An interesting article, putting some flesh to the bare essentials I already knew. The conclusion, however, is odd to the point of grotesque: As many scientists – the lesser heard ones, that is – have pointed out, with reference to the 16th century events described here as well as others, along with a plethora of research into natural climate cycles etc., there have always been (and will always be) significant climate changes (plural intended). This is implicitely accepted by the author – yet, at the end, she falls back into climate groupthink and muses about what we have to change to avoid climate changes which she has just proven to have happened relentlessly and brutally long before industry and air travel and other “evils”, even long before the advent of man. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for environmental protection, however it’s about time we ditch the childish notion that we can actually influence climate. For the sake of our ultimately doomed attempt of climate salvation we’re hurting both people (by lowering their standards of living, worldwide) and the environment (e.g. poisonous mining for electric cars, cluttering landscapes and seashored with noisy windmills (dangerous for all sort of wildlife) etc.).
‘,,,she falls back into climate groupthink and muses about what we have to change to avoid climate changes which she has just proven to have happened relentlessly and brutally long before industry and air travel and other “evils”, even long before the advent of man.’ Spot on. Almost the entire media/political class (I can no longer discern any difference between the two of them) seems incapable of anything other than groupthink.
You should re-read the last paragraph – Prof Lipscomb is arguing for conscious adaptation (accepting that there may be very little we can do about the climate) and in 3 paras above she points out that we at least should start thinking through the “what if” scenarios and how they may be managed, practically – whether that is stopping building on flood plains or properly insulating your house or getting your hands on an alottment and growing a drought resistant type of parsnip.
My father was Polish and in Poland immediately after WW1 many people went very hungry (eating plaster off walls and bark off trees type hungry). His family did OK because his father worked in the rail marshalling yards in Wilnius and could steal food off the rolling stock. However, this experience made an indelible impression on him as he routinely grew food for preserving and bottling, for the winter up until 2 years before he died. This is a very particular mindset – the just in case, pre planning pays off, expect the worst and hope for the best type of thinking. I would class this as an adaptive view of life. In the past and right now it will be the nimble and those unafraid of trying new things who will survive and pass on their (epi)genetic inheritance
As for electric cars and windmills and all the great science going on to build better batteries and grow better crops and manage electric grids in a parsimonious way and produce insect protein and genetically engineer temperature resistant corals and grow more mangrove swamps and hydrology research in general – I see adaptive thinking going on – the engine for this being a perceived existential threat. Magic.
If you don’t like change then you should get off this planet.
“If you don’t like change then you should get off this planet.” Great advice! As useful as most things our united greenmongers suggest day to day! Windmills ARE inefficient, destructive and will never be able to sustain advanced economies like ours. Electric cars will always need lithium and cobalt which can’t be grown organically in a neighbourhood garden. Anybody claiming the opposite doesn’t have a firm grasp on physics (or reality, as a matter of fact). Read Michael Shellenberger’s book, for a start.
I don’t know any reasonable power engineer who claims that windmills are the only way to fly, Wilbur.
If you think that lithium and cobalt is the only chemistry available to us to store energy or the only way to get from A to B then you need to start broadening your reading horizons.
The planet comment was simply a cheap way of pointing out that people who want to make money will always find a novel way of doing so. Right now one of the growth markets revolves around managing the changes associated with a changing climate. Prof Lipscomb names these people as “inventive” (in the past). We call them entrepeneurs. They will do what they do, invent new things and processes and make money regardless of whether you want to continue living in a non existent Arcadian past or not.
Shellenberger – sounds a bit like a polemic. Thanks but I think I will stick with This Week in Virology – real scientists talking about real science.
I disagree with your first paragraph, Elaine. The Prof. is not telling us we should adapt – I would support that approach – she is implicitly endorsing the notion that we should spend trillions pointlessly trying to reverse the irreversible.
Great Science means ‘Lithium’ batteries they have to be mined,Usually by Slave Labour As for UK Switching 34 Million vehicles to Electric would cause the Grid to collapse,Wont work certainly NOT Wind power… 8 nuclear power stations needed for such a Switch
It is a very good article describing how the climate has changed and created problems for us. What she misses is that all this happened during a period when the earth was warming, but the climate does not change in a uniform way, which is what we are made to think about recent years. If science can help us predict the future than we have to understand the driver for past temperature changes. The group think of climate scientists, academics, the media and politicians is preventing real science being conducted.
