From the strange mind of James Lileks:
As we were all taught in grade school, the Eskimos came across the land bridge from Russia, which broke once they were across, and then they settled down and built igloos, invented 37 words for snow, made parkas with fur around the face, and fished. the teacher would note that some continued to go south, and eventually populated the rest of the Americas, where they spent their time raising Maize and not inventing the wheel, hanging around wearing loincloths, and playing a game that involved putting a rubber ball through a stone circle. They also invented chocolate. Then the Spanish came, and –
Hold on, Teacher, why didn’t the Eskimos keep moving south?
We don’t know.
But why would anyone stay there? Especially when the rest of the guys are moving on?
We don’t know.
So the Eskimos are sitting in snow up to their eyebrows, and some guys say “hey, we’re going to keep moving, because this sucks,” and the Eskimos stay because they think it can’t possibly get any better?
We don’t know.
Also, some technological prognostication: videopaint.
I’ve got a buddy who’s an Eskimo. Whale hunting, duck hunting, cross-country skiing around. He likes it, and doesn’t seem particularly crazy to me.
Eskimos would be hard put to find said Sunny Climes today.
Climate Change has rendered most of America a frozen Wonderland. And to think, just a few years ago, Algore was claiming they’d go extinct. Eskimos, I mean, would go extinct. Having starved for lack of seal, polar bear and whale blubber, who died from the heat of global warming.
I’m a little twisted myself, but I always wonder where he is on weekends like this last one. He sure as hell wasn’t on any Sunday morning shows, wringing his hands and telling us the shy is falling.
(make that SKY is falling)
Individual variation. In biology, there’s a principle that life will diversify and expand to fill every available ecological niche. This seems to be true for humans as well.
It’s similar to space travel. There are those who insist that life on Earth will always be nicer (“more habitable”) than life in space. There are those who disagree. Neither side is right or wrong; they simply have different preferences.
I can’t quite recall, but I’ve recall something about iron being put forth as ‘the reason’ the Inuit stayed north. Whether it was a meteoric deposit or open seams, I don’t know.
Slightly off-topic pedantry: I can’t stand the phrase “living in space,” meaning “outer space.” Because no one is going to live in outer space any more than they do now. They’re going to live in space ships, space stations, on asteroids, moons, and other planetary surfaces. I mean, there is a possibility that we’ll all evolve into disembodied consciousnesses and then maybe we can live in outer space. But until then, we need someplace to sit down.
We could also evolve into physical creatures adapated to space. I’m not sure what that would look like (solar cells of the biological sort, I imagine, and a spherical field of vision). If you’ve read the sequels to Old Man’s War there’s a suggestion for what that sort of person might be like.
The Eskimos stayed in the frozen north because they were just glad those trashy neighbors finally left, with their human sacrifices at all hours of the winter, and always complaining about having all this ice cream but never a banana split. Why would they want to risk running into them again?
It’s also possible that Eskimo were ice-adapted latecomers. So not only would moving south mean they’d have to change their ways, they’d also have to deal with the people who were already there.
Actually, we’re pretty sure we know the answer to that one. Linguistic and genetic evidence points to three migrations into the Americas, and probably only one of those crossed the land bridge before it was swamped by rising sea levels (rather than the land bridge sinking). One migration came by land, another seems to have skirted the coast, and a third one, much later than the other two, consisted of the so-called Eskimos. In other words, pretty much everyone did move on to warmer climates, and it was the third wave who got stuck at the top because the rest was already occupied.
OK, it is not Global Warming, it is Climate Change. All of this cold, snowy weather is the result of our CO2 emissions cranking up the global weather patterns, slinging more moisture around, causing all of the snow, where I had to turn around in Detroit-Metro airport on Christmas Day and slink back to Milwaukee because my relatives in North Carolina were forecast to get inches of heavy, wet snow.
Got this Rand, this disruption in my Christmas holiday is the result of CO2-induced Climate Change.
OK. But if CO2 is churning up the weather patterns to cause more moist air to come blowing in from over the oceans to give us more snow, isn’t the effect of CO2 to increase the snow cover and reflect more heat back into space and then cool the Earth? Isn’t that a negative feedback counteracting the warming effect of CO2, a negative feedback that wasn’t supposed to happen when I was told Wisconsin would adopt the warm, dry climate of the California high desert?
That is, is there any climate scientist out there who has made a prediction, and the prediction has not come through, who has bothered to ‘fess up regarding the falsification of the original hypothesis, or is the cycle of hypothesis, falsification of hypothesis, new hypothesis just, so, 20th century?
Paul M,
No, There hasn’t been to my knowledge. I’m a former professional meteorologist (a long time ago) and I follow the debate. Whenever anything slightly unusual (or even usual) happens to the weather it is always due to CO2 induced climate change. Oh, and the likes of Hansen et al NEVER admit to being wrong. The data is always spun to support their predictions.