About 1000AD, the ice along the arctic coast melted so fast that the Inuit, who had dog sled technology, were able to follow whales which moved north and it only took the Inuit about 100-200 years to get from the west coast of Alaska clear to Greenland, replacing the more sedentary Dorset as they went. Then the ice closed in again, but the Inuit were established. At that same time, the Norsk were settling Iceland and Greenland, but had to abandon Greenland when the climate chilled down.

The thing is, we don’t know what to expect, but we have built a very complex society based on an expectation of continuance of the norm. Living in the Far North requires one to adapt to the most extreme changes on a yearly basis. In the old days it meant adapt or die. Now it means adapt or fly away to somewhere more clement. But up here we realize that climate change may mean more extremes in every direction, not just ‘global warming’. THAT is what people should prepare for.

And arctic ice ‘rebound’ is first-year ice, thin and easily melted, unlike the thick, dense multi-year ice which disappeared so dramatically in 2007. I think this melting is being driven by suboceanic magma flow myself.

Part I of Chapter IX: The State of Germany till the Invasion of the Barbarians, in the Time of the Emperor Decius of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon originally published in 1776:

Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was much colder formerly than it is at present; and the most ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm their theory. The general complaints of intense frost and eternal winter, are perhaps little to be regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the accurate standard of the thermometer, the feelings, or the expressions, of an orator born in the happier regions of Greece or Asia. But I shall select two remarkable circumstances of a less equivocal nature. 1. The great rivers which covered the Roman provinces, the Rhine and the Danube, were frequently frozen over, and capable of supporting the most enormous weights. The barbarians, who often chose that severe season for their inroads, transported, without apprehension or danger, their numerous armies, their cavalry, and their heavy wagons, over a vast and solid bridge of ice. Modern ages have not presented an instance of a like phenomenon. 2. The reindeer, that useful animal, from whom the savage of the North derives the best comforts of his dreary life, is of a constitution that supports, and even requires, the most intense cold. He is found on the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the Pole; he seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia: but at present he cannot subsist, much less multiply, in any country to the south of the Baltic. In the time of Cæsar the reindeer, as well as the elk and the wild bull, was a native of the Hercynian forest, which then overshadowed a great part of Germany and Poland. The modern improvements sufficiently explain the causes of the diminution of the cold. These immense woods have been gradually cleared, which intercepted from the earth the rays of the sun. The morasses have been drained, and, in proportion as the soil has been cultivated, the air has become more temperate. Canada, at this day, is an exact picture of ancient Germany. Although situated in the same parallel with the finest provinces of France and England, that country experiences the most rigorous cold. The reindeer are very numerous, the ground is covered with deep and lasting snow, and the great river of St. Lawrence is regularly frozen, in a season when the waters of the Seine and the Thames are usually free from ice.

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His land use change theory has similarities to more contemporary science like Roger Pielke Sr. e.g.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/286/5446/1934

“Surface and satellite-based observations show a decrease in Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent during the past 46 years.”

Isn’t it interesting that Tamino claims NH sea ice has been declining since 1965 … and this paper says NH Sea Ice has been declining since 1933.

I guess AGW works better if you don’t point
You know … if Tamino said the sky was blue, I would check.

An alternative point of view:

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/10/30/arctic-sea-ice-another-hockey-stick/

“But, despite these shortcomings, it is interesting to note that the Russian reconstruction includes a far greater degree of interdecadal variation, including a large decline from 1900 to the 1940s, a recovery from the 1940s into the late 1960s (quite possibly underestimated due to insufficient data during the early part of this period), and a then a subsequent decline to the present.”

I did a quick search and did not see the following mentioned here? I found it quite interesting and I apologize if it is a repeat.

Dr. Gerhard Loebert:
A Compilation of the Arguments that Irrefutably Prove that Climate Change is driven by Solar Activity and not by CO2 Emission

Dr. Gerhard Loebert, Otterweg 48, 85598 Baldham, Germany. March 6, 2008.
Physicist. Recipient of The Needle of Honor of German Aeronautics.
Program Manager “CCV, F 104G” (see Internet).
Program Manager “Lampyridae, MRMF” (see Internet)
Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.

I. Climatological facts

As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.

1. In the temperature trace of the past 10 000 years based on glaciological evidence, the recent decades have not displayed any anomalous behaviour. In two-thirds of these 10 000 years, the mean temperature was even higher than today. Shortly before the last ice age the temperature in Greenland even increased by 15 degrees C in only 20 years. All of this without any man-made CO2 emission!