Humans are not causing climate change and have no means of controlling it. Only basic thermodynamics is needed to see through the fraud being inflicted on us. But even rational thought is enough. In physics all calculations must have a meaning. For example, if the mass of separate objects is added together the total is a valid number. Anybody with household balance scales knows this. But temperature is not the same. Take two cups of water at 50C and mix them and it does not produce boiling water. A total temperature has no physical meaning and therefore the average does not mean anything. All we hear about is average temperatures. There can be an assumption of a single representative temperature, but that is not the same as an average. The greenhouse effect is defined in its simplest form by arithmetic. The earth’s average temperature is said to be 15C and the sun is said to heat the surface to -18C, therefore 15 = 33 -18, where 33C is the temperature added by the atmospheric greenhouse effect. If only thermodynamics were as simple as this. The climate scientists have created a new law – conservation of temperature. So they believe that two cups of water can be mixed to create boiling water. All we need today is a belief and the more people who believe it the truer it becomes.
Brian Villanueva
3 years ago
Despite our ruling class spilling lots of ink about the dangers of global warming, there’s more bark than bite to it. I live in California. If our ruling class actually believed their own rhetoric, they wouldn’t still be buying oceanfront homes.
While our wealthy don’t appear to actually be concerned about climate change, they do appear more than happy to make money on the overblown fears of the middle classes.
Words are cheap. Look at actions.
John Findlay
3 years ago
“Most obviously, the slowly unfolding disaster of global warming means extreme weather events will be more common.”
Oh dear, how to spoil the appreciation of an otherwise excellent article.
What limited warming we have seen is benign, and the weather statistics don’t support increased extreme events. All you have to do is look back far enough through meteorological newspaper records to find historic examples, and plenty of them. Tony Heller does a good job of digging them out.
Until about 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was not a desert, it was savannah, with lakes and rivers, and people hunting for food. At the same time there were no glaciers in the eastern european alps. Now, glaciers across the northern hemisphere are retreating (naturally) to reveal tree stumps. Forests were growing , then the climate changed, and they were destroyed by expanding ice masses. All this happend naturally.
The onus is on the doom-and-gloom alarmists to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is an atmospheric control knob that mankind can manipulate. Their models aren’t good enough, and every doom-laden prediction for the last 40 years about the end of snow, ice-free Arctic, 10 years to save the planet from burning up etc., has already been falsified. I just don’t understand why they have any credibility at all.
To my mind, the press are the most guilty party in all this, as they should be sceptical of activists’ claims, but seem only too happy to print the most recent sensational tosh, quietly forgetting to look at all the wrong predcitions they’ve published in the past. Add to that weak politicians, and no chance for an academic of getting a research grant for a proposal that goes against ‘the narrative’ (who wants to be labelled a ‘denier’) and we end up where we are.
That Professor Lipscomb, like so many, has taken ‘the narrative’ as fact isn’t a surpise. She shouldn’t feel bad about it, and I hope that the remarks here will enourage her to look a bit harder at this issue.
The climate change initiative today is more about control than actually bending our climate future. Those demanding de-carbonization want all of us to cede authority and funds to them so they can ‘do what is right’. Beware those who claim moral authority over you while calling anyone who disagrees a science denier.
However for every action etc. People will just chop down trees illegally and start burning coal again-( so much for the clean air act ) rather than see their families freeze if the usual heating stops or is priced too high.I used to live in a block of flats that was supposed to have under-floor electricity heating-most people just used paraffin heaters instead.
Talk about the law of unintended consequences. Will paraffin heaters make a comeback? Will people lucky enough to have chimneys resort to chopping any local trees, as happened to Berlin parks after 1945?
Tom Webster
3 years ago
An intriguing an insightful article. I particularly appreciate the fact that it pulls together events from further afield than just England. In school history one often forgets that happenings abroad can and did influence things here too. It would be interesting to look up what effects the little ice age had even further afield. For example this was the hey day of the Ottoman Empire. Did Sulieman have climatic events to contend with? Did the climate ups and downs – were any of his conquests linked in any way to the climate? What about the Barbary Pirates? A time of growth in activity for them too. Was the climate affecting a growth in the Sahara?
I feel that in posting this article a Pandora’s Box of history research has been opened and it will be interesting to see where the resultant threads all lead. (I feel a need for more reading coming on….)
Dougie Undersub
3 years ago
I was enjoying this essay until the author decided to abandon her subject and gives us some gratuitous contemporary information from the notoriously Anglophobic NYT.
Then, after telling us how natural and inevitable large alterations in climate are, she concludes by implying we should spend trillions of dollars over the next few decades trying to reverse the inexorable.
