Extreme Temperatures
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Igloo

Little Ice Age Shrank Europeans, Sparked Wars

Ice Age Over Europe
© Abraham Hondius via Heritage Images/CorbisPainting - London's River Thames, frozen over in 1677.

Pockmarked with wars, inflation, famines and shrinking humans, the 1600s in Europe came to be called the General Crisis.

But whereas historians have blamed those tumultuous decades on growing pains between feudalism and capitalism, a new study points to another culprit: the coldest stretch of the climate change period known as the Little Ice Age.

The Little Ice Age curbed agricultural production and eventually led to the European crisis, according to the authors of the study - said to be the first to scientifically verify cause-and-effect between climate change and large-scale human crises.

Prior to the industrial revolution, all European countries were by and large agrarian, and as study co-author David Zhang pointed out, "In agricultural societies, the economy is controlled by climate," since it dictates growing conditions.

A team led by Zhang, of the University of Hong Kong, pored over data from Europe and other the Northern Hemisphere regions between A.D. 1500 to 1800.

The team compared climate data, such as temperatures, with other variables, including population sizes, growth rates, wars and other social disturbances, agricultural production figures and famines, grain prices, and wages.

Pumpkin

Total corruption of science: Mad scientists conducting geo-engineering experiments to cool the planet as Ice Age approaches!

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© Mad Science
Field test by British academics marks first step towards recreating an artificial volcano that would inject particles into the stratosphere and cool the planet

It sounds barmy, audacious or sci-fi: a tethered balloon the size of Wembley stadium suspended 20km above Earth, linked to the ground by a giant garden hose pumping hundreds of tonnes of minute chemical particles a day into the thin stratospheric air to reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

But a team of British academics will next month formally announce the first step towards creating an artificial volcano by going ahead with the world's first major "geo-engineering" field-test in the next few months. The ultimate aim is to mimic the cooling effect that volcanoes have when they inject particles into the stratosphere that bounce some of the Sun's energy back into space, so preventing it from warming the Earth and mitigating the effects of man-made climate change.

Before the full-sized system can be deployed, the research team will test a scaled-down version of the balloon-and-hose design. Backed by a £1.6m government grant and the Royal Society, the team will send a balloon to a height of 1km over an undisclosed location. It will pump nothing more than water into the air, but it will allow climate scientists and engineers to gauge the engineering feasibility of the plan. Ultimately, they aim to test the impact of sulphates and other aerosol particles if they are sprayed directly into the stratosphere.

Comment: The public should be sceptical - the money behind this phony "science" knows full well that this is all a distraction and deliberate diversion of public funds, away from those areas of scientific research where funding and attention is desperately needed, like working out how to screen for psychopathology from ALL positions of social responsibility and developing mitigation and preparedness systems in the event of imminent Earth Changes and the Sixth Extinction awaiting humanity at the bottom of the looming cliff, not to mention the fact that an Ice Age is coming.


Igloo

'Once in a lifetime' polar blast gives New Zealand taste of Ice Age to come

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A polar blast has hit New Zealand, bringing freezing temperatures and the heaviest snowfall in 40 years.

Snow is even predicted to fall on the hills around Auckland in what meteorologists are describing as a once-in-a-lifetime storm.

Schools across the country have been closed for the day and most airports are at a standstill.

The bitterly cold southerly blast has now brought snow to most of New Zealand, closing roads and some airports and cutting power to thousands of homes.

Snow has made roads impassable in many areas of both islands.

MetService head forecaster Peter Kreft told the New Zealand Herald the polar blast was "of the order of a 50-year'' event and warned it could last for several more days.

"It's a once-in-many-decades event. We are probably looking at something like, in terms of extent and severity, maybe 50 years,'' he said.

Attention

Dust is All That's Needed to Plunge the World into an Ice Age: Iron-rich Dust Fuelled 4 Million Years of Ice Ages

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© NASA/SPLDust storms bring a cool climate
Dust is all that's needed to plunge the world into an ice age. When blown into the sea, the iron it contains can fertilise plankton growth on a scale large enough to cause global temperatures to drop. The finding adds support to the idea of staving off climate change by simulating the effects of dust - perhaps by sprinkling the oceans with iron filings.


Comment: This is an insane idea, especially when Mother Nature is about to introduce us to the next Ice Age without any human intervention.


Iron-rich dust falling on the ocean has long been known to spark blooms of plankton, and researchers suspect the process could have intensified the ice ages that have occurred over the past few million years.

The thinking goes that, during warm periods, much of the Southern Ocean is an oceanic desert because it lacks the iron crucial for plankton growth. That changes at the start of ice ages, when a wobble in the planet's orbit causes an initial cooling that dries the continents, generates dust storms - particularly in central Asia - and sends dust onto the surface of the Southern Ocean.

Comment: No need for any further experiments, because the process of changes in the layers of the atmosphere due to comet dust loading has already started. The next Ice Age appears to be on our doorstep.

Read the following articles to learn more on the topic:

The Harbingers of Change Can Now Be Seen All Around the World! Mysterious Noctilucent Clouds Brighten Up Night Skies
Are Ice Crystals Really to Blame? US: Halo Appears Around The Sun Over The Central Savannah River Area
Another spiral formation points to Earth's changing atmosphere
Chemtrails? Contrails? Strange Skies


Bizarro Earth

Chile: World's driest desert hit by snow, rain - the Ice Age Cometh?

Chile's Atacama was hit by four years' worth of rain in one day in July

This has been the wettest winter in decades for Chile's arid northern desert, where fractions of an inch of rain have done major damage in some areas and set the stage for spectacular floral displays in the weeks to come.

