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Day: February 14, 2015

Flashback: Historians: Cold Weather Caused the Salem Witch Trials – People looked for scapegoats to blame crop failure on

The theory, first laid out by the economist Emily Oster in her senior thesis at Harvard University eight years ago, holds that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400- year period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the “little ice age.”Oster, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, showed that as the climate varied from year to year during this cold period, lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations.

The correlation may not be surprising, Oster argued, in light of textual evidence from the period: popes and scholars alike clearly believed witches were capable of controlling the weather, and therefore, crippling food production.

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The Salem witch trials fell within an extreme cold spell that lasted from 1680 and 1730 — one of the chilliest segments of the little ice age. The notion that weather may have instigated those trials is being revived by Salem State University historian Tad Baker in his forthcoming book, “A Storm of Witchcraft” (Oxford University Press, 2013). Building on Oster’s thesis, Baker has found clues in diaries and sermons that suggest a harsh New England winter really may have set the stage for accusations of witchcraft.

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Weather patterns continue to trigger witchcraft accusations in many parts of Africa, where witch killings persist. According to a 2003 analysis by the Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, extreme rainfall — either too much or too little — coincides with a significant increase in the number of witch killings in Tanzania. The victim is typically the oldest woman in a household, killed by her own family.

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No, Global Warming Doesn’t Lead to More Snow in Boston

No, Global Warming Doesn’t Lead to More Snow in Boston

http://www.cato.org/blog/no-global-warming-doesnt-lead-more-snow-boston

Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.” — As the snow keeps piling up in Boston, so does the climate change nonsense. Never letting a good weather story go to waste, our nation’s scribes are in high dudgeon that global warming is causing the serial burial of Boston. We discussed the illogic (or at least the selective reasoning) behind the global-warming-made-this-snowstorm-worse excuses forwarded during the first big nor’easter to wallop the area (back on January 27th), and now, after the third big event (with likely more to come!) the din is deafening. Just today there are major stories in USA Today and the Washington Post strongly suggesting that global warming enhances snowfall in New England. Perhaps we can test this hypothesis, glibly hiding as a fact. Back in the late 1990s, we were involved in a research project investigating the relationship between winter temperature and winter snowfall across Canada. Our results were published in the peer-reviewed Journal Geophysical Research back in 1999. We weren’t investigating the meteorology of any one specific storm, but rather the climatology (i.e., the general relationship) of temperature and snowfall, looking to see if there were really places that were “too cold to snow” and whether a warming climate might result in more snowfall, or precisely what is being presented as fact today. Here is the context of our investigations: If one accepts the projections of most climate models that future temperatures will increase in winter in the middle and high latitudes [Houghton et al., 1996], the higher temperatures could have two different impacts on the liquid water equivalent of snowfall: (1) Total snowfall could increase with increasing air temperature since the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship dictates that saturation vapor pressure increases exponentially as a function of temperature, thereby allowing for the possibility of a more moist atmosphere, or (2) total snowfall could decrease with increasing air temperature as warmer conditions would increase the amount of precipitation that falls as rain (or mixed precipitation) relative to snow. Note that the global warming press as of late only focuses on possibility number 1. Except during …

New paper debunked: Claims AGW pushed the ‘Western US toward the driest period in 1,000 years’

New paper claims AGW pushed the “Western US toward the driest period in 1,000 years”

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/02/new-paper-claims-agw-pushed-western-us.html

A modeling study published in Science Advances claims global warming has pushed the “Western US toward the driest period in 1,000 years” and “the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains will face persistent drought worse than anything seen in times ancient or modern, with the drying conditions “driven primarily” by human-induced global warming.” However, the tree-ring proxy data in the paper shows that at the end of the record in ~2002, soil moisture of the central plains was considerably above the average of the past millennium, and peaked around ~1930, a relatively warm period in the US. The proxy record also shows many periods of drought during the Little Ice Age and that the 20th century was relatively wet period in comparison to the past millennium. For the US Southwest, the proxy data also shows a soil moisture peak around ~1930. If warming is a cause of decreased soil moisture as the paper claims, the proxy data would be expected to show the opposite pattern to that observed. Although the end of the Southwest proxy record in ~2002, conditions were relatively dry, but not as dry as at least 3 other periods during the Little Ice Age. Many other paleoclimate studies have found both droughts and floods were more common during the Little Ice Age in comparison to the 20th century. Thus, the claim that AGW has “pushed the Western US toward the driest period in 1,000 years” is not supported by the proxy data shown in the paper. In addition, the modeling claim that AGW will cause “unprecedented risk of drought in the 21st century” is entirely based upon overheated climate models which have been falsified at confidence levels exceeding 98%. As shown below, the models did not reproduce the peaks in soil moisture around ~1930 or the peak around ~2000 in the central plains, further evidence that the modeling assumptions are incorrect and the claim of unprecedented drought not supported by observations. Warming pushes Western US toward driest period in 1,000 years: Unprecedented Risk of Drought in 21st Century Date: February 12, 2015 Summary: During the second half of the 21st century, the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains will face persistent drought worse than anything seen in times ancient or modern, with the drying conditions “driven primarily” by human-induced global warming, a new …

Claim: ‘A Look At The Utopian Minds Of Environmentalists Shows Derangement, Confusion And Reality-Disconnect’

A Look At The Utopian Minds Of Environmentalists Shows Derangement, Confusion And Reality-Disconnect

http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/13/a-look-at-the-utopian-minds-of-environmentalists-shows-derangement-confusion-and-reality-disconnect/

Roger Lewis of the UK online Spectator presents a highly interesting portrait of environmentalist, doomsday-believer Dylan Evans and his Utopia Experiment. Lewis concludes from it: “Designs for living always end in tears, or worse.” So disconnected from reality was Evans, and academic, that he believed he could actually make himself a better life departing the comforts of the modern age and getting back to the natural beauty of raw survival with other like-minded persons – in the raw climate of northern Scotland of all places. Strangely Evans selected a site that he thought would allow the generation of electric power to accompany his natural living. Some excerpts on how his “Experiment” turned out: Evans admits that his utopia was doomed to failure. It attracted only idealists and disaffected romantics when what was needed were people with practical skills… […] …the small group began to disintegrate. One member even started to invent his own religion, building a shrine. […] He himself was soon fed up with sleeping under rancid fleece blankets … the sanitary arrangements were grotesque. […] It soon became apparent that ‘the whole experiment had been a huge mistake’. […] Evans was eventually detained under the Mental Health Act in a maximum security psychiatric hospital. […] He fretted unduly about global warming and ‘the looming energy crisis’… Evans, the doctors concluded, was already craving the abyss and in the throes of panic-attacks and a breakdown.” If the story of Evans tells us anything, it is that it vividly illustrates how far out to lunch academics in the ivory towers can sometimes become. Why on earth would policymakers ever listen to their loony utopian ideas to begin with? Evans just proved that its all lunacy. Evans and the loads of past academics show that their radical formulae for rendering utopian life are pure delusions of deranged minds. Yet these are precisely the minds behind the doomsday global warming scenarios, and the advocacy of a carbon-free utopia. The proof that these minds are deranged is the fact that none, except for Evans for a brief time, are willing to give up the carbon life themselves. Man was destined to escape nature, and not to stay at its mercy. Finally one cannot help but notice the contempt loony academics and pseudo-intellectual journalists hold for humans. Lewis writes; It’s …

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