Correct. The essay fell apart. Interesting historical background synthesized with silly mush and hand waves of today’s feel good environmentalism. Jamming 10 lbs of “sustainability” into a 1 lb canvas shopping sack…
These environmentalists might want to wonder why their EVs are better running on coal, or they should look up images of African Cobalt mines for their precious batteries. Weird how they fret about their coffee trader, but want toddlers involved in their Tesla’s supply chain…
J Bryant
3 years ago
I’m enjoying this Lost Years series but I think I began following it with unrealistic expectations.
I mainly enjoy it for the history lessons. I was aware of the “Little Ice Age” discussed in this article but not how long it lasted or its serious effects. It’s certainly worth remembering that when natural disaster struck in the 1500s, most people lacked any sort of safety net and starvation was a very real prospect.
This whole series puts our current covid predicament in some sort of perspective. Humanity occasionally has to deal with challenging times that inevitably produce change, but, placed in historical context, our current covid ‘crisis’ is not nearly as severe as, say, the effects of the Little Ice Age.
My expectations about this series were probably unrealistic in relation to concrete lessons to be learned, especially about ways of coping with massive disruption to society. The present article is interesting and engaging right up to the end where it sort of peters out with a rather weak and general conclusion. Like the Austrians who were forced to switch from wine to beer because of the lost grape crops in the Little Ice Age, we must now adapt to a changed world after covid. Fair enough, but this is hardly an original thought nor is it analyzed in any great detail.
The world has changed, as it has changed, quite suddenly, in the past. I get it. I would still like, however, more specific ideas about how we’re to navigate the fundamental social changes (not just economic changes) after this pandemic. How do we start to heal such a bitterly divided society? What does history teach us about that?
Aggressive environmentalism closes down the debate, making discussion of an alternative worldview tricky. I lived thought some devastating flooding in Cumbria. It took regional cohesion and some outside support to get through. The will to regroup came from having a strong community in the first place. It’s interesting that the article shows the Tudor dream of initiating a golden Arthurian age withering on so many fronts. A clue that pinning all hopes on one idea (be it a media driven environmentalism or a dynastic saviour/leader) inevitably fails.
Have they dredged Local Rivers in Last 50 years/..Also in USA, Australia, Asia NOT many lived around coastlines,200 years ago; with 8 billion on our Earth ..Volcanic Eruptions or A Krakotoa event like August 1883 Can be More devastating than any ”Climate change mumbo Jumbo.”.Look at met office own Weather Records, Redbrick ”CLimatic departments” Worldwide have falsified recent Weather records to Make Data reveal Warming at 2c instead of 0.4c last 200 years…University of East Anglia for example..
Last edited 3 years ago by Robin Lambert
Nigel Clarke
3 years ago
What can we learn from these grim years? Most obviously, the slowly unfolding disaster of global warming means extreme weather events will be more common.
She was doing really well, until the above. Everything afterwards is groupthink bollox. Humans didn’t cause the shifts in climate in the past, but clearly for Ms Lipscomb it is us who cause it now.
And in fact, the climate zealots are trying to do away with the Little Ice Age as it buggers up their doomodelling.
If my part of the UK warms up a little bit I shall turn down the central heating and save money and use less energy. If that is multiplied many times over will that result in a cut in the use of fossil fuels and slow down or even reverse the effects of ‘global warming’? It’s all so confusing.
Richard Bell
3 years ago
And the answer is NOT to cut CO2 which is increasing crop yields and greening the planet BUT to increase and maintain the use of FOSSIL FUELS so that when the next bad weather hits we have the means to both keep warm or cold …….. Renewables are a FALSE HOPE and will not ever do the job or replace base load power …….
Hugh R
3 years ago
Now…don’t dismiss this websites theorems at once..
but don’t swallow it whole either.
Not a soundbite, but worthy of consideration I believe.
Some science and quotes from NASA no less, among others.
Let me know if anyone feels it stimulating, at least. https://electroverse.net/
H.
The fact that Social media platforms are restricting its reach says it all.
Mikey Mike
3 years ago
Maybe I’m a daft Tennessean (gift certificate to Outback Steakhouse to the first person who repeats that), but that sure sounded like a conspicuous case of an academic shoehorning sanctioned climate-collectivist platitudes into an otherwise interesting piece about the mini ice age. As if to fail to repeat the official party literature could lead to excommunication from the tribe. I don’t know. Maybe I’m paranoid. I thought it had that stank to it.
