Welcome to the Ice Age

I recently read an article that discussed the departure of the Vikings from Greenland sometime in the 15th Century.  The last known record of Norse inhabitants in Greenland was a wedding that took place in 1408.  It is rather curious that the Norse had been living in North America for more than 400 years at that point but less than a century later, Columbus would 'discover' America.

Why did the Norse abandon what had been a settlement for centuries?  Because it was getting colder.  Whereas the inhabitants had begun their time in Greenland as farmers who raised cattle but supplemented their diet with fish, the increasing cold killed off the cattle and forced them to live mostly from the sea, not unlike the native peoples.  Moreover, the increasing cold made trips to and from Iceland and Scandinavia less common.  The culturally Norse folk chose to leave because their lifestyle was no longer possible in the increasingly frigid Greenland.

Now the interesting thing is that Greenland today is not as warm as it was during the Norse settlement Middle Ages.  How can that be?  With all the global warming, surely the world is vastly warmer than it was a thousand years ago.  No, not yet.  Maybe if a warms a bit more, we'll see a migration to the new temperate paradise of Greenland.  The Norse settlement took place during what is called the Medieval Warm Period (950 to 1250 AD).  It was followed by the Little Ice Age (1350 to 1850 AD).  Most interesting of all is that all of this, up to this very day, takes place in the current ice age.  Yes, geologically speaking, we are experiencing an interglacial period of a 2.6 million year ice age.  If there are ice sheets at both poles, then it is an ice age.  But that implies that there were times when there was not ice at the poles.  How could that be without fossil fuels being burned by mankind?

 

So what does this tell us?  The Earth has experienced vastly warmer periods that had nothing to do with mankind.  Global warming could be beneficial in opening vast territories in northern Canada, Greenland, and Siberia to farming and development.  The climate change panic is all about government pulling more power to itself.  Notice that all 'solutions' to climate change involve government taxation and regulation.  Government will always seek to empower itself and it will use whatever means are available to cajole the population into surrendering freedom and liberty.  If that means claiming the world is going to catch fire despite being in an ice age, then so be it.