If You Think 2022 Is Hot, You Should Have Been There in 1936!

 

There have been some big worries about spectacular 2022 heat waves in Europe and North America.  that started in July heat waves.  There has been worse in historic times.  The European heat and drought of 2003 was severe.

The winter of 1935–1936 was cold and spectacularly snowy in many parts of the United States.  Many thought it might be the end of the 1930s Dust Bowl of drought, heat, and blowing top soil.  That was not to be.  The winter and early spring precipitation stopped, and temperatures rose into a massive sustained heat wave that made 1936 the hottest year of the 1900s and the worst year of the Dust Bowl.  It is still significantly hotter than any other year with recorded data before, after, and including 2022.  

Furthermore, there were much warmer times before thermometers and records of the daily thermometer readings.  There are fuzzier temperature periods of warming and cooling inferred from historical records, such as warmth demonstrated by wine production in areas presently to cold for commercial wineries or cold demonstrated by glaciers swallowing villages in the Alps. 

The Medieval Warming period or Medieval Climate Optimum may have been roughly 900 to 1300 AD.  Britain had a lot of cheeky domestic wines.  The Norse settled Greenland (because it was green!). 

The Medieval Warm Period was followed by the Little Ice Age of comparable cooling.  British wineries could no longer compete with those of France, Spain, and Portugal.  The Norse colonies in Greenland were abandoned. 

But even then, there were some spectacular heat waves.   Europe had a vicious heat wave and drought in 1540.  Judging by records of grapes drying out before they were ripe and trees dropping their leaves in the summer, that year was probably much worse than 2022, 2003, and even 1936.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Look to the Weeds in Saving the World before Breakfast

  For thousands of years, farmers have wailed on weeds with hoes and plucked bugs off their plants.   They have fought back much more powerfully in the 1900s and 2000s with power weeders, pesticides, and herbicides. But, the pests and weeds need not be problems.   Sometimes, they can be part of the solution in developing a more efficient food-producing system.   That better food production is something humanity will need to feed a bigger population coming and for doing that despite serious global warming that might also be coming.   Hello, I’m Roger Carlson. I wrote the books, Saving the World Before Breakfast: A Better Green New Deal , and Saving the World Before Breakfast: The Earth Alone Can Save Us.   A key theme in those books is transforming problems into parts of the solution.   Let’s start with the so-called weeds and pests that become contributors when associated with one particular tiny fern, azolla. For centuries, East Asian farmers have raised fish along with ric
Read more

Every Little Energy Bit Helps

Every Little Energy Bit Helps…And Every Eccentric Bit…and Every Bottom-Line Bit Every little bit helps! Every little bit helps! That was a line from a new group in the 1970s—the environmentalists. They had big ideas about cleaning all the smoke stacks of America. They also had little ideas. One of the little ideas was a brick in the toilette tank. One brick saved about one quart per flush with the resulting savings in water and water purification chemicals. AND if all the toilettes in America had a brick…. Let’s start with a serious concern about energy. Petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert said that petroleum production is like a bell-shaped curve. Production of oil for our cars goes steeply up to a peak.…. Then, it goes steeply down. In 1956, Hubbert said that oil production in the lower forty-eight states would peak about 1970. People laughed…until 1970 when it happened. Now, other geologists are saying there is a similar curve for world oil production. And that peak might be roughly
Read more

2023 Climate Skeptics Conference: "We’re Winning!" No, They’re Not—But How they Could Win

  2023 Climate Skeptics Conference: "We’re Winning!"   No, They’re Not—But How they Could Win In February, I attended the 2023 Heartland Institute 15th International Conference on Climate Change discussing hardcore skepticism about global warming.   Most of the press and public consider global warming (which they now call climate change) a possible end-of-the-world threat.   Heartland is the foremost exception.   Heartland began in 1984, “… to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”   They soon zeroed in on predictions of catastrophic global warming and have been fiercely skeptical of it ever since.   This year’s 2023 conference continued the tradition.   The conference included high caliber climate scientists, economists, and energy experts, many whom are retired or otherwise insulated from possible loss of government funding. At every Heartland conference, the presentations target fallacies in the theory of a massive
Read more