Guest opinion by Viv Forbes
It was ice, not global warming, that killed and entombed millions of mammoths and woolly rhinos in Siberia and Alaska.
It was unrelenting cold and then ice, not global warming, that forced the Vikings out of Greenland.
It was bitter winters, not heat waves, that finally defeated the armies of Napoleon and Hitler in Russia.
George Washington’s army also suffered from an unusually bitter winter at Valley Forge in 1778, in the depths of the Little Ice Age.
Snowy blizzards periodically kill more cattle than heatwaves in Colorado, South Dakota and Texas.
When the Tambora volcano exploded in 1816 it spewed massive volumes of ash and “greenhouse” gases including carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There was no global warming from the greenhouse gases, but the heat-blocking ash-filled atmosphere and a quiet sun caused “the year without a summer”. Failed crops and famine stalked Europe, Asia and America.
It is icebergs, not warm oceans, that sink ships like the Titanic, and spreading sea ice trapped “The Ship of Fools” in Antarctica.
Every major geological era has ended with massive volcanism on land and under the seas. Molten lava heats the seas and eruptions on land fill the atmosphere with dust which blocks incoming solar energy. There is rapid evaporation from the warm seas followed by rapid condensation in the cold dark atmosphere. This process dumps massive snowfalls which become ice sheets on land, starting a new ice age and bringing the extinction of many species.
It is lethal global cooling we need to fear, not life-sustaining global warming.
AGW does not mean that all the temps just go up a comfortable few degrees and that the plants grow better.
“It is lethal global cooling we need to fear, not life-sustaining global warming.”
That’s one of the stupidest statements I ever read
Sun cycles 24-27 return a 400-year grand minimum.
Finally, someone who gets it. This is the truth of the matter! I hope CO2 is responsible for a degree or 2 of warming, since a significant cooling period is something to be truly terrified about. Especially now that the people of the good Earth have developed a civilization of 7.6 billion people within one of the most stable climate periods that the planet has had in the last 2.5 million years of glaciation. Any deviation from this stability towards a much colder climate is an absolute death sentence for hundreds of millions of people. And it usually comes like a thief in the middle of the night. Global warming is good!
Cold is a killer? Yes, it is.
Humans started domesticating plants +/- 18,000 years ago. Grasses like wild wheat and barley in the then-Fertile Crescent bore edible seeds. Rice was domesticated in Africa and China long, long ago, corn and squash were domesticated in the Americas.
You can’t plant, grow or harvest crops in ground that is covered by thick ice sheets.
I’ve had the furnace running since Tuesday. My zinnias are still blooming, but that won’t last much longer. Migration flights are to the west of me. Maybe I can get photos again this year.
Thanks for the article and a nice dose of reality. I wholeheartedly appreciate it.
Well said Viv. Thank you for these well documented historic statements.
Yes, one of the amazing events of our time is the triumph of propaganda that has convinced a huge segment of the world’s population that a warmer climate and warmer world constitutes a catastrophic disaster. That more CO2 produces non-nutritious food, that more water vapor produced by a warmer world will result in droughts, that shrinking glaciers will cause rivers to dry up, that methane from cattle needs to be regulated, that … etc. … etc. … etc. Number Watch hasn’t been updated in a long time – but it’s still a valid eye opener.
Napoleon didn’t actually stick around for the winter – he hurried back to France to take control of the situation before the full scale of the Russian defeat became apparent. Most of the lost army had actually been recruited from Germany, so while his overall power base was diminished, his French one was still intact. It still took the joint forces of Austria, Russia, and Prussia to actually, finally defeat him at Leipzig in 1813.
Simple common sense but well worth repeating Viv Forbes. Javier’s magnificent cartoon showing global temperatures against the track of earth’s obliquity – interspersed with some cracking human and natural ‘milestones’ – is still one of he best things I have ever seen on Anthony’s superb blog. I keep it bookmarked and revisit it regularly. Viv’s commentary reminds me of its ongoing relevance.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/29/earths-obliquity-and-temperature-over-the-last-20000-years/
Short, …… and ever so sweet.
Great commentary, Viv Forbes,
Having been a cold weather and winter backpacker all my life, with cold you need merely to dress well. But you can only take off so many clothes in the summer. I wonder how frequent severe heat events like last year in India will occur in the future.
Note that in the cold weather, your sweater is actually colder than you are, but it warms you. I wonder how that could work…a cold object like the atmosphere warming the surface…
Not only that even if the earth warms substantially we are the only humans in history to be able to cool ourselves artificially with air conditioning – if only we could afford it with the inflated price of electricity
To be fair, the catastrophic global warming theory doesn’t say the average temperature will go up a few degrees and stop. It predicts it will keep going up a few degrees or more each century. If that happened indeed it would certainly at some point start causing major upheavals in ecosystem and climate beyond the serious sea level rise problems. It would be bad. Really bad. It might not happen gradually either if the idea of tipping points does exist.
The problem with CAGW is that the theory is obviously flawed and is being used politically, not that it wouldn’t be a true concern if it wasn’t flawed.
The difference between heat and cold as far as humans are concerned is that in cold weather conditions you need energy (i.e. food) to maintain body temperature, whereas in hot weather you need water (i.e. perspiration) to maintain body temperature. Lack of either in extreme conditions can kill. However, all other things being equal, in conditions of scarcity water is generally easier to obtain than food.
Of course, some people have had different views in the past. General Phil Sheridan, of Civil War fame, once remarked that if he owned both Texas and Hell, he would rent out Texas and live in Hell.
Tambora didn’t explode in 1816. It is 1815. 1816 is the year without a summer….
Fifteen days with no resupply in February in the Green Mountains of Vermont during a cold and snowy winter with people trying to chase you down will separate the men from the boys. Never got above zero the whole time.
