JudyHall, sometimes I try to say hi to a friend when My Friends shows them to be online, although they often don't see my post. That works the other way too - when I am doing a puzzle I am usually oblivious to the chat. I also use My Friends to help me decide whether to respond immediately to something a friend has posted, if they are online now, or later if they are not online and I want to do something else first. However, one of my friends seems to be online all the time, and so that method does not work in her case because she probably leaves her computer on day and night.

@MrOoijer: Thank you for the book recommendation. I found Raymond T. Pierrehumbert's old, archived site at the University of Chicago with a link to his new site at Oxford University. You mentioned a free version of the book but the only one I can find is a one page description of the book plus brief extracts including table of contents and preface. Fortunately the description and the table of contents were sufficient for me to conclude that the book does not deal with the climate effects of impacts with the earth of meteors, asteroids or other space objects. Evidently the professor, and you apparently, consider that topic to be irrelevant or outside the scope of climate science.

That puzzles me because we pretty much know that space object strikes have played a major role in earth's history, with one of the larger strikes hurling so much dust and other matter into the atmosphere that incoming radiation from the sun was totally blocked and an estimated 95 per cent of the surface lifeforms, including dinosaurs, were wiped out. We also know by direct observation that smaller strikes continue to occur in our time, and while there appears to be an upper limit to the size and velocity of objects which approach us from expected directions, such as the asteroid belt, we have know way of knowing what other "rogue" and possibly much larger objects may come our way from some other direction which we are not monitoring at all. Isn't that also an essential part of climate science, studying the nature of the threats to our atmosphere posed by space object impacts, even though the threats involve sudden, catastrophic and possibly unsurvivable global cooling rather than slow global warming to which we have many opportunities to adapt?

By the way, it would be impossible for me to forget you are Dutch. I worked and lived with Dutch people for long enough to become comfortable with their styles of speech, their rules of good manners, and many of their social customs, although that was long ago and I am sure much has changed since then. Had you said that my arguments were totally silly I would have understood completely. Your actual rebuke, "your ignorance is stunning and so is your unwillingness to inform yourself" seemed a bit unusual for a Dutchman, and I assumed that my post had caught you at a bad time. I am sorry if I caused you some distress.

Done. ng, ng.

Done, ng, ng. ... definitely an "easy"

This link to Principles of Planetary Climate has 500+ pages - only missing the last chapter and appendix:

http://cips.berkeley.edu/events/rocky-planets\n-class09/ClimateVol1.pdf

For today's climate it is not really relevant what happened millions to billion years ago when the earths orbit was quite difefferent, volcanic activities were still everywhere and so on. But you should read the book - not cherry pick one aspect that is not covered in the ToC -- that is what I called unwilling to inform yourself.

Volcanoes, earth strikes, etc... are distractions used by deniers to muddy the waters. But let's take them into account. If we reduce the amount of garbage we are putting into the atmosphere we will be much more capable of surviving either an extra-terrestrial threat or a volcanic one. This volcano and earth hit argument is pretty much the same as arguing against gun control by saying alchohol kills more people than guns.

Though that argument is a fact it does nothing to solve either problem.

funny, the same people who claim to understand millions of years of climate data are the same that dispute that there are only 2 sexes. I guess that is why it was global cooling, then warming, then climate change then whatever ... normal people just call it weather.

Here we go with obfuscation again. No one disputes that there are 2 sexes, male and female based on physical attributes. There are more than 2 gender identities. Weather and climate are also 2 different things.

Global Climate affects the weather. Weather is a by-product of Climate, ocean temperatures, jet stream, high and low barometric pressure, etc.

done

I like political discussion, and (too often?) participate but wish all would respect the limited chatterbox screen, and perhaps limit posts to just a few lines and only once or twice a day. Hate it when lengthy URLs are posted, messing up the chatscreen width. Put a space in!

The perfect puzzle before coffee. Done ng, ng. A sweet easy.

@MrOoijer: Thank you for the link, but no thanks for the criticism. Did I really deserve a rebuke for not having read a book which you only told me about yesterday? Also, I did not "cherry pick one aspect that is not covered" in the book because I did not even know of the existence of that particular book until you told me about it AFTER I had identified space object strikes as potentially having far more significant influence on planetary temperatures than man-made global warming.

tuco, I am totally in favor of reducing "the amount of garbage we are putting into the atmosphere." That is in and of itself a clear and totally worthwhile goal. What I object to is doing it in the name of global warming or climate change because, if we do that and the global temperatures don't drop or the climate doesn't improve, our atmospheric clean-up efforts will be labelled a failure and public support will vanish. Let's tell it like it is instead of continuing the convoluted global warming arguments propagated by Al Gore et al.

Go

done, easy clicker

Done

gore-biden in 2020

EZPZ, 12.

done

Done.

B.T.W. MrO even math is not 100% provable. First you start with the axioms. Axioms are assumptions that you cannot prove. Many a mathematician wasted long hours trying to prove that at least the theorems were self consistent until Goedel's incompleteness theorem.

start

dng

Easiest ever? Must be close.