The Fog Of Misinformation

Back when I used to do a lot of stuff in the peace movement, during the first Gulf War in fact, this guy came up to us and said that Saddam Hussein burning oil fields should convince us that he was a madman and that the war was therefore a good thing. This struck me as totally weird because at that very moment I was thinking that that very incident was a big reason why the war was so wrong. It’s astonishing, sometimes, how the very same “evidence” can seem to convince two people to draw exactly opposite conclusions.

My understanding of rhetoric is extremely primitive and outdated, but I’m aware of the classic division into three factors: pathos, ethos and logos. I didn’t know this division at the time, but did think in this way. Logos is the use of rational arguments, ethos the reputation of the speaker and pathos the evocation of emotion. It’s actually slightly different from that if I remember correctly, such as eliciting sympathy in the audience. Ethos sounds similar to the argument from authority and ad hominem fallacies, but this is not so much about rational argument as how people are persuaded. Because rhetoric has been used so much for negative ends, this sounds like a nefarious approach, but it need not be so. For instance, it could be used to address someone’s anxieties or downheartedness and it needn’t be deceptive.

I think we all know this stuff is out there even if we don’t identify it, and we use it all the time, but naming things helps us notice and think about them. I was at this point, in 1991, naïve of them, but it occurred to me that arguments for the retention of nuclear weapons, the justification for the Gulf War and so forth at least aspired to be rational, and I didn’t want to play their game, because it seemed to me that this way of portraying things was an important part of patriarchal discourse, so I decided it would be more effective to argue emotionally. By that, I don’t at all mean crying, screaming and shouting. I did enough of that, mainly in the privacy of my own bedroom, but not in conversations with the general public or acquaintances. I should point out here that the 1991 Gulf War constituted a pivotal moment in my adult life, moving me in a direction I’m still pursuing now in 2023. Although I am talking about pathos here, Immanuel Kant and the Categorical Imperative were also important in my strategy.

Our children got really sick of hearing the Categorical Imperative from me, but I’ll repeat it here:

Act on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law of nature.

– Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten

(„Der kategorische Imperativ ist also nur ein einziger, und zwar dieser: handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, dass sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde.“).

This has several formulations in his work, and although I often quoted it, I don’t actually agree with it because it varies according to how an act is described. For instance, someone steals a loaf of bread from a bakery (24601?). Is that person depriving someone of a means of earning a living or are they trying to save their loved ones’ lives by preventing them from starving to death? Which universalisation is more appropriate. It can also be used disturbingly effectively as an argument against abortion: one cannot will that one’s life as a foetus be terminated, since one wouldn’t exist to do the willing. Since I view the ethics of abortion as the single central issue from which all ethics is derived, there must be a flaw in this argument and therefore probably in the Categorical Imperative itself. Nonetheless, it works well as a rhetorical device and appeal to the emotions.

One example of the kind of thing I used to say was, “if your mother was in Baghdad right now, would you feel okay about the city being bombed?”. This is a naked appeal to the emotions, but seeing as each person has infinite value (should be treated as an end rather than a means, as Kant would put it), it’s a fair one. I’m not saying this is an effective way of arguing. It’s particularly questionable if the person one’s talking to has a particularly bad relationship with their mother or is an orphan, and it feels kind of sneaky. I’m currently less persuaded that it’s the right approach, but maybe someone could come up with an emotive argument which will help me convince myself that it is.

Another area in which Kant comes into how I think about ego defences. Kant believed that the blizzard of sense impressions with which we are constantly assaulted is structured into a world as we understand it through things called categories. These include the likes of existence, non-existence, negation and plurality, to choose a few arbitrary examples. I noted at the time that the ego defences, such as rationalisation, projection, transference and so forth, were remarkably similar to categories, and drew from this the conclusion that we actually don’t use reason at all, or rather, we do, but it has an emotional “mould” to it. It isn’t a case of reason being one thing and emotion another, but reason at all times being dictated to and dependent upon emotion. This is because, to use a stereotype, we’re human. We’re not calculators or computers.

