2,500 years of wild climate change in southern Europe

By Joanne Nova September 17th, 2023 174 Comments @CFACT

The new study on stalagmites in caves of the Pyrenees shows that modern climate change is nothing compared to normal fluctuations in the last 2,500 years when it was, at times, much hotter, colder, and more volatile. Rapid shifts between temperatures were common.

The researchers looked at eight stalagmites in four caves and local lake levels, but they also compared their results with other European temperature proxies and reconstructions, and the pattern is consistent across the region. The Roman Warm Period was much hotter than today, and for hundreds of years as well, even though coal plants were rare. Apparently, there was a reason Romans were dressed in togas.

The Dark Ages were very cold, especially around 520 – 550 AD — which may be related to what the researchers call a “cataclysmic” volcanic eruption in Iceland in 536 AD. It was followed by two other massive volcanic eruptions in 540 and  547 AD. This effect is visible in European tree rings, which showed “an unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling”.

Indeed, the researchers declare that volcanoes and solar variability appear to be the main drivers of the climate in South Western Europe.

So, finally, we see one long continuous proxy record from ancient Greek times through until 2010. The big question is why these sorts of studies are not done everywhere and all the time. It’s not like we don’t have plenty of caves with stalagmites to analyze. If the climate really was “the biggest threat to life on Earth”, why are these extraordinary datasets not the top item on the wish-list of every institution claiming they care about the climate?

There will be more to say about this remarkable paper:

Click to enlarge. Oxygen isotopes are used to estimate temperatures.

Some passages from the paper discuss how these results match other studies from Europe:

The cold event at ca. 540 AD (the coldest of the speleothem record) may be related to a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that took place in Iceland in 536 AD and spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere, together with the effect of two other massive eruptions in 540 and 547 AD (Sigl et al., 2015). An unprecedented, long-lasting, and spatially synchronized cooling was observed in European tree-ring records associated with these large volcanic eruptions, corresponding to the LALIA period (Büntgen et al., 2016).

Some passages from the paper discuss how these results compare with many other European studies and stark moments in history.

5.2.2. Temperature variability in W Europe and the W Mediterranean during the last 2500 years
There are very few high-resolution speleothem records in Europe covering the CE (Comas-Bru et al., 2020). We compare the Central Pyrenean speleothem composite with nine selected speleothems records in Europe and northern Africa which cover with robust chronology and decadal resolution of the last 2500 years (Fig. 5). One of these records is interpreted as NAO variability (Baker et al., 2015), three are paleo-precipitation reconstructions (Ait Brahim et al., 2019; Cisneros et al., 2021; Thatcher et al., 2022) and the other five are reflecting paleo-temperature variations (Affolter et al., 2019; Fohlmeister et al., 2012; Mangini et al., 2005;  Martín-Chivelet et al., 2011; Sundqvist et al., 2010). Considering these differences in the interpretation and the fact these records are from different regions with different climates (from Sweden to Morocco), dissimilar profiles of paleoclimate variability can be expected. Still, some features are comparable and can be discussed to obtain a super-regional picture.

A. The Roman period in Europe-W Mediterranean. In Europe, particularly in the Mediterranean region, the RP is well-known as a warm period (e.g., McCormick et al., 2012). The average sea-surface temperature in the western Mediterranean Sea was 2°C higher than the average temperature of the late centuries (Margaritelli et al., 2020). Our composite, with high values of normalized  18O values during the whole RP, and particularly from 0-200 AD, agrees with the scenario of warm temperatures (Fig. 5i). Speleothem data from the Balearic Islands (Cisneros et al., 2021) indicate a transition from humid to dry conditions along the Iberian-RP (Fig. 5c). The dry period at the end of the RP in the Balearic record appears in agreement with a new speleothem record from northern Italy (Hu et al., 2022), suggesting that the observed drying trend was a possible contribution to the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 AD. Record from Morocco (Ait Brahim et al., 2019), contrarily, marks a humid trend at the end of the RP (Fig. 5d). Similarly, an increase in humidity was observed in southern Iberia during the Iberian-Roman Period (Jiménez-Moreno et al., 2013; Martín-Puertas et al., 2009) thus reflecting a large spatial heterogeneity in precipitation during the RP when comparing records from the north and south of the Mediterranean basin.

