The sea rose 10.8 feet? How could that have happened? Maybe it's already obvious to you, but I didn't have a clue — because of the way this is written — until the 10th paragraph. The first 9 paragraphs say speak in terms of the sea level rising — which I presume is intended to resonate with today's fears of climate change. To collect all the references in a compact block of elided text:
... a new study points to a key factor that may have prompted Vikings to flee their settlements: rising seas and subsequent flooding. The waters around some settlements may have risen by more than 10 feet over four centuries. “The Vikings were experiencing pervasive sea level rise... now we have a better understanding of the impact sea level change had on their society.” Sea level rise has previously been considered... nearby ocean rose by a few feet during their centuries of occupation.... But the new study pinpoints the extent of sea level rise more concretely.... advanced sea level models... up to 10.8 feet (3.3 meters) of sea level rise... about two to six times the rate of the 20th-century average.... “They’re stuck in these little places... and they’re losing them because the sea is rising on them.” ... evidence of the rising seas....
I was entirely puzzled because if the sea rose so much back then, wouldn't there have been extreme effects all over the world? And where could all that water have come from? It doesn't seem possible. What was I missing? Finally, in paragraph 10:
[T]he Greenland ice sheet near the Vikings was changing, and their land was sinking under the weight of the ice....
The land was sinking! All that talk of the seas rising, rising, rising, and that was how it subjectively appeared, but the land was sinking.
[T]he southern Greenland ice sheet advanced and grew larger [during the climatic shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age]. Cooler temperatures and the development of ice would intuitively suggest that sea levels would decrease... the opposite happened. Think of Earth as a very, very slow air mattress.... When you sit in one spot, the mattress sinks near you and bulges elsewhere. In this case, added ice on the surface caused the land near the ice to sink....
There was also some localized rising of the sea, according to this study, caused by gravity from the ice sheet.
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75 comments:
Runestruck (Calvin Trillin) says the Vikings left because of chronic huge potholes on all the roads.
But 99% of the WaPo readers won’t read that piece as carefully as Ann and they will conclude the sea did rise.
This is another example of the Fake News feeding the CAGW scam.
The Cult of Net Zero.
??!! Did Viking also know Earth Is Flat ??!!
I don’ think they left Greenland. No trees means no boats. The Medieval warm period ended and they died.
Obviously, we are to blame misinterpreting the environmental alarmists' pronouncements. They would never intentionally misrepresent the facts.
I blogged on climate change years ago, and I try not to spend too much time on it now. But: educated people make at least one simple and brutal mistake. If oceans rise to the naķed eye/daily experience, is this water rising or land subsiding? If the former, possibly higher Temps, but as this article reluctantly admits, more ice can mean subsiding land. Otherwise subsiding land results from massive geological forces. Might cause climate change, but not the result of man-made CO2. How stupid would Gore and the gang have to be?
The important part is what they did. They left to go somewhere else. Todays climate crazies think people are going to stay in place and drown over the course of 50 years.
guess what?
everything (Every Thing) pretended to be 'science' is just political propganda
Lol - shameless journalism.
One of the reasons I can't buy into climate change as the existential threat that humans have control over changing is because of all the nature specials I have watched over the years. This planet of ours has gone through incredible changes over its four and a half billion years of existing. Land masses and oceans shifting. rising and falling, glaciers forming, moving and melting . It's all pretty incredible. Why is the planet now "finished" and we puny humans must contort our lifestyles to try to maintain the status of now. It's all very foolish since our recognizable form of Homo sapiens is only a couple hundred thousand years old.
Burning fossil fuels causes the land to sink, too. AGW... the science is settled.
Narrative is selective. Diction, ditto. Words matter. Synonyms aren't.
I watched those cow brush videos which led to the letting the cows out after six months video but couldn’t figure out why British farmers had to pen their livestock all the time. Turns out they’d sink in the soft ground. Sounds like Vikings sink, too…
The Viking abandonment occurred during the climatic shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age
…due, of course, to civilization’s abandonment of SUV’S in favor of bicycles
It's the WaPo, and you were expecting accuracy?
So the article is like a magic act. 20 minutes of show, and the last two minutes the trick.
This article will be linked millions of times to prove ACGW
Subsidence (and rebound) is a well-known phenomenon in geology. The Greenland ice sheet is several million gigatons and over the millennia it has smushed the center of Greenland way down. Ditto Antarctica, which is ten times more ice. Subsidence is a big deal along the Maryland shore, New Orleans area and a very very big deal in Indonesia where IIRC Jakarta is sinking several meters a year.
