What’s Natural
By Jim Steele
Extreme scientists and politicians warn we will suffer catastrophic climate change if the earth’s average temperature rises 2.7°F above the Little Ice Age average. They claim we are in a climate crisis because average temperature has already warmed by 1.5°F since 1850 AD. Guided by climate fear, politicians fund whacky engineering schemes to shade the earth with mirrors or aerosols to lower temperatures. But the cooler Little Ice Age endured a much more disastrous climate.
The Little Ice Age coincides with the pre-industrial period. The Little Ice Age spanned a period from 1300 AD to 1850 AD, but the exact timing varies. It was a time of great droughts, retreating tree lines, and agricultural failures leading to massive global famines and rampant epidemics. Meanwhile advancing glaciers demolished European villages and farms and extensive sea ice blocked harbors and prevented trade.
Dr. Michael Mann who preaches dire predictions wrought by global warming described the Little Ice Age as a period of widespread “famine, disease, and increased child mortality in Europe during the 17th–19th century, probably related, at least in part, to colder temperatures and altered weather conditions.” In contrast to current models suggesting global warming will cause wild weather swings, Mann concluded “the Little Ice Age may have been more significant in terms of increased variability of the climate”. Indeed, historical documents from the Little Ice Age describe wild climate swings with extremely cold winters followed by very warm summers, and cold wet years followed by cold dry years.
A series of Little Ice Age droughts lasting several decades devastated Asia between the mid 1300s and 1400s. Resulting famines caused significant societal upheaval within India, China, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. Bad weather resulted in the Great Famine of 1315-1317 which decimated Europe causing extreme levels of crime, disease, mass death, cannibalism and infanticide. The North American tree-ring data reveal megadroughts lasting several decades during the cool 1500s. The Victorian Great Drought from 1876 to 1878 brought great suffering across much of the tropics with India devastated the most. More than 30 million people are thought to have died at this time from famine worldwide.
The Little Ice Age droughts and famines forced great societal upheaval, and the resulting climate change refugees were forced to seek better lands. But those movements also spread horrendous epidemics. Wild climate swings brought cold and dry weather to central Asia. That forced the Mongols to search for better grazing. As they invaded new territories they spread the Bubonic plague which had devastated parts of Asia earlier. In the 1300s the Mongols passed the plague to Italian merchant ships who then brought it to Europe where it quickly killed one third of Europe’s population. European explorers looking for new trade routes brought smallpox to the Americas, causing small native tribes to go extinct and decimating 25% to 50% of larger tribes. Introduced diseases rapidly reduced Mexico’s population from 30 million to 3 million.
By the 1700s a new killer began to dominate – accidental hypothermia. When indoor temperatures fall below 48°F for prolonged periods, the human body struggles to keep warm, setting off a series of reactions that causes stress and can result in heart attacks. As recently as the 1960s in Great Britain, 20,000 elderly and malnourished people who lacked central heating died from accidental hypothermia. As people with poor heating faced bouts of extreme cold in the 1700s, accidental hypothermia was rampant.
What caused the tragic climate changes of the Little Ice Age? Some scientists suggest lower solar output associated with periods of fewer sunspots. Increasing solar output then reversed the cooling and warmed the 20th century world. As solar output is now falling to the lows of the Little Ice Age, a natural experiment is now in progress testing that solar theory. However other scientists suggest it was rising CO2 that delivered the world from the Little Ice Age.
Increasing CO2 also has a beneficial fertilization effect that is greening the earth. The 20th century warming, whether natural or driven by rising CO2 concentrations, has lengthened the growing season. Famines are being eliminated. Tree-lines stopped retreating and trees are now reclaiming territory lost over the past 500 years. So why is it that now we face a climate crisis?
At the end of the 1300’s Great Famine and the Bubonic Plague epidemic, the earth sustained 350 million people. With today’s advances in technology and milder growing conditions, record high crop yields are now feeding a human population that ballooned to over 7.6 billion.
So, the notion that cooler times represent the “good old days” and we are now in a warmer climate crisis seems truly absurd.