REFERENCES

Bartolomé, M., Moreno, A., Sancho, C., Cacho, I., Stoll, H., Haghipour, N., Belmonte, Á., Spötl, C., Hellstrom, J., Edwards, R. L., and Cheng, H.: Reconstructing land temperature changes of the past 2,500 years using speleothems from Pyrenean caves (NE Spain), Clim. Past Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2023-54, in review, 2023.

Author

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  Joanne Nova

  A prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology. She has given keynotes about the medical revolution, gene technology and aging at conferences. She hosted a children’s TV series on Channel Nine, and has done over 200 radio interviews, many on the Australian ABC. She was formerly an associate lecturer in Science Communication at the ANU. She’s author of The Skeptics Handbook which has been translated into 15 languages. Each day 5,000 people read joannenova.com.au

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Historical Evidence Proves There Were No SUVs in the Medieval Warm Period

by Blaise Vanne | Oct 27, 2021 | Climate Change, Feature 3, Politics

Editor's Note:  I don't have permission to publish this in full, so if the Author takes exception I will take it down and link it.  However, this piece is so profound it needs published in full with the widest possible distribution. RK  

The global elite is working overtime on the next “climate emergency,” which will be joined at the hip with a blockchain-based “Fedcoin,” or similar. Want to buy and sell? Get groceries? If you go over your allotted carbon allowance (same misanthropes, no doubt, as the Covid vax doubters!), you will be cut off. But how real is anthropogenic global warming?

One hint comes from Farley Mowat, the noted Canadian leftist and Greenpeace activist, who wrote in his book West Viking (while we were still in the global cooling scare) that there were probably at least dwarf forests growing in Greenland when the Vikings arrived in 985 AD. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History reports, 

“… Erik the Red discovered two areas of southwest Greenland which were suitable for farming, with grasslands and small stands of alder and birch.” 

 You will note, of course, that it is too cold today for any type of forest to grow in Greenland, and there is zero ability to farm⏤unless modern technologies are utilized. Even then, crop selection is very minimal. Mowat also reported the Arctic pack ice was much less in that Viking discovery era than today. Dr. Fred Singer wrote in Unstoppable Global Warming⏤every 1,500 Years that when the Vikings first settled Greenland, they grew vegetables. It was warm enough to allow the population to grow to 3,000 people (the Smithsonian site says the Viking population reached a zenith of 5,000 people). By 1100 AD, the place was thriving enough that they had their own bishop and twelve churches. Nature reported in a 2010 article that clamshell studies also confirm Norse records.

Meanwhile, the Archeological Survey of Canada has also noted around A.D. 1000; a warmer climate resulted in the tree line advancing 100 kilometers north of its present position.” (See Archeological Survey of Canada, Canada’s Visual History, The Little Ice and the Historic Inuit.) The results of this? Especially in northern Europe, where we have most records, the period between 1150 and 1300 was truly a flowering period, for population reached unprecedented levels that were never to be seen again until the late 18th century in many countries; the English population experienced a staggering threefold increase in its population during the last century since the Domesday Survey in 1086. 

This climate optimum coincided with a period of increased solar activity, which is a critical element of the global warming equation. Farming of various crops extended hundreds of kilometers farther north than it is possible today.

 

Yet, in the 1100s, Greenland cooled dramatically, briefly stabilized, and then dropped even further in the 1200s to the early 1400s. Sirocko (2010) places the earlier event at the beginning of the 1310s. A more commonly accepted time frame for the first cold phase is the coinciding solar minimum called Wolf minimum from 1280-1350, per Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2000, Heidelberg Lexikon der Geowissenschaften. There were repeated cold snaps and advancing glaciers and sea ice from that time onward, but it was not until the early 1600’s that the most devastating effects of the Little Ice Age began to set in, which is the more commonly used date for its beginning. As Dale Mackenzie Brown writes in The Fate of Greenland’s Vikings, in Archeology.org, An ice core drilled from the island’s (Greenland’s) massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off; in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.” The recent recovery in temperatures is only putting us back to the average temps from an earlier age!

Indeed, when I was visiting Iceland at Skaftafell Nat’l Park two years ago, Icelandic historians know from extant Viking deeds and have put in the displays at the park, that somewhere around FORTY old Viking era farms are currently buried under the Vatnajokull glacier system (the largest in the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica). In other words, it was simply much warmer in the Icelandic settlement era than it is today.

