The Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history, how this altered climate affected historical events, and what it means for today's global warming. Building on research that has only recently confirmed that the world endured a 500-year cold snap, renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold influenced familiar events from Norse exploration to the settlement of North America to the Industrial Revolution. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in history, climate, and how they interact.
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This sort of thing has happened before and this book sets out a good overview of how the West handled it last time https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Ice-Age-Revised-1300-1850/dp...
But crops, like soy beans a staple food, are being bred with lower omega (3 & 6) oil content, to reduce storage costs because omega oils will go rancid quickly and spoil the crop.
And if there was a shortage of food then farmers wouldn't be growing crops to burn in biomass PowerStation's.
- There's a good book on the political and social consequences of the last little ice age: The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Brian Fagan.
- Its nice picking your time scales and models to convey a message as this image shows when CO2 was in the thousands parts per million. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Phaneroz...
Now whilst its true the sun is heating up before it goes super nova millions of years in the future, which is what alot of the global warming fear is based on, and yes man has contributed a small % of CO2 by releasing CO2 from fossil fuels and cut down trees, the biggest threat facing mankind in the next 30 years is the Grand Solar Minimum.
A Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) is where the sunspots in the 11 year solar cycle reduce in frequency and strength and extreme weather becomes common place.
Sun spots reduce extreme weather events.
The last GSM was seen during the Dalton Minimum and Maunder Minimum, which are now classed as mini ice ages. When this occurred we had things like increased volcanic activity which lead to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer but extreme cold weather with temperatures seen in the UK of -37 Degrees C, sea ports and the English channel freezing over, extreme winds which did things like blow copious amounts of sand inland, leading to houses being buried in places like Santon Downham, massive inland sand dunes which is what Thetford Forest is planeted on in a bid to return the soil back to some use, but most importantly estimates suggest around 25% of the global population died due to cold and famine due to crop failures.
Today we have increased crop yields so whilst more land has been turned over to agriculture with modern farming practices, the risk is still very much a major threat in the next few decades as a hectare will feed more mouths today than it did during the medieval ice age and the global population has ballooned since the introduction of oil.
There are steps you can take yourself though to reduce your risk, like buying suitable farm land whilst also investing in solar which can power air source heat pumps in case energy supplies & communication become disrupted due to extreme weather events.
1 Watt of solar power can provide upto 3 Watts of heat energy from air source heat pumps. These are just like air con units working in reverse.
Now whilst no one wants to create a panic, looking at the facts in context is important and these points we need to bear in mind.
Firstly there were no meteorological offices during the medieval ice ages, so the evidence amassed by Professor Brian Fagan which you can read about in his book "The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850" explains how man was affected and were very likely the drivers of political events that led to the French Revolution, the Irish Potatoe famine and more.
Its also worth pointing out that differences in the scientific community means no one really knows whether our manmade CO2 is going to benefit us or not when considering plants grow better with more CO2.
So there you go, a brief introduction of what TPTB are currently capitalizing on, if you fancy capitalizing on it yourself in innovative ways yourself.
