I jumped from Moose Friends (Good Morning Thread) to Topical Tropical before Larry or Pat felt compelled to engineer a move.

Terrie, this is why I said, "Puhleez." You are right about the climate being cyclical. (Though wasn't the Middle Ages a cold period?) However, in the past warm periods, there weren't millions of people living in big cities on coasts, at or below current sea level. There weren't millions (billions?) of people starving or in danger of starvation even before a major climate shift. There weren't millions of people, period.

The changes usually occur much more slowly, giving time for adaptation. (Unless there's a catastrophic event and a major die-out.) In the past, there were enough species (because we hadn't killed most of them off) so that some species would survive a dramatic climactic change. Even when h. sapiens was around, we weren't yet fowling our own nest, or the nests were too small for it to matter much, and we could move and build others to fowl.

The Arctic icecap is melting; There are big rivers running through it already. it's happened before. When that process is a little farther along, the cold water streaming down into the Atlantic will shut down the Gulf Stream, I'm sure it's happened before, in some sense. But that's what keeps the Northeast and northwestern Europe as warm as they are. And the frozen water tied up in the ice cap helps define our current coastlines. What will happen to Boston, New York, Miami, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc., etc., when the sea level rises? It may have happened before, but the effects on us will be more profound this time.

Crops the world depends on for food, many of which we've engineered into genetic dead-ends, will fail in a different climate.

It's all happened before, but in a timeframe of huge proportion; not as a catastrophic event caused by us.

While our man-made pollutants are, no doubt, helping to change the climate, the climate of the earth has never been static. Ice ages lasted thousands (100s of thousands) of years and we are merely in the lull between them.

And, yes, humans have changed their environments in many places, some making them unusable for hundreds or thousands of years. One need only look at Egypt's Sphinx to see that it once was a rainy area (the "varnish" is actually vertical erosion, only caused by rain). Or the cliff dwellings of the southwest, once water supplies flourished, as did trees.

Here are 2 online articles:

Middle Ages were warmer than today, say scientists http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/april_2003/middle.htm


By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
UK Telegraph Filed: 06/04/2003)

Claims that man-made pollution is causing "unprecedented" global warming have been seriously undermined by new research which shows that the Earth was warmer during the Middle Ages.

From the outset of the global warming debate in the late 1980s, environmentalists have said that temperatures are rising higher and faster than ever before, leading some scientists to conclude that greenhouse gases from cars and power stations are causing these "record-breaking" global temperatures.
Last year, scientists working for the UK Climate Impacts Programme said that global temperatures were "the hottest since records began" and added: "We are pretty sure that climate change due to human activity is here and it's accelerating."

This announcement followed research published in 1998, when scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia declared that the 1990s had been hotter than any other period for 1,000 years.
Such claims have now been sharply contradicted by the most comprehensive study yet of global temperature over the past 1,000 years. A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.
The review, carried out by a team from Harvard University, examined the findings of studies of so-called "temperature proxies" such as tree rings, ice cores and historical accounts which allow scientists to estimate temperatures prevailing at sites around the world.

The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today.

They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again - but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the Middle Ages.

The timing of the end of the Little Ice Age is especially significant, as it implies that the records used by climate scientists date from a time when the Earth was relatively cold, thereby exaggerating the significance of today's temperature rise.
According to the researchers, the evidence confirms suspicions that today's "unprecedented" temperatures are simply the result of examining temperature change over too short a period of time.
The study, about to be published in the journal Energy and Environment, has been welcomed by sceptics of global warming, who say it puts the claims of environmentalists in proper context. Until now, suggestions that the Middle Ages were as warm as the 21st century had been largely anecdotal and were often challenged by believers in man-made global warming.

Dr Philip Stott, the professor emeritus of bio-geography at the University of London, told The Telegraph: "What has been forgotten in all the discussion about global warming is a proper sense of history."

According to Prof Stott, the evidence also undermines doom-laden predictions about the effect of higher global temperatures. "During the Medieval Warm Period, the world was warmer even than today, and history shows that it was a wonderful period of plenty for everyone."
In contrast, said Prof Stott, severe famines and economic collapse followed the onset of the Little Ice Age around 1300. He said: "When the temperature started to drop, harvests failed and England's vine industry died. It makes one wonder why there is so much fear of warmth."

The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the official voice of global warming research, has conceded the possibility that today's "record-breaking" temperatures may be at least partly caused by the Earth recovering from a relatively cold period in recent history. While the evidence for entirely natural changes in the Earth's temperature continues to grow, its causes still remain mysterious.

Dr Simon Brown, the climate extremes research manager at the Meteorological Office at Bracknell, said that the present consensus among scientists on the IPCC was that the Medieval Warm Period could not be used to judge the significance of existing warming.

Dr Brown said: "The conclusion that 20th century warming is not unusual relies on the assertion that the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon. This is not the conclusion of IPCC."

He added that there were also doubts about the reliability of temperature proxies such as tree rings: "They are not able to capture the recent warming of the last 50 years," he said.

Economy and Climate
http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/endmiddle/economy.html


During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Europe enjoyed an economic and agricultural boom. A slight warming of the climate and improved agricultural techniques allowed lands that had previously been marginal or even infertile to become fully productive.

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, however, the climate once again began to cool and agricultural innovations could not maintain the productivity of frontier lands that again became marginal or were abandoned entirely. The decreased agricultural output could no longer support the same level of economic activity and, as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, the economy was beginning to weaken. By early in the fourteenth century and continuing well into that century, a declining population, shrinking markets, a decrease in arable land and a general mood of pessimism were evidence of deteriorating economic conditions.

This trend was far from universal and it was certainly less severe in northern Italy. Also, north of the Alps, some communities quickly rebounded and thrived on their commercial and manufacturing ventures. Coventry, England, for example, flourished with its woolen cloth industry while Bruges, in modern-day Belgium, was one of the major commercial centres of the North.

In the early fourteenth century, Florence's textile industry and banking catapulted the city-state into the forefront of European enterprise and, eventually, into the Italian Renaissance. Significant private international banking and commercial ventures provided the foundation for many fortunes but even they succumbed to the recession that began in the fourteenth century.

We can throw thousands of pages on this board that promote opposing opinions, written by people with strings of letters behind their names. But the science that goes through peer review says that we have a problem. The arguments against that, if you dig for the information, are funded by big business and do not go through peer review. See Woods Hole . That's it. I'm done. Got to go look for my RBR.

no worries Ceas. President Bush will save us.

*But we might have to wait till he screws up Alaska first...Come to think of it, that could be one hell of a long wait...<img src="http://www.arlo.net/ubb/smilies/axe.gif" width=39 height=20>

EDITED for spelling and a to add. I sure am sick of this damn War. NTM: the economy. I'd end the freakin War first tho, against popular opinon of 'fix the economy first'.

People are wierd/Rb

<center><FONT COLOR="#000080">--- Edited 1 times, lastly by rbrown on Jan 18, 2004 ---</FONT></center>