Jim Steele is retired director of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, SFSU
and authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
Wonderful post! However, he only briefly mentions the solar output as a small factor. It’s a much bigger factor than most give it credit for. During this little ice age, especially the 1300-1500 (when the plague and drought were at their worst) was during a period of sunspot inactivity, known as a Solar Minimum. Dr. Valentina Zharkova et. al has produced models following the sun’s cycles. We have already entered another solar minimum. Their models (as well as other solar physicist’s models) predict that this next minimum will be far worse than the last one.
The sun is by far the most important factor when considering the temperature of our planet! Please do a little research into the grand solar minimum.
Jim, two things:
Solar activity is not falling to the lows of the Little Ice Age. We are just in a centennial low that has significantly higher levels of solar activity than any of the three solar grand maxima of the LIA.
Even if solar activity was that low and we entered a solar grand minimum (we will not), that doesn’t mean we would be in a LIA climate, it means it would be cooling, but from present temperatures it would take 2-3 centuries of cooling to reach a LIA-like climate.
Javier, as I said “As solar output is now falling to the lows of the Little Ice Age, a natural experiment is now in progress testing that solar theory.”
Whether solar activity reaches levels of the Maunder Minimum, or just reach your “centennial low”, I have no way of knowing. Many hypotheses about the sun’s behavior so I think your assertions are too confident based on our limited understanding. Whatever the case may be, solar activity has definitely been dropping the past 2 decades.
All I argue is ” a natural experiment is now in progress testing that solar theory.”
I understand that. However I have studied the question in detail. I have analyzed the distribution of solar grand minima throughout the Holocene and it is not random. The probability of a 21st century SGM is very low. On top of that SC25 has been predicted to have more activity than SC24 by polar fields.
There is no reason to think solar activity is going to be any lower. Quite the contrary it is more likely that it will increase. Those that predict a SGM are very likely to be wrong, and those that think a LIA type of climate is possible in the 21st century are equally wrong.
Javier, asserton is unwise in these matters. Others of us study them too and even get to experience effects realtime, fulltime, lifetime. We know when things are really changing and being scientifically-trained, take note and seek answers. We do understand the experiment is always in progress…..
Quite the contrary. The only way to advance knowledge is to study the evidence, elaborate hypotheses that explain it, and then test the hypotheses against new evidence.
Plenty of people have made assertions that we are entering a new grand solar minimum. They have published them. Valentina Zharkova, Nils-Axel Mörner, Salvador, Steinhilber, among others. I am making the opposite assertion.
In just a few years SC25 will provide new evidence that will show who’s hypothesis is correct.
Except that, in geological history, cooling is not gradual but abrupt. Increased albedo is regarded as the main culprit (reflective forcing). Warming periods, in contrast, are gradual.
That is not correct. The peak of the Medieval Warm Period was around AD 1100, and the cold of the LIA started around 1300. In between 200 years of cooling. Really abrupt changes of temperature are exceptional, associated to Dansgaard-Oescheger events and the outbreak of Lakes Agassiz and Ojibwah. In both cases there is a high enthalpy or low enthalpy store that is released abruptly. Otherwise it takes time to change the temperature of the Earth, because the Earth resists changes.
Climate Change and Organized Religion are two sides of the same coin. They both preach salvation through obedience.
While those doing the preaching obey not.
The Rhone Glacier in the picture.
“Goehring said he was surprised by the evidence of exposure revealed by the isotopes. The amount of Beryllium 10 and Carbon 14 they found “told us that not only were the surfaces exposed for significant periods of time, meaning the Rhone Glacier was smaller than today, but it also told us that glacial erosion rates were much lower than expected.”
“Co-author Joerg Schaefer, a geochemist and Lamont associate research professor, is concerned the findings could be misinterpreted by skeptics of climate change. They might conclude that, if the glacier is larger than it has been over most of the time during the past several thousand years, then there is little to worry about today.”
Yeah. Truth hurts, doesn’t it.
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/06/03/rhone-glacier-finely-tuned-to-climate-changes/
Around 4000 years ago the ice caps and glaciers had reached there minimums. Then in what has been dubbed the Neoglaciation, glaciers began to grow. Warming spikes caused rapid retreat followed by a greater glacial as seen in linked graph. The Little Ice Age is the greatest cold anomaly in the past 4000 years.
http://landscapesandcycles.net/image/98415837.png
Yep. Neoglaciation only ended in the mid-1800’s. Most alpine/valley glaciers reached their maximum Holocene extent at the end of neoglaciation. Advancing glaciers is a really bad thing…
Why do the alarmists want to go back to the 1850s? The winters were cold, the summers not much better.
