We know the moon changes our tides, but can it also change our rainfall? Could the moon also cause tides in the atmosphere? Some researchers have found such periodic movements in air above 3000m. Some have suggested that the moon drives the cyclical shifts in the Length of Day (LOD) that occur on a fortnightly and seasonal basis.
Ian Wilson has been scouring the data quietly for years, following these ideas, and has found a link between lunar cycles and the sub tropical high pressure ridge that occurs in summer over the East Coast of Australia. He noticed there were 9.4 and 3.8 year cycles which match periods in spring tidal cycles. What matters is how close the full moon is to perhelion (the closest point Earth comes to the Sun). It’s yet another piece of the puzzle that the IPCC favoured models ignore.
The lunar forces are, not surprisingly, smaller than the solar one, and as the abstract points out: “it is not so much in what years do the lunar tides reach their maximum strength, but whether or not there are peaks in the strength of the lunar tides that re-occur at the same time within the annual seasonal cycle.”
It remains to be seen how his hypothesis stands up in the long run, but it’s yet another example of a genuine research avenues that are not being followed by government funded researchers who are heavily funded to find connections between CO2 and climate, but not so much to explore all the competing possibilities. Only open research and genuine curiosity will help us to truly predict the climate, inasmuch as it is possible to do so. Farmers, people living in flood zones, town planners, and dam managers desperately need models that predict the climate, instead of models that just give fashionable answers.
Long live the spirit of relentless curiosity.
–Jo
Lunar Tides and the Long-Term Variation of the Peak Latitude Anomaly
of the Summer Sub-Tropical High Pressure Ridge over Eastern Australia
The main take-home conclusions from this paper are that:
The most important influence upon the climate of Northern NSW and Southern Queensland after the La Nina/El Nino phenomenon is the Peak Latitude Anomaly for the Summer Sub-Tropical High Pressure Ridge over Eastern Australia (L(SA)).
In the big battle for the meme-of-the-moment, Fakegate has won.
DeSmog can’t be too happy about this. Google “DenierGate” and get 67,000 results, but google “Fakegate” and get 168,000.
UPDATE #2 March 14: FakeGate is now 6 times as popular. (“FakeGate” 420,000 results v “Deniergate” 69,000)
What do you know? Stealing things, breaching privacy, and exposing nothing but tiny funding isn’t catching on. As a PR faux pas this is a case study in implosions. DeSmog have inadvertently shone a beacon on the real David and Goliath story here, where the Big-Oil funding isn’t so big, and the real money is on the side who pretends they are “doing it for the planet”. Worse, between them, DeSmog and Peter Gleick have arranged a public ethics challenge for ethically challenged scientists, and a mass-media bias-test for biased journalists. The spectacle of scientists debating if it is OK to steal, and journalists making excuses for criminal activity, is doing as much damage as the original theft and overreaction. It’s so bad, even the Koch Brothers (target-number-one) can take the unassailable high ground (see below).
Note the auto-prompts: When it’s “FakeGate” it’s news, but when it’s Deniergate, Google queries the spelling … Did you mean: “denigrate”?
The Guardian “Climate change will shake the Earth” (parroted by the SMH) is feeding the pagan masses who worship The God CO2. Which would be fine, except they pretend that it’s science when it’s the “hell” part of any religion. If you drive your SUV too far you, sinner, will bear the blame for earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. The mystery, we wonder, is why they forgot pestilence and plagues?!
Try this on. I’m quoting them: “So what – geologically speaking – can we look forward to if we continue to pump out greenhouse gases at the current hell-for-leather rate?”
“we could almost certainly say an eventual goodbye to the Greenland ice sheet, and probably that covering West Antarctica too”
“a 10-metre or more rise in sea levels.”
“these could trigger submarine landslides spawning tsunamis capable of threatening North Atlantic coastlines.”
[More]” landslide activity would be inevitable in the Andes, Himalayas, European Alps…”
“acting to squeeze magma out of susceptible volcanoes that are primed and ready to blow.“
Oh, Lordy. And what major study are these dire pronouncements made on? Why, someone called Bill McGuire has noticed a lot more volcanoes lately. That’s it.
He seems to have trouble keeping things in perspective.
The bottom line is that through our climate-changing activities we are loading the dice in favour of escalating geological havoc at a time when we can most do without it.
Sure, there has never been a worse time to deal with disasters: all those neolithic cave dwellers, and preindustrial people coped so much better with volcanoes and earthquakes than we do now.
Unless there is a dramatic and completely unexpected turnaround in the way in which the human race manages itself and the planet, then long-term prospects for our civilization look increasingly grim.
