How wide is natural climate variability?

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Aug 22

Twelve thousand years ago, the world began to emerge from a prolonged ice age.  The ocean levels were four hundred feet below what they are today.

When Stonehenge was built, some six thousand years ago, the Arctic Ocean was ice-free, and trees grew to the edge of the ocean in Siberia and Northern Canada.  Now, the Arctic Ocean has an ice cap year round, and the tree line lies some sixty miles south of the shoreline.

A thousand years ago, during the medieval warm period, the Vikings discovered Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador, and vineyards like those in France today grew in Norfolk, England.  Now, they don’t.  During the Little Ice Age, the Thames froze over in winter, and now it doesn’t.

Within the last 1,500 years both the Rhine and the Seine ran dry from drought.

No one can claim that the burning of fossil fuels had anything to do with these wide changes in climatic conditions, and nothing we are seeing now in the world hasn’t happened before.

It is impossible not to conclude that whenever some academic pygmy, or worse, a journalist, says that this or that weather related phenomenon is due to man-caused climate change, they’re talking through their hats.  They exhibit no knowledge of how wide natural climate variability is.  The journalist is simply trying to look avant-garde, but the academic is doing much worse: pretending to expertise they manifestly don’t have or engaging in the climate fraud for some personal gain.  (fame, a Ph.D., the next research grant, or simply neo-Marxist political satisfaction, fear of ostracism.)

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