Maybe it is the human trait of looking back on a golden age?
A question for Jim: did his retirement from SFSU free him to state his change of mind, or has it happened since his retirement?
Hi Stephen,
My research in the Sierra Nevada evoked much skepticism. To understand changes in wildlife I needed to understand all factors affecting regional climate change. Natural ocean cycles and landscape changes appeared to dominate. My retirement simply allowed me to delve deeper into climate change and to write more.
As pointed out by Dave Middleton above ( 5:38) a very large majority of establishment academic climate scientists have demonstrated an almost total inability to recognize the most obvious Millennial and 60 year emergent patterns which are trivially obvious in solar activity and global temperature data. This causes the natural climate cycle variability to appear frightening and emotionally overwhelming. Critical thinking capacity is badly degraded. The delusionary world inhabited by the eco-left establishment activist elite is epitomized by Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes science-based fiction, ” The Collapse of Western-Civilization: A View from the Future” Oreskes and Conway imagine a world devastated by climate change. Intellectual hubris, confirmation bias, group think and a need to feel at once powerful and at the same time morally self-righteous caused those worst affected to convince themselves, politicians, governments, the politically correct chattering classes and almost the entire UK and US media that anthropogenic CO2 was the main climate driver. This led governments to introduce policies which have wasted trillions of dollars in a quixotic and futile attempt to control earth’s temperature by reducing CO2 emissions. Apocalyptic forecasts are now used as the main drivers of demands for action and for enormous investments such as those in the new IPCC SR1.5 report and in the work of Nordhaus who advocates a carbon tax .Nordhaus is quoted in the NYT as saying “If we start moving very swiftly in the next 20 years, we might able to avoid 2 degrees, but if we don’t do that, we’re in for changes in the Earth’s system that we can’t begin to understand in depth. Warming of 4, 5, 6 degrees will bring changes we don’t understand because it’s outside the range of human experience in the last 100,000 to 200,000 years.”
Those proselytizing the warming scenario are closely following the UNFCCC Agenda 21 political plan of action. Bernie Sanders says :” Climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet. The debate is over, and the scientific jury is in: global climate change is real, it is caused mainly by emissions released from burning fossil fuels and it poses a catastrophic threat to the long-term longevity of our planet. If we do nothing, the planet will heat up five to ten degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. That would cause enough sea level rise from melting glaciers to put cities like New York and Miami underwater – along with more frequent asthma attacks, higher food prices, insufficient drinking water and more infectious diseases.”
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed taxing the wealthy as high as 70% to fund a climate change plan she’s pushing called the “Green New Deal.” She also says “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change”
Fortunately, Reality is finally beginning to intrude upon the dangerous global warming meme.
Curry, 2017 in “Climate Models for the layman” says:
“GCMs are not fit for the purpose of attributing the causes of 20th century warming or for
predicting global or regional climate change on time scales of decades to centuries,
with any high level of confidence. By extension, GCMs are not fit for the purpose of
justifying political policies to fundamentally alter world social, economic and energy
systems…..”
Scafetta et al 2017 states: “The severe discrepancy between observations and modeled predictions……further confirms….that the current climate models have significantly exaggerated the anthropogenic greenhouse warming effect”
Hansen et al 2018 “Global Temperature in 2017” said “However, the solar variability is not negligible in comparison with the energy imbalance that drives global temperature change. Therefore, because of the combination of the strong 2016 El Niño and the phase of the solar cycle, it is plausible, if not likely, that the next 10 years of global temperature change will leave an impression of a ‘global warming hiatus’.
Page, 2017 in “The coming cooling: usefully accurate climate forecasting for policy makers.” said:
” This paper argued that the methods used by the establishment climate science community are not fit for purpose and that a new forecasting paradigm should be adopted.”
The reality is that 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 relation to the current phases of these different interacting natural quasi-periodicities which fall into two main categories.
a) The orbital long wave Milankovitch eccentricity, obliquity and precession cycles which are modulated by
b) Solar “activity” cycles with possibly multi-millennial, millennial, centennial and decadal time scales.
