You know, more and more of the stuff you write reminds me of the old joke from School where someone has to write a paper about elephants and instead starts writing about worms because the trunk reminds him of these.

:03:

Warhawk believes he must run jokes on the Viking'S lack of knowledge.

Maybe that is only becasue he does not see the other major point here. The vikings decided very reasonable and rational and logical when they cam to Greenland and saw the green country. It was their farming competence, their assessment as experts in the field of colonizing, discovering, farming 8experts by the standards of theirt time), that made the choosing a path that in the end led to their doom. Admitted, that they thought they must look down on the inuits and even kill them on accasion, and that they must not learn and adapt, is a sign of stupidity, but that stupidity is casued by cultural self-identity, and a desire to stay in touch with the hoimeland by not chnaging the homeland's custom'S and rites. you can see the same principle at work in the attitude of the Australians who for long tried to be more British than the Britsh in europe (their follow-the-(British)-leader attitude somebody noted in another thread short time ago also comes from that).

You can be reasonable, and decide by rational and reasonable principles and to the best knowledge available to you - and right by doujng so decide your own longterm failure and extinction.

Still wanting to mock the Norse, Warhawk? the way they behaved is no different to the ways we behave in our modern present. we stick to old habits for cultural reasons only, even if we damage ourselves by doing so, we refuse solutions and chnages by referring to our self-identity and way of life. We weigh options rationally and reasonably decide for what destroys us and kills our ressources. Mock the Norse, and you need to mock us people now, and yourself, too.

We repeat old patterns.

Like the Vikings concluded on the fertility of Greenland by thinking about farming in Scandinavia, we conclude Global Warming is meaning nothing because the present feels nice. We base on old knowledge, but do not see or do not test wehther the old knowledge is still actual, or relevant for the new we have to face. The Norse have an excuse - they could not have known it better, their biologic understanding on vegetation and growth rates was limited. but considering global warming and climate chnage, we azhve the data to see the difference to the past . So, what is our excuse? The conclusions in both cases were and are wrong. It is frightening to see how unable we are to overcome old psychologic mechanisms even when we are seeing the evidence that they have already costed us dearly in the past, and often so.

I appreciate your good will to contribute to the talking with all what you are capable of. You really fulfilled all my expectations and did not disappoint me there. Now lean back and relax and get some rest. The effort to go to your limits that closely must have been very exhausting, and we do not want you to become ill from all that stress.

Now.. now.. didn't your mom tell you: "Du sollst nicht von Dir auf andere schliessen"?

Just because you are having a hard time to express yourself and stay focused, does not mean you need to, what you might consider, belittle others. Quite the opposite actualy. You are, once again showing your ignorance and arrogance. Good Job, SB! :yeah:

You introduced a dirty banknote. I gave you the change in the currency you have chosen.

Good one, but unfortunately not quite true. But nice try. :up:

Well I think your reply wasn't in any way helpful either with comparing his intellectual level to someone who writes an essay about worms when it should be about elephants just because of their trunks. I think that you didn't mean to be rude, but I can also understand SB reacting the way he does, I think he explained more then once that he knew how the name Greenland came to be and he acknowledged also that as long as the weather was all fine and dandy that the Vikings could make do with the conditions and their customs from home (Question is: For how long, even if the climate didn't change back then?).

It was warmer back then in Greenland and they could survive (eventhough their settlements went down the drain in the end)? Is that the point? Does that take away anything from the fact that once it got colder they couldn't, because of their clinging to the old ways of their home country. And who's to say that a change in climate, whether it'd be cooling or warming, wouldn't spell doom for us if we just try to resist changes that are forced on us by nature?

Oh, I did not mean to demean his intellectual capabilities with this. He does this all by himself by calling people that disagree with him ignorant and calling them, through other, words intellectually challenged.

As I have known the story, it was more about someone who can't stay focused and that is what he is, or rather is not.

He chose to take it however he took it. It does not really matter, any how.

When you think about it aren't we doing exactly that when we heat our homes, water our lawns or even just wear insulated clothing?

Sure thing, but when the climate doesn't allow to grow crops or raise cattle, we can heat our homes as much as we want, we'll still starve.

We're long used our technology to support far more people than could exist in a "natural" environment.

Yeah, I was puzzled by the interjection of the Viking's history myself but I wasn't going to comment on it. I guess I do have one question, did the Vikings kill Greenland's ecosystem? It sounds like they applied the wrong farming techniques. But did they make the temperatures change?
Brother, I think you should look around you. Far as I can tell from my times in Germany, it's the way of life for many people.


Yes, that's fair, when Skybird claims "Hell, sometimes GT's ignorance is killing me, really." I suppose it is common for someone to take the position that others who don't agree are ignorant. But I think of it more as different perspective.

HuH? Not unless talking about Vikings behind their backs is racist. In which case Green Bay is in a lot of trouble....:D

No, but they were adversely affected by it.

My original disagreement was based on what I read from historians from the mid-twentieth century, especially Samuel Eliot Morison, who saw Erik's naming of the land as a sales pitch. But just today I was talking to a friend who studies both archeology and anthropology, and he said that those historians suffered from the same lack of knowledge that their early 13th-century sources did - a belief that climate is static.

My friend pointed to the recent discovery of whole farms, with buildings and fences, under the Greenland icecap. Apparently what AVG said was true - the evidence is that the Vikings settled a truly green land, and their colony later died out as the Greenland climate grew colder and the current icecap formed.

It looks like the weather changes really are an ongoing cycle, and current (or recent) warming trends are just a part of that cycle.

