Place Your Bets An old Mystic once told me that, Life is a cryptic crossword, clues about the present

and future are concealed in the past. His words came into my mind during the recent rains, as I watched politicians of all hues turning Green, paddling about in floodwater and promising to mend it all with a forest of windmills and Green taxes. Has anything on this scale happened before? I wondered. If so, when and where? What caused it and what were the consequences? And does any of that have any relevance today? A bit of simple research produced some interesting answers. During a period lasting from around 950 to 1350 AD the world went through a bout of global warming, known as the Medieval Warm Period. This warming coincided with increased activity on the sun that produced temperatures on earth that were on a par with those experienced in recent years. So warm, in fact, that the Vikings were able to explore and colonise the far reaches of the North Atlantic and establish farming communities in Greenland that were a going concern for nearly 500 years. At the same time, Europe enjoyed bountiful harvests and fine summers. These easy years resulted in a population explosion. As this warm phase ended, the world went through nearly 400 years of global cooling. This cold phase culminated in the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1645 to 1715 AD, when the winter weather turned rivers like the Seine and Thames into ice-skating rinks. This era of global cooling goes by the name of Maunder Minimum a time when sunspots were few and far between. The years from 1310 onwards saw marked changes in weather patterns as the Medieval Warm Period began to collapse. There were storms in early autumn, and a series of cooler and wetter summers had an adverse affect on agriculture. The weather was worsening all the time; 1312 and 1313 were particularly bad in Germany. Heavy rain hit England in June 1314, wrecking the grain harvest and causing a famine. Then, in the spring of 1315, the continuous rain was especially heavy and made it impossible to plough the fields. The few seeds that people did sow began to rot before they could germinate. The rain went endlessly on throughout the summer. By now, right across Northern Europe and the UK, the winters were longer and the summers cooler and wetter. The Baltic Sea froze; fisherman couldnt sail and merchant ships couldnt bring in much needed supplies. Salt, which was the only way to preserve fish and meat, was in short supply because the wet conditions prevented the evaporation process by which they obtained salt. As crops failed, there was a scarcity of straw and hay for the animals. Wheat prices rose by 300%. The Great Famine really began to bite in 1315 when it wiped out a quarter of Europes inhabitants. Life expectancy fell to 30-35 years. The harsh winters were not only hard on people, trees and animals, but also on buildings and bridges as ice floes battered the foundations. Builders and thatchers had no turf or straw for roofs. Quarries flooded, so there was a shortage of stone. Watermills flooded. Snow in winter, and

deep mud in the wet summers, made roads impassable. Rain washed away topsoil and flooding was everywhere. And so it went on: Normandy saw terrible windstorms in 1319. Flanders flooded in 1320. It took until 1322 to restore some kind of normality. Even then, everything went downhill towards the Little Ice Age. Adversity never comes alone. There were side effects, like extremely high levels of crime when the weather deprived people of lifes necessities. There were epidemics of disease and pneumonia. There was infanticide and parents abandoned their children. Some older people starved themselves to death so that the younger ones could have their food. There were tales of cannibalism the story of Hansel and Gretel has its origins in this period. Then, as now, people looked for scapegoats. Who, or what, was to blame for the bad weather? This was before the days of motor cars and gay marriage, so it wasnt CO2 or the Governments fault. The unknown author of Vita Edwardi Secundi, written in 1326, blamed it on the wickedness of the English people who were too proud and crafty. But, in most peoples minds, the church was responsible. In those days, that meant the Catholic Church. People turned to the church for help, but the clergy were powerless against the weather. Prayer didnt work. For the first time, people began to question the power of the Pope. Although nothing happened immediately, the tide of discontent began to flow. This paved the way for the birth of Lutheran Protestantism in 1529. So, how is all this relevant to todays world? Well, it boils down to cause and effect. Remember that, in medieval times, there was a period of global warming, followed by a period of cooling and a Little Ice Age. These different phases depended upon the amount or lack of solar activity. And, for a short period during the transition from one state to the other, there was a period of unsettled and unpredictable weather. Bearing that in mind, we can compare conditions as they are now with those of the medieval years. The current solar maximum has run from 1900 to the present day, accompanied by the well-documented rise in global temperature. This mirrors events in the Medieval Warm Period. But now, scientists have observed that solar activity is on the decline. As solar activity decreases, we can, by the laws of probability, expect colder winters to become the norm in the UK and Europe as they were in the Maunder Minimum. If the predictions are correct, we are now going through the transition from a warm period to a cold period. And, by coincidence, we are going through the wettest winter since records began. This is similar to what happened in medieval times. Keeping to the available facts in November 2013, scientists at CERN said that, If the current lull in solar activity continues until 2015 it could bring about conditions similar to the Maunder Minimum that caused the 17th Century Little Ice Age. In 2000, two scientists, Perry and Hsy, both predicted a gradual cooling over the coming centuries that could bring about a Little Ice Age. Experts at NASA have observed that Mars has experienced a period of Global Warming over the same period as we experienced it on earth. At

the same time a Russian solar physicist, Habibullo Abdussamatov, based at St Petersburg Astronomical Observatory, one of the worlds bestequipped observatories, came to the same conclusion. Habibullo Abdussamatov says: "Mars has global warming, but without greenhouse gases and without the participation of Martians. These parallel global warmings, observed simultaneously on Mars and Earth, can only be a straight-line consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance... The sun's increased irradiance over the last century, not C02 emissions, is responsible for the global warming we are seeing... and this solar irradiance explains the great volume of C02 emissions... It is no secret that increased solar irradiance warms the Earth's oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations." Habibullo Abdussamatov has even more to say on the subject: "Ascribing the 'greenhouse' effect to the Earth's atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated," he says. "Heated greenhouse gases, which become lighter as a result of expansion, ascend to the atmosphere and give the absorbed heat away." Abdussamatov goes on to say that, The cooling that is now occurring in the upper layers of the world's oceans demonstrates that the Earth has hit its temperature ceiling. Solar irradiance has begun to fall, ushering-in a protracted cooling period beginning in the years 2012 to 2015. The deepest depth of the decline in solar irradiance reaching Earth will occur around 2040, and will inevitably lead to a deep freeze around 2055-60, lasting some 50 years, after which temperatures will go up again. So where does all this leave us the punters? Politicians want to be seen as good fairies with magic wands in times of crisis... So they tell us the present flooding in the UK is due to global warming and, somehow, it can be cured if the willing European countries, unilaterally, cut back on CO2 emissions and, inevitably, pay higher Green taxes. Well maybe. But many eminent scientific bodies tell us that we are heading into a period of global cooling and that, for the next century, the problem is ice, not heat. History, and nature, tells us that this has all happened before and, no matter what politicians, scientists and the clergy do, it will all happen again. The horses are at the post. Place your bets.

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Bibliography http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01092421#page-2 National Climatic Data Centerhttp://www.canada.com/news/index.html

http://chrono.qub.ac.uk/blaauw/cds.html http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/dec/HQ_03415_ice_age.htm Lectures in Medieval History http://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/black_death.html http://geochemistry.usask.ca/bill/Courses/Climate/The%20Great%20Fam ine_prt.pdf http://europeanhistory.boisestate.edu/latemiddleages/demography/

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-great-famine-1315-1317

Wikipedia, http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/great-famine-of-1315-vs-thesun/