I'm pretty much assuming we are utterly boned by global warming. Too many powerful interests on the wrong side. Eventually people will catch on, but not before lots of awful stuff happens. OTOH, it's a good time to be doing research on carbon-neutral energy, so there's that.
Now I feel better about the election.
The point is to compare the top few inches to the bottom two, right?
When xkcd doesn't suck it really doesn't suck.
3: You measure from the base, fully stretched, if that's what you're asking.
I'm kind of mad that he didn't call Glacial Lake Missoula by name though.
6: Inorite. It wasn't just Oregon, man.
This is indeed one of his better recent ones.
He misspelled "Attila," though. Also, the "Polynesians" around 1000 BCE must refer to the Lapita expansion, but that long predates the emergence of the Polynesian language family proper.
If they were advanced enough to sail the Pacific, maybe they were advanced enough to speak a language that didn't exist.
But this sort of thing is always going to end up with a few minor errors, so I don't hold it against him.
10: Those seem like different skills, somehow.
Right, but it's not like linguists found a coconut 8-track player so they know what the guys in the boats were saying.
It's certainly true that a certain amount of inference from indirect evidence is involved in reconstructing the history of a language family.
I looked it up. The language before the Polynesian language is called proto-Polynesian. That seems a very minor distinction.
Lapita was long before that and is generally associated with the spread of the proto-Oceanic language, which is ancestral to many other languages besides proto-Polynesian.
Seriously, though, there's a really interesting literature on the relationship between linguistics and archaeology in understanding the prehistory of the Pacific. I read a bit of it a few months back.
If only the 8-track were stone, not coconut.
Are the lapita peoples the people who ended up in Flores and PNG and such? Who left Taiwan? Where do the Negritos fit into this?
No, the Lapita are the ones who left PNG and settled the islands between there and Fiji/Tonga/Samoa, some of which were already inhabited. The people who left Taiwan are general thought to have spoken Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, which includes all the non-Formosan Austronesian languages, but it's not clear what the archaeological correlates are exactly. The Negritos are generally thought to be remnant pre-Austronesian populations, some of whom eventually adopted Austronesian languages though maybe with some substrate influence from their previous languages. There's a standard introductory work on the Austronesians available for free download, although I haven't actually read it myself.
Did he edit it to change Oregon to Washington?
24: Thank you very much. This is actually a question that's been bothering me for a while (Polynesian origins) and I now have more data than I could have hoped for. Much appreciated.
I could have sworn it originally read Oregon, but either way, it was both and more. I guess I shouldn't expect too much precision in an xkcd comic.
26: No problem. Like I said, I'm hardly an expert but I have read a fair amount of the relevant recent literature and can at least point you in the right direction if you have follow-up questions.
It said Oregon. Washington has the scablands, which is a lot more dramatic than whatever the Willamette has.
What I wonder about are the two (at least) references to changes in the earth's orbit. What exactly is he talking about?
29: also the Channeled Scablands is my favorite name in geology.
Milankovitch cycles, I think they might be called.
Two science threads? Which is the right one for saying that it looks like dolphins can talk?
Maybe someone should warn them about global warming.
If I were named Milankovitch or Kondratiev it'd be hard to keep me from naming a bike shop after myself.
38 They talk a lot; but they're not saying anything.
I hear their tongues make good eating.
There seem to be three different ways of spelling Milankovitch. Milankovich himself spelled it Миланковић though his non-Serb colleagues might have spelled it Milankovic.
GOOD EGG. I CALL THIS REALLY INGENIOUS.
Eventually people will catch on, but not before lots of awful stuff happens.
Lots of awful stuff seems to be happening already in Florida and the Carolina coast (staying with America for now), and it turns out that nobody gives a shit anyway apart from the people who live there.
The dolphin conversation thing makes me think about extraordinary claims and how they demand extraordinary evidence. Maybe they were having a conversation, maybe they were doing something completely different. Maybe something that wouldn't even make sense to humans. Who knows?
We have conversations, but not in a way you can understand them.
Telegraph science story so no possible danger of hyping for clicks.
The over-reaching conclusions of the quoted researcher, combined with the uh, let's say, modest impact factor journal this is sourced from, have led me to unilateral eyebrow muscle strain.
45 God promised Noah no more floods so the people in the Carolinas and Florida are in the vanguard of not giving a shit about climate change.
I was going to saw 'tell it to the channeled scablands' but I guess the promise came after that anyway. So, 'tell it to the Cajuns' it is.
Was that storm even out of the ordinary? Florida has always been an uninhabitable hellhole.
If that's to me, I wasn't thinking of the storm, which my peeps in Jax seem to have weathered without incident, but Miami.
Got it.
With this increase, in just 30 years' time, flood-prone locations in Miami-Dade County's coastal communities would face roughly 380 high-tide flood events per year, and the extent of tidal floods would expand to affect new low-lying locations, including many low-income communities with limited resources for preparedness measures.
If I understand tides correctly, there are only 730 of them a year. If you get covered by the tide 380 times, I don't think you can call it a "flood event." You're part of the ocean.
53.2 was supposed to be in block quotes. It's from the link in 52.
Anyway, isn't it pretty much a given than large parts of Florida are just gone? Even without much of a rising sea level, they've been pumping out or diverting the fresh water that holds up the ground they building on.
God can keep his word and still flood a lot of coastal land.
They build firmly on the rock of faith. In federal bailouts.
56: Yes. He only promised to ever kill almost everybody in a flood.
53 is a very good point. Miami, like the pirates of old, will meet its fate where the tides ebb and flow twice in twenty-four hours.
They'll be fine. It'll be like the big drifting flotilla in Snow Crash, but with superyachts in the middle, anchored to the flooded towers of the city.
If Miami is under water every/most high tide, does that mean we can't count it for determining territorial waters/EEZ?
No, you can't. But the standard for islands (versus "high-tide features") is apparently "ability to sustain life", so I don't know how Waterworld-Miami would fare.
Can't count it for EEZ, that is. You can for territorial waters.
I assume that "ability to sustain life" is empirically determined by marooning people and checking back on them in a few weeks.
That sort of thing is frowned upon in The Hague.
Judging somewhere as "unable to sustain life" just because it's below mean high tide level is probably also frowned upon in the Hague.
A severe and subtle people, the Dutch.
I have an image of a highly cultured Dutch lawyer remarking that living in Miami would be utterly intolerable whether it was below mean high tide level or not.
But the standard for islands (versus "high-tide features") is apparently "ability to sustain life"
"I know that godforsaken rock is a 20 km from our coast, but there's lichen on it if you look closely, so we're going to fish in the deep ocean way beyond it! Neener, neener, neener!
68: I think the question isn't whether Miami is inhabited, but whether such habitation counts as 'life'.
67 I'm finding them quite hospitable.
Had a meetup with sometime commenter Martin Wisse last night and drank a lot of good beer. Drinking a lot of good beer this evening too until Chani arrives.
68 The he'll with the lawyers. You need yourself a good posse of Dutch hydraulic engineers.
Florida apparently is made of limestone, so if they build dikes the water will just come up through the ground anyway.
72 he'll s/b hell
fucking autocorrect..
I'm btocked.
Which they could pump out, like New Orleans does. But the water would presumably dissolve the ground on the way through, until the entire city collapses into a cenote.
71. Hope you found Martin in good health.
My takeaway from the link in 52 was that if losing £6.2bn real estate doesn't concentrate minds outside the locality, nothing ever will.
$6.4bn. I know they killed sterling, Chris, but it isn't that bad yet.