I have to confess I barely skim Heading Out's articles anymore. But I always search on terms like "warming" and "medieval" and guess what? It's always there. No matter what the topic is, he will be plugging his denialist views.
I can feel a 200 post thread on "Yes we're warming", "No, we're not warming" coming from all sides now. The air is getting close, my chest is hurting, I collapse in a daze only to be awakened hours later by a medic, saying I passed out. I am confused and stumble out the door.
The bright hot sun blinds me and burns my face, the cold wind bites through my skin. I run in panic from the voices inside my head of reason and madness fighting each other to find the truth. I sit down by the lakeside and watch the waves lapping against the shore and become calm.
Are you seriously saying that somebody like me who is a AGW denier thinks that peak oil does not exist? Or that we should just trash the environment? This is a rather absurd conclusion at best.
I do think that it is horrible that when I have visted LA that my eyes, lungs, nose burn. I do think that we should clean up our act and stop dumping crap everywhere. However even if I do think that things that regulate our climate are beyond our control does not mean that I say BURN IT ALL!!
I have a car that gets 30mpg, I run CF lights in my house. I am growing my own food. I recycle everything I can and so on.
I do not believe in climate models for a few reasons.
1) Hurricanes cannot be modeled with decent reliability yet.
2) Daily weather cannot be accurate
3) yearly trends are usually wrong
4) Models do not take everything into account such as death of trees, oceanic variability based on temperature and CO2 released due to this, Bacteria creating methane, humans breathing, yeast!... They wonder why they get it so wrong? LOL is all I can say.
5) Fringe scientists who try to bring rebuttals are considered to be lunatics. However their observations do hold merit just do not generate $$ for companies that wish to push the ever greening products.
6) Its hip, If it is hip and lots of people are onboard who do not know anything about climate science are touting it there is a problem. Real Estate anyone?
7) Are we to think that we are so super-beings that we can piss off the planet that has been around for so long?
8) The Sun well its the Sun nuff said.
9) Their models are proven wrong and even based on false data that is later realized. Even the hockey stick is considered to be fallacy now.
10) Higher C02 leads to higher plant growth speeds and therefore consumes more. Think of what happens when over abundance of food occurs in the wild with animals. Consume Consume Consume "die-off" stabilized" Regardless of our actions now we are scrapnoids if we are indeed the cause.
11) Arctic ice is refreezing at record rates
12) Solar Cycles are very impacting on weather
13) Water Vapor is by far more important of a greenhouse gas than C02
14) If there was true global warming sound science backs up that warming in the arctic would occur first nobody argues this. Hurricanes would be less frequent as the mechanism of hurricanes is nothing more than heat transfer from the lower to higher latitudes.
15) If there was higher warming there would be a increase in water vapor and rainfall overall. However there is extended drought over most of the planet that just does not set well with warming.
16) As above Colder leads to there being less rainfall and less evaporation thus drought. Drought leads to dust that blocks sunlight further making it colder.
17) There is no sound science to explain why the southern hemisphere is cooling now.
18) There has been natural climate variables that have occurred such as the little ice age and medieval warming period that exceed today in terms of speed and time.
19) greenland was fertile for the vikings therefore must have melted a lot more than today and yet life survived.
20) during earths history cool climates is the majority of the time therefore we should count our lucky stars that we exist in a time that is rather warm.
I just have to rationalize with myself on what I think is sound science. However think what you want. As I said I am not one to think polluting the atmosphere or soil/water is a good idea. I think we should quit for sure and find more reasonable means to get the energy we need. And maybe even use the word that is so hated these days... SACRIFICE!!! and do with out to make better for all.
Throstur Eysteinsson is Ass't Directer of the Icelandic Forest Service, has been working with Greenland to set up their first tree plantings and has a PhD in forestry from the Univ. of Maine. He also quite erudite.
Subject: Orchards in Greenland ?
The following was quoted to me on a discussion board:
>From the report of Ivar Bardson (a priest/monk who apparently visited Greenland at least twice in the period from 1341 - 1347, and who was later a Bishop) "On the mountains and lower down grow the best of fruits, as big as apples and good to eat. There also grows the best wheat that exists."
Just wondering about your thoughts and comments ?
Best Hopes,
Alan
Hi Alan
Good to hear from you!
I won't say that the description below is an out-and-out lie but it is an exaggeration. There are fruits in Greenland but they are all small. The closest they have to apples is northern mountain ash (Sorbus decora). It produces pomes (like apples) in clusters, each about the size of a
blueberry. Like other mountain ash species, the fruit is supposedly edible but not very good (I know, I've tried them).
Barley was cultivated in Iceland but never wheat. I suspect that the same was true for the Icelandic settlements in Greenland. (For some reason it is usually called the Norse settlements, Norse refering to the Nordic countries. But as far as anyone knows, the only Nordic people that settled there were Icelanders.)
There is no reason that I know of to think that Greenland was significantly warmer or more fertile at Settlement than it is today.
Wait a minute. I have no expertise at all on climate change in Greenland, but here we have a witness from the 14th century who went to Greenland and described what it was like. Then we have some guy in the 21st century who says the guy in the 14th century was wrong about what he says he saw? I think we should give the greater weight to the eyewitness testimony.
