We keep coming back to this. If there is a lag... and there probably is... What is the explanation for the 1942-1980 cool period? A sudden drop in output during 1920-1930?
Yes. I learned that from an episode of Nova covering the heavy water processing facility in Norway during WW II.
Fortunately for my argument, heavy water is not known to naturally occur. The concentration of deuterium in the ice is the same as the water. Hence the ice will float on the water.
I don't have the proof in front of me, and frankly, I don't see how it's my responsibility to find it for you. It's in several published papers--if you're in the field you'll know how to find them.
Ad hominem? Notice how instead of addressing the argument, you are belittling me.
The models that are projecting increased temperatures--and pointing a finger at CO2 as an important forcing in that trend--are capable of simulating the temperature trends of the 20th century. In fact one even correctly predicted the affect of an eruption--confirmed by Pinatubo in 1991.
Now that is newsworthy. The scientists in the article, who are in the field, directly contradict you. What model has accurately predicted global climate for the 15 years FOLLOWING its prediction (i.e., a model in 1991 that has predicted the last 15 years of warming)?
That is... one person starting a campfire => below the noise floor of global temperature... lots of Eurasians starting campires => still below noise floor... everybody in England burning the King's forests => still below the noise floor... 1980's oil burning => possibly the first time human CO2 makes a measurable impact on mean world temperature.
And therein lies another problem. Because the delta in temperature between 1980 and today isn't much different than the delta in temperature around the 1930's. If the 1980's is the first time the CO2 has been above the noise floor, why was there a similar jump in the 1930's?
As for your 1942-1980 argument, I find it immaterial when faced with the evidence at hand.
No, you find it inconvenient. Your evidence consists of at best 100 years of measured data, and you have anomalies for almost half of them that don't support your argument (1942-1980 is not the only such problem).
Did you notice how you did not answer the question?
Oil is not the sole source of CO2 in the atmosphere. It is not even the source of most of it. It's not like coal and natural gas weren't being used back then. CO2 output was rising 10-15 years before the cooling period as well as during. You haven't accounted for the anomaly yet.
I'm pretty sure you did not say what you meant to say. All Frozen water floats in liquid water. Thus some amount of it is above the water. When that frozen water melts, the water level does not change.
Since most of the north polar cap is floating on the water, if it melts it will not contribute to sea levels (except possibly to thermal expansion once melted).
In 1942 and 1980 the global mean temperature was approximately the same. In every year between those two the mean temperature was lower than those years. Since CO2 output was continuing to increase during this period of nearly four decades, why didn't the global mean temperature increase as well?
The pro-global warming camp never seems to explain this. Indeed the record setting 1969 Atlantic hurricane season happened during this "cool" period. If positive increase in global temperature are associated with more powerful storms, what happened here?
Keep in mind that the onus is on those pushing the new theory to fit these facts into their model. Behind all the media glitz, there are some serious questions being asked with very poor answers being offered. Is this warming bad? How much is natural variation vs. human made? The data really looks like it's a bit of both, but there simply isn't enough data to speak conclusively.
I like knowing that I will never need to throw away old hardware because neither the OS vendor nor the hardware vendor cares to provide drivers for the latest version of the OS.
So do I. Do you know of any OS that works like this? Linux doesn't.
I like knowing that the driver API is optimal, without contortions for compatibility with an ABI that might be getting obsolete.
Yeah, that's nice. The problem is if the API ever becomes more optimal, ALL the drivers need to change. So unless the hardware vendor has someone on staff or a kernel developer feels compelled, your hardware drifts into unsupported land.
I like knowing that nothing on my system will phone home to tell Sony about my sins.
Is there something about Linux that renders it incapable of running spyware?
1) DDT did not decimate the ecosystem of Borneo 2) There were no outbreaks of plague or typhus. Every instance you find of someone saying this is someone retelling a trumped up story they heard. The cats were dropped because there was FEAR an outbreak would occur. It didn't. 3) The insect control measures in Borneo are today considered to have been a great success. The problem of malaria went away. Thousands of children lived who might otherwise have died, and as I mentioned, there was no outbreak of plague or typhus. 4) Sorry, I just don't take USAID's position on DDT seriously. They have in the past shown themselves to be tools of of the anti-DDT environmental lobby.
