Climate Crisis Fun Facts!

An Inconvenient Introduction

Take a deep breath. It’s time for Climate Crisis Fun Fact Number One: There is no Climate Crisis.

The weather is not your fault. The climate (weather over time) is not your fault either. Yes, the climate is changing. It is changing because it has never not changed. But no, the pollutant CO2, anthropogenic or otherwise, is not driving this change. The only thing CO2 is driving is plant growth. The narrative you are being fed is false. The causes for climate change are natural. They are natural variabilities, cycles we do not yet fully understand.

How do we know this? We know this because of the historical records our ancestors have left us. We know this because of the physical evidence Nature has left us from the vast, pre-industrial past. We know this through astronomical observation. What we are experiencing has all happened before, only it was normally much worse than it is today. This is why we don’t need to worry about slowing down or stopping something we have been conditioned to fret about. These changes can’t be stopped, and we can’t save the planet because the planet doesn’t need saving. We only need to see how we can best adapt to these changes, something humankind has already been doing for countless generations.

But how could this be you ask? How could the rest of the world have reached a consensus that CO2 is an existential threat when it isn’t? Because consensus is a political, not a scientific term and those who benefit from this imaginary threat also control public opinion. Certain professions, institutions and industries benefit either directly or indirectly from the CO2 narrative and actively manipulate the public.

They do so by exploiting three well-known human weaknesses:

The first one is fear. Fear is easily planted in the minds of the uninformed. Unfortunately, most of us are highly uninformed. Worse, if no real danger is present, we will search for things to fear. Something inside the human brain is highly receptive to potential danger, apocalyptic warnings included. Climate hysteria satisfies this psychological predisposition.

Our second weakness is our need to conform. Being firmly rooted in strict social hierarchies, humans have a primal need to belong. This need is so great that we would rather defy our own eyes than be banned as social outcasts.

Weakness number three is our anthropocentrism. We innately feel that human beings are the center of the universe and can somehow control Nature. Neither are true, of course, and this line of thinking only leads to hubris, narcissism, megalomania, and harmful decision-making. We lack humility, in other words.

Humility is a good thing, however. And this book is an exercise in humility. It is a modest attempt to confront today’s presumptuous CO2 Climate Crisis consensus with uncommon common sense. It is a diverse collection of well-documented facts and unconventional observations that question today’s climate science status quo. It reveals how a lack of critical thinking, extreme bias, heavy-handed fear mongering, mass indoctrination methods and quasi-religious fervor have trapped us in a straitjacket of Orwellian groupthink.

Hopefully, it is also a reminder that only the individual can think. And that no one can force us to succumb to mass delusion if we choose not to. People who sell fear are the danger. Popular hysteria is the plague of our age, not CO2. It’s time to do something about it. May the skepticism be with you.

Historical Inconveniences

About 3500 years ago, during the Minoan warm period, the temperature was 4°C warmer than it is today.

The Vikings found a green land around 1100 A.D. they called Greenland. They also grew grapes on Newfoundland and Labrador, an area they referred to as Vinland, meaning vine or wine land.

The Little Ice Age (LIA) took place during the sun’s Maunder Minimum 1660-1715 and a cold relapse in 1790-1820. It was the closest Earth has been to glacial conditions for the past 12,000 years. It finally ended around 1840.

A large temperature increase of 0.6 degree Celsius (or about 1 degree Fahrenheit) took place between 1880 and 1940, well before human influences were important. The amount of fossil fuel burned at that time was very small compared to today.

One of the worst climate-induced human catastrophes in history took place around 1210 BC (the 2.8 ka BP Cold Event). This abrupt climate event or ACE brought about the Late Bronze Age Collapse through the combined effect of the climate change it caused and the invasions that followed.

Another abrupt climate event took place about 8,000 years ago. It ushered in a multi-millennial dry-wet transition in Scandinavia and a decrease in precipitation in the Middle East that lasted over 2,000 years. It is believed that this change in climate helped spread agriculture to the North.

There have been at least 78 major temperature swings in the last 4,500 years, including two since the 1970s.

1816 was a year of severe world-wide climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to drop by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F). This was most likely a result of the violent volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.

The Green Sahara entered a dryness crisis around six thousand years ago and became a desert in just 500 years when its ecosystem collapsed, and its human population was forced to flee.

Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier had already retreated by half its length before 1851. This was during much cooler times. Dynamics other than warming were clearly involved here.

The greatest temperature increase before the major rise in greenhouse gas concentration after WWII, the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s, was followed by a quarter-century decrease in temperature between 1940 and 1965.

For more than 6,100 years, or 60% of the current interglacial warm period (Holocene), the temperature was warmer than it is today.

Megadroughts occurred during the Medieval Warm Period that dwarf modern-day droughts. This was a time when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were more than 100 ppm lower than they are today.

Swedish botanist Rutger Sernander proposed that an extremely abrupt climate transition about 3,000 years ago (the Subboreal climate period) was the basis for the Norse saga Fimbulwinter, a three-year-long winter with no intervening summers.

