Bedouins were nomadic desert herders. They don't do well, unless you think a subsistence level, small, primitive bronze-age life is "doing well." Anything else requires extensive modifications of the land or outside support--or luck of being near an oasis or large river system. You can survive in the desert, but your society isn't going to do very well by modern standards. When I talked about subsidization, I was talking about societies that attempt to be modern. They usually require importation of non-desert food stuffs, technology, materials, etc.

I know about the the Bedouins. They, and most desert peoples---including those in the Australian interior--were and are primitive, small-scale, and subsistence-level societies. They weren't and aren't very advanced. The desert is a harsh environment that usually can't sustain very large technological civilizations. It has limited resources, fertile land. The only way to get around this is through irrigation, usually around major river valleys, or having rather small, mobile societies, which is why you almost always see the major early permanent civilizations (The Harapans, the Sumerians, Southwestern Native civilizations) forming not actually in the desert, but in the lush river basins with extensive international trade (e.g. during the bronze age). Those civilizations dwarfed "desert" nomads subsistence tribes.

I never said you cannot survive in the desert. Look at what I said again more carefully. I said you aren't going to do much, and you won't do that well. That's true, unless you think living like primitive bronze-age goat herders at bare subsistence is a good thing. Then okay, global warming's desertification isn't a problem, no. If you value advanced, technological society and abundant fertile farmland, large populations--modern society--global warming and desertification are serious problems. It will cause vast changes in national economies, populations, food production, etc.

Go try setting up an advanced society in the Mojave desert, isolated from everyone else. Managing to survive isn't the same thing as doing well.


Edit: If you do your research on the Bedouin, you will notice something very ironic. Many abandoned the primitive goat herder nomad lifestyle and moved into modern cities, which exploded their populations, because they now had access to more than bare subsistence. Around 1959-1960, a severe drought essentially pushed many out of their "traditional" primitive lifestyles. They moved to the cities for better lives.

Here's an apt quote: "Driving past them and towards Dukhan is a procession of jeeps. Dukhan, where thousands of barrels of black gold lies waiting alongside the biggest gas field in the world. Oil is about to be discovered in Qatar, and with it will come not just enormous wealth but the end of a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years."

Once they found a resource they could use to end their lifestyle and...buy a new one from non-desert societies, they did. No more nomad desert bull****. They bought civilization.




And neither the Apache nor the Navajo were isolated from non-desert tribes. Moreover, neither were large, advanced societies. If you want to live in primitive subsistence societies in the middle of the desert, then more power to you. That's not my idea of "doing well." All were primitive, small societies, and most modern Native American "tribes" are anything but traditional, subsistence. Most of them are quite modern and have extensive contact with the outside world to get other things they don't have. One of the only really extensive civilizations in the desert of the American Southwest was the Anasazi. And even they had a river system to support them to an extent. Advanced as they were, they used high elevation farming because it avoided much of the precipitation problems of the desert, but they were still very vulnerable to small changes in climate They were still rather small population and primitive compared to other peoples who had far better environments. They were always at significant risk of starving, and drought and increasing desert severity eventually drove them from their homes and collapsed their civilization. They flourished in brief spurts and mitigated desert conditions with rivers and high elevation precipitation. The desert has difficulty supporting large civilizations, which is why they are often primitive nomads without hydraulic agriculture.

In most cases, you can only grow so much in the desert, which limits population, which limits power, which limits growth. The world would be a very different place if we had vast deserts instead of the relatively abundant, fertile land and resources we have. Once in a while you get a civilization in the desert, usually not actually in the desert, but at an oasis or river. When they find limitations, they usually traded with others NOT in the desert. Dry farming is possible, but doesn't actually yield all that much.

On a special note, the Beduoin had such little water, they washed their faces and bathed with dirt! Yea. Sounds like they were doing awesomely!

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The Pacific Decadal Oscillation effect has happened before. It's entirely natural. It's counterbalancing, temporarily, anthropogenic warming. Scientists were expecting this. When it ends, the trend upward will continue. Nature is a game of balancing. Small additions can have big results.

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No disagreement here... except for the small additions having big results.

One does not 'create' energy out of nothing. Basic laws of thermodynamics apply... the energy must come from somewhere. e.g., the sun.

No one's saying you need to create energy from nothing. It's not coming from nothing. Ultimately, warming comes from the Sun. Greenhouse gases exacerbate it by trapping more of it. Usually the Earth radiates it away. It's no magically appearing at all.

This is how it works.

A. Sun's rays hit Earth.
B. Some goes through the atmosphere, some doesn't.
C. Some stays, some radiates back.
D. Greenhouse gasses trap MORE radiant energy that otherwise wouldn't be.

Consequence: Earth heats up more than it should.

It's not magical. It's rather common sense.



