The climate change debate continues.

[spacesailor]

A house was blown off it's foundations in Queensland. 

spacesailor

[onetrack]

My father told me a story many years ago, about he got caught in open station country, in a huge thunderstorm, about 1931, on Doolgunna Station, N of Meekatharra.

Doolgunna Station was owned by G. J. ("Jimmy") Howard and my father worked for him during the Great Depression. Dad was doing boundary riding on a horse when the storm blew up.

 

He was fortunate that there was a rare stand of fairly big trees not far away, and he galloped for it as the hail came down. As he made it to the trees, he said the hail turned into jagged chunks of ice, some of them around 4" (102mm) long.

He said his horse went crazy and he struggled to keep hold of it. He said the hail stripped all the bark off the trees on the windward side, and shredded all the leaves on the stand of trees.

He said it was the most frightening weather event he had ever endured, and he'd never seen a hailstorm like it again.

 

Here in Perth, we endured a monstrous hailstorm in 2010 that damaged thousands of cars, with many of them being write-offs, it damaged hundreds of buildings, caravans, signs, awnings and patios, and caused multiple millions in storm damage.

I was at a mates workshop and saw the storm coming, and we struggled to get the roller door shut, and keep it shut, the hail was piling up outside the door, about 200mm high.

 

[pmccarthy]

European witch hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries targeted witches that were thought to be responsible for epidemics and crop failures related to declining temperatures of the Little Ice Age.

A belief that evil humans were negatively affecting the climate and weather patterns was the “consensus” opinion of that time. How eerily similar is that notion to the current oft-repeated mantra that Man’s actions are controlling the climate and leading to catastrophic consequences?

The first extensive European witch hunts coincided with plunging temperatures as the continent transitioned away from the beneficial warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (850 to 1250 AD). Increasing cold that began in the 13th century ushered in nearly five centuries of advancing mountain glaciers and prolonged periods of rainy or cool weather. This time of naturally driven climate change was accompanied by crop failure, hunger, rising prices, epidemics and mass depopulation.

Large systematic witch hunts began in the 1430s and were advanced later in the century by an Alsatian Dominican friar and papal Inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer. At Kramer’s urging, Pope Innocence VIII issued an encyclical enshrining the persecution and eradication of weather-changing witches through this papal edict. The worst of the Inquisition’s abuses and later systemic witch hunts were, in part, empowered by this decree.

This initial period of cooler temperatures and failing crops continued through the first couple of decades of the 16th century, when a slight warming was accompanied by improvements in harvests. Clearly, the pogrom against the weather-changing witches had been successful!

Unfortunately for the people of the Late Middle Ages, the 40 years or so of slight warming gave ground to a more severe bout of cooling.

The summer of 1560 brought a return of coldness and wetness that led to severe decline in harvest, crop failure and increases in infant mortality and epidemics. Bear in mind that this was an agrarian subsistence culture, nearly totally dependent on the yearly harvest to survive. One bad harvest could be tolerated, but back-to-back failures would cause horrific consequences and, indeed, they did.

Of course, the people’s misfortunes were attributed to weather-changing witches who had triggered the death-dealing weather, most often in the form of cold, rain, frost and devastating hailstorms. Horrific atrocities were alleged of the witches, including Franconian witches who “confessed” to flying through the air to spread an ointment made of children’s fat in order to cause a killing frost.

Across the continent of Europe, from the 15th to the 17th centuries there were likely many tens of thousands of supposed witches burned at the stake, many of these old women living without husbands on the margins of society.

The worst of the witch hunts occurred during the bitter cold from 1560 to about 1680. The frenzy of killing culminated in the killing of 63 witches in the German territory of Wiesensteig in the year 1563 alone. Across Europe, though, the numbers of witches continued to increase and peaked at more than 500 per year in the mid-1600s. Most were burned at the stake; others were hung.

 

The end of the witch hunts and killings tie closely to the beginning of our current warming trend at the close of the 17th century. That warming trend started more than 300 years ago and continues in fits and starts to this day.

 

Source: A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity, by Gregory Wrightstone, executive director, CO2 Coalition.

References:

Pfister (2007) Witch Hunts: Strategies of European Societies in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

Behringer (1999) Climatic change and witch-hunting: the impact of the Little Ice Age on mentalities.

[nomadpete]

2 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

the current oft-repeated mantra that Man’s actions are controlling the climate and leading to catastrophic consequences

Well that is a statement that I haven't heard, except from conspiracy theorists who also believe contrails and microchips are controlling the weather.

 

I have heard (and believe) that human activity is CONTRIBUTING to a changing climate, with the risk of accelerating changes to the point of spoiling all our fun.

 

 

Further, I  cannot see any logical connection between witch hunts of the dark ages (based purely on religios zealotry, uninformed hysteria and paranoia), and documented shifts in climatic activity.

 

 

 

Edited 2 hours ago by nomadpete

[facthunter]

The Greenhouse effect is well known and the change of CO2 Level is also Known. Ocean acidity is well documented also as are Rising sea temps and retreating Glaciers. Insurance companies KNOW. Oil Companies Internal  Memos PROVE they also KNOW. You cannot combust as much fossil fuel as we have done without CHANGING Climate. The" Debate". (why use a combative term) Why not have a search for the truth of the Matter? The evidence is more and more obvious and known by anyone who keeps records or cares to search. I wish it  WAS a CON. but it's unfortunately NOT.   Nev

[spacesailor]

The US of A is going going explode another nuclear device!.

How many cubic metres of air will it consume. 

wIll it lower the protective atmosphere dome ! .

will we get more solar radiation,  that may ' scorch ' our Earth , ( not Trump's ) .

spacesailor

[old man emu]

What annoys me about the clamour being raised is that Australians are being accused of major contribution to the problem. Sure, we provide the coal and natrual gas, but it is to the Northern Hemisphere which has a human population maybe six times greater than the Southern Hemisphere and who use so much energy heating and cooling their local environments (houses and workplaces).

 

Sure, Australians add CO2 to the atmosphere, but we also capture a lot in the form of agricultural produce. Add to that, we still have thousands of square hectares of non-agricultural plant material that is cycling CO2 as it has done for millions of years. I don't like being called an environmental rapists when relative to those in the Northern Hemisphere, I'm and environmental voyeur.

[Marty_d]

This is the most misnamed thread ever.

The reason is, it's not a debate.

The science is settled. Only a few misguided/supported by the fossil fuel industry clowns still try to deny it, and they have about as much credibility as cult leaders who "calculate" that the world is ending in 2000 / 2012 whenever.

Everyone's allowed their own opinion but don't confuse it with fact. The magical thinking that climate change isn't real is like the "medical" practice of blood-letting - it has no basis in reality and is a harm-causing alternative to proper treatment of the problem.

[old man emu]

46 minutes ago, Marty_d said:

This is the most misnamed thread ever.

What the thread's title is, is an example of what Humpty Dumpty said,

The individual words have their own unique meaning, but taken together, they create something with another meaning. Maybe you could think if some long German words which are combination of individual wods to make a word with a different meaning, for example: Haus + Tür + Schlüssel = Haustürschlüssel (house + door + key = front door key, literally house door key).

 

So, "climate change debate" means a discourse in which Everyone's allowed their own opinion. It is another matter whether or not that opinion can be substantiated by fact.