Vikings, Ice Ages and Climate Change
My Own Climate Change Cult
You will not find a more fervent believer in Earth's changing climate than I.
Not only have I witnessed our environment constantly change on a small scale through my lifetime but I've read the results of ice, ocean and lake bottom sediment core sampling; all of which tell the story of past, and probably future global temperature excursions from our current 10,000 year average.
As shown in the image above, there are cycles evident in historical climate data which show mean global temperature variations of fully +/- 3oC average air temperature through recent human history. This data is matched with similar cycles found in the study of tree-ring growth, geomagnetic excursions recorded in rock formations, archaeological evidence of migrations and extinctions plus the cycles of our Sun to create a fascinating picture of Earth's history.
More on the above timeline at the end of this post.
Our Current Scientific 'Dark Ages'
“There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5oC... Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, President of the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference on November 30, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates – Link: https://drsultanaljaber.com/
History compiled from many different scientific disciplines is not generally taught to students or seen in regular media. I believe this omission to be a crime because all of that scientific data prepared over the years has been paid for by your tax dollars.
It is precisely this lack of public education which has resulted in the state we find ourselves in today, where very few people outside of the scientific community and government know of Earth's true natural history. Yet despite this lack of knowledge, everybody is talking about 'Climate Change' as though it were just discovered and something which humans have control over.
"Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures." Link: https://clintel.org/
As history reveals, a few degrees of warming above today's temperatures results in a fertile world with forests and streams where deserts exists today. A few degrees cooler and we enter a little 'ice age' which would be as dry and cold as our last climate freeze 340 years ago.
Vikings
For an example of real, long-term 'climate change' permit me to go back in time to the era of Vikings and their settlement of Iceland (800AD), Greenland (985AD), Western Europe (840AD) and Eastern Canada (1000 AD).
This group of explorers, warriors and traders occupy a narrow window of human history, appearing in archaeological records around the year 750 AD and disappearing from record approximately 1250 AD; an episode in Earth's climate history known as the Medieval Warm Period.
To better understand Viking occupation of Greenland, a feat impossible in today's climate, I quote Jay Porter who has used inter-disciplinary study to place many aspects of Viking-era history into context:
Eric The Red
“In 891 AD. 'Eric The Red' set off from Iceland with a few followers to explore a land to the west which they had probably spotted some time before while sailing out in their longboats, and then returned three years later with about 500 fellow Vikings. At first they settled on the south-east coast, close to the tip of this new land and then, as the population grew, created a further settlement to the south-west. They called their new home ‘Greenland’.
It has been said that this name was a ‘spin’, a publicity stunt to entice more Vikings to come to join the new settlers, but this would have been pointless if it had been impossible for them to survive.”
According to the Smithsonian Institution those Vikings on Greenland, “...built manor houses and hundreds of farms; they imported stained glass; they raised sheep, goats and cattle; they traded furs, walrus-tusk ivory, live polar bears and other exotic arctic goods with Europe.”
“These guys were really out on the frontier,” says Andrew Dugmore, a geographer at the University of Edinburgh. “They’re not just there for a few years. They’re there for generations—for centuries.”
In that same Smithsonian article the Viking westward expansion is described as being, “...during a time known as the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 900AD to 1280AD. Sea ice decreased during those centuries, so sailing from Scandinavia to Greenland became less hazardous. Longer growing seasons made it feasible to graze cattle, sheep and goats in the meadows along sheltered fjords on Greenland’s southwest coast.”
Smithsonian Link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/
Jay Porter Link: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/01/greenland-and-agw/
Pre-Viking Society Link: https://www.medieval.eu/climate-changes-in-pre-viking-societies-had-profound-consequences/
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Greenland
Jay Porter continues; “At present, the temperatures in Greenland range from a maximum of +7C in July to -9C in January. This is too cold for grain such as wheat and even rye to grow and ripen in the short summer of such northern latitudes. Nor are sheep and cattle happy at those temperatures. Hill sheep might be able to nibble away at moss and short grass, but cattle need lush meadows and hay to fatten and live through a winter. Solid wood is needed for home building, boat building and warmth, but only bushes and such weak trees as birch now grow in Greenland.
In 1991, two caribou hunters stumbled over a log on a snowy Greenland riverbank, an unusual event because Greenland is now above the treeline. Over the past century, further archaeological investigations found frozen sheep droppings, a cow barn, bones from pigs, sheep and goats and remains of rye, barley and wheat all of which indicate that the Vikings had large farmsteads with ample pastures.
The Greenlanders obviously prospered, because from the number of farms in both settlements, whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about five thousand. They also built a cathedral and churches with graves which means that the soil must have been soft enough to dig, but these graves are now well below the permafrost.
There is also a story in ‘Landnamabok, the Icelandic Book of Settlement, which tells of a man who swam across his local fjord to fetch a sheep for a feast in honour of his cousin, the founder of Greenland, Erick the Red. Studies of Channel swimmers show that +10C would be the lowest temperature that a man would be able to endure for such a swim, but the average August temperature of water in the fjords along the southern Greenland coast now rarely exceeds +6C.
