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(FB050)
April 6, 2007

Climate Change in the Recent Past

  • Rapid climate change is not an unusual phenomenon in our planet’s history. Warmer periods have generally been better for people than cooler ones.
  • During the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), large groups of Norwegians settled in Iceland and Greenland.
  • The MWP allowed European farmers to cultivate crops much further north and at higher elevations than today.
  • Bountiful harvests freed up surplus manpower, which was subsequently tapped to build cathedrals and bridges.
  • When the Earth cooled at the end of the MWP, Europe was hit with a deluge of extreme weather, floods and storms that remade the landscape and killed thousands of people.
  • The Little Ice Age that ensued caused great havoc and, as with the MWP, played a key role in changing Europe’s history.
  • The histories of glacial activity and cloud formation provide further evidence of recent, rapid climate change.
  • When the consequences of rapid global warming are compared with those for rapid global cooling, it’s clear that mankind suffers more harm from the latter.

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    Author's Picture Dr. Fred Goldberg , a Swedish materials, energy and technology expert with worldwide careers in consulting, publishing and technical lecturing, has also pursued a secondary vocation in Arctic studies. He served as Secretary for an international climate change conference held in September, 2006, at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. Considered an authority on polar history and exploration, he travels every year to Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean midway between Norway and the North Pole. In 2002, to commemorate the centennial of the 1902 Swedish Nordenskjöld Antarctic expedition, he led a group that sailed there re-enact the event and revisit the sites originally explored by Nordenskjöld’s team. In January, 2007, he debated the topic “Climate Change: Human-Caused or Natural?” at the California Institute of Technology. The author of several books and papers on technology and the Arctic, Goldberg holds a Masters in Science and a Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from KTH. He worked in term positions for the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat in 2001 and the Swedish Foreign Ministry from 2002-2004.

    Feedback:

    • RE: Climate Change in the Recent Past — April 5, 2007
      I happen to agree with you guys on this however, I keep looking over my shoulder to see if I'm being followed by the Global Warming Greenhouse Gas Policia/Brownshirts wondering if I'm going to be apprehended and shot at sunrise. Once this stuff becomes religion as GW/CC stuff has - look out. Al Gore can get away with his $20,000 monthly energy bill because he recants (and says he's trying to solve his problem when really he doesn't give a s...) whereas those of us who feel like fighting... Well, you know what happened when the Catholic Church discovered heretics who refused to recant - especially when they had a bunch of firewood nearby... E-mail from Winnipeg

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