The Scythians take kannabis seed, creep in under the felts, and throw it on the red-hot stones. It smolders and sends up such billows of steam-smoke that no Greek vapor bath can surpass it. The Scythians howl with joy in these vapor-baths, which serve them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water.
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Book 4, Ch. 74Herodotus
One thing I try to point out to people, and Dick Lindzen has pointed this out in the past, too, is that, as most of you probably know, about ninety percent of the earth’s greenhouse effect is water vapor, then carbon dioxide, methane and some trace gases. The water vapor con-centration in the atmosphere goes up and down quite a bit, but it is self-regulating. Things don’t get too warm before precipitation systems suck the water vapor out again. I don’t understand how we can know how much warming there will be with global warming until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming. We don’t under-stand that, and I have papers from modelers who have said the same thing. Modelers don’t like to talk about what they don’t know. So until we understand these natural proc-esses that remove the earth’s primary greenhouse gas, water vapor, from the atmosphere – which is a self-regulating part of the earth keeping a constant temperature – I don’t think we can predict how much warming there will be due to increasing CO2. It is a mat-ter of faith again, I think. We are not saying that we don’t believe that there can be sig-nificant global warming. As John said, if you add CO2, something has to change. But things are changing all the time anyway. The big question is: So what? How much is it going to change, compared to other things? And what can you do about it?
Roy Spencer
Cowardliness is the most pleasant of all passions; it is not noisy and strident, but quiet and suggestive and yet lustful, it attracts all the passions to itself, since in its association with them it is extremely engaging, knows how to maintain a friendship with them, and buries itself deep in the soul like somnolent vapor of stagnant water, which pestiferous breezes and deceptive phantoms rise, while the vapor still remains. What cowardliness fears most is the making of a resolution, because a resolution always disperses the vapor for a moment. The power cowardliness prefers to conspire with is time, because neither time nor cowardliness finds that there is any reason to hurry.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
The Balkan situation was far from secure, with the Odrysians and Scythians only recently defeated and with the Triballi still defiant. Yet Philip was confident of success in the interest of the Greek-speaking world and of Macedonia in particular.
N.G.L. Hammond
Beauty vanishes like a vapor,
Preach the men of musty morals.Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford
Man’s life is but a jest,
A dream, a shadow, bubble, air, a vapor at the best.George Walter Thornbury
Herodotus
Herr, Michael
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