Saturday, December 31, 2005

The Little Ice Age and the Industrial Revolution

I haven't done the research yet to make this a post on SHWI, but I am going to be headed that way eventually.

I wonder if you could do a little bit of research of plotting the roll out and adoption of the Industrial REvolution and ole Watts' toys vs the ending of the Little Ice Age. After all, that's when you start wholesale burning of coal, iirc, and that would introduce a whole lotta CO2 to the atmosphere. The timing looks very interesting and would have some baring on the current semi debate about the Global Warming. Indeed, it would push back the start some time ago.

Why do I call it a semi debate? There are zilch climatologists that believe its not happening. At this point, its a belief of how much and what's causing it. A little bit of historical evidence would help like doing the plots here. Yet, it'd hardly end it because there are some people just in denial, frankly.

One of those happens to be an SF writer that likes to mock climatologists. He likes to trot out that the American Revolutionaries counting on certain rivers freezing to pull their cannons across to make use on them on the poor, unsuspecting red coated targets and that there has been a steady warming trend during the 19th century.

Buda-boom. That's just it. The Industrial Revolution started about then. The Little Ice Age ended about 50 years afterwards. The warming trend continued rather unabated and as more sources of CO2 and other green house gases were introduced through more of the world's population being able to afford a CO2 mass producer of some sort, the fact that what we call Global Warming is nada more than an ramping up of a preexisting impact humanity was already having on the environment when there were fewer nations/peoples/whatever witht he coinage to afford the impacting technology.

So I guess you'd have to do a plot of global wealth, the number of CO2 sources, and the global temperatures during the desired time frames to make this even remotely plausible. It'd be a white paper at best, a BOE most likely, and just a thought at worst. However, it doe sseem worthwhile to do.

So, the SHWI tie in is this: No IR means a continued LIA? heh.


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