This is of course very consequential. For instance, it means that NVC is fundamentally misconceived and involves being in denial about the ineradicably emotional element of all thought. This is more significant to me than most people though. Another aspect of this is that we only ever fancifully imagine that we believe the things we do merely because of cold reasoning, because there is no such thing. What may happen, much of the time, is that we have an opinion and proceed to rationalise it by finding a reason to believe it. It’s only ever what we want to believe, not something we’ve concluded through logic. Another example: people who eat meat are highly motivated to reject veganism as an ethical position, meaning that they may want to believe that the species they eat are incapable of suffering, not conscious, unable to feel pain or perhaps feel less acutely than humans. They may then find reasons for this which skew their world view in other ways. For instance, Christine Battersby once argued to me that a non-language user was incapable of consciousness. This is highly convenient as such beings are almost literally voiceless, so it’s tantamount to saying that if you can’t speak, not only are you not entitled to an opinion but that you can’t even have one and don’t have interests to consider. You may understand why I feel rather strongly about this.

I may have moderated my position on this somewhat, because it’s potentially problematic. There seems to be such a thing as reality “out there” somewhere and emotional arguments seem to be persuasive in the face of evidence and to have major political consequences, and therefore consequences which affect people. It’s also very much the position of a privileged person. It’s substantially an attempt to compensate for one’s unconscious bias, as it might be put today, and the problem with that is that if it’s adopted by a member of a marginalised group it may cause further marginalisation, and possibly even get murdered or something as a result.

Therefore, we do unfortunately probably need good and apparently rational, evidence-based arguments, probably in all political and social arguments, or at least most. The use of emotive arguments seems to have led us to a position where people feel entitled to their own facts, and hence a lack of dialogue or mutual understanding. Another problem is that you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and while we pursue emotional means of persuasion, we’re doing that if we succeed, and if we later turn out to be wrong, what are we supposed to do? Are we then supposed to use emotive arguments again? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Actually, I wanted to talk about climate change myths in this post, so that’s what I’ll do. Well, not so much myths as statements which are often made about the situation we find ourselves in. Partly to help myself, I’m going to make some bullet points:

• Cold weather refutes climate change
• Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is
• The current change is due to fluctuations which would’ve occurred anyway
• Some glaciers are growing
• Climate change is good for the environment
• Renewable power generation is bad
• Renewable power generation is too expensive
• The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is from volcanoes, not human sources
• Sunlike stars fluctuate like the Sun

It is true that the phrase “global warming” was swapped out for “(anthropogenic) climate change” a while back. This is because the latter describes what’s happening more precisely, and such changes are part of how science works. All conclusions in science are provisional and the model has shifted from a straightforward idea of trapped heat warming the whole surface of the planet indiscriminatedly to the idea of more energy from the Sun staying near Earth’s surface. Before I state that more clearly, I want to describe what happens.

This is what I went running and did Yoga in yesterday. Some of the yellow bits are notably washed out in the photo because they are giving off more light than the visible light falling on them from the Sun. This is fluorescence: some substances absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it in the visible range, at a different wavelength. Greenhouse gases do something similar. They absorb shorter wavelengths of light and re-emit them as infrared, including the wavelengths which constitute radiant heat. This causes more energy to stay in the lower part of the atmosphere than would otherwise happen. This is actually essential to life as we know it. Without greenhouse gases, the equator would be below freezing. Incidentally, I read this piece of information in ‘Everybody’s Book Of Facts’, published in 1939. That’s how long this has been known about, at least. The chief greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are water vapour and carbon dioxide, the former being much more powerful than the latter.

Trapping solar heat in the troposphere, the turbulent layer of atmosphere closest to the surface, is trapping solar energy. This increases the turbulence after which this layer is named, changing the fluctuation of the jet stream, boosting hurricanes and other storms. Although mean global temperature is rising because of this, it can mean colder weather in some places because of effects like evaporation increasing and making air more humid, thereby increasing rainful which takes heat out of the atmosphere, and causing masses of air to expand as they warm, pushing colder masses of air into other parts of the world which don’t usually have them. It supercharges climate rather than simply warming it.

As I’ve said, water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Venus used to have an ocean. This evaporated gradually, making its atmosphere very humid, and that trapped solar energy close to the surface. That heat then baked the carbon dioxide out of the rocks, ultimately leading to today’s scorching hellscape hot enough to melt lead. This fact is sometimes used to suggest that the relatively small amount of carbon dioxide released in industrial processes is insignificant next to the much larger amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. This is wrong, because released carbon dioxide increases water evaporation which exacerbates the greenhouse effect.

