year. If that cool off does not happen then I think it could be significant talking point in favor of more bipartisan climate change action. If the cool off does happen,as I expect, more acrimony ensues.

 

Where? It is what China and India does that matters most. How much does "acrimony" mean to them?

 

I see the next 2-10 years as very interesting, we should start to see if the global warming models are correct or not. Right today we have El Nino, so the current year is questionable. But soon El Nino is over and we shall see what happens.

If El Nino goes away and the globe is still warming, then that will give a lot of ammo to the model believers.

 

No so fast my friends ... the climate skeptics loved using 1998 as their 'starting point' for a pause in global cooling. Simple do a year-by-year comparison of the El Nino 'spikes' and the problem is solved. <GRINS>

I'd already done that by plotting the maximums and minimums including the 1998 El Nino spike and the upward temperature slope was still there. It actually generates two, upward sloping lines ... the connected maximums and connected minimums. It is an old calculus trick that works for noisy data.

Bob Wilson