Grim? Here’s “Grim”
Among other things, Bill-the-vulcanologist seems to have overlooked the worst volcano in Human history, namely Toba, a supersized supervolcano of a magnitude 8 (and there is no “9” in that scale). It was so big it blew up in Indonesia and left 3-6 metre (10-20 foot) deep ash as far away as India. For all that Mount Pinatubo was a decent volcano, Toba blew off 200 times as much. In what was truly a global disaster of civilizational proportions, genetic studies on homo sapiens show a bottleneck in our gene pool at about the same time. It’s theorized that we were almost wiped off the planet — almost extincto-humanoidia.
They are even trying to target pre-schoolers. The ABC has accepted grants from the Climate Change Foundation to work the Climate Change message into ‘DirtGirl’, an ABC4Kids TV. Then there are demonstrations of bias like this from a school in Sydney.
They’re trying to train the next generation to “think” their way. We’d be mad to let them get away with it.
Thanks to the Gallileo Movement and donors, 300 FREE copies of Professor Ian Pilmer’s new book ‘How to get expelled from school’, are available to schools in Australia.
The Galileo Movement’s aim is to expose the unscientific claims made by climate change scientists and political attempts to unnecessarily control our freedom and future prosperity. If you are a teacher or you know one, you can help ensure that your local school library has a balance of books on climate change science.
Can you convince your Federal, State or Local member to talk the local school on your behalf?
The books are available to schools within Australia, all they need to do is fax a Purchase Order from their school to Connor Court, the publishers, on fax number (03) 5303 0960.
thank you to everyone who nominated and voted and for me. Cheers! Jo
———————–
Update: Sorry for the brevity, it was sent from a smart-phone-and-dumb-keyboard, on this beach. Yes, it’s a much needed holiday. Great place to get the news! 2012 Bloggies
Thanks to the guest authors who contributed including Michael Hammer, Brice Bosnich, David Evans, Frank Lansner, Anton Lang (TonyfromOz), Geoffrey Sherrington, Ken Steward, Chris Gillham, Indur Goklany, and David Lappi, Anthony Watts, and Chrisopher Monckton and the moderators who work anonymously as volunteers without whom I could not keep the comments open.
Thanks of course to all the commenters, from whom I learn so much.
Merci!
Jo
PS: Skeptics are sweeping the floor in the bloggies. Make no mistake, the mainstream media makes this so easy for us by ignoring independent scientists with a cutting message. The truth is winning 🙂
CONGRATULATIONS to Watts UP for picking up two awards — Best Science or Techonolgy Blog, and The LifeTime Achievement Award! And to Tallbloke’s Talkshop , Steven McIntyre (Climate Audit ),
Heartland have released both emails that Peter Gleick wrote under his name (below) as well as under a false name. The deceit is there for all to see. Heartland have at all times behaved impeccably. — Jo
From James Taylor at Forbes.com
The real story in this Fakegate scandal is how the global warming movement is desperate, delusional, and collapsing as global warming fails to live up to alarmist predictions. People with sound science on their side do not need to forge documents to validate their arguments or make the other side look bad. Also, people who are so desperate as to forge documents in an attempt to frame their rivals are clearly not above forging scientific data, studies, and facts to similarly further their cause. It is both striking and telling how global warming activists have failed to condemn the acts of forgery in the Fakegate scandal.
CLIMATE CHANGE WEEKLY #39 FAKEGATE ILLUSTRATES COLLAPSING GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISM
Why would a prominent scientist/global warming activist commit acts of fraud and theft against global warming skeptics and then send to the media a forged document containing fictitious, over-the-top schemes that would embarrass skeptics? Answer: Because global warming activists cannot muster sufficient credible science to win the debate.
This is so apt this weekend. The Ghost-of-Malcolm-Turnbull-leadership is channeling a message for the Labor Party. Listen carefully to him and do … the opposite.
The issue (Climategate) is proving thorny enough to have split the opposition Liberal party, some of whose senators have rebelled against leader Malcolm Turnbull’s pledge to support the measure; and the government is planning to have another go at passing the bill on Monday.
It could even lead to a general election, with Mr Turnbull warning that the party risks annihilation if the rebels hold sway:
“We would be wiped out… the vast majority of Australians want to see action on climate change.”
The Coalition chucked the bill, and chucked the leader, and instead of oblivion, went on to poll 55-60%.
The Labor Party struggled, fought, wheeled and dealed, flat out lied, and got that climate change legislation through, and face… whats the word? Annihilation.
Who says it’s only Rudd versus Gillard? Abbott came from nowhere.