Climate fluctuates constantly over geological time scales. It’s sometimes stated that global temperatures today are higher than at any time since the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. This is completely false. The highest temperatures since then were 41 million years ago during the Eocene. It’s hard to believe this because the axial tilt was the same as today, meaning that the lands of the midnight Sun were subtropical even during months of darkness. Nonetheless this was so. It is true that it’s the hottest it’s been since humans evolved, and that’s more significant because we’re used to living on a cooler planet than we currently have. The rate of change is also important.

The current cycle of ice ages and warmer intervals is due to Milankovitch cycles. When I Googled that, “Milankovitch cycles GCSE” popped up, so I’m not going to bother to talk about them specifically because I presume it’s part of a general secondary education, but I will say that we’re supposed to be due for another ice age and the fact that it’s hotter on average than it has been for many centuries merely means the ice age we would’ve had otherwise is actually mitigating climate change, and this is far from the usual cycle.

Some glaciers are growing. This is pointed to by a few climate change deniers as evidence against global warming. However, the glaciers which are growing are unusual. This illustration shows Sermeq Kujalleq, the Jakobshavn Glacier in Kalaalit Nunaat (Greenland), which is fed by a cyclical cold water current which varies, so it grows and shrinks over several years. This current has been altered by climate change, which as I’ve said involves the capture of more energy from the Sun in our global systems rather than simple temperature increase. The question to be answered here is how to ensure that something like this doesn’t look like an excuse or cherry-picking to an outsider, and unfortunately the answer is probably that people need to know, for their own sake and the sake of making political decisions, how science ideally works. It may not be enough to know why one particular glacier is growing. There are others, but the overall trend is shrinkage.

How do we know that the source of the increasing mean global temperature is not from the Sun? This one is quite straightforward: the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere cooling. The turbulent portion of Earth’s atmosphere, where most of what we would generally think of as weather is happening, ends where it stops getting colder with height, at the tropopause. Above this, air currents move horizontally, hence the name “stratosphere”. This layer shows a cooling trend, and is, like the rest of the atmosphere, exposed to the Sun. This is happening because greenhouse gases trap heat lower down, preventing light and heat which would otherwise reflect off the surface from warming the stratosphere. If global warming were due to the Sun warming the planet as part of some kind of cycle or warming trend, the stratosphere would be warming, but it’s cooling, so the simplest explanation, i.e. the most scientific one, is that climate change is not due to fluctuations in solar activity.

The influence of solar radiation on a body is referred to as “radiative forcing”, which is the rate of change of energy through a surface caused by climate change factors, measured in watts per square metre. Due to the peculiar nature of the troposphere, with its turbulent winds, cloud cover and precipitation, it only makes sense to measure this outside that layer of atmosphere, at the tropopause and the top of the stratosphere. This does vary, due to Earth having an elliptical orbit around the Sun and therefore receiving less radiation from it in the northern summer than the northern winter. This seems to many people to be the wrong way round, incidentally. It also varies because the Sun has a sunspot cycle as mentioned on my post on that star. This lasts eleven years, and involves a build-up of sunspots, which are cooler and therefore emit less light than the general photosphere of the Sun, which then wanes again, making the Sun slightly variable. These fluctuations are not reflected in the trend towards global warming, and therefore changes in solar activity are not responsible for the current change in climate.

One response to the arguments against anthropogenic climate change being lost is to say that climate change is a good thing. This can be made in several ways. In recent decades, a vineyard has been established in my birth village in Kent, and it produces very nice white wine. This has been made possible by climate change, and it presumably benefits the economy of the South of England. Norwegian wine now exists too. Wildlife moves away from the Equator. There are little egrets in the local bourne here in the East Midlands who have only arrived in the last few years. Because plants need carbon dioxide, the increase in the atmosphere is said to promote their growth, making arable farming more productive. However, this increased productivity is not accompanied by any increase in soil minerals or vitamins in the crops, so the result is a watered-down version of these crops, and other food plants, with more carbs without more vitamins and minerals. Some of the species moving away from the Equator bring infectious diseases with them, for instance ticks. Summer 2023 has brought an increase in insect bites in Britain. Moreover, the species which can move, which can be to higher altitudes or in the sea greater depths as well as towards the poles, can do so, but some can’t. This increases the risk of further pandemics. Beavers moving north have caused problems for the Inuit, that is, competition between humans and beavers. To some extent, humans are intellectually resourceful and adaptable, but competition with other species is not necessarily going to benefit any of them. Invasive species are more difficult to manage if they originated from warmer climates. Also, in the very hottest parts of the planet’s surface, the climate can become completely uninhabitable for some species, as can be seen with the deaths of Australian fruit bats. This translates, as usual, into problems for the poorest communities in the world, as they tend to live in its hottest regions.

