Story submitted by Eric Worrall
“…snowfall was much heavier than recorded before or since, and the snow lay on the ground for many months longer than it does today. Many springs and summers were cold and wet, but with great variability between years and groups of years. Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of dearth and famine”
The quote above is attributed to Hubert Lamb, founder of the CRU, in the Wikipedia section on the Little Ice Age. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Alarmists who attempt to associate extreme weather with global warming, are glossing over the fact that the best evidence we have to date is that extreme weather is more likely to be associated with global cooling. The following Climategate email admits as much:
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0476.txt
The NYT reporter Andy Revkin proposed the following:-
“My sense is that Wally B’s notion that the ‘angry beast’ is a creature of colder eras but not of warmer times has some support.”
To which Athanasios Koutavas(?) replied:-
“… It’s true that by comparison with the glacial world, the interglacial climate has been less “angry”. …”
There is also the evidence of the “Year without a Summer”, a brutal volcanic weather disruption which occurred in 1816.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
” … Rapid, dramatic temperature swings were common, with temperatures sometimes reverting from normal or above-normal summer temperatures as high as 95 °F (35 °C) to near-freezing within hours. The weather was not in itself a hardship for those accustomed to long winters. The real problem lay in the weather’s effect on crops and thus on the supply of food and firewood. …”
Given the evidence that cold periods are “angry”, and the proposition that global warming will produce “angry” weather, we have two alternatives to consider:
1. Current conditions are a miraculous “optimum” – any deviation from current conditions, cold or warm, will cause increased incidence of extreme weather. This isn’t impossible, but as a scientific proposition it stinks.
2. Predictions that a warmer climate will produce increased incidence of extreme weather are just speculation. However, the proposition that a cooler climate would result in increased incidence of extreme weather is well supported by the evidence.
In conclusion, we know a cooler climate would lead to increased incidence of extreme weather, so spending vast sums in an effort to restore pre-industrial climatic conditions (i.e. the Little Ice Age) seems to be a less than sensible use of resources.
If we are causing a little global warming, and in doing so are putting some distance between global climatic conditions and the “angry” climatic conditions of the pre-industrial age, this has to be a good thing.
I found this on the internet.
“The average life expectancy in 1276 was 35.28 years. MWP
“Between 1301 and 1325 during the Great Famine it was 29.84,
while between 1348 and 1375, during the Black Death and subsequent plagues, it went down to only 17.33.” LIA
I don’t know but it does seem to me there is a correlation between warm and cold and health. with warm being better.
“I read it in a history book”
-Mosh
Mosh (and his fellow travelers) are still a bit peeved at Hubert Lamb for starting that historical myth about medieval warming:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031018265900040
To Mosher
For once you are right.
At a site called breadandbutterscience.com a retired Naval physicist and engineer has translated ancient weather events from 0AD- present. It is a very long but good read.
This is basic meteorology 101. Stephen Skinner summed it up nicely. The temperature at the Equator isn’t going to change all that much, but the high latitudes have more variability. When the high latitudes cool, the weather gets angry. Global warming will always reduce the amount of ‘angry’ weather, if surveyed over the entire globe. The notion that global warming would produce more extreme weather has always been a myth, unsupported by reason or observations. It was strictly part of the PR campaign, and a pretty stupid part, at that.
@Steve Mosher
A 5000 foot glacier over Chicago is not extreme?
“The gales of November remember.”
The strongest longest lasting storms in the solar system on planets are on Jupiter and Saturn. With very low CO2 by the way.
Mark Stoval says:
“With about 7 Billion humans on the planet, we have to have our industrial economy to feed, house, and clothe all of them. If we sink back into a world wide pre-industrial condition as the alarmists would like to see, then perhaps 6 Billion souls must perish”.