Not only does this article make much ado over old news (subsidence), it carefully avoids talking about the real story: this “sea level rise” did not depend on rising CO2. Something else —something not done by humans— made the seas rise, and far more than Al Gore’s wildest wet dream could suggest.
If past (massive) sea level rise cannot be explained by human activity, why are we so sure the current (minuscule) changes are our doing?
Mankind can only hope that anthropogenic is global warming is actually real. It may just buy us a little more time. When the current interglacial period ends, and it will indeed end, our planet will become far more inhospitable than it is today. When that happens, there simply won't be enough comfortable places left for us to leave for.
So the sinking land ( a.k.a. “rise in sea levels” ) was caused by a period of cooling in the Middle Ages. And yet the warming period at the end of the last ice age that rid us of the glacier ice pack and raised global sea levels by almost 400 feet gets short shrift because the “Science” can’t blame it on cavemen driving SUVs polluting the atmosphere.
Better explanation I read was economic collapse of the settlements whose main cash source was walrus ivory for export - when African ivory became available in higher volume and lower cost, they had less income. That and potentially a bad hunt killing most of the men in the settlement from shipwreck.
The only true fact is that when they left it was fast - they packed up and vanished apparently in one exodus.
So, the whole article is a scam. The sea level didn't rise, the land sunk. What a surprise.
Land rises and sinks all the time. New islands are formed (not kidding.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_new_islands )
Causes include by volcanism, erosion, glacial retreat, or other mechanisms. Duh...
Does the sinking and rising balance out? I doubt it.
But face it folks.. this 'Climate Change' is a farce. It's just a scam.
Temps on Earth are higher at just the same time they are higher in MARS!! Does Mars have SUVs and Coal power plants? No?
It is a scam.
I haven't read the article, but from the excerpt is seems that the writer is trying to force a global warming warning narrative. When the Vikings settled in Greenland around 1000, it was warmer than it is today and that made it easier to cultivate some crops and have livestock. The land was also rising due to post glacial rebound. The weather did turn colder colder in subsequent centuries but I doubt that the accumulation of ice on the glaciers would quickly compress the land. If anything there would still be post glacial rebound as as the glaciers would have been much bigger during the last ice age than during the mini ice of the 15th century.
The standard explanation for the end of the Norse settlement in Greenland was that there was a mini ice age which made it more difficult to cultivate crops and commerce was cut off with Iceland and Norway because of the shorter sailing season. Also, there was most likely was fighting with Inuits who were moving further south because of the colder weather.
"I was entirely puzzled because if the sea rose so much back then, wouldn't there have been extreme effects all over the world?"
Not at all...when you use Gavin Newsom and the CA legislature's thinking. Climate-mitigation laws passed in CA, these people strongly suggest in not so many words, will change the climate within the borders of the state. The sea level might rise everywhere else by the year 4500, but not along the Malibu coast.
The LA Times didn't support the best candidate for LA Mayor, the only guy who could've made some progress in this mess, because "he doesn't have a climate-change plan." I bet you didn't know that less CO2 in L.A. means lower temperatures in L.A.
WaPo wants to make us all afraid of global warming. Reporter doesn't realize, or doesn't care, that the Viking world got colder over the centuries. And these sorts of mistakes are common, which is why dishonest leftists have adopted the rubric of "climate change" to cover both global warming, global cooling, hurricanes, anything that has to do with weather.
This fear of the elements -- The New York Times is currently terrified of the sun, so WaPo isn't even the most idiotic paper on this subject -- is typical of people who deny God. They refrain from worshiping our actual God, but our primitive minds are fully aware that there is a universe far bigger than we are. So supposedly "worldly" people adopt weather fears like it's some sort of half-ass pagan ritual.
Alleged worldly scientists should first explain our ice ages before they blame humanity for "climate change." If you don't know why the climate changed drastically in the world's past -- before humanity existed -- maybe you ought to shut up about how evil humans are and how we have to "fix the climate."
Say it with me, liberal media -- we are human beings and the sun is not our responsibility. Holy shit.
If the sea level actually rose as the headline suggests, that would not support CAGW. Just the opposite.
That is, unless those damned Vikings (my ancestors) were tooling around in gas guzzling SUVs.
The Vikings migrated back to Iceland when the Greenland settlements were no longer habitable.
The Little Ice Age keeps creeping into the story, doesn't it? It has been getting a bit warmer ever since the Little Ice Age ended in the 1860s. Most of the warming in the 20th Century occurred before 1940. Then it got cooler until the late 1970s, then warmer again. CO2 levels had little to do with it.
