I think maybe all those who fear climate change should go back and take a Geology 101 class. Or better yet, maybe our educators might think about teaching the truth for a change. That is the kind of change I believe in.
Peter
Hailstorms, Wacky Weather Chilled Ancient Baghdad
By Stephanie Pappas | LiveScience.com – 16 hrs ago Diaries and writings from ninth-century Baghdad provide a glimpse of the weird weather from the era, findings that could help researchers reconstruct past climate.
The surviving documents were written by historians and scholars during the Islamic Golden Age between A.D. 816 and A.D. 1009. They provide a new human record of climate, joining old ship's logs and World War II air force reports as one of the few sources for detailed information on historical weather.
"Climate information recovered from these ancient sources mainly refers to extreme events which impacted wider society, such as droughts and floods," study researcher Fernando Domínguez-Castro of the University of Extremadura in Spain said in a statement. "However, they also document conditions which were rarely experienced in ancient Baghdad such as hailstorms, the freezing of rivers or even cases of snow." (Some things never change; they only report the exceptional and the sensational. The Weather Channel would be proud. Peter)
Many of the writings from the Islamic Golden Age have been lost in wars and upheaval. But some works survive, including those of Sunni scholar al-Tabari (A.D. 913), Kurdish historian Ibn al-Athir (A.D. 1233) and Egyptian scholar al-Suyuti (A.D. 1505). [Top 10 Battles for Control of Iraq]
Domínguez-Castro and his colleagues collected and analyzed these documents and found that they revealed a pattern of increasing frequency of cold-weather events in the early 10th century. July A.D. 920 was unusually cold, perhaps because of a volcanic eruption, Domínguez-Castro said. It snowed in Baghdad in 908, 944 and 1007. The only snow in living memory in the city was in 2008.
The findings suggest that Iraq's climate was more prone to unusually chilly events than it is today.
"Ancient Arabic documentary sources are a very useful tool for finding eye-witness descriptions which support the theories made by climate models," said Domínguez-Castro. "The ability to reconstruct past climates provides us with useful historical context for understanding our own climate."
3 comments:
Speaking of hailstorms, we just had one! (Here in San Diego, CA)
The findings suggest that Iraq's climate was more prone to unusually chilly events than it is today.
Must have been all those Egyptian SUVs (I was going to say Jewish, but someone might take it the wrong way, like I was anti-semitic or something.)
There have definitely been continual episodes of climate change throughout recorded human history. And that isn't even counting The Great Flood, of Noah's Ark fame.
The key point being humans did not begin burning large quantities of fossil fuels until just a couple of hundred years ago, and mainly one hundred years. It is quite obvious to me that the sun is far more likely to cause global climate change as opposed to a little carbon dioxide expelled into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
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