July came and went with major storms that together dumped more than five times the annual average of rain and snow on parts of the world's driest desert.


The past weekend's precipitation blocked highways, forced the cancellation of a top Chilean football match and damaged the homes of 1,800 people, said Vicente Nunez, chief of the Interior Ministry's national emergency office.

A similarly wet stretch in early July dumped four years' worth of rain in one day on coastal Antofogasta.

Cloud Lightning

Extreme weather causes chaos in South Africa

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© Mitchell KrogA massive swirling and circulating electrical storm cell rolls across the South African landscape and packs some massive lightning strikes along with it. This weather phenomenon is a common sight in the Highveld region of South Africa during the summer rain months.
Extreme weather conditions this week left a trail of chaos and confusion with snowfalls in three South African provinces leaving thousands trapped in their homes, cars and buses as emergency workers battled to reach them.

Major roads were shut in the Eastern Cape, Free State and KwaZulu-Natal after blizzards hit. It took emergency services more than six hours to clear through kilometres of snow and heavy wind to rescue trapped motorists and commuters. Netcare 911 spokesman Chris Botha said no serious injuries were reported.

The 5 South African Infantry Battalion of the defence forces was called in to assist motorists and three SANDF tankers provided water to the Masilonyana Municipality after service delivery failed.

Igloo

Ice Age Threat Should Freeze EPA Global Warming Regs

ice
© n/a
Rather than spiraling into a global warming meltdown, we may be heading into the next ice age.

The U.S. National Solar Observatory, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and astrophysicists across the planet report that the nearly all-time low sunspot activity may result in a sustained cooling period on Earth.

The news has sent global warming theory advocates scrambling to discount and explain away the impact on global temperatures. However, the "news" is not really that new.

Many reputable scientists have been warning for decades that we are nearing the end of the 11,500-year average period between ice ages. And the last similar crash in sunspot activity coincided with the so-called "Little Ice Age" in the 1600s that lasted nearly a century.

Igloo

Prehistoric Dog Domestication Derailed by Ice Age

Siberian
© Getty ImagesThe 33,000-year-old remains of an animal in Siberia suggest it was partly domesticated. Its bones suggest it resembled the modern Samoyed dog, shown here.

Some dogs were domesticated by at least 33,000 years ago, but these canines did not generate descendants that survived past the Ice Age, suggests a new PLoS ONE study.

The theory, based on analysis of a 33,000-year-old animal that may have been a partly domesticated dog, explains why the remains of possible prehistoric dogs date to such early periods, and yet all modern dogs appear to be descended from ancestors that lived at the end of the Ice Age 17,000-14,000 years ago.

The ancient animal identified as being a partly domesticated dog was found in Razboinichya Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia.

"The Razboinichya dog find demonstrates that the right wolf/human conditions suitable for getting domestication started were present at least 33,000 years ago," co-author Susan Crockford told Discovery News. "However, such conditions would have had to be present continuously -- stable -- for many wolf generations, perhaps 20 over about 40 years for the domestication process to generate a true dog."

"It appears that such stable conditions were not present until after the Ice Age, sometime after 19,000 years ago," added Crockford, a researcher at Pacific Identifications Inc. and author of the book Rhythms of Life. "Even after the Ice Age, domestication of wolves could have got started at several different times and places, and still failed because the conditions were not continuous enough for the changes to become permanent."

Snowman

U.K.: ATS Euromaster: Motorists Urged to Prepare as Forecaster Predicts the Worst Winter on Record

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© Time.com
ATS Euromaster is urging motorists to pre-order cold weather tyres after a meteorologist predicted this winter will "break all records" in terms of snowfall and freezing temperatures.

Specialist long-range forecaster James Madden, of Exacta Weather, correctly predicted the harsh conditions experienced over the last two years and gave his forecast to ATS Euromaster as it prepares to fit cold weather tyres in the UK for the second year running.

He warns: "The UK is to brace itself for well below average temperatures and widespread heavy snowfall throughout winter 2011/2012 which will result in the fourth bad winter in succession, and will prove to be the worst of them all.

Sun

SOTT Focus: Connecting the Dots: Cosmic Changes, Planetary Instability and Extreme Weather

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© NASA / SDOThe Solar Dynamics Observatory's view of the coronal mass ejection of June 7, 2011.
With Earth Changes now clearly happening and time pressing, the editors of Sott.net are faced with the urgency of catching up with an avalanche of significant news items and trying to make sense of things! Recent weather events have been unprecedented: both spring and early summer have been bizarre across the globe, to say the least.

You name the weather or geological type of phenomenon; someone in the world had it: volcanoes, earthquakes, torrential rain, floods, sinkholes, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires ... even summertime snow! Let's review them all as best as we can, starting from the top: the cosmic factor.

Solar Activity
© Mike BormanImage Taken: Jun 4, 2011
Location: Evansville, Indiana, USA
Cosmic Changes Are Under Way

Changes on planet Earth comprise such a wide variety of phenomena, from extreme weather anomalies to volcanoes and earthquakes, so perhaps it's a good idea to zoom back and see if we can make sense of any changes in the cosmic climate that may be affecting us. Yes, we are aware that this approach goes against the sanctioned narrative claiming that these changes are caused by carbon-burning human beings living in an isolated bubble that can only grow warmer. But the pieces of the puzzle on the table point to a different, larger picture.

A huge central piece is our sun, which is not surprising, since this ongoing explosion in space is what brings order to our corner of the universe and to life to Earth. For the last couple of years the sun was expected to go into high activity in accordance with its usual 11-year sunspot cycle. But scientists were left scratching their heads as our local star remained quiet. Now it's giving off such a display of flares that it has NASA scientists going 'ooh and ahh'.