Global Warming in History, by Gråulf

I am not a climatologist, so my opinion is worth about as much as All Gores, but I am a fairly good historian with a well-developed BS detector, and I double and triple-check all data that looks suspicious. When All Gore, shows a “Hockey Stick” temperature graph done by Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998), and has to hoist his fat ass up on a crane to point to present day temperatures, and then announces that the last few years have been the warmest on record for the past 125,000 years my BS alarm goes off. Mann, Bradley and Hughes claim the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age were insignificant, and local fluctuations in temperature, presumable because it would be inconvenient for them to explain how large temperature variations took place prior to man-made industrial pollution. The infamous hockey stick graph has since been discredited for using flawed data and methodology. However, man-made global warming advocates continue using the graph, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relied on the data in the flawed graph.

Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, astrophysicists from the University of Harvard, wrote a paper called Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years, which was published in the Journal of Climate Research in 2003. The paper presented solid evidence that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age had worldwide imprints, and suggested that the 20th century is not the warmest or a uniquely extreme climactic period of the last millennium. Well, you would have thought they pissed in the Holy Grail from the response they got from the man-made global warming advocates. The editor of Climate Research was hounded out of his job for publishing the paper, and the scientific community, led by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, vilified the authors.

In the 10,000 years since the end of the last major ice age, which closed the Pleistocene Epoch, Earth's climate has undergone a series of global warmings and global coolings. Between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago, for example, during a period known as the "Holocene Maximum," global temperatures were about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are today. Rainfall patterns were also different. There were forests and savannas in what is now the arid core of the Sahara desert; hippopotamuses and crocodiles thrived in lakes and swamps. Moister conditions in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley aided the development of agriculture and humanity's first great civilizations in these regions. Now, Scandinavian scientists have published research indicating that the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in the summers during this time, and that was the reason the Eskimo could migrate from Alaska, across northern Canada, to Greenland in such a short time period.

There were several other cooling and warming periods since then, and one of these cooling periods caused the great migrations out of northern Europe that eventually toppled the Roman Empire and established the foundations of the great nations of Europe.

During the present millennium there was a period of mild climate called the Medieval Warm Period, lasting from about 800 to 1300 AD. Europe enjoyed an undeniably balmy climate during this period. Agriculture flourished farther north and at higher elevations on mountains than is possible even in today's warmish climate, and harvests generally was good. Farmers raised wine grapes in England 300 miles north of present limits, and Norse settlers grazed sheep and dairy cattle in what are now icebound parts of Greenland.

By about 1300 A.D., the climate had cooled to temperatures comparable to today, and continued to cool, bringing on the Little Ice Age, which is well documented in art and literature. The Little Ice Age lasted until 1850, and the climate is still warming. Contrary to All Gore’s claims, today’s climate is not the warmest since the last Ice Age. When Leif Ericson sailed to America the tree line was 200 miles further north than it is today, and his father, Eric the Red, was able to grow cereal grains on his farm in Greenland.

Gråulf.