As far as what Ive read, glaciers have been retreating since the 1700s (mini-ice age).
Im going to go with that until a meteor hits me upside the head.
Subsidence is still the only discernible cause of sea level rise on coastal fronts.
With elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect assures global greening, where people residing on subsiding plateaus may find sanctuary in lush green forests.
Also, the will and opportunity to colonize America before the probable arrival of indigenous... native Americans colonized the land from sea to shining sea in the next wave.
Iowan2 wrote: "the whole article is a scam."
It's far worse than that. You see, if the Washington Post wrote a story about how the sea is not rising and never has risen, then nobody would read the Washington Post.
They have to write these fake news stories so somebody (hint, hint) will buy their crap newspaper. They have figured out that it doesn't matter what the story says and it's usually far better that the story is false because that's how you get CLICKS and how yo sell advertising. The advertisers don't care if the story is false: only that their ad got viewed. The advertisers just want the money and don't care about the damage done to society by raping our journalism.
The entire "newspaper" is a scam. Not just that one article.
Jamestown Virginia was built on a meadow just about level with the river so that boats could unload easily. By 1699 the river level had risen so much that the meadow was soft useless marshland and so the capital of Virginia was moved to higher, drier Williamsburg. By now the river is four feet above the level it was at when the Jamestown fort was built in 1607. There may be climate change going on but it is not driven by human activity and cannot be stopped by us.
Milwaukee was covered a mile deep by a glacier 13,000 years ago. This glacier had been advancing and receding for over 50,000 years carving out a channel for itself and that is why Lake Michigan is shaped like a glacial lobe. Then the glacier began to recede going up past its previous terminus at the head of the Great Lakes and continuing up across Canada to its present limits 1000 miles away in the Arctic zone. This was not caused by human activity and cannot be stopped by us.
If science were properly taught in the schools people would understand the meaning of the geology around them. They would evaluate the claims of the climate change activists. They'd notice that money is required for schemes that will never stop real climate. That the money filters into the pockets of the elite who insist that students learn climate change is preventable and learn that facts suggesting otherwise are deplorable and learn that talking about geological facts will get you fired. That'sll change your climate.
I really, really, really hope that Elon Musk's rumored purchase of the NY Times comes true. These people don't deserve to survive.
We get told of sea level rise making a Pacific Island nation disappear. Reporters seem to accept that there is some way to violate the laws of physics so that the ocean can rise by feet at one island and not at all on another 100 miles away. It turned out that this island was selling gazillions of tons of sand for export.
Or that sea levels are rising in Miami but not in Fort Lauderdale a few miles north. Oops, turns out that Miami is actually sinking.
And now this. It would actually be kind of an interesting story if the NYT had played it straight. But it would not fit the narrative, would it.
Assuming that it was true, of course. But why should we trust any of these scientists.
Pure disinformation. When will the govt go after them for publishing this?
"When legend becomes fact, print the legend" A/K/A "Go with the fake news"
C'mon Elon. Pull the trigger.
John Henry
[T]he Greenland ice sheet near the Vikings was changing, and their land was sinking under the weight of the ice...
The Vikings are just lucky Greenland didn't "tip over and capsize."
"it carefully avoids talking about the real story: this “sea level rise” did not depend on rising CO2"
Right. Anthropogenic Global Warming need not be, you know, anthropogenic. Hence the rhetorical switch to "climate change."
And of course the rise may actually be a fall, of land.
Modern science: identifying a non-cause for a non-event.
The No Agenda boys recently played a clip of a congressional hearing on climate whatsit. The rep was questioning some global warming experts and he asked them to tell him, roughly, the percentage of CO2 in the air.
There were 3 or 4 and all guessed in the 5-7% range. Bear in mind that these are experts and make their living in the field. Given how much the CO2 level is bandied about, one would think they would know at least approximately.
There is a reason why, unlike every other gas in air, CO2 is expressed in PPM rather than percentage. Most people have no idea what 400ppm means and it looks like a big number. Until you express it as an actual number 400/1,000,000 Not so big looking now, is it? For comparison nitrogen is about 780,000/1,000,000
And if you convert it to percent, it is 0.04% (Nitrogen is @78%)
John Henry
Blogger rhhardin said...
Runestruck (Calvin Trillin) says
Now there is a name I've not seen in a long long time. Thanks for the reminder. Great writer. Back when the New Yorker had great writers.
