It’s all nice and warm, isn’t it? Heated debates at Copenhagen’s climate conference. Burning torches ready for climate scientists. And all critics are to be burned at the stake next week, latest. Blogs firing evidence and counter-evidence at each other.
Well, in any case, two things are certain.
On average, the temperature has gone up in the last century. About time, as the so-called little ice age (say 1600-1800) was kinda cold. All those Dutch painters from that period with their winter paintings… Yep, it was colder then. Drawback: we haven’t had a proper winter that could compare with those paintings in a while.
The current average temperature isn’t world-shaking. Before the so-called little ice age, there was the so-called medieval warm period. Warmer than now. Those Inuit currently freezing their asses off on Greenland? There were Vikings there in the middle ages. Doing agriculture. Can’t very well do that on frozen ice, can you? Some Viking graves are apparently still buried in the permafrost: that used to be easy-to-dig-in unfrozen ground.
For some fun, look at some graphs about raw unadjusted ice core temperatures. It throws your perspective off with every graph. I enjoyed it.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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