Configuring a modern Linux desktop is no harder nor any more metaphorically abstract than the average Windows or Mac OS X desktop
A few years ago I bought an Epson Stylus Photo R300. Fairly new printer at the time. It's a very high quality consumer-level 6 color inkjet printer. To install it on windows I inserted the installation CD, hit "next" a few times, plugged in the USB cable and I was done. Once installed I found there were a bunch of cool print driver features I could use - like print preview at the driver level so I could see exactly what would be printed. Saved me about a hundred bad prints throughout the first year.
I didn't install it on my Linux systems because there was no driver for it. Once there was a driver for it I had to upgrade two different printing systems (CUPS and GimpPrint I think). I still haven't figured out how to get a driver-level print preview.
Installing for Linux required about 9 months and upgrades to two pieces of software. Installing for windows took about 9 minutes. Not every complaint about Linux is false.
I believe that this article does an excellent job of painting the picture of what the first day of the war with Iran will be like.
I think that article is hilarious in that it blatantly ignores how Iraq was rolled in so short a time - twice. I'm as anti-Iran-war as the next guy, but the far-left nutjobs who write this crap are just pathetic.
1) The fighter jets don't take off before dawn, they take off before sunset. 2) The first jets to arrive are ultra-low radar cross section bombers. 3) When the air defense systems are turned on, anti-radiation weapons start neutralizing their radar stations. 4) By mid-morning, you're getting hit by the 10th strike, not the third. 5) Planes stationed near the gulf were unable to take off to down the tankers because every runway within 30 minutes flight time to the persian gulf was pitted with craters from anti-pavement weapons. 6) The anti-ship missiles managed to get within 2km of american ships before the phalanx close-in weapon systems, firing 75 20mm shells per second ripped the missiles to shreds, sending them splashing into the persian gulf. 7) The torrent of missiles lasted barely 10 minutes before the launching sites were neutralized and less than 1 in 10 managed to hit a high-value target since the missile guidance system was poor and the Patriot PAC-3 batteries took out nearly all those able to get sufficiently close.
The quote says that it is wrong to blame a single weather event specifically on global warming, full stop.
No read it again. The sentence continues after that.
Would Katrina have happened without GW, based solely on a natural cycle effect? Probably not.
No, but weather is most definitely a natural process. Thus in absence of convincing evidence otherwise, nature is the assumption.
Would Katrina have happened without a natural cycle effect, based solely on GW? Probably not.
No. That's the first question that was proposed, and the answer was no.
Would Katrina have happened without a small boy in Eastern Africa coughing at precisely 1300 on new year's day, 2000? Probably not.
No. That could be shown with any reasonable confidence interval to be a non-causal factor.
But if our data point is one single dot, then it would be fallacious to declare any single factor as 'the one'.
No.
What the statement says is that asking 'was this caused by humans' is the wrong question
No.
because if you are talking about single events in chaotic systems like the weather, you can ask 'was this caused by X' for practically any X and get 'yes' with a near 100% confidence interval.
Most emphatically no.
Did you ever take a formal course in statistics? One requiring differential calculus or better?
That article is a fine example of the bullshit logic that pro-GW forces like to use when backed into a corner:
Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.
Sorry, where I come from we have what's called the null hypothesis. In any research asking "was this caused by humans?" the null hypothesis is "no." This sort of language is the crap you see when they don't want to come out and knock a block out of the humans-caused-global-warming super structure. Unless you have evidence to suggest that it was not natural, the assumption is that it was. They've turned a normal statistical test bad by asking it both ways: "was this caused by humans?" and "was this natural?" Since neither will get your confidence interval you say "oh, see, we just don't know." Like hell, you only do that sort of thing when the answer to the first question doesn't fit your agenda.
So what this study really asks, as interpreted by Christians (or other monotheists) is whether their deity chooses to respond in a way solely calculated to reveal his or herself -- none of the praying people were vested in the lives of those being prayed for (eg, the people themselves or their families), so *if* there was a God listening, he/she/it would have no reason to respond to the prayer other than to confirm his/her/its existence (via "the power of prayer").
About once a week, the women's group at my wife's church emails out a prayer request chain where prayer is asked for people she and 95% of the people on that list do not know. It's a touchy subject around the house because I categorically reject the notion that God would give greater attention to whomever has the most "prayer votes." There are many, many Christians who believe exactly that: if you can just get enough people to pray for you, God will intervene.
