“We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some disaster with each newspaper we read.”
—Abraham Lincoln [i]
Part 1 of this timeline on climatism started with the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything being energy and ended with the Özi’s last lunch in 3258 BC.
1400-1100 BC
The Minoan Warm Period was during the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BC). Humanity advanced by inventing the wheel, bronze smelting, and winemaking. Great cities emerged. Measurements from ice, tree lines, and sediment cores indicate that temperatures were much higher than today, an inconvenient truth for some.
1100-300 BC
The Greek Dark Ages was a widespread collapse of Bronze Age civilisation. Global cooling lowered agricultural productivity, resulting in undernourishment, famine, and population loss, especially in densely populated areas.
300 BC
Theophrastus (c371-287), a student of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, documented that human activity can affect climate. He observed that the drainage of marshes cools an area around Thessaly and that the clearing of forests near Philippi warms the climate. [1]
“If there were a button I could press. I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die.”
—Pentti Linkola (1932-2020), Finnish fisherman and deep ecologist[2]
300 BC-400 AD
The Roman Warm Period, the Iron Age, was, based on multiple lines of evidence from sediments, ice cores and pollen from around the world, much hotter than today, another inconvenient truth for eco-warriors[3], deep ecologists[4] and ecoteurs[5]. Hannibal couldn’t move elephants over the Alps in today’s climate. Obelix couldn’t remain topless all year round in France today, either. It’s too cold.
450-900 AD
The Vandal Minimum was a period of global cooling that coincided with the Vandal invasion and the fall of Rome. The so-called Dark Ages and the Plague of Justinian fell into this global cooling period.
950-1250
The Medieval Warm Period was a period of warmth in the North Atlantic region. The warming coincides with an intellectual renaissance, the establishment of universities, and rising prosperity. Glaciers retreat globally.
The agricultural border for citrus fruits in China was never as far north as in the 13th century. The tree line in Europe reached a level that was not quite as high as during the Minoan Warm Period but was certainly higher than during the 20th century.[6]
The Vikings settled in Island and then discovered Greenland, which they called “the green land” because, well, it was green then. The Vikings settled in Greenland around the late 10th century, with the most significant colonization occurring in the early 11th century. The climate in Greenland was milder than today, allowing for more extensive agriculture and settlement. The Vikings primarily grew crops such as barley, oats, and vegetables like turnips and carrots in Greenland. They also raised livestock, including cattle, sheep, and goats. However, as the climate began to cool during the 14th century, the colonies in Greenland faced increasing challenges, and by the 15th century, they were gone.
One of the funny aspects of the Medieval Warm Period is that the win of arable land due to global warming was much larger than the loss of arable land due to a rise in sea levels. Warming is a positive from at least one perspective. It’s cooling that kills and destroys. Not all teenagers know this:
“The climate is like beer:
the warmer, the worse.”
—Chant of juvenile, school-ditching demonstrators in Brussels in January 2019
One less humorous aspect of the Medieval Warm Period was its disappearance from the IPCC assessment reports around 2001. But more on that in later parts of this timeline.
1300-1850
The Little Ice Age started with the Great Famine (1315-22) and the Black Death (1346-52). (One reason the Black Death was so bad is that Europe’s population was weakened by the Great Famine that preceded it.)
Global cooling, i.e., bitterly cold winters and cool, wet summers, led to crop failure, famine, and population decline. Norway had a three-year winter with no intervening summer, Greenland was abandoned, Spain dried up, fishery lines moved south, and wolves came out of the woods looking for food. In Cologne, it snowed in June, and the Thames froze regularly, allowing markets and sporting events on ice (picture below). Even parts of the Mediterranean Sea around Venice and Marseilles were occasionally frozen.
Glaciers started to expand to reach a recent peak towards the end of the 19th century. (One of the more comical aspects about naturally oscillating glaciers is the Swiss covering them up with large blankets in the recent past, as there is an emotional attachment to the large chunks of ice—they sort of look nice—and the glaciers are a tourist attraction there.) During parts of the Little Ice Age, large volcano eruptions intermittently added to the cooling of the atmosphere.
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
—Kenneth E.F. Watt (b. 1926), American ecologist in 1970 [16]
One characteristic of the Little Ice Age was higher climatic volatility, i.e., more clusters of extreme climatic events. Some of the extreme chilling periods that cause crop failure, hunger, famine, and misery can be mapped with large volcanic eruptions. Global cooling is worse than global warming, as mentioned. This is why it was so scary when scientists scared (young) people in the 1960s and 70s with the next ice age just around the corner. The current scare of global warming, or climate change, is not as scary from the humanist perspective.
