Little Ice Age

Climate change has affected us in many ways, but it was even more influential on organisms and their community. The Earth is gradually heating and we are left to deal with the consequences. Homes are being destroyed, organisms are dying, and resources are running low. Since 1880, Our Earth’s temperature had increased by about 0.8 degrees Celsius. Climate change is affecting the Earth and scientists say that one more degree will greatly affect people from all over the world. There are many consequences of climate change and each one has a great impact on all of us, but organisms’ homes are being destroyed and thousands of species are dying out. These organisms are imperative to our world and how it functions.

We all know that atmosphere is continually evolving. We have had ice ages and hotter periods when gators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have happened in a hundred thousand year cycles for the last 700 thousand years. There also have been time periods that seemed to have been hotter than the present in spite of CO2 levels being lower than they are currently. Overall what I am saying is that we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. Because of these evolutions there has been different effects on the earth.

First of all, the environmentalists disregard the fact that there has been several global warming and cooling periods throughout the history. Willie Soon, a professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, confirmed that from 800 to 1300 A.D. the average temperatures of the world were 2 to 4 degrees or more higher than that of the 20th century, which is referred to as the Medieval Warm Period (Anderson, par.16). This warming trend was detected in many other parts of the world at that time, and the history proves that it brought wealth rather than disaster. During this period, Europe flourished and was awoken by Renaissance culture.“Olives grew in 13th –century Germany, where St. Albert the Great also noted abundant fig and pomegranate groves in Cologne and the Rhine valley-places too cold for those crops today” (16). Following the Medieval Warm Period, the temperature plummeted 3 to 5 degrees, which is 2 degrees colder than our climate today, lasting until 1900. Since 1900, the world has warmed up about 1 degree (18). One of the other natural causes is the activities of volcanoes. Volcanoes release a huge amount of sulfuric acid, which is believed to contribute to global warming.

Earth has experienced many episodes of dramatic climate changes with different periods in earth history. There have been periods during which the entire planet has been covered in ice and at another time it has been scorchingly hot and dry. In this regards, earth has experienced at least three major periods of long- term frigid climate and ice ages interspersed with periods of warm climate. The last glacial period which current glaciers are the result of it, occurring during the last years of Pleistocene, from approximately 110,000 to 10,000 years age (Clayton, 1997). Indeed, glaciers present sensitive indicators of climate change and global warming and by estimating and monitoring the dynamic evolution of these ice masses, several

In 1827 Louis Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had experienced a past ice age, which he said could explain previous observations that erratic blocks of alpine rocks scattered over the slopes and summits of the Alps, had been moved there by glaciers. He presented the theory that ancient glaciers had traveled throughout the entire northern hemisphere and deposited these rock formations along the way. Though many before him had theorized moving glaciers, he was the first to label this period of time as the Ice Age.

The Great Warming is a book written by Brian Fagan that encompasses the environment and history pertaining to most of the human race between A.D. 800 and 1300. Not only does the book give a new dimension to world history by looking at climate history, but it also provides the reader with an ominous warning of the impact that climate change may have on the human race in the future. Fagan references many civilizations in the book that were affected by the rise in surface temperatures. He goes in depth with them individually to show just how worldwide this climate change was, how each civilization adapted or failed to adapt, and who the winners and losers were during this medieval warming period.

The passage declares numerus reasons in hope of justifying the real causes of Little Ice Age existence during 1350 till 1900 CE. On the contrary, the lecture challenges all the aforementioned theories by passage and believes inasmuch as the outdated information used by passage all those clarifications are merely sheer implausible misconceptions. In what follows, three major hypotheses and their critics will be delved into nut briefly.

Throughout the Pleistocene ice ages, large areas of the earth were covered by vast ice sheets. Global sea levels dropped up to 120 metres below present-day coastlines, exposing large areas of land that were once flooded by shallow seas. These lands became colonised by vegetation, animals, birds and insects over time. During the Ice Age, the island continent to the south-east of Asia comprised New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania as a single land mass. Separating this continent from Asia was a narrow sea about one hundred kilometres wide, over which the first ocean crossings were made sometime before 60,000 years ago.

The first argument examined on the man-made global warning side is that increasing greenhouse gases caused by human activities is causing directly observed climate changes. The first resulting climate change discussed is warming global surface temperature. There has been an increase in global surface temperature of 0.74 degrees C since the late 19th century. In the last 50 years alone the temperature has increased by 0.13 degrees C per decade. North America and Eurasia have seen the largest increase in warmth. However, some areas of the earth have actually cooled some this past century (Easterling & Karl, 2011, para6). After the mid 20th century 70% of the global land mass saw reduced diurnal temperatures. From 1979 to 2005 the maximum and minimum temperatures have shown no change; both indicate warming (Easterling & Karl, 2011, para10). Furthermore, borehole temperatures, snow cover, and glacier recession data all seem to agree with recent warming (Easterling & Karl, 2011, para11).