We are routinely informed of the melting of Greenland glaciers today at lower altitudes, but demonstrably there are at bare minimum low altitude glaciers in roughly the same geographic area that had seen more melting and more pronounced glacial recession one thousand years ago than we see today. Al Gore may want to visit Skaftafell National Park in Iceland on one of his many jet-setting, carbon-burning trips to check the facts himself. 

There are records of grape growing occurring in places in northern Europe back during this optimum where they can’t grow today. Gregory McNamee, in the Weather Guide Calendar (Accord Publishing, 2002) noted that wine connoisseurs might have gone to England for fine vintages (can’t grow fine vintage grapes there today!), that heat-loving trees like beeches carpeted Europe far into Scandinavia, and Viking ships crossed iceberg free oceans to ice-free harbors in Iceland. Art Horn writes that In the winter of 1249, it was so warm in England that people did not need winter clothes. They walked about in summer dress. It was so warm people thought the seasons had changed. There was no frost in England the entire winter. Can you imagine what NOAA would say if that happened next year?

On the other side of the world, research by Panin and Nefedov in 2010 analyzed rivers and lakes in the Upper Volga, and Upper Zapadnaya Dvina areas in Russia⏤also found evidence of a Medieval climatic optimum in that part of the world. Even worse for the anthropogenic warmers, recent research has found evidence for the Medieval Climatic Optimum in the central Peruvian Andes, southern South America, China, where author XJ Zhou notes temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period are comparable to those in the current warm period over China. Also, in Antarctica, per Li, Y., Cole-Dai, J. and Zhou, L. 2009 in their article Glaciochemical evidence in an East Antarctica ice core of a recent (AD 1450-1850) neoglacial episode – see Journal of Geophysical Research 114: 10.1029/2008JD011091. Further evidence of an Antarctic LIA and MWP is found here. Or you could trek north to the opposite pole, on Canada’s Arctic Ocean, where you can see below a picture of a white spruce found on Canada’s Arctic Ocean⏤far above today’s tree line.

 

Picea glauca (white spruce) stump on the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula in the tundra, some 100km north of the current treeline. Photo by Professor Ritchie (University of Toronto). The radiocarbon date was 4940 ±140 years Before Present (B.P.) and was featured in Hubert Lamb’s classic work Climate, Present, Past, and Future. Climatologist Dr. Tim Ball summarizes this here. 

Similarly, two papers, reported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one in Earth-Science Reviews and the other in Chinese Science Bulletin, reported studies of key chemical contents in micro-drilled giant clams shells and coral samples to demonstrate that in the South China Sea, the warm period of the Middle Ages was warmer than the present. The scientists examined surveys of the ratio of strontium to calcium content and heavy oxygen isotopes; both are sensitive recorders of sea surface temperatures past and present. The aragonite bicarbonate of the Tridacna gigas clamshell is so fine-grained that daily growth lines are exposed by micro-drilling with an exceptionally fine drill-bit, allowing an exceptionally detailed time-series of sea-temperature changes to be compiled – a feat of detection worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself. By using overlaps between successive generations of giant clams and corals, the three scientists – Hong Yan of the Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Yuhong Wang of Fudan University, Shanghai⏤reconstructed a record of sea-surface temperature changes going back 2500 years. The Roman and Mediaeval Warm Periods both showed up prominently in the western Pacific and East Asia. Sea surface temperatures varied considerably over the 2500 year period. See also here for a second story. 

Dr. Soon concludes: The U.N.’s climate panel should never have trusted the claim that the medieval warm period was mainly a European phenomenon. It was clearly warm in the South China Sea, too.

Another study by earth sciences professor Zunli Lu (formerly of Oxford, then Syracuse Univ.) studied samples of crystal called ikaite, which forms in cold water, which melts at room temperature. Samples were taken by Lu and colleagues, examined for variation caused by temperature fluctuations during formation, and dated. The result? Lu writes: This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula. What does this mean, practically? The MWP was not simply a localized event in northern Europe, or even the northern hemisphere. And if it was as warm 1,000 years ago as it is now all over the world, Al Gore is simply wrong. The details are summarized by the UK Register here. 