Michael Moore is known for producing critically-acclaimed documentaries which oppose establishment views. Sadly though, this did not apply to his ‘Planet Of The Humans’, for which he’s executive producer, which focusses on the environmental damage caused by renewable power sources. There is a lot to be said about this film, but if I said it all it would turn this post into a debunking of the film as opposed to a survey of climate change denial arguments, so I’m going to provide a short summary. Clips from the early part of the documentary showed a solar-powered festival from the 1990s before renewable technology had improved to the point where the issues shown, where the electricity ended up having to come from the grid, are no longer important. Likewise the clip about the electric car which is recharged using mainly coal-fired power stations dates from 2010 and the situation has improved a lot since then. Comparisons are made between the open cast mining of coal which removes entire mountain tops with the siting of wind turbines on mountains when in fact this is far less destructive and the shots of the deforestation ignored the fact that whereas an open cast coal mine is pretty permanent damage, the trees would grow back in a few years for the wind turbine site. There were then some contentious comments about ethanol and hydrogen power, which are probably true but also accepted by environmentalists, who don’t recommend their use. I’m going to have to find out more about the hydrogen power issue as it seems to have changed recently, but my possibly obsolete understanding is that hydrogen works as a way of storing power rather than being a specific fuel in itself. That is, although it’s a fuel, it’s generated by electrolysis and the source of electricity for that is what matters. Solar panels are now very efficient. They bring in twenty times the cost of manufacture in power over their working lives, and their decline in efficiency is gradual, so it isn’t like they suddenly stop working after that period. Hence even if they are manufactured using only fossil fuels, this is because those fuels were what happened to provide that energy and not because that’s the only way that energy could ever be provided. The documentary also ignores the possibility of roof-based solar power rather than power plants taking up a lot of unoccupied land elsewhere. The intermittent nature of solar and wind power can now be addressed using the more efficient batteries which are now on the market, as found for example in power walls. The investment of one unit of fossil fuel generated energy into producing solar panels and installing them is likely to produce twenty times that in clean energy. Wind power, it’s twice as efficient as that. The film also blames the problem on overpopulation, but the issue here is that the communities whose population is growing fastest are those using the least energy. Moreover, consumption is growing twice as fast as the population. This is basically about blaming Black people, as it’s White Westerners who are the biggest part of the problem.

There are two issues related to this which I want to look into but can’t comment upon yet as I’m mainly doing this off the top of my head. One is the source of materials for batteries and the other is environmental damage caused by wind turbines. However, I will say this: I have long advocated for orbital solar power as the solution, which would involve materials taken from lunar sources rather than terrestrial ones and completely circumvent any problems arising from ground-based solar and wind power while allowing microwave receiving stations to be sited in areas which are less economically developed, making those countries wealthier.

Getting back to a more general point, increases in carbon dioxide are often blamed on the gas coming out of volcanoes. However, this is relatively constant, barring mass extinction events and various uncommon calamities, and it’s the extra emissions which are important. The planet and its biosphere is used to the vast amounts of CO₂ which maintain its surface temperatures at habitable levels. It’s the extra which constitutes the problem, which is many times as much annually as volcanic carbon dioxide emissions. And this extra is sometimes said not to be from fossil fuels. In fact, the excess CO₂ can be traced definitively to fossil fuels because the isotope profile in that gas is the same as in fossil fuels and not at all the same as in volcanic emissions. This also means that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be firmly laid at the door of human activity.

I’m just going to explain how this works. Each chemical element has the same number of protons in its nuclei, but the number of neutrons varies. For instance, carbon always has six protons but may have six, seven or eight neutrons. Elements exposed to certain forms of radiation can also become other elements or different isotopes of the same elements. It’s probably too obvious to state, but this is the basis of carbon dating because when carbon dioxide is exposed to the atmosphere, cosmic rays change a certain fraction of its carbon from carbon 12 to carbon 14 or convert nitrogen and oxygen to carbon at a known rate, leading to a known proportion in a living organism which changes when it dies at a known rate, allowing its age to be estimated. It has many other uses. For instance, oxygen 16 and 18 are used to measure water temperatures in ice core samples and calcium isotopes can be used as evidence for the source of food being marine or terrestrial when human bones are recovered from ancient sites.

