Guest now I’ve heard everything by David Middleton
From that eminent scientific publication, Foreign Policy…
The Coming Climate Crisis
The Little Ice Age could offer a glimpse of our tumultuous future.
BY AMITAV GHOSH
Over the last couple of decades, as the impact of global warming has intensified, the discussion of climate change has spilled out of the scientific and technocratic circles within which it was long confined. Today, the subject has also become an important concern in the humanities and arts.
Discussions of climate tend to focus on the future. Yet even scientific projections depend crucially on the study of the past…
[…]
Perhaps the most intensively researched of these periods is the Little Ice Age, which reached its peak between the late 15th and early 18th centuries. This early modern era is of particular interest because some of the most important geopolitical processes of our own time trace back to it.
[…]
During part of the Little Ice Age, decreased solar irradiance and increased seismic activity resulted in temperatures that, as Geoffrey Parker writes in Global Crisis, a groundbreaking global history of the period, were “more than 1 [degree Celsius] cooler than those of the later twentieth century.”
The current cycle of human-induced global warming is likely to lead to a much greater climatic shift than that of the Little Ice Age.
[…]
Amitav Ghosh is the author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. @GhoshAmitav
Okay… Increased seismic activity caused cooling? While seismic activity is often associated with volcanoes and volcanic eruptions, volcanic eruptions generally aren’t a subset of seismic activity. I would have phrased it this way…
During the Little Ice Age, decreased solar irradiance, a few big volcanic eruptions and a whole lot of unknown factors may have contributed to temperatures that, as Geoffrey Parker writes in Global Crisis, a groundbreaking global history of the period, were “more than 1 [degree Celsius] cooler than those of the later twentieth century.”
The Little Ice Age was a bona fide climate crisis… Famines, cannibalism, Frankenstein, Dickens, glaciers bulldozing villages…
The Little Ice Age was really bad. It was the coldest climatic phase of the Holocene…
The fact that it’s warmed a bit more than 1 °C since the nadir of the Little Ice Age is a climatic miracle, not the precipice of a “coming climate crisis.”
Barely 40 years ago, we were on the precipice of “The Ice Age Cometh”…
If not for the miracle of climate models and all of the warming they can’t explain without tripling the climate sensitivity to CO2, we’d still be on the precipice of “The Ice Age Cometh”… Just ask Leonard Nimoy… What’s that? He’s dead? Well then, just watch the video… especially Stephen Schneider’s bit (20:06)…
It gets even worse… Fiction can’t even save us from Gorebal Warming, not even science fiction…
The Great Derangement
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE UNTHINKABLEAMITAV GHOSH
176 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2016
Berlin Family Lectures
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres…
[…]
So he admits that the LIA was a climatic shift.
Which is to say, it was a cooling from previous temperatures.
Thus, it must be obvious that the current warming is nothing more than a return to the more benign climate that preceded the LIA.
How can he think that is anything but a good outcome?
In one simple paragraph, Amitav Ghosh has shown us the solution to the “problem” of global warming:
“During part of the Little Ice Age, decreased solar irradiance and increased seismic activity resulted in temperatures that, as Geoffrey Parker writes in Global Crisis, a groundbreaking global history of the period, were ‘more than 1 [degree Celsius] cooler than those of the later twentieth century’.”
So, we should immediately embark on two crash priority programs: (1) to place a large umbrella into space at a constant relative spot that partially shades Earth from Sun radiation, and (2) to inject millions of tons of SuperGlue along Earth’s tectonic plate boundaries.
Now why didn’t I think of that?