Alice, let's eat.
John Henry
The NY Times reports that the universe is expanding but fortunately Brooklyn is not expanding.
Time to reevaluate Hank Johnson?
I have read somewhere that as the glaciers melt and retreat, archaeologists are discovering artifacts of people who lived and/or hunted there 1500-2000 years ago - in other words, the ice levels were lower then than they are now (and in other northern places like Norway). This would suggest that the earth/sun can bring about global warming just fine without human intervention.
So Congressman Hank Johnson's (D-GA) theory is plausible? /s
Ice sheet rebound is a big deal. NE Canada is rising since the ice melted 10,000 yrs ago (last ice to melt was there) but this tips NC down, so it appears sea level is rising in NC. Likewise, all of Scandanavia is rising, thus their sea level is falling.
There are so many theories about why the initial Norse Greenland settlements failed. Most of them are not mutually exclusive. The fact of the matter is Greenland's settlements were marginal from the time they were founded. The maximum (Norse) population estimate for the island during the Medieval period was 10,000, and that's probably very optimistic. The settlements required external supplies to function and the only place to get them was from Iceland, and Iceland was dependent on supplies from Norway to survive, so in reality Greenland needed supplies from Norway. That's about 1,500 miles away through difficult seas. It was not going to take much to change the status of the Greenland settlements from functional to crisis.
One of the theories why Vinland failed, despite it being a much nicer place to live than Greenland, is any Norse settlements in North America would need to be supplied, not to mention populated, from Greenland, and Greenland was completely incapable of doing so to the necessary levels.
"If anything there would still be post glacial rebound as as the glaciers would have been much bigger during the last ice age than during the mini ice of the 15th century."
Not sure that is the right way to think about it. The rate of land rising/subsidence is definitely very slow on a scale of hundreds to thousands of years, but that doesn't mean that the switchover from rising to sinking takes a long time to happen if the mass of ice starts increasing. Additionally, we really wouldn't know exactly when the ice started to increase on Greenland again- that might have started happening a couple of hundred years before the Vikings arrived during the warm period, and we don't know what added mass of ice is required to stop rising and induce subsidence.
Back in the 80s, I heard about enormous weight bending the crust of the earth, but it was attributed to the accumulated mass of National Geographic magazines people had collected over the decades.
Warming sells. Cooling sucks.
The job of The Washington Post is to gather eyeballs and sell them to the highest bidder. The more credulous the eyeballs the more valuable the eyeballs.
They left Greenland because of climate change, all right— the climate got colder and their crops failed.
“There was also some localized rising of the sea, according to this study, caused by gravity from the ice sheet.”
Absolute bullshit.
This is what is happening along the Louisiana gulf coast. It's not climate change. Believe no one who says that. It's the Mississippi river being leveed and not moving around silt like it once did before human beings straight jacketed it.
I'm suspicious that the compression of the land can happen so quickly. Rebound takes centuries. The whole article is junk science it seems.
"Climate Change" is just a very successful scam involving trillions of dollars, or whatever the new currency will be called. It's gone on for 50 years and will probably go on to the end of civilization. Maybe another 50 years if the Democrats don't change course.
OMG. Medieval global warming? This changes everything! LOL!
These lies are typical for the global warming liars.
Nearly all "sea level rise" that has been measured is due to land subsidence, not the actual oceans rising.
Prime case being Miami.
The land is sinking a bit due to all the construction and ground water pumping, not the sea levels rising.
I was puzzled, not deeply, by the repetitive nature of the writing by Mx. Patel.
I barked out the paragraph's repeated references to sea levels.
My lovely wife immediately said, "It's SEO."
Yeah. That there is SEO writing. By repeatedly using a phrase or series of related words or phrases, you are engaging in Search Engine Optimization-- the practice of fooling whatever today's algorithm happens to be in order to get your story to the top of Google's search results.
It's shitty journalism, but it's what the dying newspapers think is necessary to hang onto what little audience they have.
Some of the phrases and repetition might be inserted later by an "editor" (who isn't really an editor but an SEO specialist who knows how to fire up the clicks).
“They left Greenland because of climate change, all right— the climate got colder and their crops failed.”
Which makes much more sense. 10 feet over 400 years works out to 2 1/2 feet a century or a foot every 40 years. And they probably had to rebuild their houses at least that often. Just build them a foot higher every 40 years, and they would be fine. And that is part of the problem wit the panic over (the nonexistent) rising sea level - it doesn’t take into account economic obsolescence.
