Some Like it Hot

In an earlier post I discussed the possibility of the Earth going through a cool down rather than a continued warming period and how this could find us unprepared. Since that original post back in 2007, the Sun has remained quiet and more and more people are beginning to take notice and express concern for this possibility.

As I have mentioned before, I pretty much ignored the global warming debate for years because I had read a wonderfully informative article by Thomas Gale Moore called "Why Global Warming Would be Good for You" It never really registered with me that this entire global warming thing would become a movement not based on science but on an agenda. I just assumed that global warming would eventually be recognized as a good thing.

Here are some of the key points that Dr, Moore made in what I still consider a very likely outcome should we experience global warming.


More...

Climate affects principally agriculture, forestry, and fishing. Manufacturing, most service industries, and nearly all extractive industries are immune to climate shifts. Factories can be built in northern Sweden or Canada or in Texas, Central America, or Mexico. Banking, insurance, medical services, retailing, education and a wide variety of other services can prosper as well in warm climates (with air-conditioning) as in cold (with central heating). A few services, such as transportation and tourism, may be more susceptible to weather. A warmer climate will lower transportation costs: less snow and ice will torment truckers and automobile drivers; fewer winter storms -- bad weather in the summer has less disruptive effects and is over quickly -- will disrupt air travel; a lower incidence of storms and less fog will make water transport less risky. Hotter temperatures will leave mining and the extractive industries largely unaffected; they might even benefit oil drilling in the northern seas and mining in the mountains. .....

As I said the entire article made common sense to me. Living in Florida and knowing that people naturally migrate to warmer weather when they can, if warmer weather should migrate to them it seems like a good thing for a variety of reasons, as Moore further explained:

....A warmer climate would produce the greatest gain in temperatures at northern latitudes and much less change near the equator. Not only would this foster a longer growing season and open up new territory for farming but it would mitigate harsh weather. The contrast between the extreme cold near the poles and the warm moist atmosphere on the equator drives storms and much of the earth's climate. This difference propels air flows; if the disparity is reduced, the strength of winds driven by equatorial highs and Arctic lows will be diminished....

Again made sense to me, longer growing seasons and a more temperate climate in northern latitudes seems like something to be desired rather than feared. He explains something you never hear in today's hysteria driven science and media mantra on climate change, the positive aspects. Including the benefits of increased CO2 levels to crop growth, an overall increase in precipitation etc.

He also explains the historical record of warmer climates on human history, here is a sample:

In Europe, the Optimum period produced an expansion of civilization with the construction of cities and a technological revolution. The Bronze Age replaced the New Stone Age.[78] The more benign climate with less severe storms encouraged travel by sea.

Trade flourished during this warm period. People from ancient Denmark shipped amber along the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean. As early as 2000 B.C., the Celts apparently were sailing from Cornwall and Brittany to both Scandinavia and southern Italy. Astrological monuments built around this time, such as Stonehenge, indicate that the skies were less cloudy than now.[79]

With the glaciers in the Alps during the late Bronze Age being only about 20 percent of the size of the ice in the nineteenth century, merchants made their way through the Brenner Pass, the dominant link between northern and southern Europe. Northern Europeans exchanged tin for manufactured bronze from the south. Alpine people mined gold and traded it for goods crafted around the Mediterranean. Baltic amber found its way to Scotland.

During the warm period prior to 3000 B.C., China enjoyed much warmer temperatures. In particular midwinters were as much as 9deg.F hotter and rice was planted a month earlier than is now common.[80]

Bamboo, valued for food, building material, writing implements, furniture and musical instruments, grew much farther north -- about 3deg. in latitude -- than is now possible.[81] Chinese archaeologists have found evidence in a district near Sian that the climate5,000 to 6,000 years ago was warmer and wetter than the present.....

.....Written records confirm that the warmer climate brought drier and consequently healthier conditions to much of Europe. Robert Bartlett, citing H.E. Hallam in Settlement and Society, quotes the people of Holland who invaded Lincolnshire in 1189 that "because their own marsh had dried up, they converted them into good and fertile ploughland."[118] Moreover, prior to the twelfth century German settlers on the east side of the Elbe frequently named their towns with mar, which meant marsh, but later colonists did not use that suffix. Bartlett's explanation is that the term had gone out of use, but an alternative one is that the warmer climate had dried up the marshes.[119]

With a more pleasant climate people spent longer periods outdoors; food supplies were more reliable. Even the homes of the peasants would have become warmer and less damp. The draining or drying up of marshes and wetlands reduced the breeding grounds for mosquitoes that brought malaria. In all the infant and childhood mortality rate must have fallen spawning an explosion in population....

...The Mediterranean flourished in the twelfth century. Christian and Moslem lands achieved great brilliance. Cordova, Palermo, Constantinople and Cairo all thrived, engendering great tolerance for contending religions......

On and on he documents the historical record of the positive historical record of a warmer climate. I highly reccomend reading the entire paper which is quite long but I believe a far better assesment to a warmer world than what we get today from the relentless mind numbing drum beat of negativity so popular in our age of eco-warrior scientist.

This I compare to and article by James Marusek about the dangers of a solar minimum. Unlike the purveyors of the CO2 hypothesis he lays out in part the historical record of what has happened during times of solar minimums. This is not the mythical projections of climate models but the actual known consequences of a quiet sun. I will post the entire summary for you in order to consider the alternatives.

A taste of the cold weather due to a quiet sun.

Evidence of the Mississippi River, Ohio River, Allegheny River, Delaware River and Hudson River freezing and of very harsh winters.

