A BRIEF HISTORY OF GLOBAL COOLING – What the future might hold.

Opinion by John Gornall

Numerous astrophysicists, geophysicists, and climatologists hold the view that the hysteria generated by the fear of Global Warming has come about by computer modelling of incorrect or even falsified data. 

Poor scientific researchers have ignored well substantiated indicators that the world on the cusp of a cooling phase, similar to that of 1793-1830 – identified as the Dalton Minimum.

 

The globe over eons has experienced a continuous cycle of warming and cooling. 

Archaeologists have identified skeletal remains indicating many human River Nile populations did not survive the Younger Dryas – an ice age 11,600 years ago. 

There was a sudden and sharp decline in temperature – 15 degrees Fahrenheit – over most of the Northern Hemisphere.

 

Centuries later, followed the warmth of the stable First Holocene Climatic Optimum (6000-3800 BC) rejuvenation period. There was an abundance of food, other vegetative growth flourished, human, and animal populations expanded.

A warm ‘Atlantic’ weather pattern prevailed.

Conversely, a thousand or more years-on, clay cuneiform tablets from 2,170 B.C. Mesopotamia tell of the prolonged onset of intense cold. 

Crops failed; misery, social-conflict, starvation, and epidemics resulted. 

There was a mass exodus from abandoned northern settlements; refugees poured into southern regions. 

Frigid drought, barren cultivations led to the fall of the Akkadian Empire.

Greenland had been settled in the 10^th Century by Vikings, during the Medieval Warm Period, 800-1200AD – in the same Era of Leif Erikson’s landing in Vinland on the North American coast. 

 

Then the Little Ice Age began in 13000 and so-intensified that by 1420-AD, the winters had lengthened, spring and summer so shortened. There was a drop-in temperature of between 6-8 degrees centigrade. 

The evidence of the Greenland Norsemen’s decline, and eventual disappearance, is illustrated by archaeological findings in middens. 

Cattle-bones in the early years of plenty, were overlaid successively by sheep and then goat. 

Domesticated animals could not survive.

Finally, there followed many years of fish remnants, as vegetation disappeared under perma-frost.

Greenland was abandoned by Norsemen, only to be re-inhabited by the Dane, Hans Egede in 1721.

 

During the same period, decades of poor harvests, in Europe, including the ‘Great Famine’ of 1315-1322, left humanity so impoverished of health and vitality that the visitation of the the Black Death – was devastating. 

Throughout Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia, one in three people died.

 

In the 15^th century, Pope Innocent VIII blamed witches for the glacial conditions and miseries plaguing Europe. Surges in European witch trials coincided with the most bitterly cold phase of the 16th and 17th Centuries. 

Around 1615, as cod moved from the cooling northern waters to the warmer south, the Scottish and Faeroe Islands fishery began to fail until there was total collapse from 1675 to 1704. 

Similarly, Scandinavian farmers and fishermen were driven southwards by glacial conditions.

 

The winter of 1709 killed many thousands in France. A priest in Angers, wrote: ‘The cold began on January 6^th and lasted in all its rigor until the twenty-fourth. The crops that had been sown were all destroyed…. Most of the hens died of cold, as did beasts in the stables. 

What poultry did survive the cold, lost their combs to frost and fell off. Many birds, ducks, partridges, woodcock, and blackbirds died and were found on the roads and on the thick ice and frequent snow. 

Oaks, ashes, and other valley trees split with cold. Two thirds of the vines died…. No grape harvest was gathered at all in Anjou…. I myself did not get enough wine from my vineyard to fill a nutshell.’ 

The starving poor rioted in several cities raiding merchants’ warehouses hoarding, seizing it for themselves.

 

During this intense cold, a parasite known as ‘Fusarium Nivale’, thrived under snow, devastating crops. Compounded by cold, wet summers, there followed outbreaks of ‘St. Anthony’s Fire.’ 

Populations of peasant villagers suffered convulsions, hallucinations, gangrenous rotting of fingers and feet, and death. Damp grain developed a fungus ‘ergot blight’, producing a drug similar to LSD. 

(It is believed that the Salem, Massachusetts, witch-trial hysteria – 1692-3 – was related to ergot blight.)

 

The severity of the 1812 winter brought to an end Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. 

In 1816, a meagre oat harvest forced many German farmers to shoot their starving horses. (Thus, Karl Drais von Sauerbronn, for lack of horse-transport, was inspired to invent his ‘laufmaschine’; a proto-bicycle.) 

The starving people rioted throughout cities in Britain and the continent, where there were also typhus outbreaks. 

Glasgow recorded 3,500 deaths. Tens of thousands expired in Ireland from starvation and typhus.

 

In the same year, across the Atlantic in New England, June – snowfalls destroyed crops, generating miseries of hunger, starvation, and typhus. Farms were abandoned as migrants fled from the northeast into the Midwestern United States.

Europe and North America were not the only areas affected. 

In 17^th Century China, during the Ming Dynasty, frigid conditions were so intense, the north-eastern population fell by half. 

It created the most severe drought in 500 years. 

Peasants rose in revolt; by 1644 they had overthrown the imperial government.

Manchurians invaded from the north, breached the Great Wall, establishing the Qing Dynasty.

It was during this time in New Zealand, that the Taro could no longer be grown in the freezing conditions in the South Island. Maori migrated North, sparking tribal conflict over the possession of land.

 

The world began to emerge from the last Mini-Ice Age two-hundred years ago and has been gradually warming until the turn of this century; the last hottest year was 1998. 

There were climate cooling predictions made in the 1970s which is likely a continuum of the normal global cycle. 

Perhaps the onset of cooling will trigger a similar hysteria that the fear of Global Warming generates today.