Last edited 3 years ago by Mikey Mike
Jacques Rossat
3 years ago
Great historical pespectvie. Thanks !
GA Woolley
3 years ago
The primary ‘adaptive strategy’ we need is tackling overpopulation by discouraging large families and enabling women to control their own fertility. A slowly falling world population would not only begin to reduce the impact of climate extremes, but have beneficial effects on waste and pollution, destruction of environments, depletion of essential resources, reducing demand for labour and energy, urban overcrowding and the associated health problems and so on. Unfortunately, this, the only real root threat to the long term future of humanity, doesn’t fit the anti-capitalist, anti-West ideology which has captured the environment lobby.
That last sentence has fried my little brain. Anyway, given human nature is what it is, I wonder if fewer people might end up delving deeper and more destructively and more pollutingly into the world’s resources than the same amount or more people living more sustainably. Some Western countries have declining populations and are paying the price for having destabilised family units, but some cultures believe in and depend on large families for security and care.
Simon Cross
3 years ago
The Left’s answer to David Starkey. Except she went to a public school and he didn’t.
Breaking off from an interesting historical analysis to have a b***h at the Conservative Government is a class act, for an academic who was Professor of History at the University of Roehampton before COVID, and still will be afterwards. All you need not to suffer the pain of others is to be a Left-wing academic.
Robin Lambert
3 years ago
We are three years into ”Grand Solar minimum” Less Sunspots tends to lead to colder Wetter autumns &Winter dry moderate summers…..nowt to do with ‘Climate change’ if climate doesn’t change,it means Earth has Stopped circling the Sun ……Gates,Soros, the Chinese communist Party ,Davos,WHO,UN,biden &democrats, Lib-lab-Cons-Plaid-sNP-Greens all believe The World Can survive on ”Zero Carbon” the Reason Trees,Forests,Crops grow..Nonsense ..Excuse for high taxes & Consfiscation of Earth’s resources..
Robin, can you please try to introduce some punctuation into your pieces; they are hard to read otherwise? Also, please drop the capitalisation, because such emphasis is unnecessary.
John Harding
3 years ago
Just get St Greta to come over she is warming up the whole world. She said this is just made up there is no mini ice age. Minus -18 is made up I will not allow it not to get warmer.
Simon Newman
2 years ago
When the Earth cools, temperature variation increases and extreme weather events become more common. When the Earth warms, temperature variation decreases and extreme weather events become less common.
harlem242424
3 years ago
Sex have not changed much since ancient time, I think, Suzanna.
Jennifer Britton
3 years ago
Thanks for the history lesson. It deepened my understanding of the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, which was politically unstable. Also, your essay made me think about our worsening hurricane seasons and the freakish cold of this year’s winter. Will changes that we make keep us from entering a true climate change? There is reason to think we can influence it to some extent: when we outlawed certain refrigerants, the ozone “hole” shrank dramatically. During the pandemic lockdowns, air pollution dropped to a amazing extent, cf., reports about skies clearing dramatically around the world. If for no other reason than better health, we should make efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. And who knows, by improving the quality of the air we all breathe, we might also see our oceans become healthier and suffer fewer hurricanes, tornadoes, and freakishly hot or cold weather. We have a lot of science to show a correlation between air pollution and bad health, acid rain, rising temperatures and extreme drought. It is to our benefit to implement our scientific knowledge, which we have used to ameliorate other problems facing humanity, eg., immunizations, agricultural adaptations, etc. We just might move from correlation to causation, thereby averting an insufferably hot planet or an unbearably cold one. Given what we know, doing nothing seems irresponsible.
I would say yes to doing as much as possible to live responsibly and sustainably. What worries me is that a narrow minded environmentalism 1) shouts down the possibility of a mine in Cumbria to produce fuel for steel making in the UK 2) assumes that humanity is can tame extreme weather systems and the natural shifts of climate 3) promotes alternative energy systems that shift the problem to another kind of pollution, sustainability, poverty.
Good stewardship of the natural world is surely about harnessing all the potential in a balanced and responsible way, not putting faith in one solution. That way when a mini ice age hits again, alternative ways of keeping warm are available.
Thomas Prentice
3 years ago
The February Polar vortex freeze in Texas did not knock out the electricity grid. Rather, Ilit was cold, hard, freezing, calculations to obtain maximum profit by human capitalist energy producers and distributors that caused the grid to fail.
The “free market” provides incentives only to make profits hand over fist, the public be damned … snd we were for five days.
