Global Climate Change -- Then and Now

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In the thirteenth century, there was a major global climate change, known as the little ice age. Prior to that century, Greenland was actually green, not ice-covered as it became, and England was a temperate, grape-growing, wine-drinking country. All that changed, with the coldest weather anyone had ever seen. The weather got as cold as 500ft higher in elevation. No more grape-growing in England meant no more estate-bottled vino, beer would become the only viable alcoholic beverage due to the colder climate.

Icebergs started showing up much further south than they had ever been seen before; one might philosophically say that the Titanic was really sunk by the thirteenth century, 13, the unlucky number.

Bruegel painted ice-skaters; it was a new phenomenon. The fourteenth century suffered several famines due to bad weather causing crop failures; the same factor in the 18th century would help trigger the first French revolution.

The cold would help trigger another revolution, the Industrial Revolution. Timber consumption had risen sharply in Britain for keeping warm; but by King Henry's era, the forests became reserved to the Royal Navy, and coal became the fuel of choice.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Newcomen was partner in a mine, with a vein under the sea floor (England is an island built on coal); with water seeping in, failure to remove same would result in loss of the mine, so Newcomen made a steam-pump, the first steam engine, to deal with the water.

By the end of the century, Watt's improved engine was providing power for industry; no longer was power limited to a water-wheel. This became the first driving engine for the revolution, then came petroleum, then nuclear. All this massive increase in the use of thermal energy, triggered by global climate change -- and now, perversely, all this increased use of thermal energy is helping the current climate change in the other direction..

This increase probably helps to accelerate the overall rate of warming, with some climatologists (only two, IIRC, who have dared speak out against the political tide) saying that we are finally coming out of the little ice age! It seems highly probable, given past history of the planet, and ice-core readings of global changes over vast periods of the earth's history, that the current changes and rate of change are a result of both natural and man-made causes, but no one can stop it.

Slow it down? maybe, I guess we'll see -- but; catch-22, the politicians have their hands all over the pie, and look at the size of the money-changing scam that's being worked on the gullible public under the banner of the climate change.

In France, bad weather during the eighteenth century caused a bread shortage, which resulted in the peasants engaging in the traditional method of getting the government to solve problems they couldn't handle for themselves, they grabbed their farm implements, had a demonstration and made noise until the King asked "What's the problem?" In the past, this had usually happened whenever the roads fell into disrepair; "Fix the roads, and we'll be able to get our goods to market and pay your #@$%X taxes!"

Those of the French Enlightenment "Liberals" of what would become known as the Far Left could hardly have turned a demonstration over demanding the roads get fixed into a revolution, but one over a shortage of bread was easy to exploit, and gave the world the first de-facto communist revolutionary government.

The French revolution gave us the concept of the "Liberal Left and Conservative Right," out of the first National Assembly where the "Liberals" grouped themselves on the left side of the Manege, the Royal Equestrian hall which had bleachers built to house the 1200 delegates. The new government moved progressively to the radical left These first radical lefties, of course, set all the examples for all the modern extremist despots to come, from Robespierre to Napoleon, to Hitler to Stalin to Mao Tse Tung, all thanks to global climate change!

Nasty weather, of course, gave a cruel fate to the poor European conscripts of Napoleon's invasion of Russia; he went in with 600,000 and returned with 18,000; half of all his war casualties were by starvation and disease, and a huge proportion in the Russian campaign by freezing to death. The unfortunate German soldiers of WWII would repeat this unfortunate kind of experience that had been inflicted on their conscript ancestors in Napoleon's army.

The Germans, of course, wanted to get back at the French for both the Napoleonic wars and the Franco-Prussian war, hence two European world-wars, which may be said to have been enabled by the social and political changes that came out of global climate change of the 13th century.

It was not a very good century.

FWIW,

John

I'm not sure what it implies but to group Hitler with the political left is very strange indeed. His sponsors were the major German industrialists.