In a study by Kobashi, et al., entitled Summit Surface Snow Temperatures of Greenland, there is further corroboration of Dr. Tim Ball’s contention that the MWP was real. In sum, this study illustrated Greenland surface snow temperature variability over the past 4000 years at the GISP2 site (near the Summit of the Greenland ice sheet) with a new method that utilizes argon and nitrogen isotopic ratios from occluded air bubbles. In so doing, the eight researchers report that the average Greenland snow temperature over the past 4000 years was -30.7°C, while the current decadal (2001-2010) surface temperature at the Greenland Summit is -29.9°C, which they say is as warm as it was there in the 1930s-1940s. And they add that there was another similarly warm period (-29.7°C) in the 1140s (Medieval Warm Period), indicating that the present decade is not outside the envelope of the variability of the last 1000 years. Even more telling, prior to the last millennium, they report there were 72 decades warmer than the present one, meaning temperatures were 1.0 to 1.5°C warmer. In fact, they found that during two intervals (~1300 BP and ~3360 BP), centennial average temperatures were nearly 1.0°C warmer (-28.9°C) than in the present decade.

This proves without a doubt that there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about Greenland’s recent relative warmth, as it is clear that much warmer temperatures have been experienced there over many prior prolonged periods without any help from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. There is no valid reason to believe that mankind’s burning of coal, gas, and oil has had, or is having any measurable impact on the climate of that part of the world, or any other part of the planet.

A similar study from Yan, Soon, and Wang concluded, from studies of the ratio of strontium to calcium content and heavy oxygen isotopes in corals and Tridacna gigas (giant clams), that these warm periods also occurred in the East Asia/Western Pacific area (see Earth-Science Reviews, Dec. 13, 2014, doi: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2014.12.003)

One further fascinating study which corroborates the MWP was a study by Belt et al. in 2007, described here, where scientists used a biomarker (IP₂₅), which authors Vare et al. (2009) describe as a mono-unsaturated highly-branched isoprenoid that is synthesized by sea ice diatoms that have been shown to be stable in sediments below Arctic sea ice. The NIPCC reports concludes: Based on IP₂₅ data obtained from a marine sediment core retrieved from Barrow Strait (74°16.05’N, 91°06.38’W), which they compared with complementary proxy data obtained from analysis of other organic biomarkers, stable isotope composition of bulk organic matter, benthic foraminifera, particle size distributions and ratios of inorganic elements, the five U.K. scientists of Vare et al. developed a spring sea ice record for that part of the central Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Results indicated evidence for a decrease in spring sea ice between approximately 1200 and 800 years before present (B.P. which was followed by an increase in sea ice over the last 400 years of their record (between 800 and 400 years B.P. (emphasis mine). Even into North America, in the first Medieval Warm Period, the Rocky Mountains had a snow line 1,000 feet higher than today.

Research by the Chinese show similar warm periods on the other side of the world, including one report noting in the northeast of China During the last 500 years, apparent climate fluctuations were experienced, including two cold phases from the 1470s to the 1710s and the 1790s to the 1860s, two warm phases from the 1720s to the 1780s, and after the 1870s. The temperature variations prior to the 1500s show two anomalous warm peaks, around 300 and between approximately 1100 and 1200, that exceed the warm level of the last decades of the 20th century.

Lord Christopher Monckton of England has noted, Scores of scientific papers show that the Medieval warm period was real, global, and up to [5 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than now…Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes; today, they’re there (in fact, the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina has been expanding quite handily the past few decades. There were Viking farms in Greenland; now, they’re under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole – a Chinese naval squadron sailed right around the Arctic in 1421 and found none. One can infer there were warm as well as cool periods within the centuries-long larger trend lines – clearly this was during one of the short warm periods in the overall downward trend and the Chinese fleet may well have sailed during one of these warmer respites. As we see even today, there are counter-cyclical short-term trends, and not only meteorologically, but even within areas such as stock indices). And not only did the Chinese find little ice in 1421, 500 years later, John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, noted around 1900 that the Northwest Passage was clear of ice during another short period of warmth.

The fact is, the Medieval (and earlier Roman and Minoan) Warm Periods were not just restricted to Europe, as frantic warmers try to claim. Even former lead warmer Phil Jones of East Anglia University – the lead location for the AGW scam – was forced to admit that there is no consensus on global warming after the ClimateGate scam came to light in 2010, stating about climate debate being settled This is not my view… There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties.

