Global scamming

Since most people’s sense of history begins with their first clear memories it can be easy to alarm them with evidence that things are changing in some way along with dire warnings of disastrous consequences if the change is not arrested or reversed.

Global warming is just such an instance. I saw a”public service” ad on TV last night of a man standing on a railroad track with a train approaching him. He said since the effects of global warming wouldn’t be felt for 30 years it didn’t have anything to do with him. Then he stepped off the tracks in plenty of time to avoid the train, but in doing so revealed a young girl standing behind him. The message was clear. We must stop global warming for the children.

Since the earth has a long history and temperature has fluctuated during that history I thought it might be instructive to look at what has happened in the past when the temperature has risen by an amount even greater than the current estimates of what global warming will bring to us. This is from John Kelly’s book The Great Mortality, about the Black Plague:

Sometime between 750 and 800, Europe entered the Little Optimum [1], a period of global warming. Across the continent, temperatures increased by an average of more than 1 degree Celsius, but, rather than producing catastrophe, as many current theorists of global warming predict, the warm weather produced abundance [2]. England and Poland became wine-growing countries, and even the inhabitants of Greenland began experimenting with vineyards. More important, the warm weather turned marginal farmland into decent farmland, and decent farmland into good farmland. In the final centuries of Roman rule, crop yields had fallen to two and three to one – a yield represents the amount of seed harvested to the amount planted: a return so meager, the Roman agricultural writer Columella feared that the land had grown old. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as winters became milder and summers warmer and drier, European farms began to produce yields of five and six to one, unprecedented by medieval standards.

As you can see warmer weather is a good thing. In the Middle Ages the warming allowed the population to recover from the great die off which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. In fact the population in most areas came to exceed the Roman era population.

Following the period of Medieval global warming there was a period of global cooling:

The Swiss farmers in the Saaser Visp Valley may have been the first people in Europe to notice that the weather was changing. Sometime around 1250 the resurgent Allalin glacier began to reclaim the farmer’s traditional pasturelands. Or the Greenlanders may have been to notice the change, alerted by the sudden chill in the August nights and the appearance of ice in places it had never been seen before. “The ice now comes. . . so close to the reefs none can sail the old route without risking his life”, wrote the Norwegian priest Ivar Baardson. Or the first Europeans to realize that the Little Optimum was over may have been the fisherman on the Caspian Sea, where torrential rains produced a rise in the water level at the end of the thirteenth century. In the European heartland the Little Optimum gave way to the Little Ice Age around 1300 [3]. People noticed that the winters were growing colder, but it was the summers, suddenly cool and very wet, that alarmed them. By 1314 a string of poor and mediocre harvests had sent food prices skyrocketing. That fall, every peasant in every sodden field knew: one more cold, wet summer, and people would be reduced to eating dogs, cats, effuse – anything they could get their hands on. As the summer of 1315 approached, prayers were offered up for the return of the sun, but, like a truculent child, the cold and wet persisted. March was so chilly, some wondered if spring would ever return to the meadows of Europe. Then, in April, the gray skies turned a wicked black, and the Rain came down in a manner no one had ever seen before: it was cold, hard, and pelting; it stung the skin, hurt the eyes, reddened the face, and tore at the soft, wet ground with the force of a plow blade. In parts of southern Yorkshire, torrential downpours washed away the topsoil, exposing the underlying rock. In other areas, fields turned into raging rivers. Elsewhere in Europe in the bitter spring of 1315, men and animals stood shivering under trees, their heads and backs turned against the fierce wind and rain.

[. . .]


The early winter months of 1316 brought more suffering. As food grew costlier, people ate bird dung, family pets, mildewed wheat, corn and finally, in desperation, they ate one another. In Ireland, where the thud of shovels and the tearing of flesh from bone echoed through the dark, wet nights, the starving “extracted the bodies of the dead from the cemeteries and dug out the flesh from their skulls and ate it.” In England, where they consider the Irish indecorous, only prisoners ate one another. “Incarcerated thieves,” wrote the monk John de Trokelowe, “. . . devoured each other when they were half alive.” As the hunger intensified, the unspeakable became spoken about. “Certain people. . . because of excessive hunger devoured their own children,” wrote a German monk; another contemporary reported, “In many places, parents, after slaying their children, and children their parents, devoured the remains.”

[. . .]


The second failed harvest in succession broke human resistance. There was the “most savage, atrocious death,” “the most tearful death,” “the most inexpressible death”. Emaciated bodies winked out from half-ruined cottages and forest clearings, floated facedown in flooded fields, coursed through urban rivers, protruded from mud slides, and lay half hidden under washed-out bridges.

It was the generation who were children during the great global cooling famine who would grow up; their immune systems damaged by starvation during their growing years, and die in such horrendous numbers during the bubonic plague.

Those of us on the East Coast of the United States who are enjoying an unusually warm winter (courtesy of the El Nino in the Pacific rather than the El Camino in your neighbor’s garage) are too busy counting our savings in heating costs to worry overmuch about theories of disaster related to a rising thermometer and those on the West Coast are counting their losses from the frozen citrus crops and thinking that some warming would be a good idea about right now. However this will change come summer. When the weather gets hot opportunists like Al Gore will crawl out from under their wet rocks and begin to beat their drums warning of the impending apocalypse.

Don’t let the global warming activists alarm you. The truth is that it can get even warmer than their computer models call for and the actual results for the earth and its human population would be positive rather than negative. What should scare you are the plans being floated by some to actually artificially lower the earth’s temperature.

As can be seen from the above global cooling can lead to real horrors, and this is not speculation from a rigged computer model. This is simply looking at what has gone before on the planet.

So please, if your idea of “history” is Raquel Welch in a leather bikini fighting a Pterodactyl the size of a Lear jet do some studying before you let some politically motivated charlatan talk you into something that could result in a few hundred million emaciated bodies “coursing down urban rivers”.

Here is a good rule of thumb in evaluating claims of coming calamity. If the people giving the warnings are either running for office or if they want taxpayer money to solve or study the problem or if they want to restrict your economic or political freedom because of the problem then they should be considered to be liars until proven truthful by overwhelming evidence. And the evidence needs to come from authorities who are not receiving any kind of government money, either personally or through any institution that they work for.


[1] The Big Optimum lasted from the end of the Ice Age to roughly 1300 BC. Perhaps significantly, this may also have been the period when Y. pestis evolved. (“Climatology,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer [New York; Charles Scribner, 1982], p 456.)

[2] Says Dr. Philip Stott, professor emeritus of bio-geography at the University of London, “What has been forgotten in all the discussion of global warming is a proper sense of history. . . During the medieval warm period, the world was warmer than even today and history shows that it was a wonderful period of plenty for everyone.” (Philip Stott, interview, Daily Telegraph, 4/6/2003.)

[3] The starting date of the Little Ice Age is a source of controversy. Most authorities date it from 1300, when the Alpine glaciers began to advance again, but some experts insist the true Little Ice Age did not begin until the early 1600s, when temperatures turned bitterly cold.