They used their existing knowledge to the best understanding of theirs, and they could not know the differences between Greenland and Scandinavia - they had to learn them by experiencing Greenland over a longer time. Greenland was not just like Scandinavia -Greenland was NEW, althigz it looked inviting and green and very much the same - but it wasn't the same. They used experiences from Scandinavia, but these were inadequate - but they could not know that when arriving. Indeed, they killed those parts of the ecosystem within the reach of their settlements, those parts of the ecosystem that were in the main vital to their own survival and formed the basis of any form of agriculture and farming. Many societies of the past did that, and by that terminated themselves. Mind you, there were only two settlements at the southern tips, and only around 5-6 thousand vikings - we talk of the vikings on Greenland, but indeed they did not settle on the whole island, but lived in a very small, tiny region only. Climate change, you asked. The differences in the vegetation growth rates existed from the beginning on, so the Vikings already had met more difficult living conditions after roughly the first third of their total stay on Greenland, and then the climate cooling added to their problems, accelerating them. but they would have failed to survive anyway even without the climate chnage, because they refused to adapt to the needs of this different world the lived in even when the problems became life-threatening. Mind you, they died by hunger and at some places we even found signs for cannibalism - with seals and fish in the ocean aplenty! They refused to learn how to hunt seals in tiny, fast boots the Inuit use, because the looked down on the Inuits, killed them for fun, and called them dwarfs. It was their own arrogance preventing them to learn, for supremacist self-definitions. So even without the climate changing, the vikings stood in their own way by sticking to their cultural identity and self-definition - without willing to change these, although survival demanded this. Even at the height of the cooling they still dressed in the latest fahsion styles that they learned of from europe. Contributij gto the problems that they had no iron ore on Gereenland, only so-called grass-iron, which was of minor qulaity, and the tress they had chopped did not grow again in time. they had to important iron all the time, and wood in the past third of their stay. But what to pay with? Their most precious trading good was ivory, but europe won new markets and trading routes to the East, so this potential trading ace lost in importance.

another reason was that the scandianvian king, who finally claimed possession of Greenland, was not overly interested in Greenland and thus regular shipping was rare, and died down to zero when the shipping lines got shut by sea ice. Also take into account that the desire of wanting to remain a part of european/Nordic culture made the Norse on Greenland invest tremendous efforts and ressources in establishing churches and contributing to the social life as demanded by the churche's rites, which send bishops to greenland (a position that was not popular, becausue the Norse were known for their notorious fights and trouble-making). For maintaining this sacral network, they pend much time and effort and ressources that were not free anymore for mainting their survival. To an even greater extreme you can see this kind of pro-religious anti-survival behavior in the example of the Easter Island. Much of what I said on the greenlanders, you see even more exemplarically (?) demonstrated in the culture of the Easter Island.

So, cooling climate accelerated the viking's fall on Greenland. But it did not initially cause it. They would have failed even without changing climate.

Americanism, jeans, Macdonalds and Rock'n Roll is spread around the globe, yes. So what? That is not the point I was after. The point is that people being isolated from their home culture, like the British moving to Australia or the Norse moving to Greenland, often try to stick to their cultural roots by living the home customs and rites very exemplary and trying to be at least as British/as Nordic as the people of the home culture they left behind. The British did not like the vegetation in Australia, it looked so unpleasant and alien, so until just years ago the government punished farmers that bought land but did not kill a certain ammount of bushes and trees every year. If you bought farming land in australia, you were under an obligation of removing so and so much of bushland and forest from it (now tell Australians about erosion...) The Australian sheep keeping only functions by stellar subsidies, and the australin agriculture in general is probably the most expensively running system world-wide - compared to that the artifical watering of giant monoculturess in the US or in Israel, is cheap. They export huge ammounts of corn, but by can do that only by enormous subsidies. Left to themselves, their farmers would not be competitive.

This counterproductive habit derives from the colonisation era, though! This has done insane ammonts of damage by erosion to the farming soil in Australia, and it has skyrocketted problems with water supply, and salienation. Agriculture and sheep in Australia - that would be a book in itself. The British wanted to replace the local vegetation with the kind of vegetation they knew from home (Britain). They wanted fox hunts, so they brought in foxes. I must not tell you about the problem of rabbits and foxes in Australia, the story is widely known, yes? Rabbits are a natural disaster of top rank in Australia. But they had been brought there.

Introduction of foreign species is one of the worst man-made ecological disasters there are. It often changes the face of whole countries - or even a whole continent. No matter if it is voluntary (foxes+rabbits ->AUS) or unvoluntary (unwanted animal passengers of shipping traffic).



that is somewhat unfair. My comment you quote was due to people time and again replying in complete and total ignorrance of what I just said and already had repeated several times. If you spend time repeatedly to give an explanation and then immediately see people behaving as if the explanation has not been given even a single time, by that implying you are ignorrant yourself by not agreeing to a different view that by your explanation you nevertheless have already adressed and demonstrated to be wrong, then this is very frustrating and can cause anger. This is the only context in which you see my quoted comment, please.

Oh, and you asked why I brought up the Vikings. You made assumptions about the future by describing the present, you remember. I wanted to demonstrate that that may not be a valid argument, and that exactly this has led past societies to their doom. The Norse also made assumptions about the future (in Greenland), by refering to their past and present they knew (from Scandinavia). You said if the present is so well as it is right now (in your opinion), how could somebody be so pessimistic about the future. And the Vikings thought if their keeping of cows was managable and their farming methods worked so nice in Scandinavia (actually, there was plenty of hunger in Scandianvia, but they got along, all in all), why shouldn't all this work here in Greenland as well when the place looks so very much the same like we use to know if from back home? They saw Greenland analogously to Scandinvia, which was a mistake, like you see the future analogously to the present, which I think also is a mistake. This I wanted to demonstrate, and if my initial explanation on the Vikings would not have met so much repeated ignorance for what I just said, it would have been all much shorter.