Throstur's points are valid. There is no apparent source for wheat in Greenland (since it was never grown in Iceland, the only known contact with Greenland), just barley. And a warmer climate in Greenland should have helped Iceland (which has a better climate today). Yet Icelanders never grew wheat.
No archaeological evidence of either apples or wheat.
As the name suggests, Greenland was subject to massive Real Estate hype, of which the bishop might have been part. Post-pagan Iceland murdered far fewer men (and lost fewer "a viking") so emigration of surplus population was probably a good thing.
The sea ice records of the Icelanders showed more ice in the 1300s & 1400s than today.
Alan:
You might try
*Ivar Bardson/Bardarson, Det Gamle Grnlands Beskrivelse, edited from handwritten MS by Finnur Jonsson, Copenhagen 1930. The original was written by a monk who, among other things, dined on the wild cattle that were roaming the place in the 1340's.
Cheers
HO
(the square comes because I don't know how to put an o with a slash through it into this format).
I only just tracked it down this far. But there is are a group of folk that write about this on a discussion board, which I came across trying to find a translation. Incidentally travel at the time was not narrowly restricted and so it is perfectly possible that they acquired seed grain as part of the trade that they engaged in - selling polar bear skins etc into Europe. The church was also heavily involved in the colony.
Archaeologists love to comb through waste dumps. No evidence of wheat or apples there.
Iceland has a milder climate, and much stronger trade links, than Greenland. They have never grown wheat there (including today). As an aside, Iceland has a variety of trees to chose from that will grow well or marginally.
So far (I will confirm) only Siberian larch has been planted in Greenland.
{
[edit] A number of tree species have been planted in Greenland (Scotch Pine 100+ years ago, today 2.5 to 3 m tall). Several species survive but only Siberian larch can be said to grow. And only along the interior Fjords of the south (where the Eastern Settlement was).
The Western Settlement was treeless (and charcoal less), but the Eastern Settlement had limited short willows & birches along the interior fjords, but a very limited resource that would have been pressured by sheep farming. And iron could well have been an essential export from the Newfoundland Settlement. Unfortunately, access to Newfoundland required trees to make ships from.
[I might mention that apple orchards and sheep farming are incompatible without extensive fences, the sheep will rapidly kill the trees w/o high and extensive fences (Icelanders traditionally free range their sheep, fences were impractical). Fruit trees have sugar in their bark are are "sheep candy" AFAIK. Another strike against Greenlandic apple trees.]
Throstur also pointed out that the concept of sustainable development came from forestry. A 1713 book on silvaculture Economics in German was the first mention, he said the name of the author but I forgot[/edit]
There is no other historic record of wheat or apples, both of which would have been trade goods with Iceland, which had neither.
Throstur's theory of collapse of Greenland and not Iceland is that Iceland had small trees large enough to make charcoal, Greenland did not. Charcoal is needed to make iron (note that Viking Settlement in Newfoundland (perhaps 150 people max) had an iron foundry). Iron is needed to harvest hay. Hay is needed to keep sheep & cattle over winter. Once Greenland's declining trade links deprived them of iron, starvation was just a matter of time.
Such a theory argues against apple trees.
Greenland Vikings were never a large colony. Even much larger, and closer Iceland would go over a year without a trade vessel at various times in their history. (Although such years were rare and were complained of in the chronicles of the time).
That is, of course, the same bishop that Throstur politely called a liar. And made claims not supported by excavations of old settlements or other historical accounts.
Are you seriously saying that somebody like me who is a AGW denier thinks that peak oil does not exist?
Nope
Or that we should just trash the environment? This is a rather absurd conclusion at best.
Nope
do think that it is horrible that when I have visted LA that my eyes, lungs, nose burn. I do think that we should clean up our act and stop dumping crap everywhere. However even if I do think that things that regulate our climate are beyond our control does not mean that I say BURN IT ALL!!
Nope - never said that nor have I implied that you or anyone else who is a GW denier said as such
I would like to see a majority of trained climate scientists interpret climate data and come to the conclusion that GW as a trend is wrong. But it is not to be. As for the 20 point post - it kinda reinforces my point. Spread confusion.
I know what you mean about this. He simply refuses to take any of it seriously and continuously grasps at minutia of one sort or another as evidence that that we ought not try and do anything about global climate change.
I will tell you what I do know though - he is an academic who has a background in mining. I should note that he oftentimes writes about coal mining with a considerable amount of detailed information.
With respect to the arctic ice melt, I think it is easy to think that we are already past a tipping point, and it is too late to do anything.
If there is any possibility that the current arctic ice problems are temporary, I think it is helpful to hear the evidence. Otherwise, it is easy to come to the conclusion of "why bother, its hopeless" when looking at the climate change situation today. If it looks like there is a possibility of hope on the arctic ice melt, I think it gives a stronger argument for taking action with respect to our longer term warming problems.
It may or may not be too late for the Arctic, but the Antarctic is another matter entirely. With some deniers, delay until inevitable seems to be the desired outcome.