Subsequent to the Medieval Climatic Optimum noted above, the Greenland historical records show there was a severe drop in temps, which initially started around 1100 AD, briefly plateaued, then dropped even further through the late 1400s, only finally to sharply rise again very roughly around 1500 (by this time the Vikings had been frozen out of Greenland, and there were none left residing there), followed by a precipitous fall again starting later in the 1500s to the temperature nadirs of the Little Ice Age very roughly around the time of the American Revolution. Importantly, each of these optimums – the ones very roughly centered around 1000 AD and 1500 AD were far above today’s supposedly record high temperatures Al Gore frantically is warning us about. (Meanwhile, in the global freeze out between those two optimums, Chinese records show centuries-old citrus orchards froze, the Thames froze up to 5′ in-depth (see Civil Defense Perspectives, July 2001, vol 17, #5, p. 1) and James Aber writes around 1215 in the Alps, an oberriederin (irrigation canal) was overrun by (the) advance of the Aletsch glacier; (with) the canal head still covered by the modern Aletsch glacier to this very day. Around the same time, the passage from Iceland to Greenland became impassable around the mid-1300s due to sea ice expansion, with Greenland soon abandoned. (In this article, the author also notes in this article that skeletal remains from Hvalsey church in Greenland show that values from tooth enamel indicate sharply colder temperatures during this era of cooling.) 

Physicist Russell Rickert has also reviewed Viking agricultural settlements in Greenland that had to be abandoned after 1300 AD and states that there was a severe drop in temps sometime after the MWP (the last supply ship to get through the ice was reportedly 1406, with three other ships earlier in 1381, 1382 and 1385, per Jared M Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed). Diamond noted while we don’t know precisely when the last Viking Greenlander died, in the 1400s the North Atlantic became colder and stormier. Any mention in Viking records of ship traffic to Greenland ceased at that time. Diamond also noted a radiocarbon date of 1435 for a woman’s dress excavated from Herjolfsnes churchyard, suggesting people may have survived a few years after the last supply ship to reach Greenland. Diamond agrees that the Greenlander Norse went through several runs of cold years in the 1300s. Then the temperatures plunged in the 1400s, which cold lasted until the 1800s (he appears to be speaking in broad outlines, as there were warm spikes during this downward temperature trend). 

More evidence for the MWP. France’s Burgundy region, renowned for their wines for centuries, has kept records of grape harvest data going back to the end of the Medieval Optimum, from which researchers constructed a temperature graph which shows – you guessed it – slight cooling overall since that era. While carbon dioxide was as much as 100 ppm less, this research shows the 1300s, 1400, and 1600 were warmer than today.

The truth is, there has been global warming recently – but it started around the time of the Revolutionary war, and is today still BELOW the average of the past 3,000 years. And this is not just for Europe, Greenland, and North America, yet another red herring that has recently been thrown out by the desperate global warmers. The universality of the Viking and Medieval climatic optimums is written about by Kegwin, who wrote in Science, 1996:274:1504-1508, the mean surface temp of the Sargasso Sea (which lies roughly between the West Indies and the Azores), which was obtained by readings of isotope ratios in marine organism remains in the sediment, shows we are, today, below the three thousand year average, and far below the Medieval Climatic Optimum. See further reports documenting this here or here. Is There Evidence for the Medieval Warm Period? This also reviews the MWP from New Zealand through China and back to Europe – finding it was as warm, or warmer than today. Civil Defense Perspectives, Mar. 2007, Vol. 23, #3, p. 1, notes that evidence for this climatic optimum has been found in all but 2 out of 103 locations where it was examined, including Asia, Africa, South America, and the western U.S. (See Dr. Willie Soon, et al., Energy Environ 2003; 14 (2,3):233-296 for another report on this). But the following graph of the Kegwin research, of temperature in the Sargasso Sea, tells you all you need to know (note: that big horizontal line running across the page is the 3,000-year average!). Interestingly, the warmer times coincided not only with the best harvests, but also the least amount of major storm activity. 

