The Little Ice Age (1300-1850) and Global Warmists

For my book club, I’m reading The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850.  The title is self-explanatory and the book’s premise simple: Following a fairly halcyon early medieval period that saw global warming, and with it a rare stability in an intensely agrarian world, the world cooled down, with devastating effects on the people unlucky enough to live as subsistence farmers (which, in those days, was most people).

The book isn’t very good. Okay, maybe it’s good, but I lost respect for the author when he spent pages and pages and pages explaining about air pressure, sun spots, currents, etc., all of which have affected the earth’s weather for millenia, and then somehow managed to conclude by saying that the recent fairly minor fluctuations are anomalous in that they are all our fault. Still, aside from that fatuity,the author has clearly done his work about weather trends during the Little Ice Age.  They were devastating.  They killed crops, flooded land, froze people, shifted or destroyed animal populations, etc.

The author describes the way in which people, utterly bewildered by the devastation wrought by these climate changes, hunted desperately for explanations.  The top explanation was, of course, God’s wrath.  The second tier bet was witch craft.  One couldn’t do anything about God, but one could go after the witches.  Thousands of people, mostly women, died as people tried to avert climate changes too great for them to understand.

As I read about the witch burnings, I kept thinking of today’s Global Warmists.  As were the people of the pre-scientific era, they’re incapable of understanding that the earth marches to its own (and the sun’s rhythm).  And as did the people of the pre-scientific era, they look for scape goats.  The repulsive 10:10 mini-video is just one example of the need to make blood sacrifices to sooth Mother Gaia’s bewildering wrath.

For more about the blind fear of the earth worshipers, and the way that fear leads to the modern day equivalent of witch burning, check out Ed Driscoll’s round up on Green Supremacists.