Environmentalism is now a totalitarian philosophy – this is what the enviros want – to take us back to the pre-industrial age where mankind can “co-exist” with the planet – without any impact on it whatsoever – just like they did in ancient times. Really? Mark is absolutely right about the need for an industrial economy without which about 6 bn people will have to be “disposed of” in order for this utopian (or should that be dystopian) vision of the “perfect” world to come about. Have these people not seen the Pyramids or are they unaware of their own allegation of association of the migration of people into N America 12000 yrs ago and those peoples’ alleged wipe out of much of the large fauna there at that time. No impact? This philosophy also means that all the people in the world who are at present poor will have to remain just that, never to be allowed to have a decent standard of living, good health and long life expectancy, free from disease. Gawd luv us.
Brian J in UK
M Courtney says: August 7, 2014 at 1:00 am
The extremes of weather aren’t changing at all. We just have better detection (especially over the oceans) and better communication.
________________________________
24 hr rolling news has a lot to answer for. Back in the 1930s or even 1950s, Typhoon Haiyan would have been reported a week after the event, on page 5, with a 2-inch column saying:
Quote:
“A large typhoon has passed through the Philippines last week, destroying one village. There have been a few casualties and widespread property damage on the north of Cebu island.”
.
And as an aside, the property damage was only because most houses are bamboo and tin shacks. I was there the week after, and all the concrete houses withstood the winds, most complete with their roofs. The only damage to concrete structures, was where they were hit by the storm surge.
It depends on when we get it. If we get it in January and February, then I am all for it. Sorry Arizona.
History? Who needs history? We don’t need no steenkin’ history; we’ve got models!
This just in on the state of the crops:
The GDD totals at Moline, Illinois relative to normal have been as follows.
May + 12.3
June + 15.2
July – 142.1
August to date: – 20.2
Total: -134.8
The month of September averages about 17 GDD per day, so as of today, we need an extra 7.9 days of growing season beyond average to get to maturity. Most of the crops south of the IA/MN border will probably make it.
In 2010 I posted a Thirty Year Climate Forecast at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2010/06/thirty-year-climate-forecast.html
Here’s an excerpt .It really states the obvious i.e, on a cooler earth the temperature gradient is greater from tropics to pole – the Jetstream goes more meridianal – temperature gradients across frontal boundaries are steeper and weather is much more variable and violent than on a more equable world. This is hardly surprising.
“Concurrent changes in the Arctic Oscillation suggest a pattern of meridianal atmospheric flow will be more common than the more latitudinal flows of warmer periods.
Policymakers may wish to note the following possible effects on earth’s climate for the next 20 – 30 years. A cooler world with lower SSTs usually means a dryer world. Thus droughts will be more likely in for example east Africa with possible monsoon failures in India. In California the PDO will mean less rainfall with more forest fires in the south. However in the Cascades and Northern Sierras snowpack could increase since more of the rain could occur as snow. Northern Hemisphere growing seasons will be shorter with occasional early and late frosts and drought in the US corn belt and in Asia repeats of the harsh Mongolian and Chinese winters of 2009 – 10 . In Europe cold snowy winters and cool cloudy summers will be more frequent .
There will be a steeper temperature gradient from the tropics to the poles so that violent thunderstorms with associated flooding and tornadoes will be more frequent in the USA, At the same time the jet stream will swing more sharply North – South thus local weather in the Northern hemisphere in particular will be generally more variable with occasional more northerly heat waves and more southerly unusually cold snaps. In the USA hurricanes may strike the east coast with greater frequency in summer and storm related blizzards more common in winter.
The southern continents will be generally cooler with more frequent droughts and frost and snow in winter,
Arctic and Antarctic sea ice may react differentially to an average global cooling. We might expect sea ice to increase in the Antarctic but in the NH the Arctic Oscillation while bringing cooler temperatures further south may also occasionally bring warmer air into the Arctic with possible relative loss of sea ice in that area during those years.
The most general advice is that world food production will be subject to occasional serious severe restriction because of cold and drought. The use of food crops for biofuels should be abandoned and stockpiles built up for possible lean times ahead.. Northern cities and transportation systems should prepare for more frequent heavy snow and ice storms.
There is no threat from the burning of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, indeed an increase in CO2 would positively help in feeding the burgeoning population.”