There is more to the climate than sea level, of course. Even if all of the ice does melt, the average temperatures will still depend on the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I guess I look at it this way. We are going to have to get off of fossil fuels sooner or later anyways. Yes, we could put it off as long as possible, and thereby ensure inevitability, or we can act sooner and perhaps leave behind a more comfortable planet for us to live on.
There is considerable archaeological evidence that the Thule migrated. It is also worth noting that the Antarctic ice cap is currently larger than previously recorded.
Heading Out's contributions are great, worth more than a skim. I admit I am not as technically educated in the energy sector as I wish I were, but The Oil Drum educates me by careful reading. There is no harm in skimming, but I wouldn't announce this. It might be misinterpreted and seen as disrespectful.
I second this - HO has written a lot of great articles over the years and I hope he keeps them coming.
That said, I don't agree with his skepticism about AGW, but life is pretty boring if you only listen to people who share your own views, and you can always learn from listening to a contrarian viewpoint (admittedly some arguments against global warming are just fictions created by PR companies, but that isn't the case here).
Sometime around A.D. 1000, the whalers of North Alaska began to move eastward, probably travelling by umiak and bringing with them most of the elements of the sophisticated sea-hunting culture that had developed in Alaska over the previous millennium. We do not know why this movement took place, but it may have been related to a general climatic warming throughout the Arctic at this time. The higher temperatures probably reduced the amount of sea ice, making a greater area available for the summer feeding of bowhead whales and other large sea mammals, and perhaps at the same time making whaling more difficult during the brief spring migration season along the coast of North Alaska.
All those careful qualifications disappear and for Heading Out this is unconditional.
it was tribes such as hers that sailed their umiaks through the melted waters of the Arctic to Greenland, where, as the Thule, they met the Vikings who were also colonizing at the time.
People have moved to Greenland more than once, and gone extinct more than once. Not just white people, other people.
Well, we don't know that they went extinct. We just know that there were gaps in occupancy in specific locations along the coastal settlement chain, lasting for long periods and having new peoples settling there afterwards.
The Dorset might have just got in their boats and moved to Florida around 2,500BC or whenever.
As far as dendrochronology is concerned, why argue? We will know if the ice pack melts in two years just by waiting two years. It's not as if we could do anything to stop it, and if it does happen, we will know what happens to the Conveyor Belt at that time.
My bet is that the Greenies will be able to impose their beliefs on the world to exactly the degree that the world is able to impose it's weather on you.
I wonder, has "global warming" replaced "bird flu" as the crisis du jour? Or do most people still think that bird flu is the greatest threat to the existence of mankind over the next 5 years? I want to focus on bird flu since it is much easier to find birds that have the flu than it is to find rising oceans. Why can't we focus on solving the bird flu thing first?
B/c birds don't vote. Birds don't buy. Birds don't sell anything to the Americans.
Everyone on the other hand notices weather. Hot/cold people vote. Wet/dry people buy. And middle-class activists/peasant bicycle-drivers sell things to the Americans :-)
I think the attraction to global warming as a problem over other obvious problems is that it allows Western people to chastise each other. The desire to assert higher status over fairly high status people makes global warming more attractive than, say, species extinction in tropical rain forests because higher status Western people use most of the energy cause a smaller fraction of the rain forest damage.
I suspect that expanding populations and rising affluence in relatively poorer countries (e.g. India, China, Indonesia, southeast Asian countries) is causing far more habitat loss and species extinction than global warming will in the next 50 years. But telling poor people to have fewer babies isn't an effective formula for asserting higher status over high status people.
That there was a medieval warming in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere is not at all controversial. The controversy is in applying this data to the entire world at that time. Heading out did not imply that the medieval warming was global.
However there is a website that is looking at the global extent of the Medieval Warming Period. They appear to have collected a significant number of papers that suggest that the extent was considerably larger than just the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere.
Our Medieval Warm Period Project is an ongoing effort to document the magnitude and spatial and temporal extent of a significant period of warmth that occurred approximately one thousand years ago. Its goal is to ultimately provide sufficient real-world evidence to convince most rational people that the Medieval Warm Period was: (1) global in extent, (2) at least as warm as, but likely even warmer than, the Current Warm Period, and (3) of a duration significantly longer than that of the Current Warm Period to date.
I poked a bit at that website to see who the people were, and what their qualifications are. The one thing that jumps out at me is that I don't see any climatologists in the list of scientific advisors.
Secondly, they seem to have an agenda.
Members of the board have written papers questioning global climate change, but most of those were written back in the 1980's and 1990's. Back at the time, a bit of skepticism was a healthy thing. But today among climatologists the issue has been settled.
For example, they have something where you can see historical mean annual temperatures at various spots around the country. Apparently in an attempt to prove no warming so far, but in general the data is extremely noisy. Not surprising really. The IPCC says that temperatures have gone up about 1 degree F, but that is an average over the whole planet, and such a change would be lost in the noise for any given meteorological station. One could take the climate data from all over the US, and average it to smooth out the noise, and then any trends would be far more pronounced.