I don't think this study would help a single believer come to the conclusion that prayer chains don't work, but it might improve the critical thinking skills of those whose cognitive facilities are still moldable.
Okay I posted this in another thread, but it bears repeating.
This is not the first study that has reported heavy cell phone users getting cancer on the same side of their head as they use the cell phone. Unfortunately in both this study, and previous disputed studies, that question was often asked of patients who already had cancer and knew which side it was on. Involving controls was always deemed as being... oh I don't know what it was deemed as being: Too proper? Too Responsible? Too obvious? The studies were never properly blinded or controlled.
Unless this population of people (heavy cell phone users) has a statistically significant higher probability of getting cancer on one side of their head than the other, which the study has not asserted, the findings are dubious.
what percentage of right-handed people have malignant tumors on the left-side of their brains (left brian controls right body) and left-handers with maligincies in the right side of the brain.
In studies that suggest cell phones cause cancer, the argument falls apart shortly after the questions start to look like yours. In previous studies the "smoking gun" was: "aha! people generally get cancer on the side of their head they use the cell phone."
Shortly afterwards some people took another look at the statistics and asked "Why is it that the left/right tumor ratio in heavy cell phone users is the same as the left/right tumor ratio in non-cell phone users?" When observing heavy cell phone users as controls, there was a definite correlation between handedness and the side of the head preferred for cell phone usage.
When looking at the data the answer was obvious: they asked people who knew they had cancer and which side it was on. Inevitably people, looking for some cause or reason for their grief report that they use the cell on the cancer side more. This doesn't mean they are lying. Simply that in the situation their minds naturally "select" which memories to conjure up.
I don't trust this Swedish study because they have not learned the lesson learned before - You cannot ask someone who knows where their tumor is which side of the head they use their cell. At least, you cannot do so and expect good data back.
Are you suggesting that the good Dr. let something as simple as an incorrect base assumption get in the way of a good headline?!
Someone pointed out in another thread this link. Looks like a cyclic pattern with a mean substantially less than 75 years to me.
But then, how would you draw attention and grant funding to your research with a headline like "Warmer oceans follow expected hurricane cyclic trend, increase in severe hurricanes to follow in the coming years without needing to blame global warming." Gah, almost put me to sleep just writing it.
I think what the parent post meant was that we've had 30 years of unusual low numbers of hurricanes. The table certainly suggests that we are due for an increase in the number of severe hurricanes. In the 30 year span from 1971-2000 there were 14 severe hurricanes. There is only one other period of time (1861-1890) with fewer hurricanes, which was followed by the 1891-1900 decade with an unusually high 8 severe hurricanes.
If there's a recurring pattern, I would expect 2001-2010 to have between 7 and 10 (inclusive) major hurricanes. In the four years spanning 2001-2004, we've had 3. I would say we're right on track with where we should expect to be. The question is, will have another 30 year stretch like 1931-1960 or something more reasonable? I'm sure if we did have another 1931-1960 hurrican "peak" period, it would get blamed on global warming even though such an event would not be unheard of.
In my opinion, the research in question made a VERY SERIOUS statistical error. They said there is a 75 year recurring hurricane pattern when we only have reliable data for at most 2 cycles. Effectively they have a sample size of 2 - if their 75 year hurricane periodicity hypotheses is correct.
Little note: Marriage has nothign to do with love it started as a property contract between a man and the family of a girl. It's shifted a bit over the last 200 years (yes the chaneg was very recent).
What?! Some of that may have been true among limited socioeconomic classes in some cultures (especially including landed gentry and nobility in western societies), but we have historical documents stretching thousands of years indicating that the primary purpose of marriage among the vast majority of people was procreation.
Several religions kicked it up a notch and made it not just about procreation but sex itself. Why would sex and marriage be so closely intertwined if the real purpose were property - an asset most people would have virtually none of?
Slashdot Mirror
A patent on a music player navigation menu?!
I guess it is completely non-obvious and innovative that a portable music player would need a menu to navigate through its songs.
I must be brilliant because that requirement seemed pretty obvious to me.
And those who beat strawmen are, ironically, those who oppose beating strawmen.
I think a reasonable person could parse who I was referring to when I said "pro-global warming".