The water at that time must therefore have been at least 4C warmer and probably more than that which means that the summer temperatures (for the air) in the fjords in southern Greenland would then have been +13C to +14C, as compared with the present temperatures mentioned above.”
Jay Porter Link: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/01/greenland-and-agw/
Landnamabok Link: https://www.geni.com/projects/Landnámabók-The-Book-of-Settlements/34197
Little Ice Ages & Solar Activity
There is no written explanation for the abandonment of western Viking settlements but climate scientists have discovered that Iceland, like the rest of Europe, was gripped by a rapid and centuries-long drop in temperature, known as the Little Ice Age.
According to Dr. Ian Plimer, Emeritus Professor – The University of Melbourne, Australia, “...the Medieval Warm Period ended rapidly with the Little Ice Age, starting around 1280 AD. This major climate change took only 23 years. It led to famine, depopulation, war and disease.
The Little Ice Age started when our Sun's output was reduced. The Wolf Solar Minimum (1280 to 1340 AD) was a time when there were few sunspots, and the lack of solar activity resulted in increased cloudiness. The planet became cold.
The Little Ice Age had a number of intense periods when the Sun emitted less energy. These were the Spörer Solar Minimum (1450–1540 AD), the Maunder Solar Minimum (1645–1715 AD) which manifest the coldest conditions of this period, and the Dalton Solar Minimum (1795–1825 AD).”
Plimer Link: https://www.sabhlokcity.com/2019/07/the-little-ice-age-1280-1850-ad/
Similarly a recent study by William D’Andrea and Yongsong Huang of Brown University, Providence, RI have traced the variability of the Greenland climate over a period of 5,600 years when previous inhabitants were also subjected to rapid warm and cold swings in temperatures.”
Greenland's Changing Climate Record – Brown University Link: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/31/temperature-reconstruction-of-greenland-shows-ups-and-downs-in-climate-happened-over-5600-years/
NOAA Greenland Ice Core Temperature Image (Continued…)
In 2004 the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) published historical temperature data taken from ice cores on Greenland which show rapid and wide atmospheric temperature variations over the past 10,500 years. It, along with a host of historical temperature and climate data can be found here; https://wattsupwiththat.com/paleoclimate/
Overlaying the temperature curve are highlights of human development and the rise and fall of races and civilizations.
At that point on the temperature curve which represents the last 250-years of human history is shown 'The Mann Hockey Stick', which is the tiny window of atmospheric history upon which post-normal science has based its future CO2 and Global Warming predictions.
https://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/387H/PAPERS/conf05mckitrick.pdf
Large Ice Ages – A Mysterious Cycle
Every 100,000 years (+/-20,000), the continent of Antarctica has been thrown into a deep ice-age according to results from a 1999 study of ice cores drilled over Lake Vostok.
Video Link: https://archive.org/details/SVS-996
In 1957 the Soviet Union established a scientific base on the Antarctic ice and by 1965 their seismic data had revealed a lake the size of Lake Ontario buried more 4 kilometres beneath the ice. This discovery initiated a deep drilling program in the 1970's which has generated thousands of ice cores covering half a million years of time, and which rather controversially broke into the lake in 2011.
Vostok is not the only evidence for a 100,000 year ice-age cycle as deep sea sediment sampling from around the world has shown;
Deep Sea Sediment Core Data - Image: δ18O ppm in deep sea sediment for aminifera carbonates over time from 0-600,000 years. Averaged over a large number of cores in order to isolate a global signal. Original caption: "The variations of 18O in carbonate averaged over a large number of different cores (in order to isolate a global signal) over the last 600,000 years. Most clear are the regular oscillations of the glacial ice volume which follows small changes to Earth's orbit around the Sun (Milankovitch forcing)." cited as reference: Schmidt, G.A. 1999. Forward modeling and interpretation of carbonate proxy data using oxygen isotope tracers in a global ocean model.
How the 100,000 year cycle evolved and what drives it is up for debate. Proponents of the 'Milankovitch' theory of orbital eccentricity are faced with a dilemma in that Earth's position at the 100,000 year period should not produce such climate conditions. Other's propose that these cycles are peaks in already existing and much more frequent galactic or even universal cycles.
No matter what causes them, it would appear from the plotted cycles that our current 'inter-glacial' period is almost done.
What Our Future Holds
According to the laws of physics, warm air can hold more moisture than cold air and historical data shows an increase in global greening and civilizational advancement as temperatures rise. After the end of the dry, cold Younger-Dryas period 12,000 years ago the world began to warm and with that change came increased atmospheric moisture as evidenced by a 'green' Sahara.