Alternatively, according the IPCC, the temperature changes in the Arctic and Antarctic are far more pronounced than they would be in the continental US, but co2science.org doesn't supply mean temperature data for Alaska. But not to worry, I found such data elsewhere:
This page features the trends in mean annual and seasonal temperatures for Alaska's first-order observing stations since 1949 (Fig. 1), the time period for which the most reliable meteorological data are available. The temperature change varies from one climatic zone to another as well as for different seasons. If a linear trend is taken through mean annual temperatures, the average change over the last 5 decades is 3.4°F.
Finally, we don't even need all of this data - the plants that grow around us tell us the story. People all over the country are reporting seeing animals and plants that they have never seen before, but which are prevalent in warmer climates. And the plants are starting to grow earlier in the spring than they had before.
There is so much evidence - overwhelming evidence, in my opinion, that climate change is real. What did or didn't happen in the Medevial period is really more of academic interest to me.
It's great to see all the internet hacks and armchair experts are sooooooo much smarter than the vast majority of climate scientists on our planet...
a few google searches, a couple of articles written (for the most part) by either paid shills for industry or scientists who are in fields other than climate science, and ho-ho they have "disproved" or "cast serious doubts" on AGW
and then I talk to some of the geophysicists at the AGU this week in San Francisco, and wouldn't you know, the summary of 10 years straight in satellite readings show a ~3mm rise in sea level per year - half of which can be attributed to expansion from the sea water heating (which in itself would be indicative of a problem)- the other half? - melting glaciers and icecaps... and this is just ONE of the sort of reports from actual experts in their fields...but deniers will continue
and coal will get burned in ever-increasing amounts on oil's downslope
Hello MacDuff, sounds like you may originate from my neck of the woods.
It's great to see all the internet hacks and armchair experts are sooooooo much smarter than the vast majority of climate scientists on our planet...
Maybe you could remind us when it was the IPCC said that the Arctic would be free of summer sea ice. I can't be bothered going back to the report which I no longer consider to be worth reading. But it said on the BBC last night that it would likely be ice free in Summer in around 10 years - and a mental extrapolation of what I've seen on satellite images of sea ice and summer melting in Greenland would support that contention. Why is it that things seem to be progressing so much faster than we are led to believe by the IPCC?
The IPCC also managed to overlook the fact that the Earth probably lacks sufficient fossil fuels to create the most optimistic of global warming scenarios they forecast. And this shower have been awarded the Nobel Prize! Robert Mugabe next year no doubt.
So things on the ground are much worse than the IPCC forecast and yet we seem to lack the FF inventory to bring about their worst fears.
Here's my interpretation on your IPCC dilemma. They are conservative in their modelling of "processes". Only factor in a sub-set of all the processes. Their consensus approach also pulls down the content of their documentation to the lowest common dominator – this much we know and agree on. This explains why they have been systematically underestimating reality over the last four reports.
The 2nd point about reserves is different. Here they are optimistic (depending on your point of view!), assuming more extractable fossil fuel reserves than is likely.
These two "errors" are not mutually exclusively though as they occupy different spaces of the problem. The conservative nature of the processes leads to miss-matches with historic observations. The overestimation of reserves error won't become apparent until sometime in the future when we see the high end emissions scenarios fail to pan out.
The conclusion to all this? By the IPCC's understanding of the processes we need 800-1000ppm CO2 to get to +6C. On the one hand there isn't the carbon to get that high (good news!) but on the other hand the IPCC's understanding of the processes is conservative so we may not need 800-1000ppm to still deliver +6C.
Chris - science should not be guided by consensus - especially if the consensus gets skewed for subjective reasons.
So where do you think the IPCC have gone wrong in their modeling scenario?
I continue to wonder if they have not got the natural cycle wrong - and what we are seeing is human forcing laid on top of a natural warming period - al a HO?
The IPCC will be in deep trouble when they have to concede that they do not have enough C to burn - but then say - Oh by the way things will still be as bad as we forecast cos we screwed that up too.
The very serious issue here is how billions are spent in the coming years - C capture or vast numbers of nukes and windmills - if it turns out there just ain't enough C to worry about.
I would rather that the fear of global warming prevents coal burning electric plants from getting constructed and that we construct nukes instead. We'll breathe cleaner area and be better prepared for Peak Coal.
I think that conventional pollutant harm ought to be enough to crack down on coal burners. I would like it if the global warming brigade focused much more on cutting conventional pollutants. Such an effort would reduce fossil fuels usage and shift us toward nukes, wind, solar, and more efficient usage of energy.
By the IPCC's understanding of the processes we need 800-1000ppm CO2 to get to +6C.
Is that CO2 or CO2equivalents?
Methane is roughly 22 times as powerful as CO2 as a greenhouse gas. 400 ppm CO2 plus 30 ppm of methane would deliver the equivalent of 1000 ppm of straight CO2, and there are any number of sources of methane which could deliver that much or more.
We really need contingency plans to halt feedback loops before they run away beyond our ability to offset them.
Coal: It all hinges on coal. Can we really increase total fossil fuels consumed even as oil and natural gas production decline?
The whole global warming question seems to me hinge on how much coal we can burn. If we can burn at some multiple of our current coal burn rate and maintain that multiple for some decades then, yes, we can probably cause huge climate changes.
