Octopodial Chrome

The Virtual Ranger has a great comparison of National Geographic and BBC nature specials. The National Geographic version is staged, hyper-active, short-attention-span-oriented, not terribly interesting and only marginally educational. The BBC version is thought-provoking and designed to encourage the viewer to think in a methodical fashion.

We need less of the former and more of the latter.

It turns out that Royal Navy’s four-century collection of captains’ logs is yielding historical climate data. Apparently they made meticulous observations of air pressure, wind strength, air & sea temperature and other weather conditions, all of which is helping climate scientists study how the global climate has changed over time.

Rather unsurprisingly, the observations demonstrate that there’s nothing new under the sun: phenomena which have been attributed to global warming actually did occur well before there was any such thing—indeed, during the Little Ice Age.