“Australian scientists fear climate change will also have great impact on consumers similar to problems faced by farm lands. They believe carrots will lose its taste and steaks will be of poor quality.” (The market Business)
It’s while since of used the category “Goat Toads”. Referring to any ridiculous article based on a bit of poor quality research and coming up with “Global warming could … ” followed by pure political inspired drivel, so it’s fun to see the resurgence of this comic article.
The original “Goat toad” is a fictional species who full name is The “lesser common spotted goat toad” – for which I created the fiction narrative that a survey had found a decrease in numbers. This was then written up as the “lesser common spotted goat toad on verge of extinction due to man-made human warming” – a fair summary of all these goats toads.
But from the title of this piece, it now seems that the media have spotted the comedy angle of these goat toads. And unless it it obvious. If a degree difference in climate made any difference, then carrots would only come from a very narrow range of latitudes where this supposedly “ideal” temperature exists. We would also have an appreciable difference in flavour due to year-to-year variations. No one notices this – instead anyone at a supermarket just buys the cheapest carrots.
Completely off topic but may interest you.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31905764
I had to see how this compares with my “working hypothesis”
diagram on the internet (which came as a direct discussion here!):
http://mons-graupius.co.uk/index.php/other-roman-material/11-kelt-iii-britain-before-the-romans.
apparently I got a few details wrong.
1. I added groups who don’t appear in the SE of England & around the
Humber (unless this is the W.Yorkshire group?).
2. The borders are far more complex than I suggest
3. And generally I was a bit too bland in my simple (W)Welsh-(E)Gemanic
split.
Otherwise I think I did not too badly.
I suspected that DNA was going to be needed but earlier attempts were just messy. It must be hard to find the ‘pure breeds’. I know my DNA must be very confusing because there is a fair bit of wandering about on both sides of the family. I’ve even got some middle eastern on my Mum’s side, probably from the Romans but possibly one of the other invasions.
With the advent of ISIS I’ve been thinking how a small number of people could wipe out certain aspects of society including language. I could see it happening very quickly.
The techniques used is really very poor at telling us anything. It’s not the % of DNA of an individual, but instead the % of DNA of each type on the local population. So, if you have thee populations one 25%A, 75%B, another 50:50 A,B and the other 75%A, 25%B.
If the first and third were to settle down together they would be indistinguishable from the middle group. So, just because two groups have the same DNA doesn’t actually mean they are related.
There was preselection of people with ‘all four of their grandparents living close to each other in a rural area.’ People in rural locations have much less chance of stray DNA. Getting away from the big city is a relatively new concept I guess, especially amongst the poorer classes.
Instead of 50/50 maybe the results were more like 99/1 at the epicenter of a DNA type? Only where types overlapped do you get 50/50 and it doesn’t matter how you got that figure, it just says that you’re from a mix.
I know that there are rules in genetics that can measure how ‘old’ the DNA is. So South Americans are very genetically young and healthy because of the recent mixes of different peoples. Africa on the other hand has some very old DNA. Now there’s some topsy turvey rule that says that neighbouring African villages can be further apart genetically than say the Chinese and the British. I really don’t understand it.