But if Peak Oil comes by 2015 at the latest (and the IEA projection of plateau until 2015 seems optimistic) and we can't ramp up coal by a huge amount then global warming seems like the wrong issue to treat as one of our top concerns.
So can we ramp up coal production far beyond current production levels and sustain it?
The expansion of Chinese coal burn is gigantic - I don't have the stats to hand - but its on the scale of 19th century industrial revolution in Europe. Chinese coal consumption increased 9% and Indonesia by 18% in 2006 alone.
My own view is that all this talk of Carbon capture is just that - a crutch for the politicians to lean on. There is absolutely no point in Europe doing this while China belches out more CO2 than anyone else - as we have done for centuries.
And then there is in-situ coal gassification. I'm quite sure we'll see lots of that as our nat gas supplies plummet towards 2020.
I understand what China is doing with coal. But what are their real coal reserves? What are Australia's real reserves? How long can China sustain this burn rate?
I would like to see the very talented analysts of The Oil Drum to devote a lot more attention to coal. I thin
I have to confess I barely skim Heading Out's articles anymore. But I always search on terms like "warming" and "medieval" and guess what? It's always there. No matter what the topic is, he will be plugging his denialist views.
Time to figure out who pays his bills.
I can feel a 200 post thread on "Yes we're warming", "No, we're not warming" coming from all sides now. The air is getting close, my chest is hurting, I collapse in a daze only to be awakened hours later by a medic, saying I passed out. I am confused and stumble out the door.
The bright hot sun blinds me and burns my face, the cold wind bites through my skin. I run in panic from the voices inside my head of reason and madness fighting each other to find the truth. I sit down by the lakeside and watch the waves lapping against the shore and become calm.
amen
I do think its the people who deny GW that want you to "collapse in a daze" - if you can't bedazzle them with brilliance them confuse them with BS.
Are you seriously saying that somebody like me who is a AGW denier thinks that peak oil does not exist? Or that we should just trash the environment? This is a rather absurd conclusion at best.
I do think that it is horrible that when I have visted LA that my eyes, lungs, nose burn. I do think that we should clean up our act and stop dumping crap everywhere. However even if I do think that things that regulate our climate are beyond our control does not mean that I say BURN IT ALL!!
I have a car that gets 30mpg, I run CF lights in my house. I am growing my own food. I recycle everything I can and so on.
I do not believe in climate models for a few reasons.
1) Hurricanes cannot be modeled with decent reliability yet.
2) Daily weather cannot be accurate
3) yearly trends are usually wrong
4) Models do not take everything into account such as death of trees, oceanic variability based on temperature and CO2 released due to this, Bacteria creating methane, humans breathing, yeast!... They wonder why they get it so wrong? LOL is all I can say.
5) Fringe scientists who try to bring rebuttals are considered to be lunatics. However their observations do hold merit just do not generate $$ for companies that wish to push the ever greening products.
6) Its hip, If it is hip and lots of people are onboard who do not know anything about climate science are touting it there is a problem. Real Estate anyone?
7) Are we to think that we are so super-beings that we can piss off the planet that has been around for so long?
8) The Sun well its the Sun nuff said.
9) Their models are proven wrong and even based on false data that is later realized. Even the hockey stick is considered to be fallacy now.
10) Higher C02 leads to higher plant growth speeds and therefore consumes more. Think of what happens when over abundance of food occurs in the wild with animals. Consume Consume Consume "die-off" stabilized" Regardless of our actions now we are scrapnoids if we are indeed the cause.
11) Arctic ice is refreezing at record rates
12) Solar Cycles are very impacting on weather
13) Water Vapor is by far more important of a greenhouse gas than C02
14) If there was true global warming sound science backs up that warming in the arctic would occur first nobody argues this. Hurricanes would be less frequent as the mechanism of hurricanes is nothing more than heat transfer from the lower to higher latitudes.
15) If there was higher warming there would be a increase in water vapor and rainfall overall. However there is extended drought over most of the planet that just does not set well with warming.
16) As above Colder leads to there being less rainfall and less evaporation thus drought. Drought leads to dust that blocks sunlight further making it colder.
17) There is no sound science to explain why the southern hemisphere is cooling now.
18) There has been natural climate variables that have occurred such as the little ice age and medieval warming period that exceed today in terms of speed and time.
19) greenland was fertile for the vikings therefore must have melted a lot more than today and yet life survived.
20) during earths history cool climates is the majority of the time therefore we should count our lucky stars that we exist in a time that is rather warm.
I just have to rationalize with myself on what I think is sound science. However think what you want. As I said I am not one to think polluting the atmosphere or soil/water is a good idea. I think we should quit for sure and find more reasonable means to get the energy we need. And maybe even use the word that is so hated these days... SACRIFICE!!! and do with out to make better for all.
In can speak to the Greenland fertility issue.
Throstur Eysteinsson is Ass't Directer of the Icelandic Forest Service, has been working with Greenland to set up their first tree plantings and has a PhD in forestry from the Univ. of Maine. He also quite erudite.
Wait a minute. I have no expertise at all on climate change in Greenland, but here we have a witness from the 14th century who went to Greenland and described what it was like. Then we have some guy in the 21st century who says the guy in the 14th century was wrong about what he says he saw? I think we should give the greater weight to the eyewitness testimony.
