Volatile Weather Is Not New

Children are besieged with doomsday scenarios associated with global warming, and chronic anxiety ensues.

"North Carolina-based psychotherapist Chris Saade, co-director of the Olive Branch Center, a grief/wellness counselling firm, says he’s seen a huge jump in the number of patients under 18 who come to him with concerns about the environmental crisis. “Unlike adults who can put their heads in the sand about what we have been doing to our planet, these kids are very aware of what’s going on,” adds Saade, who has led more than 200 psychological retreats in the United States and has offered grief counselling through his private practice for more than 20 years. “Because of the Web, it’s not hidden any more. Children often ask me questions that we, as adults, try to evade: What is going to happen to the human race?”

It appears that the counselors are buying into the doomsday talk also.

The lack of actual warming has caused the mantra to be replaced with the warning of "weather volatility". But volatile weather has been around a long time. This diagram from NASA shows how the Mississippi River has changed its course over the past 1000 years (probably due to extensive periodic flooding and associated washout alternating with stablized beds).

The leftist terror tactic a la Al Gore seems to be working, at least on those who have been mal-educated in the past 25 years and are not analytically inclined.

"Dr. Anthony Levitt, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre’s director of research in the department of psychiatry, agrees climate-change anxiety increasingly enters into the discussions he has with many of the young people who come to see him. “Younger people [teens to mid-20s] appear to be much more accepting of the science and facts than older people,” Levitt observes. He’s also seen an uptick in climate-change-related anxiety in parents with younger children.

“For most people who are anxious about climate change, the anxiety is escalated by the fact they do not see an answer or a way to make a change. Worry plus powerlessness leads to distress,” says Levitt, who is also a professor in the psychiatry department at the University of Toronto.

More and more anecdotal evidence of historical warm spells is emerging, for example, from burnt tree rings in sequoias in the US western states, where fires became more common during the Medieval Warm Period when the region was warmer and dryer.

If you look closely at the unburned portion of the tree, the rings show significant variation in width (e.g. extreme left, between 1277 and 1311).

Another study has found that Mongolia was wet and warm during the Medieval Warm period, giving Genghis Khan the ability to form the strength for conquest.

These examples obviously are anecdotal rather than universal. Still they are data points which disagree with the doomsayers, meaning that the doomsayer data is not universal, either. If you think that the doomsayer data is consistent, consider this:

The IPCC originally had Medieval Warming and the Maunder Minimum in the data; apparently they now do not, even though other scientists are investigating events in the Medieval Warming period.

Most of the past 8 - 10,000 years have been within 0.5 to 1.0 degree from the 2004 point..

A point aside: given all the natural fires in the past, the CO2 generation must have been high tonnage, one would think. And so would allowing fires to eliminate the high build-up of ground fuel in forests due to the forest services war on fires for over a half century, creating the late 20th century mega-fires in the western states and a huge tonnage of CO2.