Warming Alarmists Could Use Lesson On History Of Climate

[Geee]

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We know, because they say so, that those who think catastrophic global warming is probable and perhaps imminent are exemplary empiricists. Those who disagree with them are "climate change deniers" disrespectful of science.

 

Actually, however, something about which everyone can agree is that of course the climate is changing — it always is. And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human activity?

 

Before wagering vast wealth and curtailments of liberty on correcting the climate, two recent books should be considered.

 

In "The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century," William Rosen explains how Europe's "most widespread and destructive famine" was the result of "an almost incomprehensibly complicated mixture of climate, commerce, and conflict, four centuries in gestation."

 

Early in that century, 10% of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died, partly because of the effect of climate change on "the incredible amalgam of molecules that comprises a few inches of soil that produces the world's food."

 

In the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from the end of the 9th century to the beginning of the 14th, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than at any time in the last 8,000 years — for reasons concerning which there is no consensus.