Are you really saying that both world wars started because of a Napoleonic grudge? O.o In WW1 Germany just happened to be one of the more powerful nations of a chain-reaction which started because of the Baltic assassination. And in WW2 france joined Britain in attacking Germany after Poland. And if Germany had any grudge against France in WW2, it would've been because of the Treaty of Versailles

Well there's 5 minutes that I'll never get back. What a load of nonsense.

You kinda went off the rails into some muddy terran here.

Just one thing: There were two French Revolutions. I think you have them confused.

The first french Revolution of 1789 ( the bastille and the guillotines et al) predated Karl Marx by almost a centurey and had nothing to do with Communism. So I dont know why you call that revolution "communist".

The second French Revolution was in the wake of France's defeat in the Franco Prussian War of 1870 ( after Karl Marx wrote his stuff in the eighteen fifties).
That time the revolutionaries were influenced by Marx to set up the "Paris Commune"- which was crushed-but it was indeed the first Revolution in the name of Karl Marx and Communism.

It inspired the twentieth century communist like Lenin and Mao to stage successful revolutions in the name of communism.

But what any of that has to do with climate change I dont know.

Actually, WWI could more plausibly be blamed on Britain's obsession with remaining the world's premier naval power - the newly-united Germany was building a pretty impressive fleet.

Responsibility for WWII can be laid squarely on the French, who insisted on such punitive reparations in the Treaty of Versailles that they bankrupted the Kaiser's government, which gave Hitler the political opportunity to first be elected Chancellor, then get all political power transferred to the Chancellor's office.

The Little Ice Age would appear to have been caused in part by storm damage to the Florida peninsula, which led to changes in the flow of the Gulf Stream until silt buildup could restore the normal outline of that part of North America.

Current climate change is occurring at a rate much faster than any previous global climate shift, leaving various species no time to adjust to climatic shifts. The procedures recommended to attempt to slow this process are also those which would lead to the United States achieving the much-praised state of "energy independence"; I've never understood why people who call themselves "conservative" could possibly object to this goal. I begin to think it's a purely partisan thing - if one of the major figures associated with a given topic is a Democrat, it's the bounden duty of every Republican to stand foursquare against the topic, even at the cost of their own nation (see also the new START treaty).

None of the above topics are in any way associated, except perhaps in the minds of people like David Icke (who doubtless blames the whole thing on the Reptilians...).

My reference to the first French revolutionaries as the "first communists" has nothing to do with conventional, historic labels; it's descriptive of what went on during the terror, which parallels and sets the example for the behavior of all the later despots. Think of it as metaphor.

Hitler was by definition left-wing; he was a radical National Socialist, and a socialist organizer during the trench warfare of ww1. The source of the idea that Hitler was right wing was a statement by Stalin, and Hitler was only about one foot to the right of Stalin; he was well to the extreme left of middle American politics. It was American Industrialists as well as German who were sympathetic to Hitler, along with the international banks, who do not favor laissez faire capitalism, but any strong centrist, highly controlled economy government. Henry Ford was well known to sympathize with Hitler.

(I don't favor strict laissez-faire myself)

It was a New York bank that financed Lenin and the Russian Revolution. A grateful Communist government allowed them to set up the "Soviet" bank, which is part of one, big happy family with our own Federal Reserve, and like banking institutions around the world today.

In war there is profit, and the banks have never come out on the losing side.

As to the causality of WW1, the communists examined all the European treaties to find the keystone, which was to assassinate the archduke Ferdinand, then blame it on Serbia (was it Serbia?), which all the interlocking treaties brought everyone else in Europe into the war. The Germans still did have a long-term hatred of the French, dating back to the 19th century wars, and that was what I was talking about, not the historic direct causality of the wars themselves.

With all Europe occupied by WWI, the communists could get on with their bank-financed revolution essentially un-disturbed.

Some of the information comes from The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Path To Total War. Some comes from journalist James Burke's Connections and The Day The Universe Changed series that was shown decades ago on PBS. Some comes from Sunrise of the Virginia Military Institute as a School of Arms -- Spawn of the Cincinatti, 1958 by Jennings C. Wise, Class of 1902, Professor-Commandant 1912 - 1915.

