Cold, bad harvest, famine and then the Black Death

[Rich]

Clube suggests that the reason for the climate issues are that the earth moves into a "band" of dust long before it begins to encounter impactors and that climate cooling itself is a precursor to more catastrophic activity.

This would appear to be relevant.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/35266/Global-warming-It-s-the-coldest-winter-in-decades

GLOBAL WARMING? IT’S THE COLDEST WINTER IN DECADES

Monday February 18,2008

NEW evidence has cast doubt on claims that the world’s ice-caps are melting, it emerged last night.

Satellite data shows that concerns over the levels of sea ice may have been premature.

It was feared that the polar caps were vanishing because of the effects of global warming.

But figures from the respected US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that almost all the “lost” ice has come back.

This may also explain the haze on venus: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/149791-Mysterious-Haze-Found-on-Venus despite Titov saying it is likely to be an internal process:

ESA scientists think the sulfuric acid particles that make up the bright haze are created when some atmospheric process lifts the gaseous sulfur dioxide and water vapor high up above the cloud tops where they are exposed to ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

[...]Exactly what causes the sulfur dioxide and water vapor to well up is not known, but Titov says it is likely some internal process of Venus' atmosphere.

The transient dark markings on the VMC images are even more of a mystery. They are caused by something that absorbs UV radiation, but scientists don't yet know what the chemical is.

doesn't seem to rule out a cosmic connection.

 

[Jacques]

Clube suggests that the reason for the climate issues are that the earth moves into a "band" of dust long before it begins to encounter impactors and that climate cooling itself is a precursor to more catastrophic activity.

Read this morning:

Forget Global Warming: Welcome to the New Ice Age
By Lorne Gunter - National Post
Feb 27, 2008 - 8:17:17 AM

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

And this one too:

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
By Michael Asher - Daily Tech
Feb 27, 2008 - 8:13:35 AM

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming. Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began.

Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

And this one:

Global Warming? New Data Shows Ice Is Back
By Phil Brennan - Newsmax
Feb 27, 2008 - 8:08:09 AM

Are the world's ice caps melting because of climate change, or are the reports just a lot of scare mongering by the advocates of the global warming theory? Scare mongering appears to be the case, according to reports from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that reveal that almost all the allegedly “lost” ice has come back.

A NOAA report shows that ice levels which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in October, are almost back to their original levels.

Moreover, a Feb. 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual, challenging the global warming crusaders and buttressing arguments of skeptics who deny that the world is undergoing global warming.

The Daily express recalls the photograph of polar bears clinging on to a melting iceberg which has been widely hailed as proof of the need to fight climate change and has been used by former Vice President Al Gore during his "Inconvenient Truth" lectures about mankind’s alleged impact on the global climate.

Gore fails to mention that the photograph was taken in the month of August when melting is normal. Or that the polar bear population has soared in recent years.

As winter roars in across the Northern Hemisphere, Mother Nature seems to have joined the ranks of the skeptics.

As the Express notes, scientists are saying the northern Hemisphere has endured its coldest winter in decades, adding that snow cover across the area is at its greatest since 1966. The newspaper cites the one exception — Western Europe, which had, until the weekend when temperatures plunged to as low as -10 C in some places, been basking in unseasonably warm weather.

Around the world, vast areas have been buried under some of the heaviest snowfalls in decades. Central and southern China, the United States, and Canada were hit hard by snowstorms. In China, snowfall was so heavy that over 100,000 houses collapsed under the weight of snow.

Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman, and northern Saudi Arabia report the heaviest falls in years and below-zero temperatures. In Afghanistan, snow and freezing weather killed 120 people. Even Baghdad had a snowstorm, the first in the memory of most residents.

AFP news reports icy temperatures have just swept through south China, stranding 180,000 people and leading to widespread power cuts just as the area was recovering from the worst weather in 50 years, the government said Monday. The latest cold snap has taken a severe toll in usually temperate Yunnan province, which has been struck by heavy snowfalls since Thursday, a government official from the provincial disaster relief office told AFP.

Twelve people have died there, state Xinhua news agency reported, and four remained missing as of Saturday.

An ongoing record-long spell of cold weather in Vietnam's northern region, which started on Jan. 14, has killed nearly 60,000 cattle, mainly bull and buffalo calves, local press reported Monday. By Feb. 17, the spell had killed a total of 59,962 cattle in the region, including 7,349 in the Ha Giang province, 6,400 in Lao Cai, and 5,571 in Bac Can province, said Hoang Kim Giao, director of the Animal Husbandry Department under the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, according to the Pioneer newspaper.

In Britain the temperatures plunged to -10 C in central England, according to the Express, which reports that experts say that February could end up as one of the coldest in Britain in the past 10 years with the freezing night-time conditions expected to stay around a frigid -8 C until at least the middle of the week. And the BBC reports that a bus company's efforts to cut global warming emissions have led to services being disrupted by cold weather.

Meanwhile Athens News reports that a raging snow storm that blanketed most of Greece over the weekend and continued into the early morning hours on Monday, plunging the country into sub-zero temperatures. The agency reported that public transport buses were at a standstill on Monday in the wider Athens area, while ships remained in ports, public services remained closed, and schools and courthouses in the more severely-stricken prefectures were also closed.

Scores of villages, mainly on the island of Crete, and in the prefectures of Evia, Argolida, Arcadia, Lakonia, Viotia, and the Cyclades islands were snowed in.

More than 100 villages were snowed-in on the island of Crete and temperatures in Athens dropped to -6 C before dawn, while the coldest temperatures were recorded in Kozani, Grevena, Kastoria and Florina, where they plunged to -12 C.