Throstur's points are valid. There is no apparent source for wheat in Greenland (since it was never grown in Iceland, the only known contact with Greenland), just barley. And a warmer climate in Greenland should have helped Iceland (which has a better climate today). Yet Icelanders never grew wheat.
No archaeological evidence of either apples or wheat.
As the name suggests, Greenland was subject to massive Real Estate hype, of which the bishop might have been part. Post-pagan Iceland murdered far fewer men (and lost fewer "a viking") so emigration of surplus population was probably a good thing.
The sea ice records of the Icelanders showed more ice in the 1300s & 1400s than today.
Alan
Alan:
You might try
*Ivar Bardson/Bardarson, Det Gamle Grnlands Beskrivelse, edited from handwritten MS by Finnur Jonsson, Copenhagen 1930. The original was written by a monk who, among other things, dined on the wild cattle that were roaming the place in the 1340's.
Cheers
HO
(the square comes because I don't know how to put an o with a slash through it into this format).
Short of checking for it in the National Library of Iceland, any idea how to get it ?
Or a detailed summary ?
I can kind of/sort of read Icelandic/Old Norse.
Alan
I only just tracked it down this far. But there is are a group of folk that write about this on a discussion board, which I came across trying to find a translation. Incidentally travel at the time was not narrowly restricted and so it is perfectly possible that they acquired seed grain as part of the trade that they engaged in - selling polar bear skins etc into Europe. The church was also heavily involved in the colony.
Archaeologists love to comb through waste dumps. No evidence of wheat or apples there.
Iceland has a milder climate, and much stronger trade links, than Greenland. They have never grown wheat there (including today). As an aside, Iceland has a variety of trees to chose from that will grow well or marginally.
So far (I will confirm) only Siberian larch has been planted in Greenland.
{
[edit] A number of tree species have been planted in Greenland (Scotch Pine 100+ years ago, today 2.5 to 3 m tall). Several species survive but only Siberian larch can be said to grow. And only along the interior Fjords of the south (where the Eastern Settlement was).
The Western Settlement was treeless (and charcoal less), but the Eastern Settlement had limited short willows & birches along the interior fjords, but a very limited resource that would have been pressured by sheep farming. And iron could well have been an essential export from the Newfoundland Settlement. Unfortunately, access to Newfoundland required trees to make ships from.
[I might mention that apple orchards and sheep farming are incompatible without extensive fences, the sheep will rapidly kill the trees w/o high and extensive fences (Icelanders traditionally free range their sheep, fences were impractical). Fruit trees have sugar in their bark are are "sheep candy" AFAIK. Another strike against Greenlandic apple trees.]
Throstur also pointed out that the concept of sustainable development came from forestry. A 1713 book on silvaculture Economics in German was the first mention, he said the name of the author but I forgot[/edit]
There is no other historic record of wheat or apples, both of which would have been trade goods with Iceland, which had neither.
Throstur's theory of collapse of Greenland and not Iceland is that Iceland had small trees large enough to make charcoal, Greenland did not. Charcoal is needed to make iron (note that Viking Settlement in Newfoundland (perhaps 150 people max) had an iron foundry). Iron is needed to harvest hay. Hay is needed to keep sheep & cattle over winter. Once Greenland's declining trade links deprived them of iron, starvation was just a matter of time.
Such a theory argues against apple trees.
Greenland Vikings were never a large colony. Even much larger, and closer Iceland would go over a year without a trade vessel at various times in their history. (Although such years were rare and were complained of in the chronicles of the time).
Alan
That is, of course, the same bishop that Throstur politely called a liar. And made claims not supported by excavations of old settlements or other historical accounts.
Alan
Are you seriously saying that somebody like me who is a AGW denier thinks that peak oil does not exist?
Nope
Or that we should just trash the environment? This is a rather absurd conclusion at best.
Nope
do think that it is horrible that when I have visted LA that my eyes, lungs, nose burn. I do think that we should clean up our act and stop dumping crap everywhere. However even if I do think that things that regulate our climate are beyond our control does not mean that I say BURN IT ALL!!
Nope - never said that nor have I implied that you or anyone else who is a GW denier said as such
I would like to see a majority of trained climate scientists interpret climate data and come to the conclusion that GW as a trend is wrong. But it is not to be. As for the 20 point post - it kinda reinforces my point. Spread confusion.
so instead of answering my 20 questions you decide its a good idea to say its just confusion. Cool! way to go on a rebuttal.
I know what you mean about this. He simply refuses to take any of it seriously and continuously grasps at minutia of one sort or another as evidence that that we ought not try and do anything about global climate change.
I will tell you what I do know though - he is an academic who has a background in mining. I should note that he oftentimes writes about coal mining with a considerable amount of detailed information.
With respect to the arctic ice melt, I think it is easy to think that we are already past a tipping point, and it is too late to do anything.
If there is any possibility that the current arctic ice problems are temporary, I think it is helpful to hear the evidence. Otherwise, it is easy to come to the conclusion of "why bother, its hopeless" when looking at the climate change situation today. If it looks like there is a possibility of hope on the arctic ice melt, I think it gives a stronger argument for taking action with respect to our longer term warming problems.
