How the “Little Ice Age” Debunks “Global Warming”

 

 

 

 

 

 

In response to my post on Thomas Jefferson’s chronicling of climate change in his lifetime,(see below) came a comment  and some additional “climate history”  from author Frances Hunter.   Frances blogged last fall about “The Little Ice Age” and its climatological impact on political events from the 1400s to the 1700s: 

“From about 1400 to about 1850, the climate of Europe and North America was much colder than it is today. This Little Ice Age was marked by erratic summers, short growing seasons, brutal winters and frequent, nasty storms. Though the cause of climate change is still imperfectly understood, the Little Ice Age is believed to have been caused by changes in the sun, especially sunspot activity, and variations in the magnetic field of the earth.

This weather was more than an inconvenience. There are countless ways in which it changed history. For example, in 1612, a terrible crop failure in Scotland led King James VI to allow Scottish farmers to resettle in Ireland’s Ulster, setting the stage for centuries of religious warfare. A tremendous storm in 1634 permanently altered the coastlines of Denmark, Germany, and Holland. In 1666, an unexpected heat wave led to London’s Great Plague and Great Fire. A 1703 gullywasher in England blew down the lighthouse at Plymouth, uprooted thousands of trees, wrecked countless ships, and took 8000 lives — more even than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the worst natural disaster ever suffered in the United States.

The Little Ice Age also had almost unimaginably profound effects on the settlement of North America. From about 800 to about 1250, the earth had undergone a mild, warm period that, not coincidentally, marked the era of Viking dominance of the seas. From their northerly realm, the Vikings explored the coast of North America and put down settlements; eventually their colony in Greenland grew to over 3000 people. But as the Little Ice Age set in, the Viking culture of seafaring was destroyed; much of the year, their ships were trapped at home. Their North American settlers were cut off and eventually lost completely. With the Vikings out of business, it fell to the more southerly European countries–Spain, Portugal, France, and England–to colonize the Americas.

In North America, old accounts show how much more severe the winters were for our colonial ancestors than they are today. Probably everyone has read about George Washington hauling his troops across the icy Delaware River, and marveled at the incredible cold endured by his troops at Valley Forge. In early America, rivers and coastlines routinely froze over in winter, meaning the fishing fleets had to stay home and travel was awful. Our ancestors really did have to walk to school through five feet of snow, and contend with snow drifts as high as 25 feet. In 1740, Boston Harbor froze over from December through April. One man even drove a sleigh across the ice from Cape Cod to New York City!”

See more on Frances Hunter’s “American Heroes” blog

Books by Frances Hunter (actually Mary Clare and Liz Clare)

“To the Ends of the Earth, The Last Journey of Lewis and Clark”

‘The Fairest Portion of the Globe”

Some related posts:

            Medieval Warming Period –WattsUpWithThat.com

• Lewis & Clark Among the Shoshones
• Three Diaries of William Clark
• There Really Was a Little Ice Age, and It Was Very, Very Cold.
• Essay: ‘The Little Ice Age’…

 

 

Thomas Jefferson on Global Warming posted March 7, 2010

Former  U. S. President Thomas Jefferson kept records of wind, precipitation and temperature at his home in Monticello, Virginia from 1776 to 1818.  He was intent upon collecting data (even “ordering  James Madison continue to collect it when he was travelling )  to derive new weather theories, as he felt meteorology was one of the least-advanced sciences during his lifetime.

Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Virginia I, vol.3 (Correspondence 1780-1782) (paragraph 1205):

“A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged.  Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week.  They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance.

The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year.  The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now.  This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits.  From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighbourhood of Monticello.  An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the spring of the year, so fixed an ascendency as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their developement, from every danger of returning cold.”

The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those overflowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now.”

From Newsmax.com:

“In a letter to Philadelphia physician and professor Nathaniel Chapman dated Dec. 11, 1809, nine months after he left the presidency, Jefferson wrote:

“The change which has taken place in our climate is one of those facts which all men of years are sensible of and yet none can prove by regular evidence. They can only appeal to each other’s general observation for the fact.

“I remember that when I was a small boy, say sixty years ago, snows were frequent and deep in every winter, to my knee very often, to my waist sometimes, and that they covered the earth long. And I remember while yet young to have heard from very old men that in their youth the winters had been still colder, with deeper and longer snows. In the year 1772, thirty-seven years ago, we had a snow two feet deep in the Champain parts of this state, and three feet in the counties next below the mountains . . .

“While I lived at Washington, I kept a Diary, and by recurring to that I observe that from the winter of 1802-03 to that of 1808-09 inclusive, the average fall of snow of the seven winters was only 14½ inches, and that the ground was covered but sixteen days in each winter on average of the whole. The maximum in any one winter during that period was 21 inches fall, and 34 days on the ground, the minimum was 4½ inches fall and two days on the ground . . .

“Williams in his history of Vermont has an essay on the change in the climate of Europe, Asia and Africa.”

It’s clear, then, that the earth was warming during Jefferson’s time. It’s also clear that the climate change could not be attributed to man’s activities!

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Tagged as: Climate, Frances Hunter, Little Ice Age, Thomas Jefferson