Australia may have a new Prime Minister as soon as next week. Former PM, Kevin Rudd has just resigned from his Foreign Ministership so he’s going to challenge the current PM, and it could be any day.
Here in Australia everyone seems to be saying it’ll be either Rudd or Gillard… but think back to the way another candidate can emerge when the heat is on. That’s what happened to the Liberals (our conservatives) when Abbott appeared.
Whoops. Suzanne Goldenberg unwittingly exposes how empty the Ethics Vault is in establishment climate science. Peter Gleick used a false identity to steal documents, and released them without permission and without an effort to redact private irrelevant details. So let’s ask climate scientists if stealing, deception and breaching privacy is OK. It’s a yes or no choice, is it a/ heroic, or b/ misguided? We’d hope a ten year old could get this one, but Goldenberg tells us that its thrown “the scientific community into tumult, with fierce debates…”. Oh.
The correct answer was not even on offer in the Guardian: c/probably criminal.
So when is stealing OK?
Other (scientists and activists) acknowledged Gleick’s wrongdoing, but said it should be viewed in the context of the work of Heartland and other entities devoted to spreading disinformation about science.
Here’s a face-meet-palm-moment: if Heartland is spreading misinformation on science then why not try explaining where their science is wrong, rather than just repeat this mindless, unsubstantiated claim?
As it happens, if Heartland wanted to spread “disinformation” it sure seems an odd strategy to go out of their way to invite establishment climate scientists, and even Gleick himself, to speak at their conferences?
In this upside down world, Heartland are the ones trying to start a science debate on a shoestring budget, while the establishment scientists, with 10,000 times the funding, debate whether they should steal things instead.
The so-called “hero” scientists hurl names and unscientific ad-homs in lieu of evidence and reason.
Goldenberg didn’t do enough research to understand that she is acting as an unwitting tool of activists, quoting preposterous falsehoods that are known to anyone who can enter “climate science, controversial, skeptic” into a search engine (see ClimateDepot, and btw Bing is better). Dear Suzanne, there are lots of polite scientists who can help you, you just need to ask.
BREAKING: Peter Gleick admits admits he’s the one who assumed a false identity and emailed Heartland so he could steal their private documents. His apology marks, finally, a small turning point in the PR scandal and ethical vacuum.
UPDATE: So when will DeSmog retract it’s false claim the documents came from “an insider”? When will they admit they were fooled, didn’t bother to check the veracity, and don’t care about putting out accurate information?
His answer doesn’t quite put all the pieces together. The fake document has a timestamp just prior to DeSmog and others releasing it, so it is not the “anonymous document” he refers too.
At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.
Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.
I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.
It’s sad to watch the implosion of a Nobel Cause. Well it would be…
But then DeSmog thinks providing fake documents “is in the public interest”. (Is there is a shortage of false and misleading articles around? Who knew?)
Let the games begin. As promised, Heartland want justice, starting with the removal of all the fake and alleged documents. DeSmog have overplayed their hand.
(Go on, fake smears like the DeSmog one, are designed to intimidate donors, we can rise above!)
——————————————————————————————————–
UPDATE: Joseph Bast explains why Heartland are doing this:
“We realize this will be portrayed by some as a heavy-handed threat to free speech. But the First Amendment doesn’t protect Internet fraud, and there is no right to defamatory speech.
“For 28 years, The Heartland Institute has engaged in fierce debates over a wide range of public policies – school reform, health care, telecommunications policy, corporate subsidies, and government waste and fraud, as well as environmental policy. We frequently and happily engage in vigorous, robust debate with those who disagree with our views.
“We have resorted in the past to legal means only in a very few cases involving outright fraud and defamation. The current situation clearly fits that description, and our legal counsel has advised that the first step in defending ourselves should be to ask the blogs to take down the stolen and forged documents.”
From: Jim Lakely Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2012 Subject: Stolen and Faked Heartland Documents
By email and Federal Express to:
Mr. Brendan G DeMelle
Editor DeSmog Blog
On or about February 14, 2012, your web site posted a document entitled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” (the “Fake Memo”), which is fabricated and false.
On or about the same date, your web site posted certain other documents purporting to be those of The Heartland Institute (“Heartland”). Heartland has not authenticated these documents (the “Alleged Heartland Documents”).
Your site thereafter has reported repeatedly on all of these documents.
Heartland almost immediately issued a statement disclosing the foregoing information, to which your web site has posted links.
It has come to our attention that all of these documents nevertheless remain on your site and you continue to report on their contents. Please be advised as follows:
Julia Gillard to Tim Flannery (top picture) “Tim, sorry to drag you in like this. I’m not that upset that you were so wrong about water shortages now that we’re drowing in the stuff. And how were you to know that there would be no statistically significant increase in warming for the last 15 years of increasing CO2 emissions.”
