Dude, where's my global warming?!

Climate and Human Civilization for the Past 4,000 Years

Global warming looks terrifying if you only look at the last 50 years or so, but if you stretch it back to 4,000, 8,000, or 12,000 years, it suddenly looks like we are attempting to regain average after a serious, if only short term deep freeze. Notice how quickly the temperature rises and falls.

4,000 Year Climate Timeline:

"The Holocene Thermal Optimum ended at different times in different parts of the world, but it had ended everywhere by 4,000 BP (BP here means the number of years before 2000) and the world began to cool. The timeline shown in Figure 1 shows the GISP2 Central Greenland ice core temperature proxies in blue and the HadCRUT 4.4 surface temperature estimates for the same area in red."

The last 4,000 years shows a serious declining trend in temperature. Declining temperatures are much more damaging than are rising temperatures. Cold kills far more human, plant, and animal life than does heat. Excessively low carbon is an existential threat to life on earth, the moderate atmospheric carbon levels we live with today, are a benefit to life, and act as a natural fertilizer for plants, and thereby life. Increasing the atmospheric carbon would be a huge boon to life. 

Here is the timeline going back 18,000 years:

Climate and Human Civilization over the last 18,000 years, updated

"The timeline begins at 4,000 BP and it shows steady cooling to the Little Ice Age (roughly 1250 to 1850 AD). It is easy to see that the Roman Warm Period was cooler (at least in Greenland) than the Minoan Warm Period and the Medieval and Modern Warm Periods are cooler than the Roman Warm Period. The Little Ice Age was a horrible time for mankind according to Behringer. Glaciers advanced in the Alps and destroyed homes, it was a time of perpetual war, famines and plagues. Horrible persecutions of Jews and “witches” were common. Society was suffering from the cold and lack of food and they needed to blame someone. They chose Jews and old unmarried women unfortunately. Over 50,000 witches were burned alive. Tens of thousands of Jews were massacred. Not because there was any proof, just because someone had to suffer for the bad climate. Some people, the masses mainly, seem to need to blame someone or humanity’s sins for natural disasters. Behringer notes that in The Little Ice Age: “In a society with no concept of the accidental, there was a tendency to personalize misfortune.”

Today environmental zealots assume that climate change is not only man-made but dangerous. They have no proof of either assertion, of course, but they “believe” with religious fervor in both ideas. Then we see, in Behringer’s book, the following quote from Archbishop Agobard of Lyons (769-840 AD) in his sermon “On Hail and Thunder:”

“In these parts nearly everyone – nobles and common folk, town and country, young and old – believe that human beings can bring about hail and thunder…We have seen and heard how most people are gripped by such nonsense, indeed possessed by such stupidity…"
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There are several lessons to be learned from Behringer’s book and the timeline. First, there is no perfect temperature. Man, even in pre-industrial times, adapted to a variety of temperatures and he has always done better in warm times and worse in cold times. Second, why would anyone want to go back to the pre-industrial climate? The Washington Post says the goal of the Paris Climate Conference was get the world to agree to limit global warming to less than two degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Pre-industrial times? That’s the Little Ice Age, when it snowed in July, a time of endless war, famine and plague. According to the Greenland ice core proxy data, temperatures 180 years ago were the nearly the coldest seen since the end of the last glacial period 10,000 years ago! Why measure our success in combating anthropogenic warming, if there is any such thing, from such an unusually cold time? It makes no sense, those times were awful."

Agreed, no perfect temperature, but warmer is better, more carbon is better, not just for humans, but for everything. Then again, the past 4,000 years don't seem to show any global warming, they show global cooling, dramatic cooling, pray for warm!

So, ignore the nattering nabobs of CAGW negativity, and learn to love the change.