Farley Mowat, the noted Canadian leftist and Greenpeace activist, and whose house my wife used to walk by regularly as a kid in Port Hope, ON., wrote in his book West Viking (written while we were still in the global cooling scare) that there were probably at least dwarf forests growing in Greenland when the Vikings arrived in 985 AD and…
Farley Mowat, the noted Canadian leftist and Greenpeace activist, and whose house my wife used to walk by regularly as a kid in Port Hope, ON., wrote in his book West Viking (written while we were still in the global cooling scare) that there were probably at least dwarf forests growing in Greenland when the Vikings arrived in 985 AD and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History reports “… Erik the Red discovered two areas of southwest Greenland which were suitable for farming, with grasslands and small stands of alder and birch.” You will note that it is too cold today for any type of forests to grow in Greenland, and there is zero ability to farm, unless modern technologies are utilized – and even then, crop selection is very minimal. Mowat also reported the Arctic pack ice was much less in that Viking discovery era than today.
Dr. Fred Singer writes that when the Vikings first settled Greenland, they grew vegetables, and it was warm enough to allow the population to grow to 3,000 people and by 1100 AD the place was thriving enough that they had their own bishop and twelve churches. Nature reported in a 2010 article that clamshell studies also confirm Norse records. Meanwhile, the Archeological Survey of Canada has also noted around “A.D. 1000, a warmer climate resulted in the tree line advancing 100 kilometres north of its present position.” The results of this? Especially in northern Europe, “the period between 1150 and 1300 was truly a flowering period, for population reached unprecedented levels that were never to be seen again until the late 18thcentury in many countries; the English population experienced a staggering threefold increase in its population during the last century since the Domesday Survey in 1086”. This climate optimum (also called a climate anomaly) coincided with a period of increased solar activity (see below). Farming of various crops extended hundreds of kilometers farther north than it is possible today.
Yet, in the 1100s, Greenland cooled dramatically, briefly stabilized, and then dropped even further in the 1200s to the early 1400s. Sirocko (2010) places the earlier event at the beginning of the 1310’s, while a more commonly accepted time frame for the first cold phase is the coinciding solar minimum called Wolf minimum from 1280-1350. There were repeated cold snaps and advancing glaciers and sea ice from that time onward, but it was not until the early 1600’s that the most devastating effects of the Little Ice Age began to set in, which is the more commonly used date for its beginning. As Dale Mackenzie Brown writes “An ice core drilled from the island's (Greenland’s) massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.” But the recent recovery in temperatures is only putting us back to the average temps from an earlier age!
Indeed, when I was visiting Iceland at Skaftafell Nat'l Park a few years ago, Icelandic historians know from extant deeds – and have put in the displays at the park - that somewhere around FORTY old Viking era farms are currently buried under the Vatnajokull glacier system (the largest in the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica). In other words, it was simply much warmer in the Icelandic settlement era than it is today. We are routinely informed of the melting of Greenland glaciers today at lower altitudes, but demonstrably there are at bare minimum low altitude glaciers in roughly the same geographic area that had seen more melting and more pronounced glacial recession one thousand years ago than we see today. Al Gore may want to visit Skaftafell National Park in Iceland on one of his many jet-setting, carbon burning trips to check the facts himself. More evidence: There are records of grape growing occurring in places in northern Europe back during this optimum where they can't grow today. Gregory McNamee, in the Weather Guide Calendar (Accord Publishing, 2002) noted that wine connoisseurs might have gone to England for fine vintages (can’t grow fine vintage grapes there today!), that heat loving trees like beeches carpeted Europe far into Scandinavia, and Viking ships crossed iceberg free oceans to ice free harbors in Iceland…”. Art Horn writes that “In the winter of 1249 it was so warm in England that people did not need winter clothes. They walked about in summer dress. It was so warm people thought the seasons had changed. There was no frost in England the entire winter. Can you imagine what NOAA would say if that happened next year? “
Even the lead global warmer at “AGW Central” East Anglia Univ., in the UK, fraud Phil Jones, before he was outed during the ClimateGate revelations, was forced to admit to the BBC that the MWP (Medieval Warm Period) was real.