Living matter very much prefers carbon 12 to carbon 13, and this was so for the organisms who became coal and oil. This is not so for volcanic emissions, which just emit what the expected profile of carbon isotopes would be in the form expected from sources without biological involvement. This can also be used to demonstrate that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is not simply incorporated in a larger biomasse. Hence even if carbon emissions fluctuate from year to year due to volcanic eruptions, it’s still possible to separate the volcanic and industrial sources, and the emissions cannot therefore be blamed on volcanoes.

I realise that I’ve stirred up quite a few questions as well as answering some, so I plan to address those too. These include the ethics of battery manufacture and supply chains, the “U”K government’s approach to energy policy, the issue of hydrogen and various other things. However, that’ll do for now. Please do correct me if I’m wrong and let me know what you think.

A History Of The British Climate Part II (Part I Tomorrow)

It’s common knowledge that there used to be an Ice Age in this country. Something which is never clear to me is whether people generally realise that this planet has recently, i.e. in the past million years or so, undergone five ice ages, and it’s debated whether anthropogenic climate change will be sufficient to prevent the next one. As I mentioned the other day, up until the 1980s it was considered a toss-up whether the near future would involve global cooling or warming, although looking at the graph of recent global temperatures in 1977, it seemed close to inevitable that it would warm. But there have been people here for hundreds of millennia, back to the Hoxnian about four hundred millennia ago, so I will start with that, work down to the present and then go way up and repeat the process on a grander timescale.

As far as I know, and in fact I suspect I’m wrong, the earliest human remains found in what are currently these isles are the so-called “Swanscombe Man”, a Neanderthal or pre-Neanderthal woman dating from about four hundred millennia BP (before present – in fact before 1950 CE). She was found in a Swanscombe gravel pit, near Dartford in today’s Kent. The Hoxnian Stage was an interglacial lasting from 424 to 374 millennia BP, when it was slightly warmer than today on average. At the time, there were dense forests here, making it difficult for people to penetrate much of the country and they mainly stayed in river valleys, such as the Thames, then a tributary of the Rhine, where the Swanscombe remains were found. Other species sharing that environment included the straight-tusked elephant, hippos and rhinos. This is one of the startling things about British fauna, and in fact fauna in general, up until the start of the last Ice Age: it was actually quite Afrikan. Distinctive European fauna during interglacials didn’t arise until this one, referred to as the Holocene. In fact humans could be seen as an example of that, since we are originally Afrikan.

I grew up calling the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene Donau, Günz, Mindel, Rịẞ and Würm, which are apparently the wrong names for Northern Europe, where they’re called the Hamburger, Elder, Elster, Saale and Weichsel. One of the annoying things about ice ages is that they’re called different things in different parts of the world, which doesn’t generally happen with other geological periods although one of the Cenozoic epochs, can’t remember which, is said to continue in some parts of the world after it had finished in others. Possibly the Oligocene. In the case of ice ages this is to some extent justified, because as far as the Arctic regions are concerned we’ve been in one long ice age since the start of the Pleistocene. Britain, and in particular Scotland, is the northernmost land not actually considered Arctic, so it isn’t surprising that the ice ages operated somewhat differently here than they did further south. The names I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph are also the names of Alpine rivers, because the Alps were obviously more strongly affected than lower-lying parts of the European peninsula.

When the Ice Age I’m apparently supposed to call the Saale started around 374 millennia BP, glaciers completely covered what would become this archipelago, and of course Doggerland in the German Ocean/North Sea was still completely above sea level, so at this point these isles were not islands at all but a sub-peninsula of Europe. Fauna included lemmings, mammoths, woolly rhinos and musk oxen, but there would’ve been an intermediate cooling period during which horses would have arrived because the forests were thinning out. This came to an end around 130 millennia BP with the gross of centuries or so known as the Eemian or Ipswichian, during which sea level rose to six to nine metres above where it is today. Ice ages during this time are much longer than interglacials, which all seem to last about that long, which also means we’re kind of due for a new ice age, hence Nigel Calder’s fixation which I mentioned here. This is the period during which anatomically modern humans evolved, and our split between Asian and Afrikan populations. During this time there were hippos in the Thames and Rhine, and there were also straight-tusked elephants again in Britain, although we were at the limit of their range by then. They finally became extinct, or perhaps just left, at the start of the next ice age, the Weichsel.