The Monopolized Detegulated Free Market provided NO incentives to winterize power plants, natural gas facilities and pipelines, or water lines snd pumps. Nor does it now.
Let’s not confuse a polar vortex with a greedy, profit-based, deregulated freezing cold capitalist human run energy and utility system, si vous plait. I mean Minnesota and China and Norway and Russia and Montana and Maine have figured it out…
RE: Electricity grids can be knocked out by frosts or heatwaves
An interesting article, putting some flesh to the bare essentials I already knew. The conclusion, however, is odd to the point of grotesque: As many scientists – the lesser heard ones, that is – have pointed out, with reference to the 16th century events described here as well as others, along with a plethora of research into natural climate cycles etc., there have always been (and will always be) significant climate changes (plural intended). This is implicitely accepted by the author – yet, at the end, she falls back into climate groupthink and muses about what we have to change to avoid climate changes which she has just proven to have happened relentlessly and brutally long before industry and air travel and other “evils”, even long before the advent of man. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for environmental protection, however it’s about time we ditch the childish notion that we can actually influence climate. For the sake of our ultimately doomed attempt of climate salvation we’re hurting both people (by lowering their standards of living, worldwide) and the environment (e.g. poisonous mining for electric cars, cluttering landscapes and seashored with noisy windmills (dangerous for all sort of wildlife) etc.).
‘,,,she falls back into climate groupthink and muses about what we have to change to avoid climate changes which she has just proven to have happened relentlessly and brutally long before industry and air travel and other “evils”, even long before the advent of man.’
Spot on. Almost the entire media/political class (I can no longer discern any difference between the two of them) seems incapable of anything other than groupthink.
You should re-read the last paragraph – Prof Lipscomb is arguing for conscious adaptation (accepting that there may be very little we can do about the climate) and in 3 paras above she points out that we at least should start thinking through the “what if” scenarios and how they may be managed, practically – whether that is stopping building on flood plains or properly insulating your house or getting your hands on an alottment and growing a drought resistant type of parsnip.
My father was Polish and in Poland immediately after WW1 many people went very hungry (eating plaster off walls and bark off trees type hungry). His family did OK because his father worked in the rail marshalling yards in Wilnius and could steal food off the rolling stock. However, this experience made an indelible impression on him as he routinely grew food for preserving and bottling, for the winter up until 2 years before he died. This is a very particular mindset – the just in case, pre planning pays off, expect the worst and hope for the best type of thinking. I would class this as an adaptive view of life. In the past and right now it will be the nimble and those unafraid of trying new things who will survive and pass on their (epi)genetic inheritance
As for electric cars and windmills and all the great science going on to build better batteries and grow better crops and manage electric grids in a parsimonious way and produce insect protein and genetically engineer temperature resistant corals and grow more mangrove swamps and hydrology research in general – I see adaptive thinking going on – the engine for this being a perceived existential threat. Magic.
If you don’t like change then you should get off this planet.
“If you don’t like change then you should get off this planet.” Great advice! As useful as most things our united greenmongers suggest day to day! Windmills ARE inefficient, destructive and will never be able to sustain advanced economies like ours. Electric cars will always need lithium and cobalt which can’t be grown organically in a neighbourhood garden. Anybody claiming the opposite doesn’t have a firm grasp on physics (or reality, as a matter of fact). Read Michael Shellenberger’s book, for a start.
I don’t know any reasonable power engineer who claims that windmills are the only way to fly, Wilbur.
If you think that lithium and cobalt is the only chemistry available to us to store energy or the only way to get from A to B then you need to start broadening your reading horizons.
The planet comment was simply a cheap way of pointing out that people who want to make money will always find a novel way of doing so. Right now one of the growth markets revolves around managing the changes associated with a changing climate. Prof Lipscomb names these people as “inventive” (in the past). We call them entrepeneurs. They will do what they do, invent new things and processes and make money regardless of whether you want to continue living in a non existent Arcadian past or not.
Shellenberger – sounds a bit like a polemic. Thanks but I think I will stick with This Week in Virology – real scientists talking about real science.
I disagree with your first paragraph, Elaine. The Prof. is not telling us we should adapt – I would support that approach – she is implicitly endorsing the notion that we should spend trillions pointlessly trying to reverse the irreversible.