The temperature increase during the last 25 years is unique and exceptional? Not if you compare it to the warming episodes that took place from 1860 to 1880 and 1910 to 1940. They had a similar slope (warming rate).

About 1000 years ago, during the Medieval Warm Period, wine grew in Southern Scotland and wheat cultivation reached as far north as Trondheim, Norway. Is it a coincidence that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) coincided with the last maximum of the Eddy Solar Cycle?

The 1936 North American heat wave was one of the most severe heat waves in the modern history of North America. The death toll exceeded 5,000. Human-induced CO2?

During the Little Ice Age, three climate cycles took place in close succession: An atmospheric-oceanic cycle and the Bray and the Eddy solar cycles. This made this the coldest period in the Holocene. It nearly triggered a glacial inception.

During modern times, glaciers reached their shortest extent 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. Many of the glaciers that now exist were absent.

Frost fairs were held on the river Thames in London up until the early 19th century. Most were held between the early 17th and early 19th centuries during the Little Ice Age, when the Thames froze regularly.

The modern warming period, also known as the long slow thaw, began more than 200 years before any significant contribution of human-induced CO2 to the atmosphere could be made.

Although the CO2 level was only about 70% of what we have now, Earth went through several warm periods during the past 10,000 years (the Medieval, Roman, Minoan, Egyptian Old-Kingdom, etc.). All of these were considerably warmer than today.

Storms have never been as bad as they are today! Really? How about the Great Blizzard of 1888 (in mid-March)? Also known as the Great White Hurricane of 1888. It paralyzed the East Coast and was one of the most severe recorded blizzards in American history.

1965 marked the year during the long cooling trend 1940-1970 in which the recession of many Alpine glaciers was halted and Arctic Sea ice returned to Iceland.

Man-made CO2 has increased hurricane strength? The strongest hurricane to ever hit New England was The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635. The Mayflower had just arrived a few years earlier.

According to a group of Australian scientists, aboriginal (First Nations) society has preserved memories of an ancient sea level rise of Australia’s coastline dating back to 11,000 - 5,300 BC. Industrial CO2 and rising oceans?

The Laki (Grímsvötn) volcanic eruption in Iceland in 1783 drove down temperatures in the northern hemisphere by an average of 1.5 °C and nearly 5 °C in the eastern U.S. Major eruptions spew hundreds of millions of tons of ash into the stratosphere.

The rising sea level is a problem? Looks more like the rising land level. The Maldives is 70 centimeters higher now than in the 1970s. Eastern Australia is two meters higher than 4,000 years ago. The ancient port of Ephesus in Western Anatolia is now fifteen kilometers inland and seven meters above sea level.

The climate has been in a net cooling phase for the past 6,000 years. It has been in its recent warming period for only the past 300 years, coming out of the Little Ice Age just before industrialization.

Global average temperatures cooled by about 0.3°C after 1940 and remained low until 1970. This coincided with a huge increase in industrial activities during and following World War II. Human-induced CO2 and temperature?

The sunspot maximum in the second half of the 20th century marks one of the most active solar phases of the past 10,000 years. The strength of the solar magnetic field more than doubled compared to the Little Ice Age.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse (the decline and fall of major Mediterranean civilizations during the 13th-12th centuries BCE) appears to have been climate-caused. Based on cosmogenic isotopes (interactions of cosmic rays with atomic nuclei that fall to Earth) found in proxies (preserved physical characteristics used as measurements). Human-induced CO2? This was most likely due to solar forcing.

There was a 33-year span of global cooling from 1944 to 1976 that coincided with steeply increasing CO2 concentration as global industrial output increased after WWII.

Droughts today are caused by anthropogenic CO2? And the 1930s Dust Bowl drought, the great droughts in India and North China from 1876 to 1878 and the drought of 1834-1836 in England and Wales are still too close to the Industrial Revolution for you? How about the forgotten drought in 1765–1768 that affected the British-Irish Isles and the European Megadrought from 1540? This keeps going back to antiquity, and beyond. They never end.

The glaciers began to recede (and thus the sea level began to rise) around 1800, at least a century before appreciable quantities of human-induced CO2 began to accumulate in the atmosphere.

According to a 1922 newspaper article, the Arctic seemed to be warming up. It reported a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard-of high temperatures... so little ice has never before been noted.

Germans and other Europeans regularly lecture developing countries about the threat of deforestation. And the Germans must know. Their ancestors destroyed most of their forests many centuries ago yet their progeny have somehow managed to survive. Quite comfortably in fact.

The draining of Lake Agassiz some 9,900 to 10,000 years ago may have been related to the 8,200-year climate event (also known as the 8.2-kiloyear event). This drainage has been linked to the expansion of agriculture from east to west across Europe and may also account for various flood myths of prehistoric cultures, including the Biblical flood narrative. Industrial CO2?

How could anthropogenic global warming have been the cause of the relatively ice-free Arctic recorded over two