As to "Not true" with regard to the little ice age, which part? If Greenland was always covered with ice, how did it get it's name? I can't promise I'm correct about Greenland, but I wouldn't rely on wikipedia as a reliable source on politically charged major issues. Definitely there was a severe drop in the temperature of the Northern hemisphere. All history was affected by what happened, and severe weather ever since has definitely played major roles in European famines ever since, and the overall effects of the climate change did have their ripple down effects that helped produce the social and political changes that helped shape world political events.

I'm no different, generally speaking, than the rest of us here, we can neither communicate what we mean clearly all the time, nor understand each other any better, sometimes, than we do NT's; and no, my information sources are not infallible.

And no, I do not get my info from Glen Beck, can't afford the premium cable package.

regards, St. Johnpipe the fallible (unlike the pope...)

The French Revolution was triggered by a bad wheat harvest and a bread shortage in France in 1793. The women of Paris went on a rampage looting bakeries which morphed into a general riot and the storming of the Bastaille. The rest is history.

ruveyn

Johnpipe, as a history major I must inform you that you are full of crap.

Johnpipe, try actually reading for yourself what happened when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated. It was a gigantic clusterfrak that only succeeded because after the initial disastrous failure, one of the conspirators stopped in for a sandwich at a shop that just happened to lie between the parade route and the hospital; Ferdinand insisted on going to visit the people who had been injured in the initial attack; and Ferdinand was so vain that he had to be sewn into his parade outfit, rather than wear a looser one that would have admitted to his being out of shape. When he was finally shot, it took too long for the doctors to cut his clothes off.

If history worked as neatly as you seem to think, with all these interlocking conspiracies, you'd never learn about them in the first place, of course; the very fact that you can speculate about them in such a public forum is itself evidence that the conspiracies do not in fact exist.

Perhaps you young whipper-snappers can enlighten me, since I grew up in a Southern, Liberal-Democratic Racist Left family (I was born while Hitler and Stalin were still alive and kicking; looks like some of you were too). Up until WWII, Hitler was considered by the American Liberal Progressive left to be a fellow Liberal-left Progressive. The last time I checked, "Liberals" were left-wingers.

Some of those "liberals" in my day didn't really start thinking of Hitler as a right-winger prior to the Johnson era. When Hitler declared war on the U.S., that's when many of the American "Liberal Progressive left" began dis-owning Him.

I can remember the Liberal-Progressive eugenics laws that were still on the books in my home state of Virginia, when an out of wedlock baby would get a minor sterilized, and her baby put up for adoption. There were other, nastier laws still on the books too, for the sterilization of "inferior people", such as the hill-folk in Virginia who had their children taken away to the state hospital during the 1930's for sterilization; about whom it was said by the County Sheriff "They're obviously inferior, just poor white trash."

It was the Lily-White American Liberal racist left that worked up this racial-purity and hygiene imagination and laws, right here in America during the first half of the twentieth century (in co-operation with their British Liberal Eugenics sympathizers), and sold the imagination to Hitler, because they saw him as one of their very own. Indeed, they bragged during the 1930's "The German's are beating us at our own game!"

This has been well researched for a book on the subject that came out during the past few years, with the co-operation of Planned Parenthood (swept all the skeletons out of their closet and put them on public view) and The Rockefeller foundation (who had financed much of the pseudo-science eugenics "research"). IBM did not cooperate with the book research (they had provided Hitler with the data processing equipment for his eugenics program and they didn't want to aid any publicity of negative associations with their past).

And, of course, Hitler was anti-communist; he was in a contest with Stalin to see who would become "King of the Mountain." Simply being anti-communist doesn't make one a right winger (except in the eyes of a communist, naturally). Burke also described Hitler as a Socialist, when he was talking about the eugenics movement, which was of interest early on to folk like Himmler, too (this was either in the Connections series or Day The Universe Changed.).

So, the view that Hitler was a right-winger has seemed to me to be comparatively recent, considering my upbringing; AFAIK that did not become the prevailing view until after WWII (I could be wrong about that).

But you can now see where I've gotten the perspective of Hitler as a leftie.

Regards, Nutty Old Fart Johnpipe

Nuts to you too, BuBuu