Julia Gillard to Tim Flannery: (lower image) “No! I want to know why I pay you 10 times what Bob Carter gets and he still wins the argument!”
And if Bob Carter receives an honorarium type amount of $1500 a month, the pull of those big dollars must be powerfully tempting for people like Tim Flannery who struggle along on about $1200 each day he works.
On Saturday 😀 after he scores flack in other articles, satire restores the balance in favour of Bob Carter. (Now was that in The SMH too?)
Message to DeSmog and that faker… whatever credibility you had…
Major embarrassment for Joe Romm, and DeSmog and their unthinking fans.
In the hours after the ClimateGate emails were released, skeptics asked about their authenticity (as we are wont to do). In the hours after the Heartland Documents (including at least one complete fake) were released, the commentators on the other side did not even ask (just as they uncritically accept any weak report in favour of their pet theory).
They leapt to their defamatory conclusions in a smear-fest. At least one person out there has probably committed a criminal act. The rest are guilty of small brained unskeptical blind hatred, defamation, and ignorance. And will any of them apologize? I’ll be shocked if even one has the decency or manners.
We should not allow them to forget it. DeSmog=DeSmear. They are a group happy to promote lies with no compunction. They are not interested in the truth, just in the PR. Oh the fool journalists who think the paid hacks at DeSmog ever had anything to say on science that was not biased or deceitful. Richard Littlemore, where is your apology? Instead, knowing the document is faked, he continues to promote it. So does Brad Johnson, and Joe Romm.
Their attitude to the science is just the same to their attitude to falsified documents. They don’t care. They were all happy to trumpet an insider leak, yet none of them admit they were wrong, or showed poor judgment when it turned out the documents were obtained through trickery, deceit and malicious misbehaviour. Shame, they only had to email Joe Bast to ask. Even the most minor effort to get to the truth is too much to expect.
FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/377-4000.
Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.
The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.
Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.
One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.
We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.
The believers of man-made-weather-disasters are wetting themselves with excitement. It painful to watch grown men drool.
Poor things, they were really wounded by Climategate, and they’ve been waiting, praying that some day someone would level the playing field and show that skeptics were just as petty, shameless, and money-grubbing as their team turned out to be (not to mention hypocritical, deceptive and incompetent). In their dreams.
Instead the hyped non-denier-gate shows just how incredibly successful the Heartland Institute is. Look at the numbers. The skeptics have managed to turn the propaganda around against a tide of money, and it is really some achievement.
So what the expose shows is that the Heartland Institute punches far above its weight with an incredibly efficient budget. That is, of course, assuming that the so-called expose is real and not a fake, or altered, which it could be, watch the Heartland site for any confirmation or information. [UPDATE: It was, see here]
This is a wake up call to the freedom loving people of the world, it’s time to make donations a regular part of your monthly budget to support all the people out there who work on your behalf. The fact that Heartland has only one major, generous donor is remarkable. Where are the rest?
The hypocrisy is flagrant. The Sierra Club listed a category for $1,000,000 donations by “anonymous donors” in their 2010 annual report. Strangely DeSmog didn’t froth with anticipation. Their Sierra Club annual report mentions “Matching Gifts”, and apparently supporters who matched gifts include the evil Exxon, not to mention GoldMan Sachs, Barclays, Google, Monsanto, Nestle, Yahoo, Bank of America, and many many more. But that’s alright then.
And if Bob Carter receives an honorarium type amount of $1500 a month, the pull of those big dollars must be powerfully tempting for people like Tim Flannery who struggle along on about $1200 each day he works.
As I always say when these matters are raised, YES Please. Let’s do talk about the funding.
It’s sexist, ageist, intolerant and illogical: just what we’ve come to expect from “progressives”, eh?
Oh the hubris and arrogance of the terminally immature
Take their conclusion that because skeptics are older, they are less educated, more selfish, and more easily fooled. Doesn’t the alternative sound more likely? Could it be that believers are younger and so more naive, less worldly wise, and throughout history, more likely to be the gullible rollovers — the mere tools of the powers at large? It’s not just that it’s happened before, its a standard repeat theme throughout history.
But hey, it’s not their fault they are young and badly taught. When we don’t teach logic and reason at school anymore, we can’t expect them to recognize that con-men and crooks always pretend to be “helpful” at the start of a scam, and that people who attack the messenger are the one who are losing the debate. Besides, everyone knows that educational standards have slipped badly in the last 20 – 30 years, and that today’s students are given more self esteem and less, you know, facts and logic.