For the latest update on the coming cooling see the most recent post at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
Using data from the National Weather Service Archived Climate Pages from Tulsa International Airport (daily data 1983 to present):
Hottest average day for entire time is July 19 with average of 85.4. Ranges from 69 to 92 with standard deviation of 5.1.
Coldest day for entire time is December 24 with average of 32.1. Ranges from 2 to 47 with a standard deviation of 9.1.
February 3 has a standard deviation of 15.0 with a range of 2 to 61 and an average of 38.5.
July 8 has a standard deviation of 3.3 with a range of 76 to 89 and an average of 83.4.
A scatter plot of range versus average has a trend line with a decrease of .55 in range for each increase of 1 degree of average with a R^2 of .737.
A scatter plot of standard deviation versus average has a trend line with a decrease of .127 in standard deviation for each increase of 1 degree of average with a R^2 of ,772.
I suspect that this fits in nicely with Mr. Eschenbach’s theory of a nonlinear thermostat effect which tends to kick in at higher temperatures.
I wonder if the nice linear models show this sort of variability.
George Orwell ” Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Who controls the temperature data?
Who controls the major media?
They are not our friends.
@markstoval says: “With about 7 Billion humans on the planet, we have to have our industrial economy to feed, house, and clothe all of them. If we sink back into a world wide pre-industrial condition as the alarmists would like to see, then perhaps 6 Billion souls must perish. Are they not trying to kill off innocent men, women, and children on a scale never before seen in all our bloody history?”
That’s exactly what I read into all this. The Ehrlich “Population Bomb” presumption seems to be what is still driving all this hoopla. The premise that Billions must die to preserve some half-assed ideal that they arbitrarily set, which BTW, never includes themselves in those deserving the death sentence. Oh no! Who could possibly be qualified to arbitrate the “success” of this plan better than these extra-bright, and oh-so-insightful academics and politicians.
Mosher seems to think that unless something is written in code, it cannot be true. One could actually write code to describe the following graphic, but would that effort make it more true ur just harder to apprehend?
http://geosciencebigpicture.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/iceindex.png
Don’t believe what the history books say. Don’t believe what the tree rings say. Just sneer.
@Mosher, you may not know that, but anyone who has read Leroux does, and knows why and how.
thingadonta says:
August 7, 2014 at 12:56 am
You can get Lamb’s book The Climate History of the World, written I think in the 1980s on the net. It’s a good read, with a lot of good hard science data, but also infused with a lot of underlying socialist style claptrap (such as ‘the world is now more vulnerable to changes in climate than ever before etc etc”, actually with modern technology and advances in health and welfare the world is now LESS vulnerable, similar style misguided arguments occur throughout the book). Eventually the socialist claptrap evident in the text took over the actual hard data, which has now become very distorted. The book serves as a window into what became of climate science once it became too politicised.
The MWP and the LIA as well as all the normal stuff on solar activity and natural climate change is in the book, before most of this was bulldozed over by the likes of Mann and others later on. They have re-written over a lot of what Lamb discusses, but the book does have some good scientific stuff that serves as a useful historical context.
__________
Lamb wrote a 1977 book about climate which is free of most of this CO2 nonsense. You can buy an old-fashioned hardcover from a used book dealer (make sure you’re getting the 1970’s edition, though).
looks like Goddard has been popping Mosh’s history bubbles again……….
I remember reading an article that stated if you used the current population density in London, which I took to be fairly middle of the road, and you relocated every man, woman, and child on the entire planet, they could exist in an area the size of Texas with London’s population density.
My “friends” who complain about over-crowding and Earth’s “over population” refuse to accept that statistic, even though it’s nothing but simple math.
jim
jimmaine, see here
Sorry, messed the link. See here
Hope this doesn’t double post, don’t know what happened.
David Archibald says:
August 7, 2014 at 6:31 am
This just in on the state of the crops:
Better than last year, not by a whole lot, but we’ll take any improvements. Does this one start from May 15th also and last year was like -160 at this time? It was excellent until the July cold shots.