On the flip side, if they can’t farm, because the crops they were growing no longer can grow as well, because of te cooing climate they will die.
Headline from 1912:
"Over 1500 souls lost as sea rises over RMS Titanic."
John Henry: a congressional hearing ... questioning some global warming experts and he asked them to tell him, roughly, the percentage of CO2 in the air. There were 3 or 4 and all guessed in the 5-7% range. There is a reason why, unlike every other gas in air, CO2 is expressed in PPM rather than percentage. "
Neither the parts per million nor the percentage is a valid input to the "science" of atmospheric heat retention (a.k.a. "the greenhouse effect".) The measure in question is called the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) the equilibrium global warming (in Kelvin, or degrees Celcius) following a DOUBLING of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
So if a scientist measures (models, estimates, guesses) the PPM in the year 1850 to have been around about 300 parts per million and the present day measure (model, fear, claim) is just over 400 PPM, we haven't doubled the concentration even once. We see (model, infer, suppose) a rise in average global temperatures of about ONE degree over the past century.
In ecology discussions there is often raised the fable of the lilypad. Given that you KNOW for an absolute fact that (0) there is one lilypad in the lake and (0.5) it doubles in surface area every day (1) the math shows your vitally necessary lake will be COMPLETELY COVERED with choking lilypads in 30 days, and that (2) your bean-counting business owners insist you not even begin addressing the problem until the lake is half-covered then HOW MANY DAYS do you have to solve the problem when you finally get bean-counters' authorization?
In the discussion of global warming, our fable is the famous chessboard problem. (also, sometimes, the backgammon problem) Suppose we desired to intentionally raise the global average temperature. Over the entire past century with every industrialized nation on Earth burning up forests and coal and oil and gas, we have not quite doubled atmospheric CO2. How much MORE fossil fuel use, how many MORE nations MUST intentionally BEGIN burning fossil fuels, to complete even one more "doubling" in the next, -- say, the next decade? Okay, you get all of China mining and burning coal. Now, double again. India? Not enough. Every nation of South America, AND India? Okay,maybe. So now global warming is up by maybe 2 degrees C. Now double, again. How? All of Africa? Not enough. Everybody in Europe and the US (Canada, Australia, Japan...) industrializing even more? No, they don't like soot and ash and smoke anymore -- let alone CO2. They're switching over to nuclear fission and small local wind power... How are you going to raise global average temperatures in the 2040s -- assuming it was imperative that you do so? How do you "sustain" the doubling rate that the math requires?
So when the planet warms, Greenland will rise, as the oceans do, and it will be a wonderful place along with many more unspoiled areas in the northern hemisphere.
"How dare you!"
"Burning fossil fuels causes the land to sink, too. AGW... the science is settled."
It's clear we need to start using the term topography change. And never forget, sinking land isn't topography.
The retreat of glaciers leads to extremely complicated and rapid changes. Some parts of the landscape are sinking and other parts are rising at the same time. Rivers suddenly flow backward, or get routed into new valleys uncovered by the retreat. Glaciers also affect atmospheric flow, so you can have a glacial advance in one area caused by glacial retreat in another.
"I really, really, really hope that Elon Musk's rumored purchase of the NY Times comes true. "
Hope all you want, but keep in mind that millionaires hire PR firms, billionaires buy newspapers.
The Richest man in Minnesota owns the Star Tribune, and every time I try to post post "millionaires hire PR firms, billionaires buy newspapers" it doesn't get past the moderators. And what's really funny, is that the overwhelming majority of commenters at the Star Tribune hate the rich. That they're reading a billionaire's paper everyday doesn't even enter into their calculus.
I ran across an item on Jakarta a while back and they did the same thing. Apparently, they're moving the capital of Indonesia from Jakarta to another city. In the introduction they said the city had a problem with flooding because the sea level was rising due to climate change.
However, when they got into the meat of explaining it, that wasn't the reason Jakarta was flooding. They had polluted the rivers running into it, and so to get fresh water they started pumping it from underground. Jakarta is built on swampy land, so when the underground water got pumped out the land started settling. The same thing, not the seas rising, but the land settling.
And if you convert it to percent, it is 0.04% (Nitrogen is @78%)
Anthropogenic CO2 is a fraction of a fraction with lab-like... not even heat, but rather radiative, performance in the wild. That said, go green... emit.
Where I live here in Kansas we are 945 ft above sea level. 90 million years ago we were underwater. If there is one constant it is climate change.
