Let Them Melt
by Robert Davison (Wolf)
It had to happen. The magazine noted for its fluffy, vacuous articles on lost cities and natural science—and perhaps even more famous with young lads for its pictures of topless natives—has for over one hundred years assiduously avoided political causes; but like another gray old lady, The New York Times, it may now have abandoned its objectivity. National Geographic has weighed in on the side of global warming.
A flash of photographers has gone on record asserting that the danger not only exists, but that man is a significant contributor
The story is told by a noogie of nerds who are convinced that terraforming is a confirmed fact, and whose wet dreams perpetuate the hubris that Gaia cannot outmuscle a man determined to “save the planet.”
It is evident, even to a litter of polluters, that mankind should not trash the planet. What is not clear is why we should cozy up to Kyoto, when it excuses India and China and asks the rest of us, particularly the U.S., to emulate third world nations. What is even more annoying is the ignorance and malice of forethought that is blind to two significant ‘natural’ events in this millennium alone.
According to authors Hubert Lamb and Le Roy Ladurie, between the tenth and fourteenth centuries A.D., Earth's average global temperature was much warmer than it is today. This Medieval Warm Period is deduced from historical weather records and proxy climate data from England and Northern Europe. The authors write:
The warmer conditions associated with this interval of time are known to have had a largely beneficial impact on Earth's plant and animal life. In fact, the environmental conditions of this time period have been determined to have been so favorable that it is often referred to as the Little Climatic Optimum. (This is the period that coincides with the existence of Norse colonies in Greenland and Vinland that have so confounded historians.)
In Europe, temperatures reached some of the warmest levels of the last 4,000 years, allowing enough grapes to be successfully grown in England to sustain an indigenous wine industry. Contemporaneously, horticulturists in China extended their cultivation of citrus trees and perennial herbs further and further northward, resulting in an expansion of their ranges that reached its maximum extent in the thirteenth century. From examining the climatic conditions required to grow these species successfully, it has been estimated that annual mean temperatures in the region must have been about 1.0 °C higher than at present, with extreme January minimum temperatures fully 3.5 °C warmer than they are today.
For a fuller account, see the current issue of CO2 Science here.
Scott A. Mandia, Assoc. Professor of Physical Sciences at SUNY-Suffolk, relies heavily on Lamb and Ladurie in describing climactic events that had the opposite effect in the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries:
Lamb (1966) points out that in the warmest times of the last 1000 years, southern England had the climate that Normandy, France has now. The difference between the two locations is about 350 miles. In other words that means the growing season changed by 15 to 20 percent between the warmest and coldest times of the millennium. That is enough to affect almost any type of food production, especially crops highly adapted to use the full-season warm climatic periods. During the coldest times, England's growing season was shortened by one to two months compared to present day values. The availability of varieties of seed today that can withstand extreme cold or warmth, wetness or dryness, was not available in the past ...
One of the worst famines in the seventeenth century occurred in France due to the failed harvest of 1693. Millions of people in France and surrounding countries were killed. The effect of this little ice age on Swiss farms was also severe. Due to the cooler climate, snow covered the ground deep into spring, and a parasite, known as Fusarium nivale, which thrives under snow cover, devastated crops. Additionally, due to the increased number of days of snow cover, the stocks of hay for the animals ran out so livestock were fed on straw and pine branches. Many cows had to be slaughtered ...
Ladurie (1971) notes that there were many "bad years" for wine during this period in France and surrounding countries, due to very late harvests and very wet summers. The cultivation of grapes was extensive throughout the southern portion of England from about 1100-1300. This area is about 300 miles farther north than the areas in France and Germany that grow grapes today. Grapes were also grown in northern France and Germany at that time, areas that even today do not sustain commercial vineyards…
In fact, Lamb (1995) suggests that during that period the amount of wine produced in England was substantial enough to provide significant economic competition with the producers in France. With the coming cooler climate in the 1400's, temperatures became too cold for grape production and the vineyards in southern England ceased to exist and do not exist even today.
In 1595, glacial advances at Gietroz (Switzerland) dammed the Dranse River and flooded Bagne, resulting in 70 deaths. Between 1600 and 1610, advances by the Chamonix glaciers in France caused massive floods that destroyed three villages and severely damaged a fourth, which had stood since the 1200's. 1670-80 recorded the maximum historical advances by glaciers in eastern Alps. There was a noticeable decline of human population in the areas close to these glaciers, whereas population elsewhere in Europe rose. Between the years 1695-1709, Icelandic glaciers advanced dramatically, destroying farms. A glacier in Norway advanced at a rate of 100 meters per year from 1710 to 1735—and from 1748 to 1750 Norwegian glaciers achieved their historical maximum positions. For more background, see Mandia's Little Ice Age site.
In light of these events, it is hard get it up for global warming or to mourn the retreat of today’s glaciers. Until science can explain these dramatic events, no one can reasonably put stock in the current, petty statistics tormented into significance by flawed computer models—especially when, just a short thirty years ago, these same sources were warning of an impending ice age.
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