 

If you would like corroboration of Kegwin’s study, Dr. Roy Spencer has a similar chart found at www.drroyspencer.com, where he charts temperatures for the past two thousand years. Similarly, a Russian study by Dergachev and Raspopov, found, as reported in the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, that a detailed 750-year temperature reconstruction from an ice core in Siberia agrees well with measures of solar modulation based on sunspot number and carbon-14 and Be-10 estimates, and that the agreement is remarkable at multi-decadal time scales, and concluded that Dergachev and Raspopov compare the solar indices of the past millennium with the borehole temperature reconstructions, demonstrating that the borehole data and solar indices agree on the long-term temperature pattern of the past thousand years. That is to say; the two parameters imply the existence of a solar-induced Medieval Warm Period (MWP) around AD 1000 to 1300 and a Little Ice Age (LIA) in the 1600s to 1700s. Thus, their study pretty much proves the existence of a global MWP, while demonstrating the link between the MWP-LIA oscillation and solar activity. And it indicates that the MWP was roughly as warm as — or possibly even warmer than — it has been to date during the Current Warm Period. Graph for this here. 

More evidence of the MWP was published in 2010, including a study by Billeaud, Tessier, and Lesueur in  2009 of the area around Mont-Saint-Michel Bay, France, showing that the Holocene has been regularly punctuated by warming periods, occurring every 1500 years, +/- 500 years. The MWP also existed in Central Asia, as summarized by the NIPCC of an article by Chen, et al. Moisture changes over the last millennium in arid central Asia: A review, synthesis, and comparison with monsoon region, published in Quaternary Science Reviews 29: 1055-1068. 

Even the Chinese are in on the act: CM Ma, et al., analyzed multi-proxy data, including, in their words, “¹⁴C, grain size, microfossil, plant seeds, and geochemical elements — which they obtained from sediment retrieved from excavations made in the dry lake bed of Lop Nur China’s West Lake (40°27’129″ N, 90°20’083″ E) — in order to amply discuss, as they describe it, the climate and environment changes during the MWP (Medieval Warm Period), which they identified as occurring between AD 900 and 1300. So what did they find?… Ma, et al. conclude that ‘the environment was the best…temperature was almost the same [as] or a little higher than [italics added] nowadays.”

Once again, one can see that Mr. Gore and his green minions have confused the emergence from the mini-ice age with anthropogenic global warming. 

In case you need yet more evidence of the Medieval Climatic Optimum, the NIPC.org cites a study by Kobashi et al. (2010) wherein Greenland, oxygen isotopes of ice (Stuiver et al., 1995) have been extensively used as a temperature proxy, but the data are noisy and do not clearly show multi-centennial trends for the last 1,000 years in contrast to borehole temperature records that show a clear ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Medieval Warm Period’ (Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998).” However, they note that nitrogen (N) and argon (Ar) isotopic ratios — ¹⁵N/¹⁴N and ⁴⁰Ar/³⁶Ar, respectively — can be used to construct a temperature record that is not seasonally biased, and does not require any calibration to instrumental records, and resolves decadal to centennial temperature fluctuations.” And what does this study by Kobashi, et al., show? See for yourself: 

 

In Italy, at the NIPC reports, Working with stalagmite SV1 from Grotta Savi — a cave located at the southeast margin of the European Alps in Italy (45°37’05” N, 13°53’10” E) — Frisia et al. (2005) developed a 17,000-year record of speleothem calcite δ¹⁸O_C data, which they calibrated against “a reconstruction of temperature anomalies in the Alps” that was developed by Luterbacher et al. (2004) for the last quarter of the past millennium.”

This work clearly shows that between the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, there was a cold period, but at least during with MWP, it was as warm as, if not warmer, than today. And I am pretty sure Al Gore and his green fasco-Marxists cannot blame that on Medieval SUVs, though perhaps that will be next in the fake news. 

Global Cooling! But This Isn't a Schadenfreude Moment

By Rich Kozlovich

The Germans have a word that appears in literature quite often, and is one I use quite a bit.  It's schadenfreude.  There's no direct English equivalent but basically it means "pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune", and generally the implication the misfortune being suffered is being suffered by people who deserve it.  

Well, I've been right about all this twattle about Anthropogenic Climate Change from the beginning.  Global Warming claims has made scientific integrity an oxymoron.  The  of scientists is at best misleading or at worse, fraudulent, as I demonstrated in my 2014 piece, How Many Constitute 97%?  And there's much more.