We keep coming back to this. If there is a lag... and there probably is... What is the explanation for the 1942-1980 cool period? A sudden drop in output during 1920-1930?
Sure it will. Did you have a point to make?
Yes. I learned that from an episode of Nova covering the heavy water processing facility in Norway during WW II.
Fortunately for my argument, heavy water is not known to naturally occur. The concentration of deuterium in the ice is the same as the water. Hence the ice will float on the water.
I don't have the proof in front of me, and frankly, I don't see how it's my responsibility to find it for you. It's in several published papers--if you're in the field you'll know how to find them.
Ad hominem? Notice how instead of addressing the argument, you are belittling me.
The models that are projecting increased temperatures--and pointing a finger at CO2 as an important forcing in that trend--are capable of simulating the temperature trends of the 20th century. In fact one even correctly predicted the affect of an eruption--confirmed by Pinatubo in 1991.
Now that is newsworthy. The scientists in the article, who are in the field, directly contradict you. What model has accurately predicted global climate for the 15 years FOLLOWING its prediction (i.e., a model in 1991 that has predicted the last 15 years of warming)?
Oooh, nice strawman. Care to answer the question?
That is... one person starting a campfire => below the noise floor of global temperature... lots of Eurasians starting campires => still below noise floor... everybody in England burning the King's forests => still below the noise floor... 1980's oil burning => possibly the first time human CO2 makes a measurable impact on mean world temperature.
And therein lies another problem. Because the delta in temperature between 1980 and today isn't much different than the delta in temperature around the 1930's. If the 1980's is the first time the CO2 has been above the noise floor, why was there a similar jump in the 1930's?
Once again, the data is lacking.
As for your 1942-1980 argument, I find it immaterial when faced with the evidence at hand.
No, you find it inconvenient. Your evidence consists of at best 100 years of measured data, and you have anomalies for almost half of them that don't support your argument (1942-1980 is not the only such problem).
Did you notice how you did not answer the question?
Oil is not the sole source of CO2 in the atmosphere. It is not even the source of most of it. It's not like coal and natural gas weren't being used back then. CO2 output was rising 10-15 years before the cooling period as well as during. You haven't accounted for the anomaly yet.
I'm pretty sure you did not say what you meant to say. All Frozen water floats in liquid water. Thus some amount of it is above the water. When that frozen water melts, the water level does not change.
Since most of the north polar cap is floating on the water, if it melts it will not contribute to sea levels (except possibly to thermal expansion once melted).
In 1942 and 1980 the global mean temperature was approximately the same. In every year between those two the mean temperature was lower than those years. Since CO2 output was continuing to increase during this period of nearly four decades, why didn't the global mean temperature increase as well?
The pro-global warming camp never seems to explain this. Indeed the record setting 1969 Atlantic hurricane season happened during this "cool" period. If positive increase in global temperature are associated with more powerful storms, what happened here?
Keep in mind that the onus is on those pushing the new theory to fit these facts into their model. Behind all the media glitz, there are some serious questions being asked with very poor answers being offered. Is this warming bad? How much is natural variation vs. human made? The data really looks like it's a bit of both, but there simply isn't enough data to speak conclusively.
I like knowing that I will never need to throw away old hardware because neither the OS vendor nor the hardware vendor cares to provide drivers for the latest version of the OS.
So do I. Do you know of any OS that works like this? Linux doesn't.
I like knowing that the driver API is optimal, without contortions for compatibility with an ABI that might be getting obsolete.
Yeah, that's nice. The problem is if the API ever becomes more optimal, ALL the drivers need to change. So unless the hardware vendor has someone on staff or a kernel developer feels compelled, your hardware drifts into unsupported land.
I like knowing that nothing on my system will phone home to tell Sony about my sins.
Is there something about Linux that renders it incapable of running spyware?
1) DDT did not decimate the ecosystem of Borneo
2) There were no outbreaks of plague or typhus. Every instance you find of someone saying this is someone retelling a trumped up story they heard. The cats were dropped because there was FEAR an outbreak would occur. It didn't.
3) The insect control measures in Borneo are today considered to have been a great success. The problem of malaria went away. Thousands of children lived who might otherwise have died, and as I mentioned, there was no outbreak of plague or typhus.
