How do we really know if it's hotter now, or even cooler? Or if there are grand cycles involved?
While watching "Titanic" recently, I thought I'd do a bit of reading about the ship.
I stumbled onto this quote:
Titanic Secrets
"The winter of 1912 had been unusually mild, and unprecedented amounts of ice had broken loose from the arctic regions."
I thought that was a bit out of line with the current Global Warming panic.
Why would the ice be melting back before the SUV was invented?
The histroy of argiculture seems to provide an answer.
But the UN has chosen to omit (hide) this fact for some reason!
In 1996 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a chart showing climatic change over a period of 1000 years. This graph showed a Medieval warming period in which global temperatures were higher than they are today. In 2001 the IPCC issued another 1000 year graph in which the Medieval warming period was missing.
Why has one scientist promoting the cause of man-made global warming been quoted as saying "we have to get rid of the medieval warming period?"
Why? Come up with your own conclusion. I have mine.
Over the past 3,000 years there have been five different extended periods when the earth was measurably warmer than it is today.
In fact, one such period occurred relatively recently, the medieval warm period, more commonly known as the Little Climatic Optimum (LCO), a period stretching roughly from the 10th to the 13th centuries, in which the average temperature was anything from 1 to 3 degrees centigrade higher than it is today.
* How warm was it during the LCO? Areas in the Midlands and Scotland that cannot grow crops today were regularly farmed. England was known for its wine exports.
* The average height of Britons around A.D. 1000 was close to six feet, thanks to good nutrition. The small stature of the British lower classes (and the Irish) later in the millennium is an artifact of lower temperatures. People of the 20th century were the first Europeans in centuries to grow to their "true" stature - and most had to grow up in the USA to do it.
* In fact, famine - and its partner, plague -- appears to have taken a hike for several centuries. We have records of only a handful of famines during the LCO, and few mass outbreaks of disease. The bubonic plague itself appears to have retreated to its heartland of Central Asia.
* The LCO was the first age of transatlantic exploration. The Vikings were charting new lands across the North Atlantic, one of the stormiest seas on earth (only the Southern Ocean - the Roaring 40s - is worse). If you tried the same thing today, traveling their routes in open boats of the size they used, you would drown. They discovered Iceland, and Greenland, and a new world even beyond, where they found grape vines, the same as in England.
* The Agricultural Revolution is not widely known except among historians. Mild temperatures eased land clearing and lengthened growing seasons. More certain harvests encouraged experimentation among farmers involving field rotation, novel implements, and new crops such as legumes. While the thought of peas and beans may not thrill the foodies among us, they expanded an almost unbelievably bland ancient diet as well as providing new sources of nutrition. The result was a near-tripling of European population from 27 million at the end of the 7th century to 70 million in 1300.
* The First Industrial Revolution is not widely known even among historians. Opening the northern German plains allowed access to easily mined iron deposits in the Ruhr and the Saarland. As a result smithies and mills became common sights throughout Europe. Then came the basic inventions without which nothing more complex can be made - the compound crank, the connecting rod, the flywheel, followed by the turbine, the compass, the mechanical clock, and eyeglasses. Our entire technical civilization has its roots in the LCO.
But in the late 13th century, it all came to an end.
The climate cooled down. Rains ruined crops and washed away entire seacoast towns. Far to the north, the great colonies of Iceland and Greenland faltered and began to fade away. Famine returned to Europe, and with it the plague, in one of the greatest mass deaths ever witnessed by humanity. The bright centuries were replaced by the dance of death and a dank and morbid religiosity. The focus of culture shifted to the warm Mediterranean. It remained cold, within certain broad limits, for six hundred years. The chill only lifted in the 1850s, when our current warming actually began.
We look back to a world that was a far more pleasant place at the turn of the last millennium, with a milder climate, plentiful food, a healthy populace. A picture, needless to say, at some variance with the Greens' prediction of coming universal disaster. It also undermines one of one of the basic environmentalist tenets - that nature is in delicate balance that can destroyed by a hard look from any given capitalist, and that any such change leads inevitably to catastrophe.
The LCO suggests that a warmer world may well be more desirable than the one we have now.
It wasn't all that long ago that these very same scientists were warning us about "global cooling" and another approaching ice age?
On July 24, 1974 Time Magazine published an article entitled "Another Ice Age?" Here's the first paragraph:
"As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age."
Edited by Rogerdodger, 03 February 2007 - 01:41 PM.