More people die from too cold than from too warm
1540
The Great Drought, or the 1540 Drought, was one of the most severe and prolonged droughts on record in Europe. It affected much of Central and Western Europe, including the Alps and the British Isles. The summer of 1540 was particularly hot and dry, with very little rainfall, leading to crop failures, food shortages, and other economic and social impacts.
This is important to remember because droughts nowadays are often referred to as man-made, i.e., the result of anthropologic climate change.
1543
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the Prussian polymath, published On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, thus kick-starting the Scientific Revolution during the Renaissance period, which morphed into the Enlightenment period, the Age of Reason c100-200 years later. His work laid the foundation for the scientific method and our understanding of the Earth's place in the cosmos.
Excursion: dread risk and FUD for thought
Dread risk refers to the heightened fear or anxiety that people feel towards events that have a low probability of occurring but have potentially catastrophic consequences. This type of risk is characterized by its emotional intensity and the disproportionate reaction it elicits compared to more statistically probable but less dramatic risks. Dread risk is part of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), a propaganda tactic that also helps sell newspapers.
Gerd Gigerenzer (b. 1947), the German psychologist and author of Risk Savvy, defines dread risk as the fear of low-probability but high-impact events. He argues that people often overestimate the likelihood of such events due to their dramatic and memorable nature, amplified by media coverage and vivid imagery. This leads to irrational behaviour and decision-making, where individuals might take excessive precautions against unlikely dangers while neglecting more common, everyday risks.
Paul Slovic (b. 1938), the psychologist known for his work on risk perception, has contributed significantly to the understanding of how people perceive and respond to different types of risks. In the context of dread risks, Slovic's research has focused on how people tend to react more strongly to risks that are perceived as being more fearful or catastrophic, even if the actual probability of these events occurring is low.
Slovic suggests that dread risks are those that are not only potentially fatal but also uncontrollable, catastrophic, and potentially catastrophic to future generations. Slovic argues that our responses to these types of risks are often driven more by emotion than by a rational assessment of the probability of the event occurring.
“Appeal to emotion belongs to those who strive in the direction of fascism, while democratic propaganda must limit itself to reason and restraint. Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.”
—Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69), German philosopher and member oft he Frankfurt School [7]
One of Slovic's key insights is that people tend to be more willing to accept risks that they perceive as being under their control, even if those risks are objectively higher than dread risks.
A scare can be a real or an imaginary risk in which many people suddenly die. Examples are terrorist attacks, nuclear accidents, aeroplane crashes, food scares, pandemics, etc. You can scare people with mad cow disease but not with people dying from drinking scented lamp oil, despite the death toll between the two being identical. [8]
Fear is very natural. Evolution has "picked" fear to deal with stress. If one of your ancestors stepped out of the cave in the morning and on his left, there was a nice sunrise, and on the right, there was an audible noise in the grass, he had to deal with the noise in the grass first. If he didn't, he's not your ancestor, and you don’t exist.
Stress releases cortisol into the blood. It invades the hippocampus and interferes with its work. Stress causes most people to focus narrowly on the thing that they consider most important and it may be the wrong thing. Under extreme stress, the visual field narrows. This reaction is referred to as tunnel vision.
Under stress, emotion takes over from the thinking part of the brain, the neocortex, to affect an instinctive set of responses necessary for survival. This has been referred to as the “hostile takeover of consciousness by emotion.” [9]
Emotions are genetic survival mechanisms, but they do not always work for the benefit of the individual. They work across many trials to keep the species alive. The individual may live or die, but over a few million years, more mammals lived than died by letting emotion take over, and so emotion was selected as a stress response for survival.
“In order to survive in these wild times, you're going to make a total fool of yourself with incredible regularity. If you can't laugh about it, then you are doomed.”
—Tom Peters (b. 1942), American business writer [10]
Moods are contagious, and the emotional states involved with smiling, humour, and laughter are among the most contagious. Laughter does not take conscious thought. That’s why you cannot tickle yourself. The brain can predict the sensations and, therefore, reduces the response.
Laughter stimulates the left prefrontal cortex, an area in the brain that helps us feel good and be motivated. There is evidence that laughter can send chemical signals to actively inhibit the firing of nerves in parts of the brain, thereby dampening fear. Investors ordinarily do not share a laugh when their portfolios start the year with a 40% loss. Per the referenced research in Gonzales’ book, they should. Having a good laugh is a survival technique, at least according to business management book writer Tom Peters, who has been in the business of searching for excellence for a long while.
