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Memories of the 28th Century

Existential Threat? No

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I have respected science and knowledge in general since my earliest memories. I strongly considered going into a scientific field professionally, but being outside the sciences is more appropriate to someone of my personality; I am better suited for generalism than for the narrow specialization of the sciences.

While it is possible that the human race will be destroyed by a change in the climate of the Earth, that is rather unlikely, and it would be impossible for humans to alter the climate enough to prevent that. But most of the people reading this have read 1984, and we are aware of governments telling big lies to make people act in ways that would be advantageous to the government.

When the evidence is held by a prejudiced party and altered when that party wishes, then we can’t have much confidence in the evidence or in conclusions derived from it. The whole matter of climate change, global warming, or the coming ice age is quite made up. And there is little evidence that it is actually happening. That the evidence is restricted and is in the possession of people who have prejudice in the mater makes it impossible to determine whether there has been much climate change. The records only go back to the late 19th century, so we can’t show a long term trend, and in the late 19th century, the Little Ice Age was ending, so we can expect that temperatures warmed between then and a century plus later.

The whole mater is also contrary to what I remember from a few decades ago, when in the 1960’s there was a hot stretch in July when temperatures got over 100 F, but that hasn’t happened for decades.

There are people who even go so far as to deny that the Little Ice Age happened, but there are old maps of Greenland that show the southern third being mostly free of ice and a fjord was almost across the island. And that maps was made several hundred years ago, and it reflects the Medieval Warm Period, when many of the Alps were ice free. Within the last few decades, there have been many news reports of things, such as tools and clothing, were found when mountain glaciers melted. What I m trying to establish is that the Little Ice Age took place, and that we are still seeing the effects of its end, not all of the glaciers that built up during that unusually cool period have melted.

Many people don't realize that the locations of some cities above the mouth of a river was a result of the drop in sea level during the Little Ice Age. For example, Pisa was founded on the coast, but the sea moved away when the sea level dropped; The delta also grew. The Delta of the Nile has had cities at different elevations through thousands of years, but there have been other factors. And there was Ephesus, which was the busiest port on the Mediterranean in the early Roman period. It wasn't a Roman city, but during the Dark Ages the sea level dropped with ice build up in the North, and the harbor silted up, so the city was abandoned. Water level was not constant, see link about Bari, and there were times when the lagoon of Venice had a road through it, see link. The sizes and locations of islands in the Aegean Sea has varied since they were first settled.

While sea level changes, humans have changed their patterns of settlement over the thousands of years, and more sea level rise would force people in many areas to move. But sea level can also fall, as it did during the last Ice Age, when it was about a thousand feet lower. Sea level change has not been an existential threat in the past, and contrary to Mr Biden's comment, it is not an existential threat now. But it might be a threat to the happiness of some people.

Sea level does vary, and people who live along the shore know that, and human activity has changed sea level in some places. For example, the delta and islands around the outflow of the Mississippi River have changed radically since the outflow was channelized, so that sediment does not build up on those islands anymore, but the islands are not disappearing because of climate change; they are disappearing because they are not replenished by silt.

It is possible that sea level will rise to a dangerous point, but it still isn't as high as it was a thousand years ago, during the Medieval Warm Period. Let's not panic until there is something to panic about.



Greenland Map before Little Ice Age glaciers
https://www.medievalistin the lates.net/2014/04/norse-cultural-reaction-climate-change-little-ice-age-societal-collapse-greenland/
evidence from the Adriatic coast of Italy
https://www.researchgate.net/publica...Southern_Italy
Venice
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92939-w

Comments

  1. tailor STATELY's Avatar
    And this in to muddy the waters: https://www.science.org/content/arti...global-warming
    Using an array of satellite observations, researchers have found that the climatic influence of global air pollution has dropped by up to 30% from 2000 levels. Although this is welcome news for public health—airborne fine particles, or aerosols, are believed to kill several million people per year—it is bad news for global warming. The cleaner air has effectively boosted the total warming from carbon dioxide emitted over the same time by anywhere from 15% to 50%, estimates Johannes Quaas, a climate scientist at Leipzig University and lead author of the study. And as air pollution continues to be curbed, he says, “There is a lot more of this to come.”
    Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
    tailor