The Great Warming by Brian Fagan claims that environmental changes (most commonly prolonged droughts, El Niños, and La Niñas during the Medieval Warm Period) affect human civilization, including human’s trading abilities, overall movement, and quality of life. He examines the world’s ancient climate warming, known as the Medieval Warming, between the 10th and the 15th centuries, also mentioning the preceding and succeeding centuries. Fagan gathers his research using studies conducted by archaeologists, historians, and paleoclimatologists. Throughout his book, he refers to direct methods to study climate change, such as instrument records and historical documents, and indirect methods, such as ice, deep sea cores, coral records, and tree rings. Fagan digs into the rise and fall of multiple civilizations around the world as an effect of The Medieval Warming Period. As well as examining civilizations across the world, he attempts to connect the climate change patterns during The Medieval Warming Period to the current global warming faced today. The Great Warming discusses positive and negative connections between climate change and human civilizations across the world, starting in Europe and working its way into Asia, North America, South America, Africa, and even covering the arctic ice caps; however, throughout the book, Fagan has a hard time connecting his various ideas back to one main topic and can easily stray from his point about the effects of climate change.

First, the reading states that the cooling may have been caused by distrupting of ocean currents. The professor opposes this point by saying that the disrupting of ocean currents can cause cooling effects in Europe and North America only, but the Little Ice Age also affected Soth Africa, so the disrupting of ocean currents can't explain why South American was affected by the Little Ice Age.

"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words” (Anna Sewell). There is undeniable evidence that animals are being affected by climate change. Even though the effects are difficult to measure, there are many different ways animals are being affected. With the loss of predator and prey species it affects the life cycles in the food chain. The earth’s climate change causes habitats such as snow, ice, or forest areas to alter, resulting in loss of habitat and food accessibility as well as causing extinction.

11,700 years ago the geological epoch the Holocene was thought to of began following the Pleistocene epoch, together these time periods make up the Quaternary period. The Holocene has been described as being relatively warm and with a fairly stable climate. Not only this, but it is thought to coincide with the start of agriculture as human populations rose throughout the Holocene technology became more sophisticated aiding the rise of agriculture (Holden, 2012). The early anthropogenic hypothesis was published in 2003 by Professor W.F. Ruddiman, this was a three part hypothesis in which Ruddiman proposed humans reversed natural decreases in CO2 values within the atmosphere by deforestation. That they reversed natural methane decreases after 5,000 years by irrigating rice, they also caused a warming sufficient to prevent a new glaciation within the last several thousand years and during the Holocene (Ruddiman 2005). This hypothesis has attracted a lot of attention with many people both supporting it and criticising it. Throughout this essay I will be exploring the many arguments for and against the early anthropogenic hypothesis and stating whether or not human kind could have prevented the start of an ice age during the Holocene.

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) refers to a relatively warm period lasting from about the 10th to the 14th century.2 However, the initial evidence for the MWP was largely based on data3 gathered from Europe, and more recent analyses indicate that the MWP was not a global phenomenon. A number of reconstructions of millennium-scale global temperatures have indicated that the maximum globally averaged temperature during the MWP was not as extreme as present-day temperatures and that the warming was regional rather than global. Perhaps the most well-known of these is that of Michael Mann and colleagues (Nature, 392, 1998, pg. 779). Their reconstruction produced the so-called “hockey stick” graphic that contributed to this conclusion in the 2001 assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “The…'Medieval Warm Period' appear(s) to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries." The accuracy of the “hockey stick” graphic was widely discussed in the press when the Mann et al. methodology was criticized by McIntyre and McKitrick (Geophys. Res. Lettr, 32, 2005, pg. L03710). Less attention was given to subsequent studies, such as that of Moberg and colleagues (Nature, 433, 2005, pg. 613) and Osborn and Briffa (Science, 311, 2006, pg. 841) that were based on different, independent methodologies but reached conclusions similar to Mann. Observations of melting high altitude glaciers are

The Arctic is global warming’s canary in the coal mine. It is a highly sensitive area which is profoundly affected by the changing climate. The average temperature in the Arctic is rising twice as fast as elsewhere in the world (nrdc.org). Because of this, the ice cap is getting thinner, melting away, and rupturing. Here is an example of this; the largest ice block in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, had been around for 3000 years before it started cracking in 2000 (nrdc.org) By 2002, the Ward Hunt has cracked completely through and had started breaking into smaller pieces. The melting ice caps are affecting the earth and its inhabitants in many ways. In this paper, the following concepts and subjects will be