Peter B. DeMenocal & Jessica E. Tierney in their 2012 Nature Education article describe some of the first evidence that the Sahara was not always desert;
“As he crossed by caravan from Tripoli to Timbuktu in the mid 1800s, the German explorer Heinrich Barth became the first European to discover the then-mysterious prehistoric Saharan rock paintings and engravings, which we now know date back to the African Humid Period, a humid phase across North Africa which peaked between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago. These masterfully-rendered images depict pastoral scenes with abundant elephants, giraffe, hippos, aurochs (a wild ancestor of domestic cattle), and antelope, occasionally being pursued by bands of hunters...
We now know that these images document a dramatic climate change across North Africa from the hyperarid desert it is today to a nearly completely vegetated landscape dotted with large and small lakes during the early and middle Holocene epoch. This event is commonly called the "African Humid Period (AHP)"
Today the Sahara is a desert again but not for long according to scientists who predict a future ‘green Sahara’ because of ‘global warming’…
“OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes.
And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of global warming, said the lead author of the report about the desert's history published in the journal Science.
"Today I think we have the same thing going on, a global warming," said Stefan Kropelin of the University of Cologne, and he added there were already greener signs in a huge area with almost no reliable weather records.
"I see a clear trend to a new greening of the Sahara, a very slow one," he said, based on visits to some of the remotest and uninhabited parts of the desert over the past two decades.
"You go to unoccupied areas over a long time and you know there was pure sand there without a single snake or scorpion. Now you see tens of kilometers covered by grass," Stefan Kropelin of the University of Cologne in Germany, lead author of the study with scientists in Belgium, Canada, the United States, Sweden and France
Reuters Link: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-sahara-idUSL0833018820080508/
Green Sahara Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289384860_Green_Sahara_African_Humid_Periods_paces_by_Earth's_orbital_changes
Younger-Dryas Link: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-problem-of-the-younger-dryaswhat-does-it-mean-and-what-caused-it/
In a dangerous turn of events, today's post-normal science believes that the world will burn up should our mean global temperature rise a few degrees. This belief is based on computer model predictions which have been proven wildly incorrect these past many decades in the presence of mountains of ‘real’ data.
"To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. This is precisely the problem of today's climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. Should not we free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models?" Link: https://clintel.org/
A 'climate emergency' is said to exist today and I agree with that statement, but it's not because of warming. From all of the above noted and linked scientific data collected over the past fifty or more years, my belief is that we face a much colder future.
As Dr. Ian Plimer noted “...the Medieval Warm Period ended rapidly with the Little Ice Age. This major climate change took only 23 years. It led to famine, depopulation, war and disease.”
Rapid Change Link: https://iowaclimate.org/2019/11/13/descent-into-the-next-glacial-period-perhaps-within-our-lifetimes/
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What do you think? Are you ready to join My Climate Change Cult? You will need warmer clothes.
Thanks for reading,
Ted
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“We don't have time to sit on our hands as our planet burns. For young people, climate change is bigger than election or re-election. It's life or death.” ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ - Twitter, December 20, 2018
“All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man, increasingly dangerous weather patterns and devastating storms are abruptly putting an end to the long-running debate over whether or not climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.” BARACK OBAMA – speech April 03, 2006
“The good news is we know what to do. The good news is, we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming. We have all the technologies we need, more are being developed, and as they become available and become more affordable when produced in scale, they will make it easier to respond. But we should not wait, we cannot wait, we must not wait.” AL GORE - speech at National Sierra Club Convention, Sept. 9, 2005
Further Reading:
National Affairs – Current Articles Link: https://nationalaffairs.com/
Inter-disciplinary Studies – Current Articles Link: https://www.sis-group.org.uk/
Article References:
2011 Vostok Ice Core Drilling Link: https://spaceref.com/science-and-exploration/russian-scientists-penetrate-antarctic-subglacial-lake-vostok-for-the-first-time-2/
2022 Vostok Ice Core Drilling Link: https://forpost-sz.ru/en/a/2022-01-28/scientists-extract-500000-year-old-ice-core-borehole-above-antarcticas-lake-vostok
Ice & Deep Sea Sediment Cores Link 1: https://iu.pressbooks.pub/zkilibar/chapter/chapter-5-ice-cores-and-climate-change/
Deep Sea Sediment Cores Link 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100,000-year_problem#/media/File:Delta-O-18_in_deep_sea_sediment-svg.svg
Milankovitch Cycles Link: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/
Alternatives to Milankovitch Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275045319_Evaluating_alternatives_to_the_Milankovitch_Theory
Orbital Periods Link: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/27/100000-year-ice-age-cycle-linked-to-orbital-periods-and-sea-ice/
Hemispheric sea ice distribution article Link:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL071307
Lacking Skills Link: https://thebl.com/us-news/oregon-students-will-graduate-without-having-to-prove-they-know-how-to-read-write-or-do-math.html
Questionable Science Link: https://wattsupwiththat.com/climategate/
Global Warming Quotes Link: http://www.notable-quotes.com/g/global_warming_quotes.html
