Guest post by S Jay Porter
In 891 AD. Eric The Red set off from Iceland with a few followers to explore a land to the west which they had probably spotted some time before while sailing out in their longboats, and then returned three years later with about 500 fellow Vikings. At first they settled on the south-east coast, close to the tip of this new land and then, as the population grew, created a further settlement to the south-west. They called their new home ‘Greenland’.
It has been said that this name was a ‘spin’, a publicity stunt to entice more Vikings to come to join the new settlers, but this would have been pointless if it had been impossible for them to survive. They must at least have been able to create their own dwellings, build their own fires, make their own clothes and above all, grow their own food. The settlers might have been able to trade such things as polar bear-skins and fox furs for iron and other necessities on occasional trips to Europe, but their compatriots in Denmark and Iceland would have been neither able nor willing to row their longboats out each month with groceries.
At present, the temperatures in Greenland range from a maximum of 7C in July to -9C in January. This is too cold for grain such as wheat and even rye to grow and ripen in the short summer of such northern latitudes. Nor are sheep and cattle happy at those temperatures. Hill sheep might be able to nibble away at moss and short grass, but cattle need lush meadows and hay to fatten and live through a winter. Solid wood is needed for building, boat building and warmth, but only bushes and such weak trees as birch now grow in Greenland.
In 1991, two caribou hunters stumbled over a log on a snowy Greenland riverbank, an unusual event because Greenland is now above the treeline. (1) Over the past century, further archaeological investigations found frozen sheep droppings, a cow barn, bones from pigs, sheep and goats and remains of rye, barley and wheat all of which indicate that the Vikings had large farmsteads with ample pastures. The Greenlanders obviously prospered, because from the number of farms in both settlements, whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about five thousand. They also built a cathedral and churches with graves which means that the soil must have been soft enough to dig, but these graves are now well below the permafrost (2).
There is also a story in ‘Landnamabok, the Icelandic Book of Settlement, which tells of a man who swam across his local fjord to fetch a sheep for a feast in honour of his cousin, the founder of Greenland, Erick the Red. Studies of Channel swimmers show that 10C would be the lowest temperature that a man would be able to endure for such a swim, but the average August temperature of water in the fjords along the southern Greenland coast now rarely exceeds 6C. The water at that time must therefore have been at least 4C warmer and probably more than that which means that the summer temperatures (for the air) in the fjords in southern Greenland would then have been 13C-14C, (3) as compared with the present temperatures mentioned above.
It follows that temperatures must have been higher than those of today’s during that first settlement of Greenland which lasted from approximately 900 until the mid-1400s AD, when these settlements died out. There is no written explanation for this sudden demise but climate scientists have discovered that Iceland, like the rest of Europe, was gripped by a rapid and centuries-long drop in temperature, known as the Little Ice Age. And in a recent study, William D’Andrea and Yongsong Huang of Brown University, Providence RI (4) have traced the variability of the Greenland climate over a period of 5,600 years when previous inhabitants were also subjected to rapid warm and cold swings in temperatures
Yet the whole reason for the existence of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is to thrust upon the world’s population the idea that industrialisation in the West over the last 100 years and our profligate use of fossil fuels is producing a run-away heating of the planet through the emission of greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, which unless checked will lead to its — and humanity’s — death. The western governments are happily looking forward to a vast increase in taxes to pay for measures to reduce ’carbon emissions’ and even the possibility of a Global Government to control everything has been mentioned (5).
So the possibility that temperatures were higher in the past in any part of the world was a thorn in the sides of those Climatologists who are wedded to the whole idea of Anthopogenic Global Warming (AGW), also known as Climate Change.
Unfortunately for them, an English Climatologist, Hubert H Lamb, first formulated the idea of a Medieval Warming Period (MWP) in 1965 and other surveys have found that this warming did not just occur in the northwestern hemisphere but was global (6). Lamb founded the UK Climate Research Unit (CRU) in 1971 and until the mid 1990s the MWP was undisputed fact and was shown even in the IPPC progress report of 1990. But Dr David Darning (University of Oklahoma College of Earth and Energy) in his recent testimony to Congress (7) said ‘…I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. It said “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”’ And this the ‘warmist’ Climatologists certainly tried to do.
In 1998 a graph was produced by geophysicist Michael Mann, known as the Hockey Stick Graph’, which managed to almost air-brush out of existence the Medieval Warming Period . This was published in the eminent scientific magazine Nature and also in several places in the IPPC Report of 2001 and created a world-wide sensation. Here was proof positive the world was overheating and it was All Our Fault.
However, investigation of the graph by historians and climatologists who doubted the existence of global warming, brought criticism centred around the statistical method used and the associated computer programme. It was eventually called the most discredited study in the history of science and quietly dropped by the IPPC from the latest 2007 IPPC report for policy makers.
