Little Ice Age

“The majority is always wrong. The minority is rarely right.” — Henrik Ibsen


Still sick. Mom too.


British Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a decisive majority in the general election, a stunning victory for the Brexit cheerleader that paves the way for the U.K. Parliament to trigger a long-delayed split with the European Union. (wsj)
After the revote in the UK was excoriated over and over again, it certainly proved to be clarifying.

Ebeling lays out what he calls the ethical principles of free markets. He says: "The hallmark of a truly free market is that all associations and relationships are based on voluntary agreement and mutual consent. Another way of saying this is that in the free market society, people are morally and legally viewed as sovereign individuals possessing rights to their life, liberty, and honestly acquired property, who may not be coerced into any transaction that they do not consider being to their personal betterment and advantage."
To have a claim on what my fellow man produces, I'm forced to serve him. Contrast that requirement to government handouts.

Why do all the TV car commercials have young women cutting down a Christmas tree in the woods alone?

David Brooks has argued that America faces a crisis of loneliness, making us unhappy and impoverishing us spiritually. 
How would do that study?

People used to smoke cigarettes on airplanes. In fact, the history of cigarette bans is surprisingly recent. According to Wikipedia, "the U.S. ban on inflight smoking began with domestic flights of 2 hours or less in April 1988, and to all domestic and international flights in 2000.” The U.S. Army used to give cigarettes to every soldier.

The WSJ reports Fakespot says that more than a third of reviews found on Amazon’s, Walmart’s, and Sephora’s online shopping sites are fake. Here Fakespot means “fake” as in a person was paid to write a biased review—or a bot was used to write the review. 

“New Zealand has ordered about 1,290 square feet of human skin from the United States to help treat patients severely burned in Monday’s volcanic eruption on White Island, as emergency workers scramble to find at least nine people still missing amid concerns the volcano could erupt again.”

What did Kobe Bryant read? "I made a point of reading the referee's handbook. One of the rules I gleaned from it was that each referee has a designated slot where he is supposed to be on the floor. If the ball, for instance, is in place W, referees X, Y, and Z each have an area on the court assigned to them.

When they do that, it creates dead zones, areas on the floor where they can't see certain things. I learned where those zones were, and I took advantage of them. I would get away with holds, travels, and all sorts of minor violations simply because I took the time to understand the officials' limitations."

Should people be encouraged to take advantage of the limits of rules?

Scientists in Indonesia say they have discovered the oldest ever cave painting depicting a story, estimated to be some 44,000 years old. The red images daubed onto a cave on the island of Sulawesi show small human-like figures who appear to be hunting wild animals. The findings have been published in a study in the journal Nature, which details how a mostly-Australian team of scientists uncovered the Sulawesi paintings in a cave called Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 in the south of the island. Although the cave art is not the oldest ever drawing found, if the researcher’s interpretation of the scene is correct it is by far the oldest painting which shows some kind of narrative. The oldest ever drawing was found on a rock in South Africa last year and is thought to be 73,000 years old. 

By some estimates, more than 50,000 pieces of artwork are stolen each year, amounting to annual losses of around $6 to $8 billion globally. This makes art theft one of the most valuable criminal enterprises around, exceeded only by drug trafficking and arms dealing.

During the Sino-Japanese War, Nanking, the capital of China, fell to Japanese forces, and the Chinese government fled to Hankow, further inland along the Yangtze River, on this day, 1937. To break the spirit of Chinese resistance, Japanese General Matsui Iwane ordered that the city of Nanking be destroyed. Much of the city was burned, and Japanese troops launched a campaign of atrocities against civilians. In what became known as the “Rape of Nanking,” the Japanese butchered an estimated 150,000 male “war prisoners,” massacred an additional 50,000 male civilians, and raped at least 20,000 women and girls of all ages, many of whom were mutilated or killed in the process.
A famous woman historian studying the event was said to have been driven mad by the cruelty.

                             Little Ice Age

From an article in Aeon by Dagomar Degroot, an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University and co-director of the Climate History Network. His most recent book is The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (2018). 

Midway through the 13th century, for example, parts of the Northern Hemisphere started cooling. The causes were complex but involved some combination of cyclical changes in the orientation of Earth’s rotational axis, repeated declines in solar radiation, random fluctuations in oceanic and atmospheric currents, and volcanic eruptions that temporarily shrouded the Earth in veils of sunlight-scattering sulfur dioxide.

Temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere fluctuated for a while before cooling sharply in the 15th century. They rebounded briefly in the 16th, then dropped across much of the world – including the Southern Hemisphere – later in that century. Temperatures in some places warmed briefly halfway through the 17th century, then cooled again until early in the 18th. After several decades of modest warming, renewed cooling beset much of the world until midway through the 19th century, when persistent warming finally set in.

Global temperatures over the past 2,000 years, according to different statistical methods. The black line represents modern warming, as measured by meteorological instruments (such as thermometers in weather stations)

These cooling waves are together called the ‘Little Ice Age’, which is more than a bit of a misnomer. Global cooling in even the chilliest decades of the 17th and 19th centuries – the coldest of the period – probably did not exceed 0.5 degrees Celsius. Unlike today’s warming, cooling reached different places at different times, with more or less severity, and hot years could interrupt even the coldest decades. Glaciers did expand out of many mountain ranges, but this was not an ‘Ice Age’.

Nor was it ‘little’. Temperature anomalies were probably longer-lasting and more severe than any had been for millennia, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. They brought short-term changes in ocean currents and wind patterns that repeatedly drenched some regions in torrential rain, or afflicted others with landmark droughts. For those who lived through it, the Little Ice Age was no trivial matter.

Archaeologists and historians have long argued that many societies were woefully unprepared for the cooling of the Little Ice Age, and therefore suffered tremendous losses. When the Little Ice Age first chilled Greenland, for example, the sedentary agricultural practices that Vikings brought with them from Europe were no longer viable. Yet the Vikings, they supposed, stubbornly adhered to those practices, victims of cultural assumptions that they could not abandon. As temperatures continued to drop in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Viking settlements disappeared.

The remains of Hvalsey Church, the location of the last written record of the Greenlandic Vikings. Photo courtesy Wikipedia

At around the same time, waves of bubonic plague swept across Eurasia, killing tens of millions. Some scholars have argued that torrential rains associated with the onset of a newly unstable European climate in the early 14th century ruined harvests and spurred the rise of disease among cattle, leading to a Great Famine that killed perhaps 10 percent of the continent’s population. Malnutrition in children can permanently weaken immune systems, and those who were children during the Great Famine were especially vulnerable to the later arrival of the plague. Others claim that precipitation extremes provoked by the onset of a cool but unstable climate drove booms and busts in the population of rodent vectors for the plague. When rodents in central Asia multiplied, fleas that carried plague did too; when they declined, fleas overcrowded on surviving rodents fled in desperation to new hosts: humans living nearby. After such migrations, waves of plague slowly traveled west towards Europe.

Famines led to widespread starvation, migration, and epidemics, which in turn kindled rebellions, civil wars, and conflict between states. According to the historian Geoffrey Parker, this ‘fatal synergy’ between climatic cooling, starvation, disease, and conflict culminated in a ‘global crisis’ that killed perhaps a third of the world’s population.