It may or may not be too late for the Arctic, but the Antarctic is another matter entirely. With some deniers, delay until inevitable seems to be the desired outcome.
There is more to the climate than sea level, of course. Even if all of the ice does melt, the average temperatures will still depend on the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I guess I look at it this way. We are going to have to get off of fossil fuels sooner or later anyways. Yes, we could put it off as long as possible, and thereby ensure inevitability, or we can act sooner and perhaps leave behind a more comfortable planet for us to live on.
There is considerable archaeological evidence that the Thule migrated. It is also worth noting that the Antarctic ice cap is currently larger than previously recorded.
Heading Out's contributions are great, worth more than a skim. I admit I am not as technically educated in the energy sector as I wish I were, but The Oil Drum educates me by careful reading. There is no harm in skimming, but I wouldn't announce this. It might be misinterpreted and seen as disrespectful.
I second this - HO has written a lot of great articles over the years and I hope he keeps them coming.
That said, I don't agree with his skepticism about AGW, but life is pretty boring if you only listen to people who share your own views, and you can always learn from listening to a contrarian viewpoint (admittedly some arguments against global warming are just fictions created by PR companies, but that isn't the case here).
The link he gives says (my itallics)
All those careful qualifications disappear and for Heading Out this is unconditional.
People have moved to Greenland more than once, and gone extinct more than once. Not just white people, other people.
Well, we don't know that they went extinct. We just know that there were gaps in occupancy in specific locations along the coastal settlement chain, lasting for long periods and having new peoples settling there afterwards.
The Dorset might have just got in their boats and moved to Florida around 2,500BC or whenever.
As far as dendrochronology is concerned, why argue? We will know if the ice pack melts in two years just by waiting two years. It's not as if we could do anything to stop it, and if it does happen, we will know what happens to the Conveyor Belt at that time.
My bet is that the Greenies will be able to impose their beliefs on the world to exactly the degree that the world is able to impose it's weather on you.
I wonder, has "global warming" replaced "bird flu" as the crisis du jour? Or do most people still think that bird flu is the greatest threat to the existence of mankind over the next 5 years? I want to focus on bird flu since it is much easier to find birds that have the flu than it is to find rising oceans. Why can't we focus on solving the bird flu thing first?
B/c birds don't vote. Birds don't buy. Birds don't sell anything to the Americans.
Everyone on the other hand notices weather. Hot/cold people vote. Wet/dry people buy. And middle-class activists/peasant bicycle-drivers sell things to the Americans :-)
It is possible that bird flu was just another facet of "The Power Of Nightmares" being manipulated for commercial advantage...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article350787.ece
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GK04Aa01.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
I think the attraction to global warming as a problem over other obvious problems is that it allows Western people to chastise each other. The desire to assert higher status over fairly high status people makes global warming more attractive than, say, species extinction in tropical rain forests because higher status Western people use most of the energy cause a smaller fraction of the rain forest damage.
I suspect that expanding populations and rising affluence in relatively poorer countries (e.g. India, China, Indonesia, southeast Asian countries) is causing far more habitat loss and species extinction than global warming will in the next 50 years. But telling poor people to have fewer babies isn't an effective formula for asserting higher status over high status people.
That there was a medieval warming in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere is not at all controversial. The controversy is in applying this data to the entire world at that time. Heading out did not imply that the medieval warming was global.
However there is a website that is looking at the global extent of the Medieval Warming Period. They appear to have collected a significant number of papers that suggest that the extent was considerably larger than just the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere.
I poked a bit at that website to see who the people were, and what their qualifications are. The one thing that jumps out at me is that I don't see any climatologists in the list of scientific advisors.
Secondly, they seem to have an agenda.
Members of the board have written papers questioning global climate change, but most of those were written back in the 1980's and 1990's. Back at the time, a bit of skepticism was a healthy thing. But today among climatologists the issue has been settled.
For example, they have something where you can see historical mean annual temperatures at various spots around the country. Apparently in an attempt to prove no warming so far, but in general the data is extremely noisy. Not surprising really. The IPCC says that temperatures have gone up about 1 degree F, but that is an average over the whole planet, and such a change would be lost in the noise for any given meteorological station. One could take the climate data from all over the US, and average it to smooth out the noise, and then any trends would be far more pronounced.
Alternatively, according the IPCC, the temperature changes in the Arctic and Antarctic are far more pronounced than they would be in the continental US, but co2science.org doesn't supply mean temperature data for Alaska. But not to worry, I found such data elsewhere:
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
and this does show a pronounced increase.
Finally, we don't even need all of this data - the plants that grow around us tell us the story. People all over the country are reporting seeing animals and plants that they have never seen before, but which are prevalent in warmer climates. And the plants are starting to grow earlier in the spring than they had before.
There is so much evidence - overwhelming evidence, in my opinion, that climate change is real. What did or didn't happen in the Medevial period is really more of academic interest to me.