But now we finally have people publicly coming out with information that we're facing another grand solar minimum.  And that means global cooling!  Serious cooling! Worse yet, has been the distortion of the historical impact of warming.  History has shown all the warming periods of the past were beneficial to the Earth, and all that inhabits our planet, but cooling is deadly!

With all this twattle about the world's greatest threat to humanity being global warming, I thought it worthwhile to republish this information I published on February 2018.  

Welcome to the world of reality, say goodbye to the world of leftist illusion promoting a system of leftist world governance, because that's what all this twattle about global warming is really all about.  

Andrew West published an article entitled, Deadly Temperatures Are Set To Invade America…Are You Safe? on December 28, 2017 saying: 

"All good hoaxes must come to an end, and this week’s frigid and dangerous arctic blast may be another nail in the coffin for the “global warming” charlatans. The idea that the entire globe is somehow filling with greenhouse gasses, thusly heating the planet up to the point of no return, is patently absurd. Even the liberal science community believed 30 years ago that this process would likely cause a mini ice age, before dramatically shifting to their current hangup regarding an increase in temperature.  The reason for this abrupt change was not some scientific breakthrough, rather, the idea that the earth could become uninhabitable via heat is a much more profound problem."

Unfortunately, this isn't a schadenfreude moment.  You love to smugly say "I told you so", when arrogant, smarmy leftists look down their noses at everyone and declare any who disagree with them as enemies of humanity, flat Earthers, deniers, and more in their efforts to impose a totally destructive economic plan on the world based on the Kyoto Accords.  A scientifically fraudulent plan with the real goal of creating a scheme of worldwide governance under the United Nations.  Even a past president of France, Jacques Chirac acknowledged the Kyoto Accord was the first step in global governance.

 

However, this cooling trend is what many of us who've been on the right side of this issue from the beginning has been expecting for some time:  The potential for another solar minimum, and they're deadly!

 

The last minimum was during what's called the Dalton Minimum, which was another low sun spot period starting "about 1790 to 1830 or 1796 to 1820, corresponding to the period solar cycle 4 to solar cycle 7."  "Like the Maunder Minimum, 1645 - 1715, and Sporer Minimum 1460 -1550, the Dalton Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures.  During that period, there was a variation of temperature of about 1 °C in Germany." 

 

Some are claiming the cause for that cooling was a result of volcanism - and while that may have been a contributing factor - the fact of the matter is the cooling temperatures and solar minimum patterns are solid evidence, and that pattern is playing out right now.

 

But here's something to think about.  There's no consistent pattern as to how long these minimums go on.  The Maunder Minimum started in "about 1645 and continuing to about 1715", about 70 years, and if the Dalton minimum started in 1790 and lasted until 1830, that was 40 years, if it lasted, as some claim, from 1796 until 1820, that was a mere 24 years.  But no matter - there was only about a 75 to 85 year period where temperatures rose to level better suited to human and animal survival during that either 175 or 185 year period. 

 

Let's understand this - over the last 1000 years it's been the cold that's been deadly, not the warming.  The warm periods were periods where agriculture, humans and animals flourished, including the Roman Warming Period from approximately 250 BC to AD 400.

 

A thousand years ago that age, now known as the Medieval Warming Period from 800 to 1400 AD, it was substantially warmer than it is today.  Although there are those who claim - through the use of Climate Proxy records this warming period wasn't universal.  Proxy records like tree ring counting, but is that reliable?

 

As a result of Biffa's offerings - tree ring counting that supplied evidence in support of what's now being called the "fraudulent" Hockey Stick Graph - we now know it isn't. 

 

We now know that  not only can it be unreliable, it can be manipulated to get the results the researcher wants, all of which Anthony Watts covers quite well in his December 4, 2009 article, Jo Nova finds the Medieval Warm Period.  It's also interesting no one questioned the universality of that warming period until it interfered with the Warmist’s claims, especially since in Mann's Hockey Stick Graph the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age completely disappear.

The Medieval Warming period ended with what's called the Little Ice Age - 1300 to about 1850 - which forced the Vikings who lived there for about 300 years to abandon Greenland and return to Iceland. Greenland really was green over a large section of the Southern region.  It's also known from the historical records they're agricultural practises were the same as those practiced in Norway and Iceland.  They had to leave because they could no longer maintain those practises.  Because cold kills!  And every warming period humanity has experience has been beneficial.

