Mitchell
- Website: profile.typekey.com/mporter
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Commented on Forever Summer
"it looks like by the end of the century global average temperatures are going to be up by somewhere between 5 and 10 degrees" Charlie, I think there is zero prospect of this, because there is zero prospect that the...
Comment Threads
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DaveBell commented on
Forever Summer
Those figures also show how unusual NW Europe is. One theory, partly prompted by suspiciously similar stone tools in Europe and North America, which don't appear in Asia, is that there was some movement of people across the Atlantic, following the edge of the ice-pack. The ice-sheet in North America reached down to New York and Chicago. In European terms, that's a far south as Madrid or Naples. That's a very crude comparison, maybe as useful as the ice-age novels of the Seventies, which seem to have been based on a rough knowledge of glacials and inter-glacials. Not the real...
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DaveBell commented on
Forever Summer
Guthrie @124, I came up with the following for US Wheat. 36.74 bushels to the tonne. Predicted 2009 harvest is down--it's running late--at 51 million tonnes. Highest recent figure for UK wheat production is around 17 million tonnes. More usually it's around 13 million tonnes. Average yields in the UK are reported at around 8 tonnes per hectare, roughly 120 bushels per acre, but at the prices for much of the past decade that barely covered costs. A quick Google comes up with a US figure of 60.1 million acres growing wheat for the 2007 harvest. British farmers are growing...
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DaveBell commented on
Forever Summer
long tons or short tons? I've been known to talk about megagrams when people start trying to be officious about units. Isn't it odd how the American insist on using units which give bigger numbers....
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DaveBell commented on
Forever Summer
Being more serious, that conversion figure between volume and mass, bushels and tonnes, could be misleading, because the bushelweight of wheat varies, and it can also be used as a part of a definition of grain quality. It's possible that US farmers are really using "bushel" as a measure of mass, with a fixed conversion factor. The conversion factor I found is close to the bottom end of the bushelweights traded in the grain markets. Here in the UK, US and Canadian wheat is imported as a gluten source. Consistent protein behaviour in the grist is a key element of...
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DaveBell commented on
Forever Summer
A review of worldwide responses to excessive heat, by the Muppets... Note that it doesn't say what Scots do....
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- How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
- Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
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