Great Science means ‘Lithium’ batteries they have to be mined,Usually by Slave Labour As for UK Switching 34 Million vehicles to Electric would cause the Grid to collapse,Wont work certainly NOT Wind power… 8 nuclear power stations needed for such a Switch
It is a very good article describing how the climate has changed and created problems for us. What she misses is that all this happened during a period when the earth was warming, but the climate does not change in a uniform way, which is what we are made to think about recent years. If science can help us predict the future than we have to understand the driver for past temperature changes. The group think of climate scientists, academics, the media and politicians is preventing real science being conducted.
Humans are not causing climate change and have no means of controlling it. Only basic thermodynamics is needed to see through the fraud being inflicted on us. But even rational thought is enough. In physics all calculations must have a meaning. For example, if the mass of separate objects is added together the total is a valid number. Anybody with household balance scales knows this. But temperature is not the same. Take two cups of water at 50C and mix them and it does not produce boiling water. A total temperature has no physical meaning and therefore the average does not mean anything. All we hear about is average temperatures. There can be an assumption of a single representative temperature, but that is not the same as an average. The greenhouse effect is defined in its simplest form by arithmetic. The earth’s average temperature is said to be 15C and the sun is said to heat the surface to -18C, therefore 15 = 33 -18, where 33C is the temperature added by the atmospheric greenhouse effect. If only thermodynamics were as simple as this. The climate scientists have created a new law – conservation of temperature. So they believe that two cups of water can be mixed to create boiling water. All we need today is a belief and the more people who believe it the truer it becomes.
Despite our ruling class spilling lots of ink about the dangers of global warming, there’s more bark than bite to it. I live in California. If our ruling class actually believed their own rhetoric, they wouldn’t still be buying oceanfront homes.
While our wealthy don’t appear to actually be concerned about climate change, they do appear more than happy to make money on the overblown fears of the middle classes.
Words are cheap. Look at actions.
“Most obviously, the slowly unfolding disaster of global warming means extreme weather events will be more common.”
Oh dear, how to spoil the appreciation of an otherwise excellent article.
What limited warming we have seen is benign, and the weather statistics don’t support increased extreme events. All you have to do is look back far enough through meteorological newspaper records to find historic examples, and plenty of them. Tony Heller does a good job of digging them out.
Until about 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was not a desert, it was savannah, with lakes and rivers, and people hunting for food. At the same time there were no glaciers in the eastern european alps. Now, glaciers across the northern hemisphere are retreating (naturally) to reveal tree stumps. Forests were growing , then the climate changed, and they were destroyed by expanding ice masses. All this happend naturally.
The onus is on the doom-and-gloom alarmists to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is an atmospheric control knob that mankind can manipulate. Their models aren’t good enough, and every doom-laden prediction for the last 40 years about the end of snow, ice-free Arctic, 10 years to save the planet from burning up etc., has already been falsified. I just don’t understand why they have any credibility at all.
To my mind, the press are the most guilty party in all this, as they should be sceptical of activists’ claims, but seem only too happy to print the most recent sensational tosh, quietly forgetting to look at all the wrong predcitions they’ve published in the past. Add to that weak politicians, and no chance for an academic of getting a research grant for a proposal that goes against ‘the narrative’ (who wants to be labelled a ‘denier’) and we end up where we are.
That Professor Lipscomb, like so many, has taken ‘the narrative’ as fact isn’t a surpise. She shouldn’t feel bad about it, and I hope that the remarks here will enourage her to look a bit harder at this issue.
She isn’t a scientist.
The climate change initiative today is more about control than actually bending our climate future. Those demanding de-carbonization want all of us to cede authority and funds to them so they can ‘do what is right’. Beware those who claim moral authority over you while calling anyone who disagrees a science denier.
However for every action etc. People will just chop down trees illegally and start burning coal again-( so much for the clean air act ) rather than see their families freeze if the usual heating stops or is priced too high.I used to live in a block of flats that was supposed to have under-floor electricity heating-most people just used paraffin heaters instead.
Talk about the law of unintended consequences. Will paraffin heaters make a comeback? Will people lucky enough to have chimneys resort to chopping any local trees, as happened to Berlin parks after 1945?
An intriguing an insightful article. I particularly appreciate the fact that it pulls together events from further afield than just England. In school history one often forgets that happenings abroad can and did influence things here too. It would be interesting to look up what effects the little ice age had even further afield. For example this was the hey day of the Ottoman Empire. Did Sulieman have climatic events to contend with? Did the climate ups and downs – were any of his conquests linked in any way to the climate? What about the Barbary Pirates? A time of growth in activity for them too. Was the climate affecting a growth in the Sahara?
I feel that in posting this article a Pandora’s Box of history research has been opened and it will be interesting to see where the resultant threads all lead. (I feel a need for more reading coming on….)
