Monday, February 15, 2010

Going medieval on AGW....

That's the Medieval Warming Period. The period lasting from 950 AD to just over 1300AD. The warm climate overlaps with a time of high solar activity called the Medieval Maximum.

During this period, Dr. Phil Jones(one of the leading lights of the Anthropogenic Global Warming believers) has for the first time admitted that the Medieval Warm Period could have been warmer than the present day. You remember Dr. Jones best from the day when Servers were cracked at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. In fall-out over what those e-mails revealed, Dr. Jones has resigned recently. Hoodathunk covers the breaking news here. There are highlighted links to the full history on that blog, as well as links to Watt's excellent blog on these matters.

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During the Little Ice Age(1275 AD till 1850 AD), which directly followed MWP, average global temperatures were 1-1.5 degree Celsius (2-3 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than they are today. The cooler temperatures were caused by a combination of less solar activity and large volcanic eruptions. Cooling caused glaciers to advance and stunted tree growth. Livestock died, harvests failed, and humans suffered from famine and disease.
Proof of this period are offered mostly by way of Greenland and, conversely, Iceland. Naming of Greenland took place during MWP because the land was "green" upon it's discovery (something that always made me wonder why someone would name a block of ice "Greenland") and Iceland was named during the Little Ice Age, because it looked more like a barren ice wasteland than it's current "green" terrain that we recognise today. Another historical reference of the "Little Ice Age" is those huge blocks of ice in the Delaware in Washington's depicted crossing in the late 1700's.

As Hoodathunk asks, and I repeat here -- what industrial revolution -- belching fumes into the sky, and SUVs with their belching exhausts pipes caused the MWP? Why didn't the seas boil over, or the polar ice caps fall off? Fact is, there is no direct connection between global warming and human activity, and even in warmer times, the threatened apocolyptic end didn't occur.
As you read above, LOOSING temperature created much more havoc (At least one paper has been put in at the AGU Fall meeting that forcast a repeat of the Dalton Minimum---with the conclusion that the Sun is leaving its fifty to sixty year long grand maximum of the second half of the 20th century. The author had said previously that the Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than in the previous 8,000 years). This may signal a return to another period of diminished solar flare activity --resulting in global cooling...not warming. The proof has been with us for centuries, if we'd only have looked at the solar activity models.

The warming trends have much more to do with solar flare activity, something that isn't responsive to Cap and Trade punishment on the masses, or carbon-credit schemes.
These programs were designed to reign in money for special causes for a special few, and many lies were told to escort the ignorant masses to an understanding which would keep them passive about parting with their cash.

Look, I'm all for recycling materials. It's cheaper than mining for new material, and therefore makes all the sense in the world. I don't have a problem with abating plastic from our landfills. I don't have a problem harnessing wind, solar and other renewable energy sources, because quite frankly, we're going to need them in the immediate future. But I draw the line at government-imposed taxes or fines that are specifically targeted at the populance in order to fund other special interest groups at the expense of other more pressing initiatives.
And fostering lies and deliberate misinformation to do it.

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