Awful climate extremes of the past 10,000 years
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted last week it had no evidence to support the various claims that the planet’s weather is becoming “more extreme.” The new IPCC report on weather extremes reads: “While there is evidence that increases in greenhouse gases have likely caused changes in some types of extremes, there is no simple answer to question of whether the climate, in general, has become more or less extreme.”
Incredibly, even this non-confirmation is false. The more correct answer is “less extreme.” Moreover, paleoclimate proxy records have already told us about the truly awful climate extremes of the past 10,000 years—most of them mega-droughts during “little ice ages.” For example, the 300-year drought that beset today’s Iraq in 2200 BC. The inhabitants all starved, and the land was left to a few nomadic shepherds until the warm phase of the 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle returned stable weather. Then the Tigris-Euphrates Valley produced a new irrigated agriculture and built the world’s first cities. This valley’s devastation/recovery pattern has happened at least seven different times, in the D-O’s 1,500-year rhythm.
Nor did the IPCC mention the 11th century AD mega-drought in the northern California mountains, with lake levels falling 70 feet below “normal.” At the same time, the Anasazi and dozens of other western Indian tribes were driven from their homes forever. In the Corn Belt, the mega-drought destroyed Cahokia, Illinois, the only city the AmerIndians ever built.