Whatever – – none of it tells us anything about the planetary atmosphere. Not that you can explain that to the starry-eyed fan of Gaia who keeps believing the witchdoctors even though their predictions of droughts, warm winters, hot summers, dead reefs, and wild cyclones were all wrong. And they don’t seem to care that their witchdoctors are helping themselves to buckets of taxpayer’s cash…
The immature believers struggle with numbers:
Mathew Wright, executive director of Beyond Zero Emissions and the 2010 winner of the federal environment minister’s Young Environmentalist of the Year, says: things are moving faster than they ever have before, and the fact that solar didn’t work 20 years ago but works now is a problem that for some people is hard to face and admit to.”
So what does “works” mean? Not something you can measure with money or kilowatts. Coal fired electricity costs 3c a kilowatt wholesale, and the government is paying up to 60c a KWH for solar electricity. The Victoria Auditor General showed large scale solar costs about 5.5 times as much as coal, and at best, rooftop solar costs at least 9 times as much.
So Wright thinks something “works” when taxpayers have to fork out 5- 20 times as much for the same electricity?
And who wants Global Warming when you can face avalanches, deep snow, and record cold?
How much fun can you have with 2 meters of snow on your house, and none of that evil coal powered electricity?
What’s happening in Europe and Russia over the last two weeks is not just your average cold-snap. Temperatures reached -28C in Moscow. One point in Russia hit -52.8C (-68F) on Monday.
MOSCOW — Some 215 Russians have died this year in a prolonged period of abnormally cold winter weather, the health ministry said Monday as the overall death toll for Europe rose to well over 600. [National Post]
NASA Earth Observatory. Dark blue areas are -15C below average. White areas are average. Deep Red are 15C above. (See the NASA link below for the proper scale):.
The Danube has frozen over from Austria to the Black Sea, and 224 ships (some delivering fuel) have been stuck in their ports. Schools in Bosnia have been closed for days. Trains in Montenegroare at a standstill, and one train with 50 passengers was stranded in a tunnel for three days before rescuers began evacuating people yesterday.
In Serbia 11,000 villagers are trapped by huge snowfalls as temperatures hit – 26C in one town (Al jazeera puts the figure at 70,000 people), and some Bosnian villages haven’t had electricity for days.
Hundreds of barns are collapsing under the snow, killing the animals below, and prompting Tom Nelson to write “Children won’t know what barns look like”.
For the first time in over 30 years, snow has fallen in the Sahara Desert.
Alan Caruba found a Turkish writer lamenting the waste and misdirection of millions of dollars spent on the Green global warming bureaucracy instead of preparations to save lives.
This is disturbing news. What if eating undercooked meat, gardening, or having a cat could give you an infection which stayed with you for life, nested in cysts in your brain? Worse, those cysts somehow affected your personality, possibly putting you at increased risk of suicide, schizophrenia, or car accident? And here’s the stop-you-in-your-tracks point: up to one third of humanity may harbor this protozoan. That is one very successful parasite.
Infection rates are frighteningly high: as much as 10-20% of the population in the US, 30-40% of Czechs, and 55% in France.
Sounds like a plot for a bad sci-fi but we know that Toxoplasma gondii makes small mammals take life threatening risks – an infected rat finds cat-urine “attractive” and runs about more, being fearless, but getting eaten: good for the parasite, not so good for the rat. Our brains may be larger but they are made with much the same building blocks and tools. Rabies is known to stir larger mammals into a rage, and there are “a truckload” of examples from the insect and fish world of parasitic mind control. Hmmm.
Toxoplasmosis is thought to be a nasty parasite that affects pregnant women and immune-compromised people, but evidence of an insidious nature is accruing. Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist from Prague, has a theory that this protozoan might be rewiring our brains.
‘There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Another more obvious reason for resistance, of course, is that Flegr’s notions sound an awful lot like fringe science, right up there with UFO sightings and claims of dolphins telepathically communicating with humans.’
Flegr has been ignored or years, but other researchers are now getting results that support his theory. Studies show that mental illness is 2-3 times as common in people who have the parasite compared to people in the same region who don’t. It could be that schizophrenia runs in families because of a genetic predisposition to a weaker immune response to parasites.
According to psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, schizophrenia did not become common until around the same time as people started having cats for pets. Schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared.”
Now that I ponder the unpleasant implications, it seems inevitable that evolution could toss up a parasite-host relationship which shifts human behavior. If Toxo isn’t doing it, sooner or later something else will. (Another reason we ought throw more money at medical research, rather than at bat-killing windmills.)
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