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Globe Warmer In Time of Vikings
SEWilco writes "A record of recent global temperatures has been assembled by piecing together the hundreds of studies with past temperature estimates [Discovery, Harvard]. The record shows there was a "Medieval Warm Period" warmer than the 20th Century. This was followed by the "Little Ice Age", which ended around 1900. We're having average climate now. Numerous sources indicated this, but apparently were not gathered into one document" This adds some more background reading to the previously linked Telegraph story.
I'm frankly disappointed at each of you who is falling for that spin game.
This isssue has be politicized to the point that even with the three or four recent findings that seem to support the case that our quickness to attribute shifts in climate to the actions of man may be completely off base, the side screaming bloody murder for the last 10 years will never admit that they may have been wrong.
Having said that, I am sympathetic to the evironmental movement, there's just nothing I hate more than bad science that persists due to politics.
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Traipsing all over the world in those huge boats, putting out all sorts of greenhouse gasses (methane), when they could have been conserving their energy and travelling only on inshore trips in lightweight, hybrid fuel (sail and oar) dinghys.
All because of their imperialist, war mongering culture.
Bastards.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Too late. In Western societies, more people believe in Global Warming than believe in God. It is to good a story to stay anything but the global boogeyman it is.
Just not well known to anyone who hasnt studied the subject. We may hve jacked global warming up by 1 degree celcius in the last 100 years, but were due to rise 3 degrees anyway due to, well, historical patterns. Look up paleloclimatology(sp) and do your own research. Were just coming out of the ice age that killed off roman civilistaton.
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If these increasing numbers of studies disproving man-influenced climate change turn out to be true, we can all thank Bush for not plunging our economy further down the toilet by signing the Kyoto treaty.
That being said, I am entirely in favor of *real* environmental protection laws and the promotion of cleaner technologies. By 'real' I mean factors that actually affect people--water and air quality, landfills, etc. And I also think we should switch to a hydrogen economy ASAP, not out of worry about so-called greenhouse gasses, but as the single most effective way to fight terrorism--shut off the money flow to the middle east!
I read an article awhile back, don't remember where, but it said that the vikings inhabited Iceland a long time ago. The climate there at the time was warm enough for them to have large field of grapes and they ran wineries.
Or maybe it was Greenland. Either way, that sort of climate was definitely warmer than it is now. It's kind of interesting to see all of the viking heritage stuff in Iceland. I strongly suggest taking a trip there if you haven't before. Plane tix and hotels are cheap (food and drink is not though), and the people are amazingly friendly. I had an excellent time there.
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That said, I agree that bandwagon environmentalism is a bad trend. It does not seem, however, that the current US administration is in danger of subverting our economy with overzealous environmental regulation.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Is why so many people seem to want to oversimplify the situation.
As with any set of data, it's not all signal and it's not all noise. Much of the research in global warming may be due to political motive. (Though personally, I'm not inclined to agree that environmentalism is a purely political issue. I have a lot of reasons to be concerned by the idea that Florida might start shrinking in the next century, and none of them have to do with politics.) However, the focus of all the stuff I've heard about lately is on trying to figure out just how much of the change in global climate over the past century is due to natural fluctuation and how much is due to pollution.
Besides, even if it turns out to be entirely due to nautural fluctuation, it seems that it would be in our best interests to still modify the actions of humanity as a whole to promote a global climate that is best suited to humans. People don't think irrigation is a stupid idea because Mother Nature didn't put a body of water in the middle of every cornfield. The issue at hand should be what action is ultimately the most beneficial to the world.
It's been proven that the dog farting can clear a room. Therefore, Joe's farts can't clear a room.
There's no reason to believe that there can't be two or more contributing factors.
I dunno about that, the graphs I'm looking at show an average surface temperature of about 14.6 C, with the maximum for the past 900,000 years being around 16. Were we just due to be hotter than ever before then? (seeing as our 14 + your 3 > 16)
Required reading for anyone entering this thread: Still waiting for Greenhouse which has a pretty comprehensive treatment of the whole greenhouse show.
Seriously, Black currant (Ribes nigrum), vinbär/solbær, makes excellent wine grows in cooler climates. Wine from grapes is probably an artifact of mediterranean culture / continental Europe. However, mead was more common as the wax was a sought after trade good for the Byzantine empire.