Even if the sea level had in fact risen by 10 feet over several centuries, it is doubtful that such an increase would by itself cause the Vikings to abandon Greenland. It's far more likely that they would do the same thing that just about every other human community did when the sea level increased: moved their settlement to a nearby location that was on higher ground.
Even if the sea level had in fact risen by 10 feet over several centuries, it is doubtful that such an increase would by itself cause the Vikings to abandon Greenland. It's far more likely that they would do the same thing that just about every other human community did when the sea level increased: moved their settlement to a nearby location that was on higher ground.
The cover story of the May/June 2023 issue of Archaeology Magazine is about a Roman city on the Bay of Naples which sank under the waves due to volcanic activity in the area. Seems that the whole thing is on top of a super-volcano, of which Vesuvius is only a part. There's a process called Bradyseism where the land rises and falls due to the movement of magma deep underground. This process sank this pleasure-spot under the sea, until it was gone.
This was during the First Millennium AD. No ice-sheets required.
"Why is the planet now 'finished' and we puny humans must contort our lifestyles to try to maintain the status of now. It's all very foolish since our recognizable form of Homo sapiens is only a couple hundred thousand years old."
Well, of course, the planet is not "finished." However, the changing climate will bring about changes in the habitats of all earth's flora and fauna, as it has in past such changes. Many lifeforms will die off or be reduced to a much smaller portion of the planet's living organisms than previously, while new life forms will appear. The dinosaurs, of course, are a great example: these awesome beasts existed for hundreds of millions of years...yet, they're all gone now, except in the form of their lesser descendants.
So...the question is whether humankind will survive much longer (in geological time), or, if we do, will be reduced to a much smaller population or altered in other ways, having adapted over time to the world's changing environment? Human society, as we know it today, may well go extinct, even if "human creatures" of some sort, greater or lesser than we are now, manage to hold on. Or, humans may be as dead as the proverbial duck in surprisingly quick time. When predictions of "the end of the world" are brought up, it's really egocentric, as it means just the end of the world for us as we know it, or possibly the end of us. But, if so, the planet will not miss us.
[T]he southern Greenland ice sheet advanced and grew larger [during the climatic shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age].
Gosh, you mean the Medieval Warm Period, where the Earth underwent warming far greater than what's happening now, and where it was pretty much entirely a positive thing, was real?
I've changed my mind, we do need to censor everyone who engages in misinformation and disinformation.
We can start with every single "climate scientist" who's ever claimed that the Medieval Warm Period didn't exist
I'll tell you what happened.
The Inuit happened. They were not the original inhabitants of Greenland- the Danes were.
No kidding. In the year 1000, about when the Danes first landed in Greenland, the Inuit were no farther east than Alaska, having arrived from Asia a few centuries earlier.
Then the Inuit moved east and exterminated both the Paleoeskimos, who had lived in the Arctic for thousands of years, but the Danes as well.
True story. The Danes are the indigenous people of Greenland. The Inuit are the colonists.
I’ll ask again. How did the Vikings “leave” Greenland if they had no wood to build ships? There are no trees in Greenland, the. Or now. So did they walk?
The way I heard the story, the Greenlanders of 985 AD, when the first Vikings colonized the island, to the early 1400s, when the last known contact was made by people from the outside, Greenland was able to support somewhere between 2000 to 10,000 inhabitants using nothing more than standard Medieval farming technology. But the Greenlanders were partly dependent on trade with Iceland and other Scandinavian countries to survive, and in the 14th to 15th century two things happened: the Medieval Warm Period ended in the 15th, and the Black Death arrived in Europe in the middle of the 14th, curtailing trade. The colony was doomed.
If they had only cut their CO2 emissions by 50% they would still be there. Oh wait, never mind. The other thing that didn't happen was they didn't all drown as the sea level rose. They moved.
The other thing that didn't happen was they didn't all drown as the sea level rose. They moved.
My point upthread is that they didn’t move. They starved and froze to death. In the dark. As the Democrats intend for us today.
See Mowat, "Westviking". Many voyages from Greenland to North America, some for the purpose of getting timber for the Greenlanders.
Even if you accept the entire global warming catastrophe theory, it does not follow that destroying the global economy is the best answer. Realism about our options, and adaptation to the changes that may come are our best bet.
Note to Big Mike (who implied that the inhabitants of Greenland could not have built "boats" -- seagoing ships -- because Greenland is/was treeless.
Greenlanders necessarily engaged in maritime trade with other lands. Lumber was, and is, imported by sea. Hence the Greenlanders could continue to build ships.
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