The more I think about it, the more this graph looks misleading, even deliberately so. There is very little effort made to break down plant food groups: it's just "fruits" and "vegetables". If you lumped "meat" together, you'd get a different graph. If you broke "vegetables" even into "roots", "leafy greens" and…

I know people in the US eat a **** of a lot of meat per capita, but surely even there you eat more vegetables than you eat meat? How do these figures look in terms of instances of food poisoning per unit weight consumed?

Are we at cross purposes? You said (accurately) that it's difficult to build an aqueduct using Egyptian technology of the time.

I don't see your point. Yes, the Romans built aqueducts. The Assyrians built a long high aqueduct section at Jerwan as part of their project to provide water to Nineveh in the early 7th century BCE, long before the Romans got in on the act.

The Romans did not invent the aqueduct. They nicked the idea from the Assyrians, who developed it from earlier ideas (the qanat) after their imperial expansion phase.

Apple? Nothing.

Indeed and, as you presumably know, one should always choose the lesser of two weevils.

I suppose both responses are legitimate. I've become very misanthropic about it all, to the point of hoping we go extinct sooner rather than later in order to limit the inevitable destruction.

Now you are being disingenuous. That argument is often used to legitimise human rapacity.

I've been reading the books, and spotted your reference. Don't worry. I'm just concerned your reference was evading the actual cause of the problem - us.

It makes me angry more than sad. As humans, this is our fault.

That makes it sound like some sort of random event. The two leading causes of coral bleaching are increased water temperatures (the result of climate change) and nutrient runoff, mostly from farming.

Possibly, but some respect for the men who drowned with her is called for. I'll join you in dislike for Japan's military and political leaders of the time, but not for conscripted airmen , soldiers and sailors, often acting under coercion from superior officers.

That is almost certainly a different species of Curculio (Anthonomus grandis - (10-12mm long)), with significant advantage in both length and breadth over your likely hardtack weevil (Sitophilus granarius (3-5mm) or S. Oryzae (~2mm)).

Your reply exhibits a gross (hopefully not deliberate) misunderstanding of an important point. These authors, and you, appear to expect what amounts to forecasting (i.e. a prediction) of what will happen in the future.

I'm saying that the variability is to some degree influenced by human activity. Some of that variability is more influenced by humans than other, and studies are under way to work out attribution probabilities.

Not really. The way you would test it is by running a series of climate models, some with the observed aerosols from China, some without, and seeing whether you are more likely to observe the changed weather patterns in the US with the observed aerosols. If you run enough models you can work out the probability that…

The trouble is, geoengineering is a really, really bad idea.

It makes several predictions. For example, the infrared re-emission profiles of most GHGs are well understood. This is how we predict the system is warming (as we observe). It is difficult to ascertain whether any given storm was more likely as a result of climate disruption as a result of human activity (although this

No, it means the climate will be disrupted. On average it will be warmer. Some places will become more warmer than others. Locally, some areas may become colder. This is exactly what we observe.