The Little Ice Age

I have commented on global warming from time to time … http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/12/climatologys-piltdown-man.html and http://gordon-feil-history-observations.blogspot.ca/2017/01/rising-and-warming-oceans.html. I think it’s important to place and face the issue against the backdrop of climate history. We know that the earth used to be warmer ---- considerably warmer. We know that for most of its history it was warmer. Even the poles were above freezing 365 days of the year. Breadfruit grew at Canada’s Arctic Circle. We seem to be in an ice age right now. Within this ice age are periods of relative warmth and also colder periods.

The earth….at least the areas surrounding the North Atlantic….became much colder in the early 1300s.  We moved into what today is known as The Little Ice Age. And rats moved indoors and brought into people’s homes the Black Death. In Greenland, which actually did have lush vegetation at one time, the Viking colonists struggled for survival. We know that whereas their diet had been about 80% of the land and 20% of the sea, that ratio inverted as the land animals perished. It had gotten so cold that the cows were kept indoors 6 months of the year. When it was finally time to let them graze, they were often so weak that the farmers had to carry them to pasture. As the herds died, fishing became primary, but soon that also became untenable because the waters were covered in ice and some of the fish species left the waters for warmer seas. The Inuit survived…even thrived. They had winter fishing techniques that the Vikings did not deign to learn. The Vikings regarded the Inuit as an inferior people. And in some respects, ALL peoples WERE inferior to the Vikings, that ballsy race who conquered Russia through to the Bosporus, as well as Normandy, Britain, and the coasts of Ireland.

Why did the Little Ice Age come?  The warmth of the previous few hundred years had caused much glacial melt along the North Atlantic. It is thought that the Gulfstream ceased.  The way it works today is that waters flow from the western tropical Atlantic to Iceland where they cool and sink to the bottom of the ocean and then move back south to warm up again. The fresh water pouring in from the melting ice was not salinized and not heavy enough to sink for the trip south, so they blocked the natural flow and the Gulfstream slowed and perhaps even stopped. Further, there apparently was a series of Krakatoa sized volcanos that spewed ash into the atmosphere and hindered sunlight. 

Starting about 1645 and continuing for about 70 years, the already cold weather turned particularly cold as sunspot activity slowed and the sun no longer emitted the same energy that is usually did. Even the canals of Venice froze.

At last, around 1850, average temperatures began to rise and have kept rising. We observe it today and think we have global warming. We do, but it seems to me to be a cyclical recovery from the cold.