The Hockey Stick graph had also attempted to remove the Little Ice Age which was another world-wide event, lasting from roughly the early 14th century to the mid-19th century with short interspersed warm periods. It is well-known from written reports that temperatures must at times have been considerably lower than in the Medieval Warming Period since Frost Fairs were often held on the frozen Thames until 1814 and in 1658, during the coldest period of the Little Ice Age, King Karl X Gustav of Sweden led an army across the frozen Danish waters to lay siege to Copenhagen.
It was also at this time that the Viking settlements in Greenland gradually died out. The Medieval Warming Period is usually agreed to have lasted from approximately 900 to approximately 1300 AD and from then onwards the climate cooled again. Glaciers grew, sea ice advanced and marine life migrated southwards as it did so, leaving the Greenlanders with a smaller and more difficult catch. The summers became shorter and progressively cooler, limiting the time cattle could be kept outdoors and increasing the need for winter fodder which became less available. Trade between Greenland, Iceland and Europe became more difficult and finally ceased. (3) It can only be hoped that a few Greenlanders escaped to re-settled somewhere less cold before starvation overcame them all.
But since temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period were higher in Greenland than they are even today, and since this was followed by a Cooling Period, and since this has happened many times before (which have not been considered here), the fact that the earth may have warmed somewhat since the mid 1850s is not unusual. Nor will it be unusual if the temperatures now start to drop.
Above all, since man was not industrialised before the mid-1850s and so was not emitting any huge amounts of CO2, any warming which has occurred over the past 150 years (for which we should be grateful) is obviously a natural event and —
— NOT ALL OUR FAULT!
——————————————————————————————————————————–
Word Count: 1,418
Sonya Porter
Source Material:
(1) http://watsupwiththat.com (The Viking farm under the sand in Greenland by Terese Brasen)
(2) http://www.archaeology.org
(3) ‘Heaven and Earth’ by Prof. Ian Plimer
(5) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lsltxgrr_o
(6) http://www.science-skeptical.de/blog
(7) http://epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements.cfm?id=266543
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Barry said:
[me]: The big-warming “scientist” attempts to deny past changes by hiding MWP
> How is it hidden when it is discussed in paleoclimate reconstructions from
> Mann 98/99 onwards and is discussed in the IPCC reports?
Yeah the IPCC/big-warming has just been totally up-front about MWP, huh? They only tried to iron it flat with statistical trickery.
And discussed? Discounted/dismissed maybe, but big-warming doesn’t go in for discussions:. the science is settled, doncha know…
> The talking point is scientists ‘hiding the MWP’, but that’s just a straw man.
Shedding the light of day on the perfidy of big-warming is hardly a straw man.
> Anyone who says anything categorically on this, on either side of the debate,
> is selling something.
Debate? Science is not a debate. And the selling job is coming from CAGW snake-oil peddlers.
I ain’t buying.
Barry,
Michael Mann tried to erase the MWP, despite reams of evidence that it existed on a global scale. This has been rehashed here so often that anyone still flogging that dead horse is just being an enabler for a known scientific charlatan.
You’re not fooling anyone, and you just look desperate. People here know about Mann. Run along and peddle your nonsense on realclimate, they’ll give it a better reception. WUWT [and CA] readers know that MBH98 through Mann ’08 have been totally debunked as the work of a self-serving propagandist. Mann has no more credibility now than Harold Camping.
Caleb, viking ships DO exist. Visit the museum in Oslo, or the one in Roskilde, Denmark. They may have been excavated from real or watery graves, but they are very real ships indeed.
Caleb, on fully reading your comment, you both say that a few viking ships exist from graves and that “no ships survive”. We have the ships from Roskilde Fjord because they were deliberately sunk to block enemy ships, and they were not carefully built royal ships. Thanks for all the links, and the stalwart defense of the Greenland Norse farmers, who, as you point out, had far more extensive farms than those of the present, without the luxury of importing animal feed. I would also mention without modern cold-adapted varieties of plants, plastic for greenhouse use and insulated buildings for the animals.
I have wondered for a long time why the Vikings experienced rapid expansion and conquest when they did. It seems that the conquering empires started in the latitudes of Egypt, then Persia and Greece and Rome, then a period of Viking expansion followed by the growth of the Spanish and British Empires. Maybe my history is not precise, but my question is this: Did global climate changes cause the populations of those various empires to grow and expand when they did? Has optimum climate for human development moved in parallel with empire growth and decline? Did the need for more space and resources drive the urge to conquer?
I have read about the development of Viking ships that permitted more seagoing expansion. But that does not explain the motivation of the Vikings to build the ships and undertake conquest. I wonder if there were demographic and economic factors, possibly related to climate and agriculture.
