Pre Ice Age Asset Consolodation, Tickets Now on Sale

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Port Phillip Bay from the Challenger Space Shuttle.
Credit: Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/00current.htm
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The 'Little Ice Age' on Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay
May 04, 2011

Imagine the yachts of Mornington harbour locked up in meters of thick ice.
Picture our pride and joy, maxi yacht Wild Thing, with its tackle caked in icicles and skipper Grant Warrington clad in fur skins. Imagine yourself down at the Portsea headlands, looking across at the ice blocking the passage of massive container ships trying to get into the once thriving Melbourne Docklands.

'Impossible!' you say, but research has shown that just such a scenario probably occurred in Victoria and only a few short centuries ago. What happened?

The 'Little Ice Age' period is a scientific reconstruction that includes the time from 1300 AD to approximately 1820 AD when there was a dramatic and erratic climate deterioration. The Little Ice Age is classified into four periods: the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder, and Dalton Minima respectively. They were interspaced with relatively stable periods before. These deteriorations were not only cooler and wetter on average but vastly more erratic.

Such erratic climate extremes are prime ingredients for famine, plague, and the abandonment of human settlements. They followed a period known as the 'Medieval warm maximum', which lasted from 900 AD to around 1300 AD That time was much hotter than the present. It was a prosperous era that saw t

 

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-80's: Maximum historical advances by glaciers in eastern Alps. Noticeable decline of human population by this time in areas close to glaciers, whereas population elsewhere in Europe had risen.
1695-1709: Iceland glaciers advance dramatically, destroying farms.
1710-1735: A glacier in Norway was advancing at a rate of 100 m per year for 25 years.
1748-50: Norwegian glaciers achieved their historical maximum LIA positions.
Further to this we must include anecdotal but legitimate evidence regarding ice formation throughout. An example is the world phenomena of ice fares such as the ones on the Thames that only ended in 1815(2). It has become fashionable to dismiss this particular event as only occurring because the Thames was more sluggish but water still freezes over at zero degrees Celsius. And the Thames seems too large a river to change significantly. More telling however is the formation of Ice in the English Channel in salt water which requires even lower temperatures to freeze. In 1684 AD the coast of the English Channel had a six kilometre belt of ice around it.(3) This is a true indication of bitter cold only experienced today in truly arctic locations. Another more scientific witness is the nautical log books of the British navy and the East India Company(4). These go well back into the early seventeenth century. These are a wealth of knowledge of temperatures, violent storms, barometric pressure. More they scale the world as they record for instance Cook's Antarctic exploration in the mid eighteenth century and Darwin's trips to the America's. They faithfully reproduce the exigencies of the Little Ice Age both in Europe and the rest of the world. It was there were typically rapid fluctuations in temperature and precipitation. Extremely cold and wet periods were followed by excessively hot years. Following the growth years of the medieval warm period there was global massive depopulation with the available food supplies unable to feed the excessive population.(5) This was a global event with larger impacts in particular areas.





The Little Ice Age 1280-1850 A.D. The Mega famines of the Little Ice Age - Part 1
Little Ice Age, IPCC and scientists' objections - Part 2
The Erratic climate changes of the Little Ice Age - Part 3
The Little Ice Age and Coronal Mass Ejections - Part 4


Other parts of the world during the Little Ice Age
In North America forests reacted to the extrem