As for the comment about small things, your argument is the equivalent of saying that given my mortgage is the largest expense I have, any other bill is irrelevant in balancing the budget because it's ultimately dwarfed by the importance of the mortgage bill. Small things can add up or tip the balance in a system that is already very tight.

Another example. A few milligrams of liquid isn't much relative to a glass that's already full, but if you put additional fluid into a filled volume at max capacity, it's going to overflow, regardless of what you're adding being relatively smaller. You can say "but...it's only a milligram" all day long, and it won't change reality.

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Here's a great article describing how even the resourceful, yet still poor, desert peoples are being hurt by increasing desert condition severity due to global climate change. Global Warming is increasing the size, scope of deserts as well as worsening desert conditions. It's taking an already horrible condition and making it even worse to live in, and you think because some people can eek out substance lifestyles in the desert, it's not a problem for modern civilization?

Nomads in Need - Life in the Desert in the Era of Climate Change | GLOBAL 3000 | Deutsche Welle

THere are almost a billion people in the world, many in desert conditions, who are at risk of dying because they don't have access to enough water...because when you blow away all of the romantic bull**** about desert life...it's harsh and sucks. And it's only getting worse.

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...my point is that you cannot MAKE energy out of nothing.

and if you want to consider Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, a few ppm will have no effect on that scheme.

My guess it is largely due to water vapor over the ocean..

No, it means that independent scientists should be able to perform the same experiments and come up with the same results. Since the "big bang" is not something that cannot be observed, it cannot be considered either hypothesis or theory - it's nothing more than conjecture.

Wrong! There is no place for guesswork in science. You can't go around saying the universe just magically came into existence all by itself and call that "science" if there's no way of directly observing it or replicating it.

Unacceptable! There is no place for guesswork in science.

Again, there is no place for guesswork in science. Besides you idiot science-worshippers keep going around calling evolution (which cannot be replicated and, therefore, cannot be subjected to the scientific method) fact when you know damned well it's nothing more than guesswork.

You are so full of crap! Peer review only happens for the "scientist" that adheres to the politically correct (within the scientific community) views. Others can't get their work peer reviewed.

Sorry, I expect more from science than conjecture and guesswork!

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

A huge problem. Scientists are absolutely terrible at PR and engaging the public. Hence the explosion in pseudoscience and hokey New Age crap these days.

I think that's just how it has come to be popularly viewed. Like scientists are equivalent to a priesthood, making dogmatic pronouncements from upon high. That's a big part of the PR problem science has.

Scientists get defensive about their "pet" topics, and aren't immune to petty bickering. Especially now that this GW thing has gotten political, which is a shame. Ideally, science should be as value-neutral as possible.

You'll be waiting a while. Cosmology/Astronomy isn't considered an experimental "lab" science, like physics is. There's a pretty unreasonable demand for "proof" outthere, for things that simply cannot be proven, only hypothesized and best-guessed.

It's like the endless arguments about anthropology. Unless we have a time-machine, all we can do is collect and extrapolate the data we can. Facts are interpretable, and again, science has done a somewhat poor job in presentation. People take facts or findings and only accept what they want of it, what suits their preconceived notions, or worse, look for ways to "make" it fit, or use bits and pieces to "invalidate" something else. Consider what a mess the popular notions of Darwinian evolutionary theory is.

People hate to hear that we simply don't know. People prefer to have nice, tidy explanations to digest, rather than uncomfortable hanging questions. Do we know where the original superparticle came from? Nope. Is it likely that we can even devise a way to find out? Nope. Does that completely invalidate all astronomical science since the Enlightenment?

Nope.

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Unfortunately, the Founders did not address the possibility of this nation becoming populated with obnoxious twits.

There has not been an explosion in pseudoscience: it's been around nearly as long as science has been.



Actually, if you study the history of science you would see that it is directly connected to the philosophies of naturalism, rationalism and empiricism, these philosophies being (to varying degrees) the underlying assumptions science brings to the table.

Science is just as biased as any system applying particular philosophies to the world around us.



I don't think it's at all unreasonable to hold science to its own standard.

And I don't put much stock in anthropology either (though one of my college courses was in cultural anthropology). Since science insists on being treated as the sole arbiter of truth (using that term a bit loosely to include "fact" and "reality") - not unlike certain religions - I expect it to be absolutely without error.

Science puts itself out there as being the sole arbiter of truth - as the only valid source of fact and explanations about the world around us. It damned well had better know. Otherwise, it needs to shut the hell up about things like the so-called "big bang." Science is not entitled to opinion or guesswork.


The only parts of astronomical science (or any science) that are not invalidated are those that have been absolutely proven beyond any shadow of doubt and, therefore, are actual fact.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

You can have empirical experiments and hypothesis testing in physical anthropology as well as astronomy. You can match assumptions with observations and then test predictions against observations.

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