Recent periods of quiet sun were the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830 A.D.), the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715 A.D.) and the Spörer Minimum (1420 to 1570 A.D.). The Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum were solar Grand Minima and each were individually referred to as the Little Ice Age.

A few decades after the Dalton Minimum
In the spring Eliza, a slave, carrying her young son, fled from Kentucky by crossing the Ohio River on foot. The river was “swollen and turbulent, great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid waters.” She leaped from one chunk of ice to the next until she reached freedom on the Ohio shore. [Source: Uncle Tomʼs Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati, Ohio from 1832 to 1850. In 1851, she wrote “Uncle Tomʼs Cabin”. Her life in Ohio was intertwined in this work of fiction.]

During the Dalton Minimum
The Hudson River at the New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk across the ice from Manhattan to Staten Island. The Hudson froze over completely during particularly brutal winter of 1779/1780, when the surface was solid for five weeks straight and the British rolled cannons over the ice. In 1821, taverns were constructed in the middle of the river to offer warmth and refreshment to pedestrians...

..Early settlers routinely waited till winter to cross the frozen Mississippi river in their wagon trains. In 1799, George Frederick Bollinger led a group of early pioneers from North Carolina to establish early settlements in Missouri. They hoped to cross their largest obstacle, the Mississippi River, on the ice, frozen solid in mid-winter. They arrived on the east bank of the Mississippi river opposite St. Genevieve in late December, pitched camp and explored potential river crossings. St. Genevieve is located about a hundred miles downstream from St. Louis. Daily the thickness of the ice was measured and then on December 31, a chopped hole in the ice indicated thickness well over two feet. The next day the settlers successfully drove their heavy loaded wagons across the river. [Source: “The Bollinger Migration to the Louisiana Territory”, part of "Bollinger Collection" compiled by Orena Bollinger in 1984.]

...From 1803 to 1806, Captains Lewis and Clark lead a transcontinental expedition to explore the greater Northwest. During the winter of 1804/1805, the explorers set up a winter base camp near the Big Knife River near what is today the town of Bismarck, North Dakota. The winter was bitterly cold. There were 6 days with temperatures of -30oF or lower. These occurred in 1804 on December 12 (-38 degrees F), December 17 (-45 degrees F), December 18 (-32 degrees F), in 1805 on January 10 (-40 degrees F), January 11 (-38 degrees F), and January 13 (-34 degrees F). Compare this to the current low temperatures of Bismarck, North Dakota in which only one day in the past decade fell below -30 degrees F. On January 15, 2009 the temperature fell to -44 degrees F. [Sources: (1) The Journals of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, (2) Weather Underground for Bismarck, ND]

Between the Dalton Minimum and the Maunder Minimum
December 1776 was a desperate time for George Washington and the American Revolution. During the night of December 25, Washington led his small Continental army of 2,400 troops from Pennsylvania across the Delaware River made dangerous and barely navigable by huge chunks of ice. Once across they launched a surprise attack on the Britain's Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, New Jersey, capturing 1,000 prisoners and seizing muskets, powder, and artillery...

..In Boston, Massachusetts on February 22, 1772, Anna, a young school girl, writes in her diary “Since about the middle of December, we have had till this week, a series of cold and stormy weather - every snow storm (of which we have had abundance) except the first, ended with rain, by which means the snow was so hardened that the strong gales at northwest soon turned it, and all above ground to ice.” In some streets about town this mixture of ice and snow is 5 feet thick. On March 11, she writes that the snow is now 7 feet deep in some places around her house[Source: “Diary of a Boston School Girl” written by Anna Green Winslow from 1771-1773, edited by Alice Morse Earle in 1894.]...

...Just before the opening battles of the French and Indian War in December 1753, George Washington, then 21 years old, crossed the Allegheny River. In their first attempt, Washington and a guide used a raft to cross the ice-choked river and this ended in disaster as Washington was knocked overboard in deep water and saved himself only by catching the raft as it swept by. The severe cold that night froze their clothes and the guide's fingers. The river also froze, however, allowing them to walk across on the ice the next morning. Soon they reached the safety of an English trader's settlement.

During the Maunder Minimum
During the Great Frost of (1683–1684) in England, the River Thames was completely frozen for two months, the ice was 11 inches thick at London. Sea ice was reported along the coasts of southeast England, and ice prevented the use of many harbors. The sea froze, so that ice formed for a time between Dover and Calais, joining England and France. The Thames was recorded to have frozen over at London during the years: 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1667, 1684, 1695, 1709, and 1716....

...During the Little Ice Age, growing seasons in England and Continental Europe generally became short and unreliable, which led to shortages and famine. These hardships were nothing compared to the more northerly countries: Glaciers advanced rapidly in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and North America, making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland. Finlandʼs population fell by one third, Icelandʼs by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities.

During the Spörer Minimum
By 1518, early explorers made significant progress in probing and surveying the New World. They described North America as a “land of frozen seas, horrid, barren and scarcely habitable for cold”. “In the New World, cold predominates. The rigor of the frigid zone extends over half of those regions which should be temperate by their position. Countries where the grape and the fig should ripen, are buried under snow one half of the year; and lands situated in the same parallel with the most fertile and best cultivated provinces in Europe, are chilled with perpetual frosts, which almost destroy the power of vegetation.” [Source: The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America by William Robertson, 1826]

Again I recommend you read the entire article which is quite chilling, but the comparisons between the two could not be more stark. If indeed we are headed into a period of global cooling not only will our world be a much less friendly place to live but because of the obsession over global warming we now will be less prepared to handle it .

One wonders that should the Rivers Thames and Hudson freeze over in the next few years, will our eco-warrior scientist peer review papers explaining that your frozen breathe is to blame.