1548
A King’s Commission in England determined that maintaining forests as renewable resources rather than just depleting them would limit the iron industry. Two hundred years later, higher energy-density coal, and more particularly coke, allowed for much greater steel production, thereby sparking the Industrial Revolution.[11]
The problem of some forms of renewable energy being inefficient, i.e., having a low density, was already known in the Middle Ages.
1615
The Roman Inquisition found Galilei’s heliocentrism “foolish” which resulted in Galilei spending some time in “home office”. This is an early data point of a new scientific belief system about to replace an old one. Later, the moral vacuum created by the defeat of religion by science allowed for other ideals to fill the void, such as the worship of nature for example.
“Corona is the cure,
humans are the disease.”
—Fake Extinction Rebellion pamphlet in 2020 [12] [13] [14]
Today’s behaviour of the Extinction Rebellion movement makes the link between religion and a fear-based death cult on the one hand and environmentalism and the four horsemen of the environmental apocalypse (overpopulation, rising pollution, climate destruction, and natural resource exhaustion) on the other quite clear. The medieval costumes seen at protests make the situation look like someone is shooting a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s movie Eyes Wide Shut.
“[I]t is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society: it is belief.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish dramatist, critic, and political activist [15]
Shaw’s quote aged well.
To be continued…
[i] Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Bloomington, 29 May 1856.
[1] Timeline: How the world discovered global warming, reuters.com, 2 December 2011.
[2] Three days before he died in 2020, he said in an interview that he hoped the coronavirus would slow the destruction of the earth a bit.
[3] An eco-warrior is typically referred to as an environmental activist who feels legitimised to take matters into his own hands, including violence, civic disruption and disobedience, to promote environmental and, most often, socialist ideology. Greenpeace activists are famous eco-warriors.
[4] Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy which promotes the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, plus the restructuring of modern human societies in accordance with such ideas. (In ethics, biocentrism is a point of view that extends inherent value to all living things.)
[5] Ecotage promotes and legitimises sabotage carried out for ecological reasons.
[6] Wolfgang Behringer, Kulturgeschichte des Klimas: Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung (München: Beck C.H., 2007), Vom Optimum der Römerzeit zur Mittelalterlichen Warmzeit, Kindle.
[7] Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 976. Edits in the original.
[8] Example is from Gigerenzer, Gerd (2014) “Risk Savvy How to make good decisions,” New York: Viking, p. 235.
[9] Gonzales, Laurence (2003) “Deep Survival Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why,” New York: Norton & Company.
[10] Sound off: Tell us what you think,” by Tom Peters, Fast Company, 28 February 2001.
[11] Andrew Lees, “The Earth is Round – Challenging the Orthodoxy of the Day,” MacroStrategy Partnership, 21 May 2019 making reference to Vaclav Smil, Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
[12] Matt Ridley commented on the pamphlet stuck to a tree: "The eco-fascists are quite pleased." @mattwridley, 25 March 2020. Extinction Rebellion responded to the media by saying that the pamphlet was fake and the message was "in no way a representation" of its principles and values
[13] If the quote on the pamphlet is fake, this is what Roger Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, did say on public TV: “Teenagers are shitting themselves about what’s happening for the future, they’ve got another 50, 60, 70 years to live on this planet, by that time there could only be a billion people left. I mean that’s six billion people that have died from starvation or slaughtered in war.” (Roger Hallam, “Something drastic has to happen”, BBC HARDtalk, 17 August 2019.) This 25-minute interview is an eye-opener as to the degree of fear of the upcoming apocalypse by an intelligent, well-articulated grownup. It’s also a good example of how fearmongers misuse science. Hallam’s sense of certainty and lack of doubt in his beliefs make him appear like a religious fanatic.
[14] The quote would be consistent with the idea of the four horsemen of the environmental apocalypse (overpopulation, rising pollution, climate destruction, and natural resource exhaustion). But more on that in later parts.
[15] From the preface to Shaw’s 1912 playwright “Androcles and the Lion.”
[16] To an audience of teenagers at Smarthmore College, PA, on 19 April 1970. The first Earth Day was on 22 April 1970, when an estimated 20 million people nationwide attended the inaugural events at tens of thousands of sites, including elementary and secondary schools, universities, and community sites across the United States.