 

In the paper, The `Hockey Stick': A New Low in Climate Science by John L. Daly he outlines the time lines in this way:

1. Medieval Warm Period (AD 700 - 1300)
2. Sporer Minimum' cool period (AD 1300 - 1500)
3. Brief climatic warming (AD 1500 - 1560)
4. Little Ice Age (`Maunder Minimum') (AD 1560 - 1830) 

• (Editor's note:  I think he must be melding the Maunder and Dalton Minimums in this time frame.  One thing we all have to acknowledge is the exact time frames for all of this is malleable, which can be a source for controversy, but the fact these eras existed isn't disputable. RK)

1. Brief warmer period (AD 1830 - 1870)
2. Brief cool period (AD 1870 - 1910)
3. 20th century warm period (AD 1910 - 2000)

 He goes on to say:

 

"As to what caused these two major climatic events, the most probable candidate is the variable sun, particularly with respect to the Little Ice Age. This is because we have direct observations of sunspot counts going back to 1600 AD, which allows us to compare variations in the sun with variations to global climate. Fig.2 shows how the sun has changed over time, the radiation being greatest during a sunspot maximum and least during a sunspot minimum, both recurring on an 11-year cycle."

 

All the claims about Anthropogenic Climate Change are based on two foundations.  The Hockey Stick Graph, which is now being challenged by more and more scientists, including those who previously adhered to this tenet of green religion, and computer models, all of which are failing or have failed, which is why I call that Game Boy science.  

 

There are three things Warminsts leave out of these models that actually have something to do with climate: The decadal cycles of the oceans currents, the sun's cycles and the number one component of our atmosphere which actually does hold warmth - water vapor!  Why are they left out?  Because these are natural components of climate and mankind can't be blamed. 

 

Computer models are an important part of science as it allows scientists to test new ideas quickly, then change the parameters to see what comes out, allowing for more speculation.  But speculation isn't science!  It’s a component of science which can allows for shortcuts in deciding what areas they need to pay attention to in order to do real science.  Science based on actual observation, not speculation.   Actual science is observable, recordable and repeatable!

 

We're hearing all these claims of Anthropogenic Climate Change and disaster, but we should be asking this:  Why did these hysterians opt out of  the phrase, Anthropogenic Global Warming and choose Anthropogenic Climate Change instead?  They knew their claims were unraveling!  It was also clear the "climate deniers" weren't walking away from the evidence of their fraud so they had to find a way to make whatever temperatures changes which might occur the fault of mankind, and most importantly - capitalism - and especially the capitalists of the United States.

 

But their efforts are failing so rapidly even Al Gore won't be able to further enrich himself with the scam.  The biggest reason is the Internet!  Finally, those who've opposed all the fraudulent claims put out by that neo-pagan secular religion known as Environmentalism, had a platform - an international platform - to challenge these people.  A platform the media would have never given them.  That's why the Kyoto Protocol never passed, and that piece of junk science known as the Montreal Protocol would have never been passed if the Internet existed then.

 

What I would like to know is when are these fraudsters going to be charged with a crime?  The Global Warming scam is a fraud paid for by the American taxpayer.  And the last time I looked: Fraud is a crime!

 

There are a five questions everyone has to ask.

1. Was it substantially warmer during the Medieval Warming period than it is now?  The answer is yes!
2. If the answer is yes, and it is, then we have to ask: What caused that warming period and what caused the Roman Warming Period?  Answer:  Those periods of warming must have been naturally occurring.
3. If those warming periods were naturally occurring why shouldn't we believe any warming occurring now (which stopped over 20 years ago) isn't naturally occurring?  Answer: We shouldn't 
4. If it was substantially warmer during both the Roman and Medeival Warming periods did any of the disasters they're predicting for today occur then?  Answer:  There's absolutely nothing in the historical record to show any of these disasters occurred then.
5.  If these disasters didn't occur then, when it was substantially warmer, why should we believe any of these disasters will occur today.  The answer is - we shouldn't!

We're going through another period of little or no sun spot activity.  Does that mean another solar minimum?  No one knows for sure, but it seems historically and scientifically probable.  It's hard to feel schadenfreude when that happens - because cold kills!