I was enjoying this essay until the author decided to abandon her subject and gives us some gratuitous contemporary information from the notoriously Anglophobic NYT.
Then, after telling us how natural and inevitable large alterations in climate are, she concludes by implying we should spend trillions of dollars over the next few decades trying to reverse the inexorable.
Correct. The essay fell apart. Interesting historical background synthesized with silly mush and hand waves of today’s feel good environmentalism. Jamming 10 lbs of “sustainability” into a 1 lb canvas shopping sack…
These environmentalists might want to wonder why their EVs are better running on coal, or they should look up images of African Cobalt mines for their precious batteries. Weird how they fret about their coffee trader, but want toddlers involved in their Tesla’s supply chain…
I’m enjoying this Lost Years series but I think I began following it with unrealistic expectations.
I mainly enjoy it for the history lessons. I was aware of the “Little Ice Age” discussed in this article but not how long it lasted or its serious effects. It’s certainly worth remembering that when natural disaster struck in the 1500s, most people lacked any sort of safety net and starvation was a very real prospect.
This whole series puts our current covid predicament in some sort of perspective. Humanity occasionally has to deal with challenging times that inevitably produce change, but, placed in historical context, our current covid ‘crisis’ is not nearly as severe as, say, the effects of the Little Ice Age.
My expectations about this series were probably unrealistic in relation to concrete lessons to be learned, especially about ways of coping with massive disruption to society. The present article is interesting and engaging right up to the end where it sort of peters out with a rather weak and general conclusion. Like the Austrians who were forced to switch from wine to beer because of the lost grape crops in the Little Ice Age, we must now adapt to a changed world after covid. Fair enough, but this is hardly an original thought nor is it analyzed in any great detail.
The world has changed, as it has changed, quite suddenly, in the past. I get it. I would still like, however, more specific ideas about how we’re to navigate the fundamental social changes (not just economic changes) after this pandemic. How do we start to heal such a bitterly divided society? What does history teach us about that?
Aggressive environmentalism closes down the debate, making discussion of an alternative worldview tricky. I lived thought some devastating flooding in Cumbria. It took regional cohesion and some outside support to get through. The will to regroup came from having a strong community in the first place. It’s interesting that the article shows the Tudor dream of initiating a golden Arthurian age withering on so many fronts. A clue that pinning all hopes on one idea (be it a media driven environmentalism or a dynastic saviour/leader) inevitably fails.
Have they dredged Local Rivers in Last 50 years/..Also in USA, Australia, Asia NOT many lived around coastlines,200 years ago; with 8 billion on our Earth ..Volcanic Eruptions or A Krakotoa event like August 1883 Can be More devastating than any ”Climate change mumbo Jumbo.”.Look at met office own Weather Records, Redbrick ”CLimatic departments” Worldwide have falsified recent Weather records to Make Data reveal Warming at 2c instead of 0.4c last 200 years…University of East Anglia for example..
She was doing really well, until the above. Everything afterwards is groupthink bollox.
Humans didn’t cause the shifts in climate in the past, but clearly for Ms Lipscomb it is us who cause it now.
And in fact, the climate zealots are trying to do away with the Little Ice Age as it buggers up their doomodelling.
If my part of the UK warms up a little bit I shall turn down the central heating and save money and use less energy. If that is multiplied many times over will that result in a cut in the use of fossil fuels and slow down or even reverse the effects of ‘global warming’? It’s all so confusing.
And the answer is NOT to cut CO2 which is increasing crop yields and greening the planet BUT to increase and maintain the use of FOSSIL FUELS so that when the next bad weather hits we have the means to both keep warm or cold …….. Renewables are a FALSE HOPE and will not ever do the job or replace base load power …….
Now…don’t dismiss this websites theorems at once..
but don’t swallow it whole either.
Not a soundbite, but worthy of consideration I believe.
Some science and quotes from NASA no less, among others.
Let me know if anyone feels it stimulating, at least.
https://electroverse.net/
H.
The fact that Social media platforms are restricting its reach says it all.
Maybe I’m a daft Tennessean (gift certificate to Outback Steakhouse to the first person who repeats that), but that sure sounded like a conspicuous case of an academic shoehorning sanctioned climate-collectivist platitudes into an otherwise interesting piece about the mini ice age. As if to fail to repeat the official party literature could lead to excommunication from the tribe. I don’t know. Maybe I’m paranoid. I thought it had that stank to it.
Great historical pespectvie. Thanks !
