Friday 17 May 2019

Little Ice Age never happened - shock.

From here:

Global mean warming [has] reached 1°C above preindustrial for the first time.

It is a signal from the climate system that time is running out if we are to be able to reduce emissions fast enough so as to hold warming below 2°C, and ultimately below 1.5°C by 2100.


This is illustrated with the following chart:


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According to that chart, the Mediaeval Warm Period was barely a blip, and the Little Ice Age was only 0.3C cooler than the MWP.

That's is not how everybody else remembers it, is it?

From here:

Little Ice Age's Worldwide Effects

Ice cores, cores of lake sediment and coral, and annual growth rings in trees showed that Greenland, Scandinavia, the British Isles, Europe, and North America all experienced cold, with temperatures dropping 1 to 2 °C (1.8 to 3.6 °F) below the average for 1000 to 2000 CE.

During the LIA, mountain glaciers expanded in the European Alps, New Zealand, Alaska, and the southern Andes. In Switzerland and France, the advance of alpine glaciers wiped out farms and villages. Cold winters and cool, wet summers caused crops to fail, and this leads to famines in much of northern and central Europe.

To the west, sea ice expanded around Iceland, cutting off its harbors and access to imported food. Iceland's population fell by half. Icelandic sea ice went from zero average coverage before the year 1200, to eight weeks during the 13th century, and to 40 weeks during the 19th century.


Follow up question, do the Warmenists have an explanation for why it was so warm between six and ten thousand years ago? No, thought not.

6 comments:

Dinero said...

The data on the chart as is , starting from a level between the LIA and the MWP, the increase is not 1.0 it is 0.8.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Din, true.

Andrew S. Mooney said...

Thames Frost Fairs, anyone? Presumably they just used time travel and refrigerators. That's where all the heat in our time period is coming from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Thames_frost_fairs

Mark Wadsworth said...

ASM, good one.

formertory said...

I know you've seen it before, MW, but I still feel this now 10-year old blog has some things to say, especially because it doesn't use smoothings and adjustments to data - just ice core temperatures.

The last graph is the killer. Global warming - saving the planet? :-)

Mark Wadsworth said...

FT, I hadn't seen that particular article, but I think along those lines.