It's great to see all the internet hacks and armchair experts are sooooooo much smarter than the vast majority of climate scientists on our planet...
a few google searches, a couple of articles written (for the most part) by either paid shills for industry or scientists who are in fields other than climate science, and ho-ho they have "disproved" or "cast serious doubts" on AGW
and then I talk to some of the geophysicists at the AGU this week in San Francisco, and wouldn't you know, the summary of 10 years straight in satellite readings show a ~3mm rise in sea level per year - half of which can be attributed to expansion from the sea water heating (which in itself would be indicative of a problem)- the other half? - melting glaciers and icecaps... and this is just ONE of the sort of reports from actual experts in their fields...but deniers will continue
and coal will get burned in ever-increasing amounts on oil's downslope
Hello MacDuff, sounds like you may originate from my neck of the woods.
Maybe you could remind us when it was the IPCC said that the Arctic would be free of summer sea ice. I can't be bothered going back to the report which I no longer consider to be worth reading. But it said on the BBC last night that it would likely be ice free in Summer in around 10 years - and a mental extrapolation of what I've seen on satellite images of sea ice and summer melting in Greenland would support that contention. Why is it that things seem to be progressing so much faster than we are led to believe by the IPCC?
The IPCC also managed to overlook the fact that the Earth probably lacks sufficient fossil fuels to create the most optimistic of global warming scenarios they forecast. And this shower have been awarded the Nobel Prize! Robert Mugabe next year no doubt.
So things on the ground are much worse than the IPCC forecast and yet we seem to lack the FF inventory to bring about their worst fears.
Please explain.
CW
Here's my interpretation on your IPCC dilemma. They are conservative in their modelling of "processes". Only factor in a sub-set of all the processes. Their consensus approach also pulls down the content of their documentation to the lowest common dominator – this much we know and agree on. This explains why they have been systematically underestimating reality over the last four reports.
The 2nd point about reserves is different. Here they are optimistic (depending on your point of view!), assuming more extractable fossil fuel reserves than is likely.
These two "errors" are not mutually exclusively though as they occupy different spaces of the problem. The conservative nature of the processes leads to miss-matches with historic observations. The overestimation of reserves error won't become apparent until sometime in the future when we see the high end emissions scenarios fail to pan out.
The conclusion to all this? By the IPCC's understanding of the processes we need 800-1000ppm CO2 to get to +6C. On the one hand there isn't the carbon to get that high (good news!) but on the other hand the IPCC's understanding of the processes is conservative so we may not need 800-1000ppm to still deliver +6C.
Chris - science should not be guided by consensus - especially if the consensus gets skewed for subjective reasons.
So where do you think the IPCC have gone wrong in their modeling scenario?
I continue to wonder if they have not got the natural cycle wrong - and what we are seeing is human forcing laid on top of a natural warming period - al a HO?
The IPCC will be in deep trouble when they have to concede that they do not have enough C to burn - but then say - Oh by the way things will still be as bad as we forecast cos we screwed that up too.
The very serious issue here is how billions are spent in the coming years - C capture or vast numbers of nukes and windmills - if it turns out there just ain't enough C to worry about.
I would rather that the fear of global warming prevents coal burning electric plants from getting constructed and that we construct nukes instead. We'll breathe cleaner area and be better prepared for Peak Coal.
I think that conventional pollutant harm ought to be enough to crack down on coal burners. I would like it if the global warming brigade focused much more on cutting conventional pollutants. Such an effort would reduce fossil fuels usage and shift us toward nukes, wind, solar, and more efficient usage of energy.
Is that CO2 or CO2 equivalents?
Methane is roughly 22 times as powerful as CO2 as a greenhouse gas. 400 ppm CO2 plus 30 ppm of methane would deliver the equivalent of 1000 ppm of straight CO2, and there are any number of sources of methane which could deliver that much or more.
We really need contingency plans to halt feedback loops before they run away beyond our ability to offset them.
Coal: It all hinges on coal. Can we really increase total fossil fuels consumed even as oil and natural gas production decline?
The whole global warming question seems to me hinge on how much coal we can burn. If we can burn at some multiple of our current coal burn rate and maintain that multiple for some decades then, yes, we can probably cause huge climate changes.
But if Peak Oil comes by 2015 at the latest (and the IEA projection of plateau until 2015 seems optimistic) and we can't ramp up coal by a huge amount then global warming seems like the wrong issue to treat as one of our top concerns.
So can we ramp up coal production far beyond current production levels and sustain it?
The expansion of Chinese coal burn is gigantic - I don't have the stats to hand - but its on the scale of 19th century industrial revolution in Europe. Chinese coal consumption increased 9% and Indonesia by 18% in 2006 alone.
My own view is that all this talk of Carbon capture is just that - a crutch for the politicians to lean on. There is absolutely no point in Europe doing this while China belches out more CO2 than anyone else - as we have done for centuries.
And then there is in-situ coal gassification. I'm quite sure we'll see lots of that as our nat gas supplies plummet towards 2020.
Oil will peak on 15 th November 2011.
I understand what China is doing with coal. But what are their real coal reserves? What are Australia's real reserves? How long can China sustain this burn rate?
I would like to see the very talented analysts of The Oil Drum to devote a lot more attention to coal. I thin