1:20pm Wednesday 17th February 2010
CHRIS Davies is the MEP for the North West England, so his letter probably appeared in every local newspaper throughout the north and he won’t get to read many replies.
He asks if we know the difference between climate and weather.
I want to know whether does. I mean the real effect, and not the one that governments have used as an excuse to levy new taxes and fines?
He studied history at Cambridge and Canterbury so should know that China traded around the North West Passage, and as did the Vikings according to the testimony of the Saga of Erik the Red, from approximately AD 1000 to 1200 until the Little Ice Age, when the North West Passage froze over.
The environmentalists now say that the opening of it again is proof of global warming. Correct but why? There is no agreed beginning year to the Little Ice Age, though there is a referenced series of events such as 1250AD for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow and warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe.
It brought colder winters to Europe and North America. Farms and villages in the Swiss Alps were destroyed by encroaching glaciers during the mid-17th century, canals and rivers in Great Britain were frequently frozen.
The first River Thames frost fair was in 1607; the last in 1814.
Effects of global warming on the North West Passage now mean it’s open again – the planet is evolving.
Scientists have tentatively identified four causes of the Little Ice Age, one of the difficulties in identifying the causes is the lack of consensus on what constitutes a normal climate, or if indeed a normal one exists. One wonders if in the year 1200 they held a UN climate change conference costing £130m, which failed miserably to reach an agreement.
James Kasting, a Penn State professor of meteorology and geosciences says if we have calculated correctly, Earth has been habitable for 4.5bn years and only has a half-billion years left from new estimates due to greenhouse gases, aerosols, and land surface changes, and it is extremely likely that human activities have exerted a substantial net warming influence on climate since 1750.
DON REID Winsford
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