Red Got it Right

If you look up Leif Erikson’s father you may well read that the discoverer of Greenland scammed his fellow Vikings with false promises of a hospitable place. He lied to get them follow him as colonists. The name was part of the scam. It’s a persistent libel. The truth is the earth was relatively warm place in 985 AD when Erik the Red founded his settlements. Greenland was as he described it, blessed with inviting fjords and fertile green valleys. Climatologists now call the time the Medieval Warm Period. Some call it the Medieval Climate Optimum because European agriculture fared better with higher rainfall and a longer growing season, and because a lot more people die in cold snaps than in heat waves. Some refer to it as the “so called” MWP because the occurrence suggests the current warming trend may not be all that unusual. There is little question mean and median global temperatures were a degree or so higher than they were a few centuries earlier or later. Whether temperatures in the 20^th century were even warmer is a matter of intense scientific conjecture. In any case the Viking settlements in Greenland survived for 500 years, until about the time the Little Ice Age began.

Being more recent, the LIA is a bit better documented. Spanish Explorers saw snow covered mountains along the California coast. The winter George Washington spent at Valley Forge was famously cold. The Hudson River regularly froze over as far south as New York City. Glaciers around the world were growing. Mountain villages in the Alps were engulfed with ice. Eskimos were spotted paddling kayaks off the coast of England. But precise measurements of temperatures around the world are hard to come by.

Determining global mean and median temperatures from ice cores, tree rings, and ocean sediment is an inexact science at best but a group from the Oregon Institute of Science surveyed the literature on the subject. They concluded most of it supports the .contention that there was indeed a warm climatic anomaly from about 800-1300 AD, a cold climatic anomaly between 1300-1900 AD, and the 20^th Century was probably not the warmest on record. All three conclusions apply to most geographic regions of the world. The historical record contains no reports of global warming catastrophes. None of this is good for today’s alarmists because the medieval period certainly predates the industrial revolution. Any warming could not possible have been caused by man made carbon dioxide. And warmer temperatures don’t seem to have done any harm. They were a good thing. Increased levels of CO2 have quite beneficial effects as well. Trees grow faster over a wider geographic range.

Given all this it’s safe to say the climate for the past 3000 years or so has been punctuated by periods of relative warmth and cold. But the accuracy claimed for the infamous hockey stick graph published by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the graph Al Gore used to dramatic effect to demonstrate the trend in man made global warming, is questionable at best. We are talking about a science that only recently has been able to say with any confidence what global temperatures are today, let alone what they were a millennium ago. Even current measurements are challenged by many as misleadingly high. Recording stations tend to be located in urban areas and affected by “heat islands.” We are also talking about differences of maybe 1 °C, a change most people in a crowded room wouldn’t notice. We are trying to project those differences into parts of the world where there are no reliable records, using a science in its infancy. All we know for sure is that Erik the Red got a bad rap.