The Weichsel, which is the most recent ice age and the one many probably just think of as the Ice Age, was less severe than the Saale, with the ice sheets only reaching as far south as the Humber and Mid-Wales, and across in Ireland in a line across from Wexford to Galway. South of those would’ve been tundra rather than actual permanent ice cover, and there were reindeer in the Peak District who used to migrate to Lincolnshire to calve. There were also still mammoths, for instance in Shropshire, until 14 000 BP, although they had previously been wiped out here because it was too cold for them. What seems to have been happening here is that local populations of mammoths were dying out and then getting replaced by others moving into the area, in a cycle. There were also bison, woolly rhinos and Irish elks. The last seem to be remembered in Irish legends. They were not closely related to elks but to fallow deer, and their last representatives vanished around 7 700 BP in Russia, at a time when mammoths were still around – they only died out around the time the pyramids were built. Irish elk appear in cave paintings and were hunted by humans.

The Holocene is actually formally defined, kind of by fiat, rather than just being the end of the last ice age. In the 1990s CE, it was proposed that a Holocene calendar be formally designated where years are numbered from the start of the epoch. Hence it started officially in 10 000 BCE or 11 950 BP. This makes it easier to use for geology and archæology, since Bede’s timing for the birth of Jesus is both arbitrary and culturally biassed, and not very useful for these purposes except that it helps us relate to the dates if one has a Christian background. That said, the onset of the Holocene is also the time of the last glacial retreat, and as such dates to around 11 650 years ago, or 9 630 BCE with spurious accuracy. All human recorded history has taken place in this period, and during this time there has been fluctuation in climate, here and elsewhere.

A big factor in the Holocene was the Bond events, which are fluctuations in ice rafting occurring from the Arctic in an approximately ten century cycle. In terms of the Common Era, these nine events took place at the following approximate dates: 9100 BCE, 8300 BCE, 7400 BCE, 6200 BCE, 3900 BCE, 2200 BCE, 800 BCE, 600 CE and 1500 CE. Some of these are associated with particular historical events or trends. What seems to be happening, and this is my interpretation, is that Arctic ice breaks up and spreads out in the North Atlantic, reflecting more heat back into space and cooling the planet globally. Then it refreezes and the planet warms up due to a smaller area being covered by ice.

The events in question sometimes had a major effect here, sometimes either not or not in a discernible way from this distance in time. Before I go on, I’ll talk about Doggerland, the formation of the Irish Sea and the English Channel. Doggerland, as you must surely know but I’ll mention it anyway, is the area now flooded by the North Sea. The Irish Sea used to be a marshy area with some lakes, the English Channel was also above sea level and even after the rest was submerged there was a narrow isthmus across the Pas De Calais until 5000 BCE. All of this was to do with ice melting and sea level rise.

Where the Bond events didn’t directly influence the climate significantly in this country, and in fact they would’ve done although without agriculture or written records the traces are harder to discern without some archæological research such as looking at tree rings, they may still have had a long-term knock on effect from what happened elsewhere. For instance, the 6200 BCE event led to a drier spell in Mesopotamia and therefore may have triggered irrigation efforts which led to the emergence of Sumer and the other cultures in that area, ultimately leading to the arrival of more advanced technology and different peoples here in the characteristic pattern where the East is south of the West. That said, the distribution of the aforementioned elephants also shows a northeast-southwest boundary and the glaciation kind of followed the same “diagonal” line. The 3900 BCE event led to the reformation of the Sahara Desert by four centuries later, whose effects can be seen in rock paintings showing animals usually found in wetter climates in that area. The Bronze Age began a couple of centuries after that. This got to Britain about a millennium later still. A later significant oscillation was the Iron Age Cold Epoch, which started around 800 BCE and coincided with the expansion of Ancient Greece and the foundation of Rome. This was followed by the Roman Warm period from 250 BCE to 400 CE, or 500 to 1150 AUC in the Roman dating system, which seems to have been fairly local, i.e. confined to Europe. Italy at the time was wetter and cooler, and it was the start of the current Subatlantic period. The temperature left to itself is slightly lower in this, current, period, than its predecessors and again this is evidence that we’re due an Ice Age, but human activity seems to be either postponing or preventing this for now. The cooling is thought to have triggered the migration of the Germanic tribes from Scandinavia down into the main part of Europe. There are then a number of named periods: the Late Antique Little Ice Age, Dark Ages Cold Period, Mediæval Warm Period and finally the well-known Little Ice Age.