In my Graduating class of the SFQC in September there were four other medics besides me that went to 10th SFG(A). After the winter warfare training that winter, there were two of us left. The others had quit or found to be unable to deal with it.
They learned that the qualification course was nothing compared to what was required to make it on a team. And perhaps that is why purely academic qualifications don’t impress me much. I don’t care if a person has multiple doctorates. If they haven’t left the Ivory towers and proven their competence in the real world, then their abilities are questionable.
How about we totally ignore Griff !
I get tired of having to plow through his BS and all the replies .
Don’t give him the attention he so desperately needs.
Perhaps he will get bored and go away.
Climate is controlled by natural cycles. Earth is just past the 2003+/- peak of a millennial cycle and the current cooling trend will likely continue until the next Little Ice Age minimum at about 2650.See the Energy and Environment paper at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0958305X16686488
and an earlier accessible blog version at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html
Here is the abstract for convenience :
“ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the methods used by the establishment climate science community are not fit for purpose and that a new forecasting paradigm should be adopted. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths. It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in time in relation to the current phases of those different interacting natural quasi periodicities. Evidence is presented specifying the timing and amplitude of the natural 60+/- year and, more importantly, 1,000 year periodicities (observed emergent behaviors) that are so obvious in the temperature record. Data related to the solar climate driver is discussed and the solar cycle 22 low in the neutron count (high solar activity) in 1991 is identified as a solar activity millennial peak and correlated with the millennial peak -inversion point – in the UAH6 temperature trend in about 2003. The cyclic trends are projected forward and predict a probable general temperature decline in the coming decades and centuries. Estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling are made. If the real climate outcomes follow a trend which approaches the near term forecasts of this working hypothesis, the divergence between the IPCC forecasts and those projected by this paper will be so large by 2021 as to make the current, supposedly actionable, level of confidence in the IPCC forecasts untenable.””
See Fig 12 to see cooling forecast to 2100
“3.1 Long Term.
The depths of the next LIA will likely occur about 2640 +/-. In the real world no pattern repeats exactly because other things are never equal. Look for example at the short-term annual variability about the 50-year moving average in Fig. 3. The actual future pattern will incorporate other solar periodicities in addition to the 60-year and millennial cycles, and will also reflect extraneous events such as volcanism. However, these two most obvious cycles should capture the principal components of the general trends with an accuracy high enough, and probability likely enough, to guide policy. Forward projections made by mathematical curve fitting alone have no necessary connection to reality if turning points picked from empirical data in Figs 4 and 10 are ignored.
Fig. 12 compares the IPCC forecast with the Akasofu (31) forecast (red harmonic) and with the simple and most reasonable working hypothesis of this paper (green line) that the “Golden Spike” temperature peak at about 2003 is the most recent peak in the millennial cycle. Akasofu forecasts a further temperature increase to 2100 to be 0.5°C ± 0.2C, rather than 4.0 C +/- 2.0C predicted by the IPCC. but this interpretation ignores the Millennial inflexion point at 2004. Fig. 12 shows that the well documented 60-year temperature cycle coincidentally also peaks at about 2003.Looking at the shorter 60+/- year wavelength modulation of the millennial trend, the most straightforward hypothesis is that the cooling trends from 2003 forward will simply be a mirror image of the recent rising trends. This is illustrated by the green curve in Fig. 12, which shows cooling until 2038, slight warming to 2073 and then cooling to the end of the century, by which time almost all of the 20th century warming will have been reversed. Easterbrook 2015 (32) based his 2100 forecasts on the warming/cooling, mainly PDO, cycles of the last century. These are similar to Akasofu’s because Easterbrook’s Fig 5 also fails to recognize the 2004 Millennial peak and inversion. Scaffetta’s 2000-2100 projected warming forecast (18) ranged between 0.3 C and 1.6 C which is significantly lower than the IPCC GCM ensemble mean projected warming of 1.1C to 4.1 C. The difference between Scaffetta’s paper and the current paper is that his Fig.30 B also ignores the Millennial temperature trend inversion here picked at 2003 and he allows for the possibility of a more significant anthropogenic CO2 warming contribution.”
Viv Forbes – I agree with your opinion but please don’t make blanket statements about historical geology like “Every major geological era has ended with massive volcanism on land and under the seas.” Some may have and others demonstratively not.
Warm is deadly, cold is fine:
Here is my proof: Many more people dies annually in California than in Alaska.
Case closed.
( A wee bit of sarcasm is included)
Griff. My salutations. Once again a stimulating sentence (not even particularly outrageous this time), then you can sit back, without any further effort, and watch the affronted go on the boil, spewing thousands of words. So very economical.
It was global warming and CO2 greening of the earth that prevented the mass starvation predicted by so many famous scientists 50 years ago.
The current Modern Warming Period is still cooler than previous 1000-yr warm cycles (Medeival, Roman, Minoan and Holocene Maximum.
The greatest global economic,societietal, political, technological advancements occurred during these past Warming Periods, followed by widespread famine, political and social upheaval during the cold periods which followed.
Unfortuantely, with the developing Grand Solar Minimum and 30-year PDO/AMO cool cycles, we’ll likely have to face 100 years of cooling global temperatures..
The Mother of All Ironies is that the tiny amount of CO2 forcing will help ameliorate some of the coming cooling…
I have developed a theory which explains why the Antarctic is cooling while the Arctic is warming. It also explains long term cycles. Give me an hour to plow through my website using a desktop monitor. It is new science, and it might turn out to be true.
https://www.harrytodd.org
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Don’t worry, the cold will come and then “they/alarmists” will pronounce it caused by using fossil fuels and be twice as bad as the warming.
Yes, there is a reason why “Survivor” is shot in the tropics and not the arctic.