I would appreciate any suggestion about reference material on this.
Martin says:
June 2, 2011 at 7:12 pm
—
Was this the same “oil” slick that was hundreds of times smaller than we were told it was going to be?
barry says:
June 2, 2011 at 8:38 pm
—
The problem is that the melting ice sheet is being used as proof that CO2 causes significant warming.
If it is proven that the ice sheets can and do melt absent CO2 warming, then much of the proof that CO2 has much if any influence on climate disappears as well.
barry says:
[snippage of IPCC strawman BS]
Barry, I think your agenda is interfering with an honest take on the matter.
😉
Hi Smokey.
In 1999, there was very little data for the Southern Hemisphere, not ‘reams’ – nobody was doing global reconstructions then because it wasn’t possible.
For someone trying to ‘erase’ the MWP, Mann seems oddly keen to discuss how warm it may have been.
That’s from Mann et al (1999): Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations
You can say that these conclusions are overconfident, that the methodology was flawed, or that you believe temps were warmer a thousand years ago. But no one with a sober perspective can honestly claim Mann tried to ‘erase’ the MWP. And it appears in other reconstructions with varying magnitudes, including in later Mann studies. It ‘exists’.
But IMO this argument really boils down to the shape of a 12 year-old graph that appeared in the IPCC 2001. It’s not scientific rigour that drives skeptical anathema to Mann’s work, it’s about a graphic ‘icon’ and it’s supposed impact on policy makers and the public. It is, at base, a political argument. It will be good when all the outrage fades and we can take a dispassionate look at the (scientific) issue, instead of flogging dead horses.
Hi Mark W,
I think other evidence is leaned on for the significance of CO2. The melting ice sheet is evidence that the world is warming.
Well, you’ll never have anything ‘proved’ in science. There’s still much we don’t know about gravity, for example, yet we can land people on the moon. If it turns out that Greenland (or the world) was warmer 1000 years ago, that doesn’t change much else. CO2 will still be a greenhouse gas, its radiative properties will be the same, and climate sensitivity will still be assessed on a range of metrics. Some people argue that if the world was warmer 1000 years ago, then the climate system is more sensitive to perturbations, and climate sensitivity estimates could be too low.
The argument that, if it’s been warmer before the industrial revolution, before CO2 levels rose, then CO2 doesn’t cause warming, is completely illogical. Like saying there were forest fires before humans came along, therefore humans can’t cause forest fires to break out.
The idea that AGW evaporates if the globe was half a degree warmer 1000 years ago is a very unscientific conclusion, and yet many skeptics seem to believe that Mann et al is some kind of foundation stone that, because it is , flawed, brings the whole house down. It’s a simple, but absolutely specious narrative. Mann et al relates to the temperatures of the last 1000+ years, not ice-sheet sensitivity, or radiative dynamics. The interest in bashing it 12 years on is political in nature, which can easily be seen by the language in replies to me here – I mean, just read back and count the rhetorical phrases all lined up.
I should like to see one skeptic give;
1) the time period for the MWP
2) when exactly it was warmer globally than the last couple of decades
3) reasonable evidence to back this up, taking into account the full range of papers discussing global temps in the last millennium or so.
(Mann 1999, of course, was not a global reconstruction)
My understanding was that there were only three or four Viking ships that survived, mostly warships from graves, and that there were no examples of the trading knarr that sailed to Greenland. However I was interested when I read about the “ships from Roskilde Fjord.” Hopefully I’m not too old to learn, especially about Vikings, because they’ve always fascinated me.
There is no evidence for forests in Greenland at the time of the Norse colonization. At most there were small stands of spindly birch, alder and/or willows in sheltered locations at the base of long fjords in SW Greenland. Meadows, wild flowers, sure. Not forests, unless you go back a very long time on Disko Island.
The southernmost tip of Greenland had abnormal temperatures two winters ago allowing some tufts of grass to winter over. Greenland “farming” is very modest, people using plastic tarps over vegetable gardens. Recently a Scandinavian berry-growing project decided to become more active in Greenland, according to knr.gl
The rising temperature at sea level is probably down to a change in the cold Arctic current that circulates along the coasts.
The popular story that Erik the Red called it Greenland to attract settlers goes back to one of the versions of the origin of the name contained in the Icelandic sagas. It makes a good story, anyway. Probably the name was originally Grundt-land, meaning more or less “gravel land.” Erik wasn’t the discover, an earlier Icelander was blown off course and brought back a report, maybe even landed there, I don’t recall now.