2. There is no direct connection between CO2 emission and climate warming. This is shown by the fact that these two physical quantities have displayed an entirely different temporal behaviour in the past 150 years. Whereas the mean global temperature varied in a quasi-periodic manner, with a mean period of 70 years, the CO2 concentration has been increasing exponentially since the 1950’s. The sea level has been rising and the glaciers have been shortening practically linearly from 1850 onwards. Neither time trace showed any reaction to the sudden increase of hydrocarbon burning from the 1950’s onwards.

3. The hypothesis that the global warming of the past decades is man-made is based on the results of calculations with climate models in which the main influence on climate is not included. The most important climate driver (besides solar luminosity) comes from the interplay of solar activity, interplanetary magnetic field strength, cosmic radiation intensity, and cloud cover of the Earth atmosphere. As is shown in Section II, this phenomenon is generated by the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the core of the Sun.

4. The extremely close correlation between the changes in the mean global temperature and the small changes in the rotational velocity of the Earth in the past 150 years (see Fig. 2.2 of http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e03.htm), which has been ignored by the mainstream climatologists, leaves little room for a human influence on climate. This close correlation results from the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the Sun and on the Earth (see Section II). Note that temperature lags rotation by 6 years.

5. From the steady decrease of the rotational velocity of the Earth that set in in Dec. 2003, it can reliably be concluded that the mean Earth temperature will decrease again in 2010 for the duration of three decades as it did from 1872 to 1913 and from 1942 to 1972.

6. The RSS AMSU satellite measurements show that the global temperature has not increased since 2001 despite the enormous worldwide CO2 emissions. Since 2006 it has been decreasing again.

II. Physical explanation for the strong correlation between fluctuations of the rotational velocity and changes of the mean surface temperature of the Earth

Despite its great successes, the gravitational theory of the great physicist Albert Einstein, General Relativity, (which is of a purely geometric nature and is totally incompatible with the highly successful quantum theory) must be discarded because this theory is completely irreconcilable with the extremely large energy density of the vacuum that has been accurately measured in the Casimir experiment.

Seaon Theory, a new theory of gravitation based on quantum mechanics that was developed eight decades after General Relativity, not only covers the well-known Einstein-effects but also shows up half a dozen post-Einstein effects that occur in nature. From a humanitarian standpoint, the most important super-Einsteinian physical phenomenon is the generation of small-amplitude longitudinal gravitational waves by the motion of the supermassive bodies located at the center of our galaxy, their transmission throughout the Galaxy, and the action of these waves on the Sun, the Earth and the other celestial bodies through which they pass. These vacuum density waves, which carry with them small changes in the electromagnetic properties of the vacuum, occur in an extremely large period range from minutes to millennia.

On the Sun, these vacuum waves modulate the intensity of the thermonuclear energy conversion process within the core, and this has its effect on all physical quantities of the Sun (this is called solar activity). This in turn has its influences on the Earth and the other planets. In particular, the solar wind and the solar magnetic field strength are modulated which results in large changes in the intensity of the cosmic radiation reaching the Earth. Cosmic rays produce condensation nuclei so that the cloud cover of the atmosphere and the Earth albedo also change.

On the Earth, the steady stream of vacuum density waves produces parts-per-billion changes in a large number of geophysical quantities. The most important quantities are the radius, circumference, rotational velocity, gravitational acceleration, VLBI baseline lengths, and axis orientation angles of the Earth, as well as the orbital elements of all low-earth-orbit satellites. All of these fluctuations have been measured.

Irrefutable evidence for the existence of this new, super-Einsteinian wave type is provided by the extremely close correlation between changes of the mean temperature and fluctuations of the mean rotational velocity of the Earth. (see the figure referred to in Section I.4). Einsteinian theory cannot explain this amazing correlation between two physical quantities that seem to be completely unrelated.

While the rotational velocity of the Earth and the thermonuclear energy conversion process on the Sun react simultaneously to the passage of a vacuum density wave, a time span of 6 years is needed for the energy to be transported from the core of the Sun to the Earth’s atmosphere and for the latter’s reaction time.

As can be seen, super-Einsteinian gravitation reveals the true cause of climate change.

REPLY: It is the music of the spheres, interconected.

REPLY: That is true.