These books comport with the comments in Dimitar Sasselov's book The Life of Super-Earths: How the Hunt for Alien Worlds and Artificial Cells Will Revolutionize Life on Our Planet, wherein he observes that climate changes run on a 40,000 year cycle. For those who think there is no history Mr. Gore's superficial claims make sense. In terms of history the alarmists are at best misguided.
[From article]
In "The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century," William Rosen explains how Europe's "most widespread and destructive famine" was the result of "an almost incomprehensibly complicated mixture of climate, commerce, and conflict, four centuries in gestation." Early in that century, 10 percent of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died, partly because of the effect of climate change on "the incredible amalgam of molecules that comprises a few inches of soil that produces the world's food."
[. . .]
came the severe winters of 1309-1312, when polar bears could walk from Greenland to Iceland on pack ice. In 1315 there was rain for perhaps 155 consecutive days, washing away topsoil. Upwards of half the arable land in much of Europe was gone; cannibalism arrived as parents ate children. Corpses hanging from gallows were devoured.
[. . .]
In "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century," Geoffrey Parker, a history professor at Ohio State University, explains how a "fatal synergy" between climatological and political factors produced turmoil from Europe to China.
[. . .]
The flight from abandoned farms to cities produced the "urban graveyard effect," crises of disease, nutrition, water, sanitation, housing, fire, crime, abortion, infanticide, marriages forgone and suicide. Given the ubiquity of desperation, it is not surprising that more wars took place during the 17th-century crisis "than in any other era before the Second World War."
[. . .]
Neither book, however, supports those who believe human behavior is the sovereign or even primary disrupter of climate normality, whatever that might be. With the hands that today's climate Cassandras are not using to pat themselves on the back for their virtuous empiricism, they should pick up such books
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will010815.php3
Climate change's instructive past
By George Will
Published Jan. 8, 2015
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