4) Sorry, I just don't take USAID's position on DDT seriously. They have in the past shown themselves to be tools of of the anti-DDT environmental lobby.
If it isn't (and some day it won't be), Linux will still support it.
Since Microsoft will no longer be doing that (at some point) XP *will* die.
What is it that the Linux folks are always accusing Microsoft of? FUD? Isn't that what you just wrote?
Configuring a modern Linux desktop is no harder nor any more metaphorically abstract than the average Windows or Mac OS X desktop
A few years ago I bought an Epson Stylus Photo R300. Fairly new printer at the time. It's a very high quality consumer-level 6 color inkjet printer. To install it on windows I inserted the installation CD, hit "next" a few times, plugged in the USB cable and I was done. Once installed I found there were a bunch of cool print driver features I could use - like print preview at the driver level so I could see exactly what would be printed. Saved me about a hundred bad prints throughout the first year.
I didn't install it on my Linux systems because there was no driver for it. Once there was a driver for it I had to upgrade two different printing systems (CUPS and GimpPrint I think). I still haven't figured out how to get a driver-level print preview.
Installing for Linux required about 9 months and upgrades to two pieces of software. Installing for windows took about 9 minutes. Not every complaint about Linux is false.
I believe that this article does an excellent job of painting the picture of what the first day of the war with Iran will be like.
I think that article is hilarious in that it blatantly ignores how Iraq was rolled in so short a time - twice. I'm as anti-Iran-war as the next guy, but the far-left nutjobs who write this crap are just pathetic.
1) The fighter jets don't take off before dawn, they take off before sunset.
2) The first jets to arrive are ultra-low radar cross section bombers.
3) When the air defense systems are turned on, anti-radiation weapons start neutralizing their radar stations.
4) By mid-morning, you're getting hit by the 10th strike, not the third.
5) Planes stationed near the gulf were unable to take off to down the tankers because every runway within 30 minutes flight time to the persian gulf was pitted with craters from anti-pavement weapons.
6) The anti-ship missiles managed to get within 2km of american ships before the phalanx close-in weapon systems, firing 75 20mm shells per second ripped the missiles to shreds, sending them splashing into the persian gulf.
7) The torrent of missiles lasted barely 10 minutes before the launching sites were neutralized and less than 1 in 10 managed to hit a high-value target since the missile guidance system was poor and the Patriot PAC-3 batteries took out nearly all those able to get sufficiently close.
The quote says that it is wrong to blame a single weather event specifically on global warming, full stop.
No read it again. The sentence continues after that.
Would Katrina have happened without GW, based solely on a natural cycle effect? Probably not.
No, but weather is most definitely a natural process. Thus in absence of convincing evidence otherwise, nature is the assumption.
Would Katrina have happened without a natural cycle effect, based solely on GW? Probably not.
No. That's the first question that was proposed, and the answer was no.
Would Katrina have happened without a small boy in Eastern Africa coughing at precisely 1300 on new year's day, 2000? Probably not.
No. That could be shown with any reasonable confidence interval to be a non-causal factor.
But if our data point is one single dot, then it would be fallacious to declare any single factor as 'the one'.
No.
What the statement says is that asking 'was this caused by humans' is the wrong question
No.
because if you are talking about single events in chaotic systems like the weather, you can ask 'was this caused by X' for practically any X and get 'yes' with a near 100% confidence interval.
Most emphatically no.
Did you ever take a formal course in statistics? One requiring differential calculus or better?
That article is a fine example of the bullshit logic that pro-GW forces like to use when backed into a corner:
Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.
Sorry, where I come from we have what's called the null hypothesis. In any research asking "was this caused by humans?" the null hypothesis is "no." This sort of language is the crap you see when they don't want to come out and knock a block out of the humans-caused-global-warming super structure. Unless you have evidence to suggest that it was not natural, the assumption is that it was. They've turned a normal statistical test bad by asking it both ways: "was this caused by humans?" and "was this natural?" Since neither will get your confidence interval you say "oh, see, we just don't know." Like hell, you only do that sort of thing when the answer to the first question doesn't fit your agenda.
So what this study really asks, as interpreted by Christians (or other monotheists) is whether their deity chooses to respond in a way solely calculated to reveal his or herself -- none of the praying people were vested in the lives of those being prayed for (eg, the people themselves or their families), so *if* there was a God listening, he/she/it would have no reason to respond to the prayer other than to confirm his/her/its existence (via "the power of prayer").
