The Benefits of Warming

Keith Sherwood and Craig Idso of CO2 Science, as published at ICECAP:

In the introduction to their illuminating paper, the authors (Zhang, etal 2007) say they previously studied “a long span of Chinese history and found that the number of war outbreaks and population collapses in China is significantly correlated with Northern Hemisphere temperature variations and that all of the periods of nationwide unrest, population collapse, and drastic change occurred in the cold phases of this period.” In their current study, they write that they “extend the earlier study to the global and continental levels between AD 1400 and AD 1900.” This they do by using high-resolution paleoclimate data to explore “at a macroscale” the effects of climate change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the pre-industrial era as discerned by analyses of historical socioeconomic and demographic data.

In describing their findings, the five scientists say their newest analyses, like their earlier ones, show that “cooling impeded agricultural production, which brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation, then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline.” And they suggest, as they put it, that “worldwide and synchronistic war-peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change,” wherein warm periods were supportive of good times and cooling led to bad times, some of which (in our opinion) could arguably be described as a descent into hell.

Frequent readers of this site will know that I have often pointed out how researchers who publish results that refute the catastrophist storyline often feel obliged to tag on to their paper a pro forma statement of support for the catastrophist position, even if nothing in their results support such a conclusion.  My sense is that this is similar to Copernicus singing the praises of the Catholic Church to try to forestall their wrath over his science.  Sherwood and Idso find something similar in Zhang:

Interestingly, after having presented an essentially ironclad case for their finding that warmer periods throughout human history have almost always been more conducive to good times than bad times throughout the majority of the Northern Hemisphere, Zhang et al. conclude their paper by suggesting just the opposite, i.e., that bad times would likely follow any future global warming that might occur, throwing all of their findings to the wind and listing as their reason for doing so the usual litany of unduly-catastrophic consequences that climate alarmists insist will follow any temperature increase that might occur, while stating that “the current high global average temperature (which has never been experienced in the last two millennia) is continuing to rise at an accelerated speed.”

3 thoughts on “The Benefits of Warming”

  1. It may be that, with biofuels, the warmists have discovered a way to give warmer temperatures the bad agricultural effects of cooler temperatures.

  2. Another example can be seen in comments by Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, as quoted by National Geographic (re their new model, which predicts cooling over the next decade): “We want to make very clear that we don’t want to say that [anthropogenic] global warming is not here.” This reminds me a bit of the sort of standard disclaimer that advertisers bolt on to the end of commercials, to avoid lawsuits. “Share prices can fall as well as rise”, that kind of thing.

Comments are closed.