If global warming gets any worse we'll all freeze to death.

 

[Abram730]

It is said to be the precedent to the Black Death, very interesting, considering what we know about the link between asteroids/comets and germs spreading illnesses.

Great Famine of 1315–1317

http://www.cassiopedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Great_Famine_of_1315-1317

The Great Famine of 1315-1317 (or to 1322) was the first of a series of large-scale crises that struck Europe early in the 14th century, causing millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marking a clear end to an earlier period of growth and prosperity during the 11th through 13th centuries. Starting with bad weather in the spring of 1315, universal crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer of 1317; Europe did not fully recover until 1322. It was a period marked by extreme levels of criminal activity, disease and mass death, infanticide, and cannibalism. It had consequences for Church, State, European society and future calamities to follow in the 14th century.

Famine in the Medieval European context meant that people died of starvation on a massive scale. As brutal as they were, famines were familiar occurrences in Medieval Europe. As an example, localized famines occurred in France during the 14th century in 1304, 1305, 1310, 1315-1317 (the Great Famine), 1330-1334, 1349-1351, 1358-1360, 1371, 1374-1375 and 1390. In England, the most prosperous kingdom affected by the Great Famine, there were famines in 1315-1317, 1321, 1351, 1369, and more.

[...]The height of the famine was reached in 1317 as the wet weather hung on. Finally in the summer the weather returned to its normal patterns. However by now people were so weakened by diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis, tuberculosis, and other sicknesses, and much of the seed stock had been eaten, that it was not until 1325 that the food supply returned to relatively normal conditions and the population began to increase again. Historians debate the toll but it is estimated that between 10%-25% of the population of many cities and towns died. While the Black Death (1338-1375) would kill more, for many the Great Famine was worse. While the plague swept through an area in a matter of months, the Great Famine lingered for years, drawing out the suffering of those who would slowly starve to death, face cannibalism, child-murder and rampant crime.

There is also a book on that, Before the Black Death by A. R. Bridbury

Another interesting period was that of 1302.

_http://vulcan.fis.uniroma3.it/ischia/escurs-eng.html

The morphology of the island is dominated in the central part by the Monte Epomeo, 785 m asl high, around which are located numerous other reliefs of volcanic nature. The flat part of the island is located between Casamicciola, Barano and Ischia Ponte.

The recent volcanic activity of the Island is subdivided into 5 phases. The first two (old cycle) occurred before the emission of the Green Tuff forming much of Monte Epomeo. The last three (younger cycle) are younger than the Green Tuff. […]

[...]Phase 5 - after 10.000 years ago until 1302 AD (scoria cone of Punta della Cannuccia; volcano of Zaro; Formation of Piano Liguori; volcanic complexes of Monte Rotaro and Montagnone-Monte Maschiatta; eruptive centers of Porto d'Ischia, Vateliero-Molara-Cava Nocelle; Arso volcano).[…]

[...]12 - Lava flow of Arso.
This lava flow was emitted during the last eruption on Ischia in 1302. It destroyed the middle age village of Geronda. The crater is to the east of Fiaiano and it is surrounded by black and red scoriae. The lava flow is 2.7 km long , and 1 km wide in its largest point near Punta Molina. In this point it is 15-17 m high. The lava flow is presently covered by pine trees planted between 1853-1855.

Then there's the Battle of the Golden Spursb, that I find to be similar to the French Revolution.

The Battle of the Golden Spurs (Dutch: De Guldensporenslag, French: "bataille des éperons d'or") was fought on July 11, 1302, near Kortrijk in Flanders. The battle is also called The Battle of Courtrai after the French name for Kortrijk.

Another unusual feature of this battle is that it is often cited as one of the few successful uprisings of peasants and townsmen, given that at the time most peasant uprisings in Europe were quelled.

The uprising originated from the people themselves, without being provoked by a lord (the Flemish count and his most important lords were in French captivity). Only when the uprising became widespread, the count's relatives who still were free rushed in to aid. But in the first place this was a struggle of people against a lord (the French king), not the struggle between two lords.[5]

Barbara Tuchman describes this as a peasant uprising in A Distant Mirror.

And on November 18, 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued the Papal bull Unam sanctam ("The One Holy"), which historians consider one of the most extreme statements of Papal spiritual supremacy ever made.

The bull also declared that the Church must be united, that the Pope was the sole and absolute head of the Church: "Therefore, of the one and only Church there is one body and one head, not two heads like a monster." The Bull also stated, "We are informed by the texts of the gospels that in this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal." Thus, it was concluded, the temporal authorities must submit to the spiritual authorities: "For with truth as our witness, it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power and to pass judgement if it has not been good."

The bull ends "Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.

This period could be also dated as the starting point of the medieval Little Ice Age:

Dating of the Little Ice Age

There is no agreed beginning year to the Little Ice Age, although there are a frequently referenced series of events preceding the known climatic minima. Starting in the 13th century, pack ice began advancing southwards in the North Atlantic, as well as glaciers in Greenland. The three years of torrential rains beginning in 1315 ushered in an era of unpredictable weather in Northern Europe which did not lift until the 19th century. There is anecdotal evidence of expanding glaciers almost worldwide, but a climate reconstruction based on glacial length [3] shows no great variation from 1600 to 1850, though it shows strong retreat thereafter.

For this reason, scholars tend to use any of several dates ranging over 400 years for the beginning of the Little Ice Age:

* 1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
* 1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
* 1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
* 1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
* 1650 for the first climatic minimum

Just puzzling.

Jesus had come back and was burned for heresy.