The primary ‘adaptive strategy’ we need is tackling overpopulation by discouraging large families and enabling women to control their own fertility. A slowly falling world population would not only begin to reduce the impact of climate extremes, but have beneficial effects on waste and pollution, destruction of environments, depletion of essential resources, reducing demand for labour and energy, urban overcrowding and the associated health problems and so on. Unfortunately, this, the only real root threat to the long term future of humanity, doesn’t fit the anti-capitalist, anti-West ideology which has captured the environment lobby.
That last sentence has fried my little brain. Anyway, given human nature is what it is, I wonder if fewer people might end up delving deeper and more destructively and more pollutingly into the world’s resources than the same amount or more people living more sustainably. Some Western countries have declining populations and are paying the price for having destabilised family units, but some cultures believe in and depend on large families for security and care.
The Left’s answer to David Starkey. Except she went to a public school and he didn’t.
Breaking off from an interesting historical analysis to have a b***h at the Conservative Government is a class act, for an academic who was Professor of History at the University of Roehampton before COVID, and still will be afterwards. All you need not to suffer the pain of others is to be a Left-wing academic.
We are three years into ”Grand Solar minimum” Less Sunspots tends to lead to colder Wetter autumns &Winter dry moderate summers…..nowt to do with ‘Climate change’ if climate doesn’t change,it means Earth has Stopped circling the Sun ……Gates,Soros, the Chinese communist Party ,Davos,WHO,UN,biden &democrats, Lib-lab-Cons-Plaid-sNP-Greens all believe The World Can survive on ”Zero Carbon” the Reason Trees,Forests,Crops grow..Nonsense ..Excuse for high taxes & Consfiscation of Earth’s resources..
Robin, can you please try to introduce some punctuation into your pieces; they are hard to read otherwise? Also, please drop the capitalisation, because such emphasis is unnecessary.
Just get St Greta to come over she is warming up the whole world. She said this is just made up there is no mini ice age. Minus -18 is made up I will not allow it not to get warmer.
When the Earth cools, temperature variation increases and extreme weather events become more common. When the Earth warms, temperature variation decreases and extreme weather events become less common.
Sex have not changed much since ancient time, I think, Suzanna.
Thanks for the history lesson. It deepened my understanding of the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, which was politically unstable. Also, your essay made me think about our worsening hurricane seasons and the freakish cold of this year’s winter. Will changes that we make keep us from entering a true climate change? There is reason to think we can influence it to some extent: when we outlawed certain refrigerants, the ozone “hole” shrank dramatically. During the pandemic lockdowns, air pollution dropped to a amazing extent, cf., reports about skies clearing dramatically around the world. If for no other reason than better health, we should make efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. And who knows, by improving the quality of the air we all breathe, we might also see our oceans become healthier and suffer fewer hurricanes, tornadoes, and freakishly hot or cold weather. We have a lot of science to show a correlation between air pollution and bad health, acid rain, rising temperatures and extreme drought. It is to our benefit to implement our scientific knowledge, which we have used to ameliorate other problems facing humanity, eg., immunizations, agricultural adaptations, etc. We just might move from correlation to causation, thereby averting an insufferably hot planet or an unbearably cold one. Given what we know, doing nothing seems irresponsible.
I would say yes to doing as much as possible to live responsibly and sustainably. What worries me is that a narrow minded environmentalism 1) shouts down the possibility of a mine in Cumbria to produce fuel for steel making in the UK 2) assumes that humanity is can tame extreme weather systems and the natural shifts of climate 3) promotes alternative energy systems that shift the problem to another kind of pollution, sustainability, poverty.
Good stewardship of the natural world is surely about harnessing all the potential in a balanced and responsible way, not putting faith in one solution. That way when a mini ice age hits again, alternative ways of keeping warm are available.
The February Polar vortex freeze in Texas did not knock out the electricity grid. Rather, Ilit was cold, hard, freezing, calculations to obtain maximum profit by human capitalist energy producers and distributors that caused the grid to fail.
The “free market” provides incentives only to make profits hand over fist, the public be damned … snd we were for five days.
The Monopolized Detegulated Free Market provided NO incentives to winterize power plants, natural gas facilities and pipelines, or water lines snd pumps. Nor does it now.
Let’s not confuse a polar vortex with a greedy, profit-based, deregulated freezing cold capitalist human run energy and utility system, si vous plait. I mean Minnesota and China and Norway and Russia and Montana and Maine have figured it out…
RE: Electricity grids can be knocked out by frosts or heatwaves