Cooling of the climate in the 1200's seemed to have killed off the Greenland colonies. The Viking groups (Goths, Svear, Danes, Norrmen) had tradroutes from China/Bagdad to the east coast of what is now Canada. Iceland, Greenland, Shetlands, Froes, and parts of Ireland, England and Scotland were all settlements.
Aside from warm weather, technology made the long trips possible. Iron nails and sails were just two of the improvements. Prior to that they were closer to home. The basic ship, even before sails and iron nails, was strong and light because they had no saws. Hewn planks have about twice the strength and flexibility of sawn ones.
Not all changes in technology are improvements. Later, European-style ships were heavier and less maneuverable and could neither handle shallow rivers nor be portaged.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
> It might be useful to have a link to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [www.ipcc.ch]
You refer, of course to the Interworld Police Coordination Company ?
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In any case, the argument against greenhouse gas emissions has little to do with the past; it's a concern about plausible (but uncertain) events in the future. At the rate at which carbon dioxide emissions are growing, we will change the climate some time this or next century; that is simple physics. Furthermore, it takes a long time for the levels to come down again, so we will have to live with the consequences of our actions. The only discussion is when exactly that change will occur, how big it will be, and how much warning we will get. Since there are plausible models that say that change will happen pretty soon and will have serious consequences, it seems prudent to take precautions.
The real question is why some people are so eager to engage in an experiment with our climate on a global scale by continuing to emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases. Oddly enough, it is many self-proclaimed "conservatives" that advocate engaging in this kind of completely unprecedented behavior.
The thing that is "off base" is simply to drag historical records into this discussion at all--they are largely irrelevant to whether we should or should not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
You mean to tell me that Earth isn't in a state of static equilibrium? You mean that Earth actually changes over time??
Holy cow!! What are you gonna tell us next, that Antarctica wasn't always frozen?
I bet it was killing all the hot air windbags eco nuts that lead to the mini ice age afterwards. Maybe we need to take a play from Erik's playbook and do the same. :-)
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I agree with you. I think people(western society) tend to only look at their actions impact in the short term if at all. Our actions long term impact is what we will be remembered in the future by, if humanity survives long enough. Do we really want to be remembered as a culture that raped the land, and left nothing for its children? Or maybe we could be remembered as a culture with enough foresight to take action in preserving our little home in the stars for future civilizations to enjoy.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
Im just remembering back to a graph showing average earth temps for the past several million years. When you look at the graph, there are ice ages constantly, with little plataus of warmpth ever so often, in a regular pattern. We appear to be right at the start of one of these plateaus, and there are temperatre spinkes up and down on these. Very interesting.
THis time period also relates bact to the Anasazi indians and such in the southwest USA. In the warm period, they floursed with corn farming, and as the climate cooled, the resources became scarce, and they started fighting with each other. Current issue of discover has an article.
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I used to think that too. Then a conservative friend of mine noted that he had quit the Sierra Club after repeatedly having to sit through tirades about Republicans that had not one damn thing to do with actual environmental issues. Looking around, talking with him, reading some of what passed as "discussion" in environmental circles, it became quite apparent that the majority of "greens" have hooked their wagons to a particular rigid point of view about what is and what should be, and have stopped thinking about the general point of science, which is to be flexible and seek truth.
Of course this goes on in most scientific fields--an orthodoxy is established, moves some sort of progress forward, and eventually something comes along to break down or modify the orthodoxy in strange new directions--but in environmental science, and particular around the issue of Global Warming, the orthodoxy is particularly entrenched and fighting particularly hard to hold its position regardless of the facts.
I don't think any reasonable person is going to argue with you that the right thing to do is to modify human behavior to best balance between "progress" and the environment (my conservative friend is among those reasonable people). Unfortunately, most of the so called "environmentalists" have already made up their mind and don't want to discuss it any further. It's like trying to have a religious discussion with Jerry Falwell, and people are just as incensed when these people try to shove their environmental religion down our throats as they are when the (im)Moral Majority does.
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Over-rated? How can a comment be over-rated when it hasn't been modded up, and I didn't use the +1 bonus?
I have seen recent articles claiming actualy that it was severe and repeated droughts spread over more than one century that finished off the poor Anasazis.