When analyzing complex systems with multiple interacting variables it is useful to note the advice of Enrico Fermi who reportedly said “never make something more accurate than absolutely necessary”. The 2017 paper proposed a simple heuristic approach to climate science which plausibly proposes that a Millennial Turning Point (MTP) and peak in solar activity was reached in 1991,that this turning point correlates with a temperature turning point in 2003/4, and that a general cooling trend will now follow until approximately 2650.
The establishment’s dangerous global warming meme, the associated IPCC series of reports ,the entire UNFCCC circus, the recent hysterical IPCC SR1.5 proposals and Nordhaus’ recent Nobel prize are founded on two basic errors in scientific judgement. First – the sample size is too small. Most IPCC model studies retrofit from the present back for only 100 – 150 years when the currently most important climate controlling, largest amplitude, solar activity cycle is millennial. This means that all climate model temperature outcomes are too hot and likely fall outside of the real future world. (See Kahneman -. Thinking Fast and Slow p 118) Second – the models make the fundamental scientific error of forecasting straight ahead beyond the Millennial Turning Point (MTP) and peak in solar activity which was reached in 1991.These errors are compounded by confirmation bias and academic consensus group think.
See the Energy and Environment paper The coming cooling: usefully accurate climate forecasting for policy makers.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 See also https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-millennial-turning-point-solar.html
and the discussion with Professor William Happer at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2018/02/exchange-with-professor-happer-princeton.html
Thank you Jim.
I find your comment about regional climate change very interesting, as I have felt for a long time that climate change has been localised rather than uniform over the whole world.
Some climates seem to have been affected by human action such as deforestation or overgrazing.
In the UK since the 1940s the climate has been on a roller coaster with hot and cold seasons and dry years. The dryest year I have recorded was 19 inches in1983 and the wettest was just over 40 inches in 2000. There have also been a couple of hurricanes in 1703 and 1987.
We have had very hot years in 1959, 1975 ,1976 and 2018 and very cold winters in 1947, 1968, the 1970s and early 1980s, and last year we had the Beast from the East.
I had a cherry-plum tree that I used to gauge whether it was an early or late Spring.
The earliest that it flowered was 1st February and the latest was 1st April.
Many of the CAGW commentators seem to be very young and have not experienced much in the way of extreme weather, and seem to disregard previous experience of us ol’!
1963 was a very cold winter in the UK.
1968 – possibly a typo as I don’t remember it as being notably cold.
We did have snow in 1969, IIRC.
Auto
One thing will help surviving the Eddy Minimum. Gen4 nuclear which is safe (no possible meltdown) and uses current nuclear waste as fuel. Each unit will be very small and serve a local area. No need for a power grid.
It will also pacify the AGW alarmists since it generates no CO2 at all.
In a nutshell:
Arrhenius feared the oceans would soak up any benefit that CO2 might confer on the climate. Callendar hoped CO2 would save us from “the deadly glaciers.” Revelle considered it a wonderful experiment we were doing with nature. The Soviets dreamed of a way to promote global warming and free up Arctic shipping., even considering damming the Bering Strait. Then in the 60s Emiliani’s deep sea cores in the Carribean showed not only were ice ages cyclical but that they corresponded well with Milankovitch’s insolation calculations. So it became apparent we were near the end of the present interglacial. Global cooling was just beginning.
A few physicists were skeptical, Budyko, Singer, Seitz, Nierenberg, thought CO2 would win in the end, and they lobbied for funding to keep a close eye on the climate. Bryson, ever the cooler, and Suomi, his erstwhile partner, parted the ways over the issue. Suomi wanted satellite observations. Then the globe started warming a little, late 70s, and former coolers jumped onto the warming bandwagon. We might get lucky after all. Or worse. The predicted oil peak never happened, and Revelle’s experiment was on in earnest.
In 1978 the CIA was warning the President of the security threat of a cooling climate. In 1988 James Hansen was warning congress of an imminent threat of warming disaster. NeoMalthusians and the Club of Rome saw considerable potential in the crisis, and billionaire socialists in the East and West took up the cause; with a billion dollars you can buy a thousand millionaires.