The Viking farmers (and most Vikings were farmers throughout all the Viking domains) needed lumber so much they had to import it from Scandinavia until Leif Erikson brought back tales of wood to the west, whereupon an expedition was launched to bring some of this precious commodity back from what is now maritime Canada. Greenland doesn’t have any native wood, unless you get lucky and strike a vein of petrified forest somewhere, but then you’re still dealing with masonry that won’t float on water. The only wood is what washes up on shore, some of it larger logs from somewhere in Siberia (explain that one), laryx spp I think mainly. Drift logs would have been an important commodity in the Norse settlements.
There has been a project for some years now to adapt cold-hardy trees to Greenland and there is even a small “forest,” even featured in the Greenland Airlines on-flight freebie magazine, called the Greenland Arboretum:
http://en.sl.life.ku.dk/Faciliteter/GroenlandsArboretet.aspx?forside=false&expath=&type=
It makes me think how arrogant we are sometimes in talking glibly of terraforming Mars, while we cannot even do afforestation on anything more than a hobby basis in the colder climes of our own planet.
Oops, old link is dead. Here’s something about the Greenlandic arboretum:
http://www.stamps.gl/en-us/news/newslist/sider/05012011.aspx
Caleb
You missed the obvious point. In a story about a man who swims across a Fjord to fetch a sheep for a wedding, does that strike you as evidence you would accept if say
mann offerred it up?
I think not.
Those that postulate current CO2 causation (as opposed to historical natural drivers) fail miserably regarding the energy required to warm up Greenland. The only place that energy could have come from at that time in history would be within the confines of a weather pattern variation (think stationary pressure systems that parked themselves over Greenland, or major influx of warm ocean currents along the coastline).
Pamela,
The most northerly viking settlements were on the west coast and surprisingly far north. They were all located on the east/northeast sides of fairly high mountains. This would have been because Foehn winds in the lee of these mountains made these locations warmer.
This precludes stationary high pressure as a cause of warming and indicates the opposite, stronger westerly/southwesterly winds (than present times), may well have been a partial cause of these locations being warm enough for farming during the MWP.
Although only a partial cause as the overall climate must have been substantially warmer than at present to grow the crops we know they grew there.
“Iceland” is no more than the familiar root word “island”, which is pronounced with a soft “s” in Old Norse, rather than being entirely left out as it is in English.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%8Dsland
Nothing at all to do with ice or climate.
“Greenland was also called Gruntland (‘Ground-land’) and Engronelant (or Engroneland) on early maps. Whether green is an erroneous transcription of grunt (‘ground’), which refers to shallow bays, or vice versa, is not known.”
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Greenland
Not about climate, but history: Eirik Raude (Erik the Red) was – as the majority of people in Iceland and Greenland those days – a norwegian (Norse). According to the Sagas, he was born and grew up near Sola at Jaeren in south-western Norway.
After beeing involved in murder with his father, he fled to Iceland, which was inhabited by people who a few generations earlier started coming from all over western Norway (many local chieftans departed to avoid subjection to king Harald Finehair) and from the norwegian colonies on the islands around Scotland – most probably including keltic slaves. (Irish monks had been there before of course, but to make a population grow, you either need women or steady new visitors..)
After a short stop in Iceland (some sources say 2 years) , Eirik was once again involved in murder, and had to flee. The Landnámábok says he set off with 25 ships to Greenland, only 14 arrived, and he was the first to establish a colony there – around 985. According to the Saga, he named it Greenland to inspire people to go there. And if so, the name means “green”, as in Gore..
Gunnbjörn was said to be the first to discover the island. Eirik’s son Leif Eiriksson may have been born during Eirik’s short, murderous, stay in Iceland, though he is allways referred to as a “Greenlander”.
To survive and grow, the colony in Greenland was obviously dependent on a steady contact with their relatives back home in Norway and Iceland. As Iceland was primarily oriented towards Norway and the norwegian “keltic” colonies, so was Greenland. The greenlanders imported iron, timber, grain and luxury goods, which was paid for by pelts of polar bears and foxes, hunting falcons, walrus tusks, narwhale tusks, whalebone, rope from whalrus hide, baleen from whales, and live polar bears (!) (ref. danish historian Else Roesdahl).
The shipping between Greenland and Norway was the greenlanders’ life-line, and that life-line broke in the fist part of The Little Ice Age. The traditional sailing route between Greenland and Norway along 65N was given up in 1342 (Humlum). Sailing 64N continued to some degree, but in 1369, after a trade ship from Greenland went down by the norwegian coast, the contact was broken (Humlum).
Vinland, Markland , Greenland map
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland_map
The Vinland Map first came to light in 1957 (three years before the discovery of the Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows in 1960), on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland
One of the reasons its said to be a fake is it accurately shows Greenland as an Island,
During the Medieval warm period would it have been possible for the Vikings to have identified Greenland as an Island?