The first two of these coincide to some extent, with the Late Antique Little Ice Age occurring in the middle of the Dark Ages Cold Period. In other words the former was the peak of the latter. The longer period seems to be precisely dateable to 509-865 CE, and includes for Britain most of the sub-Roman period, Augustine’s arrival and the early years of Alfred’s life until shortly before he became King. The middle of that period seems to have been worsened by volcanic eruptions reducing sunlight. The Annals of Ulster record a crop failure leading to a lack of bread in 536 and those of Innisfallen says this continued until 539. Ice cores from those years show a higher sulphur content than others. The Annales Cambriæ record “great mortality in Britain and Ireland” and also say it was King Arthur’s last battle. In various places it’s said that the Sun shone only weakly for a year and a half. In China it snowed in August 536.

This was eventually followed by the Mediæval Warm Period, lasting from around 950-1250. Sediments in the Sargasso Sea show that it was 1°C warmer than 1996 at this time. It seems that the ice-free seas of the North Atlantic were taken advantage of by the Norse people to colonise Greenland, as they called it, and Afrika was drier. After a bit of a gap, the Little Ice Age began in about 1350 and lasted up until about 1900, and this is something I find puzzling. There was a major famine here in 1315-17 which seems to have set Europe up for the Black Death later in the century because the people who were children at the time of the famine seem to have grown up rather unhealthy, laying them and the communities around them open to the ravages of the plague, if that’s what it was, as adults, and also making them a source of infection for healthier people who might otherwise have escaped. It might be expected that this was due to a series of years with bad weather conditions for growth of wheat in particular because of the climate, but in fact this doesn’t seem to be so. However, it does seem that a five-year long series of eruptions in Aotearoa/New Zealand of Mount Tarawera may have precipitated the event. Some people do extend the Little Ice Age back to 1300.

The following few centuries had such features as white Xmases and frost fairs on the Thames. There are two reasons why white Xmases used to me more frequent. One of them is pretty obvious, but the other, so I hear, is that there tends to be a snowier period shortly before the dates which are now celebrated as Christmas, and the calendar reforms moved it out of this to a less snowy stage of the winter. I’m not sure about that because it seems more likely to snow in early January than mid-December, so it seems to be in the wrong direction.

Frost fairs were held on the Thames in London from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries CE, peaking from the seventeenth century onward when the Little Ice Age was at its most severe. It’s thought that the Thames was more likely to freeze over in any case back then because of the water wheels under London Bridge slowing the flow of the river down and the pollution in the water raising the freezing point. They were in any case quite seldom held, and were much more common elsewhere in Europe. The Thames has frozen over further upstream much more recently, unsurprisingly in winter 1963. I can remember the sea freezing over to a limited extent in the Thames Estuary. It froze over for several weeks in London in the third Christian century, and in 695, the date of the first fair, then there’s a gap until 1608, when it first used name. The biggest was in 1683-4, when the ice was half a metre thick. The last one was in February 1814, when the ice supported an elephant. I don’t want to ignore the cruelty of exploiting a presumably Asian elephant in that way, but note the connection with native British straight-tusked elephants living on the banks of the river in ages past. In 1831, London Bridge was pulled down and the climate was warming, meaning that it ceased to be feasible from that point on.

By Giorgiogp2 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8942703

Approaching living memory, there’s the Year Without A Summer, also known as “Eighteen Hundred And Frozen To Death”, a phrase many older people may have heard of. This is 1816. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in today’s Indonesia led to a global fall in temperature of 0.7°C. The summer temperatures were relatively lowest in France and England. There was food price inflation all over Europe and in 1819, there were typhus epidemics in Ireland and Scotland as a result of malnourishment. Mary Shelley wrote ‘Frankenstein’ during the summer of this year because the weather was too bad for them to go outside. Also by this time, sunspots were being observed and the Sun’s surface was unusually “clean” between 1796 and 1820, a period known as the Dalton Minimum, and like other minima it coincided with a spell of colder temperatures. The better-known Maunder Minimum from 1645-1715 had also seen this, and it’s also hypothesised that there’s a rhythm instantiated by these two, meaning that an earlier Spörer Minimum had occurred from 1460-1550.