The IPCC began to exaggerate. Pachauri sensationalized the Himalayan glaciers with bad data. Santer overstated the science. The big three, Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, didn’t like what they were seeing, and said so. In response Naomi Oreskes and NASA historian Eric Conway wrote a book, “Merchants of Doubt,” intended to smear their reputations and destroy their credibility (and these were the guys who worried about warming in a world of coolers!): they were career skeptics for hire, in the pockets of Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
And the propagandists made up more stories like “Big Oil Knew” (in a world of coolers, of course), and “97% of scientists agree,” and the newspapers ate it up. Hansen said go nuclear; Oreskes cried “neo-denier.” There’s no consensus where it counts: on solutions. –AGF
1. Samuel Pepys 21st jan 1661
It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here.
House Of Lords 11th jan 1662
The Fast to be observed in Westm. Abbey, and the Bp. of St. David’s to preach.
¶Whereas His Majesty hath been pleased, by Proclamation, upon the Unseasonableness of the Weather, to command a general and public Fast, to be religiously and solemnly kept, within the Cities of London and Westm. and Places adjacent: It is ORDERED, by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, in Parliament assembled.
Samuel Pepys 15 jan 1662
fast day ordered by the Parliament, to pray for more seasonable weather; it having hitherto been summer weather, that it is, both as to warmth and every other thing, just as if it were the middle of May or June, which do threaten a plague (as all men think) to follow, for so it was almost the last winter; and the whole year after hath been a very sickly time to this day
Meanwhile, however, with the decrease in solar cycles the population is falling.
Even fertility rates.
Coincidence?
I do not think so.
https://urbancoldspot.wordpress.com/2019/03/25/il-crollo-demografico/
And the earth is flat …
Why do all the world’s top scientists believe gkobal warming is an existential threat to our way of life?
None of them do. You can’t name one. What do you think happened between 1978 and 1988? Politics took over. Not even the IPCC takes NASA’s James Hansen seriously. His boiling oceans scenarios are nothing but children’s fairy tales. –AGF
So when the cold sets in the Mediterranean will be festooned with leaky dinghies heading south to Libya.
Excellent article Dr. Steele.
Don’t forget the Mayan Civilization collapse,
The collapse of the Cliff Dwellers in and around Mesa Verde,
The collapse of the Cahokia Mound Builders’ Civilization.
All collapses linked to droughts as contributors.
We are presently living in a golden age of abundance not seen since the Medieval Warm Period. Then it created a new age of renaissance art as people no longer had to spend dawn to dusk hunting or growing food just to keep alive. Now it has created a new age of technology and social media. Enjoy it while it lasts because the next age will be a cold one with crop failures, famines and disease, and billions of people will die.
Jesus, Lord help us! Throw the money makers out on a glacier; like you did in B.C., before A.D. Let us live with out your hogwash before it sinks New York and East Anglia.
Jesus, Lord help us! Throw the money makers out on a glacier; like you did in B.C. before A.D. Let us live without the hogwash of them before it sinks New York and East Anglia to Hell.
“Dr. Michael Mann who preaches dire predictions wrought by global warming described the Little Ice Age as a period of widespread “famine, disease, and increased child mortality in Europe during the 17th–19th century, probably related, at least in part, to colder temperatures and altered weather conditions.” ”
I thought Mann was a LIA denier?
Why is the UN’s IPCC apparently worried about a tiny 2 C, when they say we are already two thirds there from 1850.
Anyway as we still slowly coming out of “The Little Ice Age”, one
would expect it to get a little warmer, back to how it was before the LIA.
And what about the hundreds of years of the Roman Empire, and before that the Minion warm period, or were they just a quick snap of summer, Ha Ha.
All the historical evidence clearly shows that a long term warm period results in far less violent weather, but of course a modern IPCC forecast saying a bit warmer and less violent weather will not be any good for the Medias scare campaign.
And the politicians will not be able to frighten the population as they like doing.
MJE VK5ELL
There were not even any watermelons around back then to espouse eating lots of cattle and to burn coal to save the planet from run away cold.
There is a massive ice shelf….the size of Florida
And then there’s a landscape greater than all all the subsidized everglades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(Hamsun_novel)