New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming.
The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. This cold spell, whose precise timeline scholars debate, but which seems to have set in around 600 years ago, was responsible for crop failures, famines and pandemics throughout Europe, resulting in misery and death for millions. To date, the mechanisms that led to this harsh climate state have remained inconclusive. However, a new paper published recently in Science Advances gives an up-to-date picture of the events that brought about the Little Ice Age. Surprisingly, the cooling appears to have been triggered by an unusually warm episode.
When lead author Francois Lapointe, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in geosciences at UMass Amherst and Raymond Bradley, distinguished professor in geosciences at UMass Amherst began carefully examining their 3,000-year reconstruction of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, results of which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, they noticed something surprising: a sudden change from very warm conditions in the late 1300s to unprecedented cold conditions in the early 1400s, only 20 years later.
Using many detailed marine records, Lapointe and Bradley discovered that there was an abnormally strong northward transfer of warm water in the late 1300s which peaked around 1380. As a result, the waters south of Greenland and the Nordic Seas became much warmer than usual. “No one has recognized this before,” notes Lapointe.
The damned Spaniards, Portugese, Italians and their diesel-powered caravels. Time to cancel Columbus (again.)
I blame Atlantis!
Bison farts.
The white man did the world a favour hunting almost to extinction!
Lets not forget that the All Mighty only created the world 6000 years ago.
In short, there was nothing that could be done to change it. All the taxes in the world could not have altered the climate.
“All the taxes in the world could not have altered the climate.”
Ha, considering their commitment to ‘The Climate Narrative’, they would probably argue the last mini Ice Age was caused by collecting too much carbon tax. But, then again, I am not sure if most leftards can even grasp the concept of “too much tax”.
No the commies want it all.
Is this Bradley, the hockey stick Bradley? Oh yeah, it appears so.
A load of bollocks then.
I’m just re reading Ian Pilmer’s book and in the Little Ice Age section … he does a very detailed ( but poorly written review / summary of the data) and the book is Heaven and Earth – global warming the missing science. From 2008 and so dated now but the info is still good.
Addolff – Who is hockey stick Bradley? Michael Mann invented the climate hockey stick. It may be bollocks but the paper highlights the very warm mediaeval warming period that Mann’s hockey stick tried to erase. It then leads to questions like “Was the mediaeval warming period global (it appears to have been) and what kind of SUVs were they driving in 1,300 AD (Anno Domino)…
Mann, Bradley and Hughes 1999 — The Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 (MBH98) multiproxy study on “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing …
Yah I know,1999 is ancient history.
Bring on the big freeze then.
It’ll keep the Liberal long pig preserved while I use their stick frame houses to burn in my wood stove.
I thought the Medieval Warm Period was caused by Ghenghis Kahn and his Hordes of SUVs overrunning Europe?
Do you know how much carbon-laden horseshit a single horde can produce? It’s Armageddon.
As I like to say to the indoctrinated youth eminating from our educational establishments: Ghengis Khan and Atilla the Hun were both social activists who wanted to change society.
Can I just say that I’ve come to hate the use of the term “unprecedented” and especially so in regard to weather events and shifts in climate. I’ve always understood unprecedented to mean never happened before but with the way language changes every day in service to the narrative, maybe it’s just me.
“..carefully examining their 3,000-year reconstruction of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures..”
Crystal ball stuff right there. Horseshit posing as science.
GIGO.
Or, as they might say on Twitter these days, tell me you’re making shit up without telling me you’re making shit up.
Worse. They are inventing data. How can a “reconstruction” produce reliable data. A reconstruction can only be used to illustrate an hypothesis. “This reconstruction illustrates how we think surface temperatures may have evolved in the past 3000 years, according to our theories”. Of course, it may all be Blarney Science.
We’ve known about freshwater dilution of the deep salty current for a long time. I remember James Burk talking about it in the 1980s.
I learnt about geologic periods 60 years ago and one of the consequences of change was more change. The environment is in a state of flux and on a smaller scale we call it weather. The Post Grad & Prof are trying to sell new when there is nothing new to sell. It will secure their futures in academic circles where taking the known and recycling or refuting the known to get known is the natural course of events. Log Rolling 101.
Rumsfeldian, known knowns, unknown knowns, et al
The early renaissance period which led to great strides in western civilization.
If Europe had happened to become tropical at that point we would likely still be living in huts.
Correlation is not causation but how many voyages of discovery originated in the tropics?
This research was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
Wish that was at top of the link I’d have saved myself some time. The NSF isn’t going to fund anything that goes against their anthropogenic climate change narrative and it’s obvious these two Geological chuckleheads know who puts the butter on their bread.
Climate models do not capture these events reliably…”
Ya don’t say?
So which inferometer (proxies) did they use given the modern thermometer wasn’t invented until the 1700s by some guy named Fahrenheit ?
Never you mind,our proxies are accurate to the 3rd decimal point…What do you mean ..The trees diverged?
A decline?
Impossible.
“Hide the Decline”.
JD I guess you too have noticed that whatever the proxi is,there are no error ranges provided,to qualify their Wild Assed Guess.
Just like that amazing “Global Average Temperature”..
Garbage In.
Gospel Out.
What is the range of temperatures across the globe?
Antarctica low ____degC
Death Valley high ____degC
the priests/priestesses love to expound on ever higher highs/lower lows, increments of averages in 100 years…
whatever that dead white dood Shakespeare said, “they complain too much”.
Forget the globe, how about Ottawa. Winter -30C summer +30C every 6 months!
I remember this study from years ago…it’s not new. They even made a movie about it called “the Day after tomorrow.” Which as we know…..must be true, because it came from Hollywood.
And in that vein, I have also seen Planet of the Apes……so I think it’s time we killed all the chimps, gorilla’s, and orangutans….just in case.
My memory sucks but this idea has been around since at least the 1950s. I believe it was a couple of geophysicists from Lamont Doherty who had a theory that the Arctic warms to the point where it’s pretty much ice-free in the summer. This leads to much greater precipitation, which leads to greater snow cover, which leads to cooling. Their theory was easy to Google – now it seems to have been disappeared. Could have been the early 1960s.
My theory is that we don’t know what the climate does other than from the ice core data (thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago) and the satellite data (since 1979). Variations in climate of the period 75 – 500 years are unknown to us still.
Found it on page 289. Interesting read and amazing person – William Maurice Ewing.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1975.0007
The ice data is open to many interpretations and objections. Global climate study in the scientific, data driven sense, only started in the 1970s with the firts reasonably gobal measurements via satellite. We need a thousand years of this data before we can say anything.
This paper assumes a central tennet of the Warmistas, that the Little Ice Age was regional, not global.
yeah but if we pay more taxes the planet will heal itself !!!
especially when the government is a leftist one !!!