The of this study measured tree-ring density and the vegetation pattern from remains in the deposits. I have not seen their raw data, but I tend to believe them. I was interested in Anasazis at one point. Water is scarce in the Southwest to begin with and if you have seen the actual Anasazi places, you can immediately understand that it would not take too much drought to make their agriculture+hunting pretty difficult.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
there were no vineries in Iceland (or Greenland) and Vikings had knack for blueberries anyway. (Having their teeth stained blue was a sign of good oral hygiene)
The vineries were in England at that time, though. The englishmen transition back to beer and whiskey coincided with the little ice age of 1200'.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
This is a good article, although it concentrates on Europe with a ski industry slant. There is quite a lot of background information and data
An article about the archeology of warfare. Basically they discuss in there how the climate warmed up, caused a few hundred years of better rain, then it dried up again, thus causing warfare for resources. At least acoording to the guy writig the article.
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I'm quite sick of of the "conservative movement" blaming the issue on the environmental movement. According to a very well made Frontline special I saw recently, there will be isolated regions that get hotter or colder all the time, it's the global avarage that matters, and according the data this show used, the 20th century is the hottest going back several thousand years.
;)
The show was fair and balanced - not like Fox pretends to be fair and balanced, by artificially leaning right to counter an assumed prevailing "left", but truely fair.
For example, it states that no combination of "alternative" energy can save us, if indeed there is something to be saved from.
In any case, the environmental movement started out as a grass roots movement, and now has a life of it's own, which is true for any large "group", if you want to call it that. Blanket statements like "those damn environmentalists" don't amount to squat.
We know the planet is warming - if it's partly a natural trend, fine
We know that CO2 is partially responsible.
We know we are approaching doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere.
We know that of the many climate models, the oil companies choose the 1 degree rise, while the gloom and doomers choose the 8 degree rise
We know that if we tripple and quadruple the amount of CO2 we are screwed, even the oil scientists concur.
Even Bush agrees that the planet is both warming and that we are partially responsible.
Moral: we are fucked, if not in 50 years, than surely in 200, and, folks, right now, we don't have the technology to a damn thing about it
It would take a larger percentage of the surface of the earth than we currently use for farming to provide a similar amount of enegery with alternative fuels, and that doesn't account for future growth.
In the short term, better and safer nuclear reactors are an option, except we only have a limited supply of this resource left, compared to the VAST and CHEAP coal reserves...
"Besides, even if it turns out to be entirely due to nautural fluctuation, it seems that it would be in our best interests to still modify the actions of humanity as a whole to promote a global climate that is best suited to humans."
But what does promoting a certain global climate look like? One side of this argument says "Of course human CO2 prodution is causing the warming" and the other side says "it is not at all clear that human CO2 production is a significant cause of warming." IF human CO2 prodution is not a significant factor, then reducing it by 30% or 50% or 75% is not going to make a difference in the climate, but it is going to impact some economies. So if you tell me "we should reduce CO2 produciton just in case it might make a difference." I'm going to say that I a more definite link than that.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
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What I keep reading here from slashdotter classic enviro's is that we havent been this warm for 1000's of years, so humans are responsible. This doesn't make any sense to me. The first part of the statement disproves the conclusion. If you switch this statement around, it is clear that people are saying we were just as hot on this planet 1000's of years ago. And since we clearly did not have IBM, MS, Ford, GM, etc around back then, then you can not say that simply because it is warm now, that the increase in temperatures is caused by things present today. Perhaps temperature's are caused by current technology. However, by admitting that we were just as warm 1000's of years ago, it merely demonstrates that the world my be warming up for the same reason it did 1000's of years ago. Of course, we don't know conclusively what that reason is. In fact, simply by stating that we haven't been as warm in 1000's of years, it would be more logical based on that statement to say that we have corrected a colder climate with modern advancements in technology. In all honesty, we can't prove either so let's hear some research before we decide that we need to drastically do anything to change the earth's climate.
I just don't understand these findings. If we are indeed warming up, fine. However 100 years of sample data in this regard is like saying the haystack is turning into needles, when there is only one needle in the stack. (Don't know if that made sense lol)
100 years of sample data, by any researcher, would be considered rediculious. Especially considering that in earths past there have been hundreds perhaps even thousands of ice ages. You can't tell me that after an ice age, the world warms up because of people. Especially since the data is from only this last century.
Next thing they will try to convince us of is if the world gets cooler, its cause there is too much water caused by hydrogen cars. Give me a break.
I do not doubt humans influence climate change. I doubt whether the climate change is as suggested. In 500 years a change of 1 degree is quite signifigant, but can that be attributed to humans, or is that attributed to the fact we are nearing the top of the warm period and heading toward a ice age?
I say show me the data, show me the sample, give me all the information.
100% agreement can come from a sample of one/one