A young woman buttonholed me at the market last week with a request to join her group to lobby the federal government to take more drastic action to combat climate change. She was a bit vague on how she believed the climate was changing, but she seemed to think global warming was the most likely probability.
I declined to sign up, not because I disbelieve in climate change. It has happened too often in the past for that. But what disturbed me was that it appeared that her group hadn’t really bothered to consider the subject in any depth.
They had only investigated the possible downsides to climate change—the ‘cons’ of the issue, so to speak—and on this basis they had concluded that the sky is falling.
Yet there are ‘pros’ worth pondering—positive aspects to global warming that that they (and virtually everybody else advocating drastic measures to combat global warming) clearly haven’t considered.
Not least, a modest increase in global temperatures—and a modest increase is what the most responsible global warming advocates are predicting—would make considerably more land suitable for farming, and would extend the growing seasons for much of the land already under cultivation.
In other words, global warming has the potential substantially to increase the world’s food supply.
One can reasonably postulate the above on the basis of historical precedence. We are currently living in what might be—repeat might be—the tail end of the ‘Mini Ice Age’ that began in the late Middle Ages.
At that time global temperatures dropped sharply and the glaciers advanced greatly, rendering large areas of the earth virtually uninhabitable. Staple crops that been mainstays for a large proportion of the world’s population failed, and it was a time of famine and widespread starvation.
For example, before the Mini Ice Age, the vast island called Greenland aptly reflected the name bestowed upon it by the Viking explorer Erik Thorvaldsson (better known by his nickname Erik the Red) in the latter quarter of the 10th Century.
Erik brought his and children from Norway to make their home on Greenland, and soon other Norsemen and the families arrived to settle the land. And, from around the year 1000 until the early 1400s, there flourished a vibrant Nordic civilisation—not just farms, hamlets, and rustic villages, but towns complete with churches, cathedrals, and monasteries.
The Mini Ice Age brought this civilisation to an abrupt end. First, sharply falling temperatures made it impossible to grow the staples the population relied on—even the hardy grain, rye. Then rapidly advancing glaciers swallowed up villages, towns, and farmland. Those members of the population who could not flee either starved to death or were slain by invading Eskimos.
Wide swathes of northern Europe, Asia, and North America became uncultivable. The profundity of the change can be gauged from the name Leif Eriksson, Erik the Red’s son, gave to what we now know as North America.
The Nordic Sagas indicate that Eriksson made landfall somewhere in northern Maine. They also record that he was so struck by the high sugar content of grapes he found there, he dubbed the new land he had discovered ‘Wineland the Good’.
That Eriksson reported making ‘good wine’ from grapes grown in Maine is telling, but it should not entirely come as a shock. When the Romans arrived in Britain, wine grapes, for example, could be grown as far north as Scotland.
Moreover, until the coming of the Mini Ice Age, a number of English monasteries were noted for their wine making. True, wine is again being made in southern England, but with some difficulty and not in very large quantities.
Then there is the centuries-long search for the so-called ‘North West Passage’—a sea route along the fringes of the Arctic which would permit merchant ships to trade with the Orient without the necessity of rounding Cape Horn. Had the passage been discovered, it would have cut thousands of miles and many months off a voyage to China.
Between the beginning of the 16th Century and the beginning of the 20th, the search for the North West Passage cost the lives of many an intrepid sea captain and his crew, but the elusive sea route was never discovered—leading many to claim it was simply a myth.
But the reason the explorers risked their lives and the lives of their men to find it was that, thanks to the Sagas, it was widely known once to have existed. The reason that it could not be found is that the Mini Ice Age had closed it down.
A question is thus worth asking: Why should current climatic conditions be considered ‘normal’? Would not a modest degree of global warming simply return us to the ‘normal’ that pertained before the Mini Ice Age?
But, if the beneficial effects of a modest degree of global warning are to be cautiously welcomed, what if the climatic opposite is in the offing? What if we are standing on the threshold of a new Ice Age, mini or macro?
Reportedly, the world has undergone no significant warming for almost two decades. This might well be considered worrisome because the Mini Ice Age was preceded by a period of warming similar to the one that has given birth to the current ‘climate change’ scare.
If that is true, the last thing we need to be doing is taking the sort of action currently being proposed at the international, intergovernmental conferences on climate change.
If I appear less that convinced by the party line on climate change, it is because I have been through more climate apocalypses than I care to remember.
First, the Nazis were plotting to change the course of the Gulf Stream and turn England and much of Canada into an iceberg. When the Nazis bit the dust, it was the Russians.
Then nuclear tests were claimed to be poisoning our milk with Strontium 90. When that threat evaporated, the tests were predicted to cause nuclear winter. This was followed by a global warming scare, as I recall, but then Mount St. Helens blew its top and we were back to nuclear winter once again.
In view of this less than stellar track record for climate change forecasting, forgive me if I am somewhat skeptical about the ‘expert’ predictions on this one.
It seems to me that too little thought and too much speculation prompted by folks with an agenda are deeply colouring the current ‘climate change’ debate. Surely it’s high time that we dropped the epithets and scaremongering and got down to an honest conversation on the subject. GPH✠
Newsletter