Catastrophe

Written by David Keys

It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world”¢’‚¬?essentially the modern world as we know it today”¢’‚¬?began to emerge.

I’ve always wondered why this period isn’t studied more from a climate point of view. Was the cooling local, or more widespread? Can precipitation proxies point to any draughts? How much did the NAO play in this cooling? Just a thought.

I think that it is a reasonable assumption that all 4 series have grafted instrumental and reconstruction information. Similar results apply to all 15 archived series for Rutherford et al. 2005

Yes, it indeed is. To be exact it is HadCRUT grid cell temperatures for NH up to 70N infilled with RegEM (see Rutherford, section 2a). They infilled the instrumental grid cells with RegEM BEFORE using any proxy data. These infilled intrumental temperatures are used for verification, this is a problem noticed by B&C (“verification bias”).

I believe that the Northern European frontier of the Roman Empire was the River Rhine. For many years the Romans had a large fleet of ships on the Rhine to prevent undesirables from crossing it into the Imperial territory.

Late in the Empire the story goes that one year, 31st December 406, there was particularly severe winter, and the Rhine froze solid, a very unusual event. The various tribes took the opportunity to cross the Rhine en masse in wheeled vehicles. Thus the end of Roman control over that section of their Empire.

See also “What do we know about the Dark Ages Cold Period as it was experienced in Europe?”
Link

Interesting stuff.

But what I noticed more from the data was that there is another extreme cooling period that we seem to have forgotten about, “The Dark Ages.”

It is generally recognized that civilization fell apart in the years 350 AD to about 650-850 AD and one of the biggest reasons was the extreme cooling that Europe
(at least) experienced.

The climate models do not explain the climate variation of the past 2,000 years. They do not explain the climate variation of the last 7,000 years. They do not explain the climate variation of the past 3.0 million years of ice ages and interglacials.

Obviously, they do NOT work. Simple greenhouse gas accumulations do not explain the climate adequately, except for perhaps the past 150 years. Now that used to be called a “spurious explanation”, an explanation that just by chance works but is either:

- illogical to start with (not really in the case of greenhouse gases since there is some theory and logic to it); or,

- entirely accidental (since global warming is certainly not proven yet we should accept this alternative as possible): or,

- by chance the variable(s) only work some of the time and do not explain all of the variation which needs to be explained (which is by far the most likely alternative.)

This is why Mann’s “hockey stick” was so important to the AGW crowd. They needed to remove the spurious relationship that exists for the past 150 years and extend it as far back in time as possible.

They need to build (much) better models that can explain the climate variation of the past 400,000 years and especially the last 11,000 years before we can say they have adequately proved anything.

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 – 1832)

I don’t think it would make you many friends to show on line all requests, but a page showing those long overdue a reply would make a good role of shame and might well throw light on the way some of the social networks work.

Mark