Weird Weather
When someone tells me, “Boy, the weather sure has been weird in recent years,” I am pretty sure of two things: one, they have bought into the global warming, climate change hoax, and two, they know absolutely nothing about history (I assume the latter for 99% of the people I meet anyway, especially if they were educated in America). Upon hearing the “weather is weird lately” comment, I immediately ask two questions, “Compared to what?” and “How do you know what the weather was like 200 years ago?” To the first question, they might mumble something like, “well, it’s weirder than it was a few years ago” and to the second question, they have no answer. Because they don’t know. Except in general, I don’t, either.
So, the weather is weirder than it was 5 years ago, but maybe not as weird as it was 205 years ago. Brilliant. Let’s build the world’s economy on that.
As an historian, I have frequently, in various writings, bemoaned the utter ignorance of history evident among nearly all Americans today. Since I am an historian, I tend to take a little broader view of what is happening in the world, and maybe know more about past events than just what I had for dinner last night. But that is about as far back as most people can go. If they try to go back beyond yesterday’s supper, they are, sadly, almost invariably wrong.
Lots of tornados in America so far this spring? Weird weather! Climate change! Global warming! Snow in the northern plains in April? Uhh...has to be climate change. Somehow. “It’s been a long winter,” I heard the nice lady on The Weather Channel say a few days ago. She probably will never be heard from again. You people in Minnesota keep sweeping that “global warming” off your sidewalks.
The problem is that thinking is an exercise which requires a little bit of training and labor, more than most folks want to accede to. People don’t think, and they don’t think because they have little knowledge to think about. You have to “know” something before you can “think” rationally about it, and Americans know virtually nothing about history. And that is especially true of climate history. And Al Gore has made millions off that ignorance while Joe Biden is destroying American energy independence via the same method.
So, back to the southern tornadoes for a minute. Yes, terrible. Can anybody tell me what the weather was like in northern Mississippi on March 20, 1701? How about the weather in central Utah on June 13, 1666? Mr. “Weird Weather Genius,” please tell me what the weather was like in Alma Ata, Russia, on October 3, 1312. Florida panhandle on April 15, 1512. Manhattan Island, from February 5 to March 13, 772-756 B.C. Don’t know? Then how do you know our current weather is “weird”? How many tornadoes did Mississippi have in 1412? 1639? 1845? You have no clue, have you. All you know is the “weather is weird” and “global warming/climate change is true” because CNN and Greta Thunberg tell you so.
“But the weather records show warming...” Yes, that is true—over the last few decades. How far do accurate, instrument-measured weather records go back? A few decades is all. So how do we know about specific weather events, on specific days or even months, before those records started being kept? We don’t. Climate scientists can tell us weather trends over decades and centuries, but they cannot tell you how many tornadoes Mississippi had in any month, for thousands of years, prior to recent record keeping. It is folly to say our weather is “weird” because we don’t know what “normal” was like in the past. It may have been even weirder.
Please note the first picture below, and I must thank Marc Marano and “Global Depot” for this information. Christopher Monckton said, and the graph shows, that there has been no true “global warming” since 2013. There is a reason the switch was made from “global warming” to “climate change”—there ain’t been no warming recently. The second graph may be difficult to read, but the analysis says: warmer in the year 100 A.D. than in 2000 A.D. The 2000 year trend, except for the “Medieval Warming Period” from about 1000 to 1350, has been towards colder weather. Since 1900, there has been gradual warmth. So, I guess the weather has been weird since 1900. Over most of the last 2000 years, the earth has been cold.
Humans, of course, are causing the current global temperature rise (say Al and Greta). Can anyone tell me how humans caused the temperature rise 2000 years ago in the Roman period? What industries did medieval man invent that created the Medieval Warming Period? Peasant farming, I guess.
The second graph of the picture below shows the weather trends over the past 1,000 years. Again, notice the “Medieval Warming Period” followed by nearly 500 years of a so-called “Little Ice Age.” The earth has only begun to recover from that since the mid-1900, though predictions of another “ice age” were widespread in the 1950s-70s. Now the trend, apart from the past 10 years or so, is back to greater warmth. Except for the long winter this year. But, of course, the hotter temperatures, especially over the past 30 years, are the evidence “global warmists” use for their theory. And, of course, it is man’s fault. Just like it was, somehow, in the Roman and Medieval warming periods.
Thomas Jefferson, in 1799, wrote there was less snow then than 60 years earlier (note that there was a warming trend in the 1700s). Did mankind cause that, too?
A little history can go a long way to debunk hoaxes and myths. That is why Karl Marx so accurately said, “Keep people from their history and they are easily controlled.” People are being “controlled’ now by Leftist, “climate change” lies, and one of the major reasons for it is an abysmal ignorance of history. Marc Marano at “Global Depot,” and some others, are trying. But they are being swamped and overwhelmed. As long as the Left controls the global narrative and the American education system, our climb is decidedly uphill.