About once a week, the women's group at my wife's church emails out a prayer request chain where prayer is asked for people she and 95% of the people on that list do not know. It's a touchy subject around the house because I categorically reject the notion that God would give greater attention to whomever has the most "prayer votes." There are many, many Christians who believe exactly that: if you can just get enough people to pray for you, God will intervene.
I don't think this study would help a single believer come to the conclusion that prayer chains don't work, but it might improve the critical thinking skills of those whose cognitive facilities are still moldable.
Okay I posted this in another thread, but it bears repeating.
This is not the first study that has reported heavy cell phone users getting cancer on the same side of their head as they use the cell phone. Unfortunately in both this study, and previous disputed studies, that question was often asked of patients who already had cancer and knew which side it was on. Involving controls was always deemed as being... oh I don't know what it was deemed as being: Too proper? Too Responsible? Too obvious? The studies were never properly blinded or controlled.
Unless this population of people (heavy cell phone users) has a statistically significant higher probability of getting cancer on one side of their head than the other, which the study has not asserted, the findings are dubious.
what percentage of right-handed people have malignant tumors on the left-side of their brains (left brian controls right body) and left-handers with maligincies in the right side of the brain.
In studies that suggest cell phones cause cancer, the argument falls apart shortly after the questions start to look like yours. In previous studies the "smoking gun" was: "aha! people generally get cancer on the side of their head they use the cell phone."
Shortly afterwards some people took another look at the statistics and asked "Why is it that the left/right tumor ratio in heavy cell phone users is the same as the left/right tumor ratio in non-cell phone users?" When observing heavy cell phone users as controls, there was a definite correlation between handedness and the side of the head preferred for cell phone usage.
When looking at the data the answer was obvious: they asked people who knew they had cancer and which side it was on. Inevitably people, looking for some cause or reason for their grief report that they use the cell on the cancer side more. This doesn't mean they are lying. Simply that in the situation their minds naturally "select" which memories to conjure up.
I don't trust this Swedish study because they have not learned the lesson learned before - You cannot ask someone who knows where their tumor is which side of the head they use their cell. At least, you cannot do so and expect good data back.
Are you suggesting that the good Dr. let something as simple as an incorrect base assumption get in the way of a good headline?!
Someone pointed out in another thread this link. Looks like a cyclic pattern with a mean substantially less than 75 years to me.
But then, how would you draw attention and grant funding to your research with a headline like "Warmer oceans follow expected hurricane cyclic trend, increase in severe hurricanes to follow in the coming years without needing to blame global warming." Gah, almost put me to sleep just writing it.
I think what the parent post meant was that we've had 30 years of unusual low numbers of hurricanes. The table certainly suggests that we are due for an increase in the number of severe hurricanes. In the 30 year span from 1971-2000 there were 14 severe hurricanes. There is only one other period of time (1861-1890) with fewer hurricanes, which was followed by the 1891-1900 decade with an unusually high 8 severe hurricanes.
If there's a recurring pattern, I would expect 2001-2010 to have between 7 and 10 (inclusive) major hurricanes. In the four years spanning 2001-2004, we've had 3. I would say we're right on track with where we should expect to be. The question is, will have another 30 year stretch like 1931-1960 or something more reasonable? I'm sure if we did have another 1931-1960 hurrican "peak" period, it would get blamed on global warming even though such an event would not be unheard of.
In my opinion, the research in question made a VERY SERIOUS statistical error. They said there is a 75 year recurring hurricane pattern when we only have reliable data for at most 2 cycles. Effectively they have a sample size of 2 - if their 75 year hurricane periodicity hypotheses is correct.
Little note: Marriage has nothign to do with love it started as a property contract between a man and the family of a girl. It's shifted a bit over the last 200 years (yes the chaneg was very recent).
What?! Some of that may have been true among limited socioeconomic classes in some cultures (especially including landed gentry and nobility in western societies), but we have historical documents stretching thousands of years indicating that the primary purpose of marriage among the vast majority of people was procreation.
Several religions kicked it up a notch and made it not just about procreation but sex itself. Why would sex and marriage be so closely intertwined if the real purpose were property - an asset most people would have virtually none of?