Farley Mowat, the noted Canadian leftist and Greenpeace activist, and whose house my wife used to walk by regularly as a kid in Port Hope, ON., wrote in his book West Viking (written while we were still in the global cooling scare) that there were probably at least dwarf forests growing in Greenland when the Vikings arrived in 985 AD and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History reports “… Erik the Red discovered two areas of southwest Greenland which were suitable for farming, with grasslands and small stands of alder and birch.” You will note that it is too cold today for any type of forests to grow in Greenland, and there is zero ability to farm, unless modern technologies are utilized – and even then, crop selection is very minimal. Mowat also reported the Arctic pack ice was much less in that Viking discovery era than today.
Dr. Fred Singer writes that when the Vikings first settled Greenland, they grew vegetables, and it was warm enough to allow the population to grow to 3,000 people and by 1100 AD the place was thriving enough that they had their own bishop and twelve churches. Nature reported in a 2010 article that clamshell studies also confirm Norse records. Meanwhile, the Archeological Survey of Canada has also noted around “A.D. 1000, a warmer climate resulted in the tree line advancing 100 kilometres north of its present position.” The results of this? Especially in northern Europe, “the period between 1150 and 1300 was truly a flowering period, for population reached unprecedented levels that were never to be seen again until the late 18thcentury in many countries; the English population experienced a staggering threefold increase in its population during the last century since the Domesday Survey in 1086”. This climate optimum (also called a climate anomaly) coincided with a period of increased solar activity (see below). Farming of various crops extended hundreds of kilometers farther north than it is possible today.
Yet, in the 1100s, Greenland cooled dramatically, briefly stabilized, and then dropped even further in the 1200s to the early 1400s. Sirocko (2010) places the earlier event at the beginning of the 1310’s, while a more commonly accepted time frame for the first cold phase is the coinciding solar minimum called Wolf minimum from 1280-1350. There were repeated cold snaps and advancing glaciers and sea ice from that time onward, but it was not until the early 1600’s that the most devastating effects of the Little Ice Age began to set in, which is the more commonly used date for its beginning. As Dale Mackenzie Brown writes “An ice core drilled from the island's (Greenland’s) massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.” But the recent recovery in temperatures is only putting us back to the average temps from an earlier age!
Indeed, when I was visiting Iceland at Skaftafell Nat'l Park a few years ago, Icelandic historians know from extant deeds – and have put in the displays at the park - that somewhere around FORTY old Viking era farms are currently buried under the Vatnajokull glacier system (the largest in the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica). In other words, it was simply much warmer in the Icelandic settlement era than it is today. We are routinely informed of the melting of Greenland glaciers today at lower altitudes, but demonstrably there are at bare minimum low altitude glaciers in roughly the same geographic area that had seen more melting and more pronounced glacial recession one thousand years ago than we see today. Al Gore may want to visit Skaftafell National Park in Iceland on one of his many jet-setting, carbon burning trips to check the facts himself. More evidence: There are records of grape growing occurring in places in northern Europe back during this optimum where they can't grow today. Gregory McNamee, in the Weather Guide Calendar (Accord Publishing, 2002) noted that wine connoisseurs might have gone to England for fine vintages (can’t grow fine vintage grapes there today!), that heat loving trees like beeches carpeted Europe far into Scandinavia, and Viking ships crossed iceberg free oceans to ice free harbors in Iceland…”. Art Horn writes that “In the winter of 1249 it was so warm in England that people did not need winter clothes. They walked about in summer dress. It was so warm people thought the seasons had changed. There was no frost in England the entire winter. Can you imagine what NOAA would say if that happened next year? “
Even the lead global warmer at “AGW Central” East Anglia Univ., in the UK, fraud Phil Jones, before he was outed during the ClimateGate revelations, was forced to admit to the BBC that the MWP (Medieval Warm Period) was real.