There are several ways to retrieve the record of climate change in fairly recent times, including ice core samples, tree rings, coral skeletons, cave deposits and foraminiferan skeletons from the sea bed and chalk. One of the things these show is that the industrial revolution, which at the time was fuelled by coal, began to make its presence felt by about 1830, rather surprisingly in the Southern Hemisphere more than the Northern. Antarctica has been protected from much of this by the circulation of water and air currents in the Southern Ocean, but it can be seen in other oceans and landmasses south of the Equator.

This is more or less common knowledge, so I won’t go into much depth, and I’m pretty sure I’ve covered it extensively elsewhere on this blog. Therefore I’ll just mention three events: the winters of 1947 and 1963, and the summer of 1976.

From 23rd January 1947, Britain and the rest of Europe experienced an unusually harsh winter, which incidentally is a major plot point in my novel ‘1934’. I also know someone whose life was basically ruined by it. An anticyclone was stationary over Scandinavia, preventing low pressure areas from moving towards Britain from the Atlantic and allowing winds to blow from the east across the country. The temperature dropped to -21°C, there was pack ice in the Channel and ice floes in the North Sea. Similar, and in some cases more severe, measures were taken as during the War, including lower rations, the suspension of television, the reduction of radio and there were power cuts which even affected Buckingham Palace. Four million people claimed unemployment benefit. Three million sheep died, there were many crops lost or irretrievable from the ground due to frozen soil and there were of course many human casualties. This was followed by serious flooding in March when the snow and ice melted.

The next severe winter occurred sixteen years later, and Sarada can remember this although I wasn’t born. This was known as the Big Freeze of ’63 and was the coldest since 1895. The situation began similarly to 1947 with a stationary high over Scandinavia, but this was then replaced by another over Iceland. Temperatures fell to -19°C in Scotland and the sea froze over at Herne Bay for 1.6 kilometres. January 1963 is the coldest month since January 1814. The difference between the two post-War winters is probably down to the fact that Britain had recovered economically from the War by the second, and there were also some advances in technology and the infrastructure, but that’s just my guess.

Finally for today I want to mention an incident which I can actually remember quite clearly: the summer of 1976. Although this was only the second driest summer since records began, next to 1995, it’s far more memorable for its weather than the later one. You may recall, incidentally, that 1975 was also very hot and dry, and that dryness and mildness continued through the ’75-’76 winter, meaning that more insects survived and continued to reproduce in the next year. Meanwhile the water reserves were already unusually low. The cause of the actual heatwave and drought was, surprisingly, similar to those of the winters of ’47 and ’63, with a high pressure area stuck over Europe, and in fact the whole of Europe was affected, not just Britain. Shade temperatures rose to 34°C in late July. Rivers, lakes and reservoirs dried up, the grass died and there was a plague of ladybirds. It was actually possible to fill shovels with them, and many people, including myself, discovered for the first time that they “sweat” an irritant clear yellow liquid when stressed (incidentally the same thing happened a couple of days ago to me while I was out). This was because ladybirds are predators of other insects, and their plethora had led to a population explosion. There were also standpipes in the street due to a water shortage, and I think hosepipes were banned for the first time. The Archbishop of Canterbury prayed for rain to no avail. Then, bizarrely, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson appointed a minister for drought, Denis Howell, and ordered him to do a rain dance! Then it rained and he became minster for floods. I shall now specifically invite Steve to tell us his tale of ’76.

As for me, my tenth birthday occurred during the drought. I was on holiday in the Isle Of Wight and my brother and I both went down with tonsilitis. My temperature went up to 38.3°C. However, I recovered in time to enjoy the rest of the holiday, and we went to Blackgang Chine where there was a “ride” purporting to be Hell which was very hot inside, except that it wasn’t because of the temperature outside. Two other notable features were that after it had started raining people were still using standpipes and were actually standing in the rain waiting for water, and it was stated that even if it rained every day until the year 2000 there wouldn’t be enough water to replace what there had been in 1974. There was also said to be a problem with the mud getting baked into an impermeable condition, such that the rain would just run off and fail to accumulate. There were forest fires in the South, and everyone was warned to take extreme care. However, these have actually served to replenish heathland in the long run. Deaths went up by twenty percent.

That, then, is the history of climate in this country from the life of Swanscombe Woman four hundred millennia ago into the late twentieth century. Tomorrow I will cover the history of climate here from deep in prehistory up until the advent of the latest spate of Ice Ages.