Melting Glaciers Uncover Medieval Artefacts In Norway
By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
The Mail discovers the Medieval Warming Period!!
Melting glaciers in Norway have revealed ancient artefacts dropped by the side of a road more than 1,000 years ago.
Clothes, tools, equipment and animal bone have been found by a team at a lost mountain pass at Lendbreen in Norway’s mountainous region.
A haul of more than 100 artefacts at the site includes horseshoes, a wooden whisk, a walking stick, a wooden needle, a mitten and a small iron knife.
The team also found the frozen skull of an unlucky horse used to carry loads that did not make it over the ice.
The objects that were contained in ice reveal that the pass was used in the Iron Age, from around AD 300 until the 14th century.
Activity on the pass peaked around AD 1000 and declined after the black death in the 1300s, due as well to economic and climate factors.
The researchers say the melting of mountain glaciers due to climate change has revealed the historical objects, with many more to come.
Unfortunately neither the journalist nor the scientists seem to be capable of adding 2+2!
The existence of the Medieval Warm Period in Norway, followed by glacial advance in the Little Ice Age has been long known about, as HH Lamb wrote in 1982:
HH Lamb –Climate, History and the Modern World – pp177, 224, 226
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier is melting and retreating, exposing the trunks of ancient trees. Carbon dating has revealed that some of the trees were growing 1,000 years ago, and some about 2,000 years ago. In other words, the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period were both warmer than our Modern Warm Period, and were warm long enough for forests to flourish where there has recently been a glacier. That earlier warmth was natural, with no human emissions, and the current warming is almost certainly mostly natural.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/alaska-glacier-thaws-ancient-forests-uncovered-as-mendenhall-glacier-retreats_295037.html
Also the Exit Glacier in Alaska. Only there:
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a time of global cooling from approximately 1350
to 1870 AD. During this time glaciers expanded in the northern regions, moving
down the mountains and scouring the vegetation that had been in the valleys
below. Park Service personnel recently discovered evidence of a buried forest
dating back to at least 1170 AD high in the Forelands near the current glacier’s edge.
Exit Glacier advanced from the Harding Icefield during the Little Ice Age, burying
this existing forest and advancing to a maximum marked by the terminal moraine
dated to 1815.
1170 AD ~ 850 years ago.
Imagine – that if this global warm cycle were to continue for another 100-200 years (doesn’t even need to warm any more – just stay near the current temps) perhaps another forest can take root and grow to maturity. How wonderful might that be?
Click to access The%20Retreat%20of%20Exit%20Glacier.pdf
From the video link in the Mail Online article.
Secrets of the Ice: The Hunt for the Lost Mountain Pass.
https://secretsoftheice.com/news/2020/04/16/mountain-pass/
“Activity on the pass peaked around AD 1000 and declined after the black death in the 1300s…”
The Black Death, yep, that would explain why loads of people stopped using a mountain pass for 700 years…
I wonder if they found any hockey sticks? If so, I doubt their handles would have been very straight.
so now we must look for the pre roman industrialised civilisation that caused the global warming that led to this medieval warming period.. of course it might have been all the cars (as the bible says, Moses came down the mountain in his Triumph), As todays warming is man made and due to all this naughty carbon we produce, and the climate brigade accept no other reason, then that must have been the cause then also as there cannot be any other cause.
Ian,
I believe Hockey Stick Mann was particularly active around this time and lived off tree rings until the mid-twentieth century when the narrowing of the rings forced him to abandon trees and adopt thermometers in order to ensure the survival of the Hockey Stick era.
Unfortunately this era was shown to have came to a sudden end circa 2005 due to the research of two Canadians called the McIntyre and McKidrick
Great analysis Patrick Upton. I was going to talk about Mann and his disavowal of both the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age in order to have that straight hockey stick handle.
I wonder if he will considering lawsuits against those posting such criticisms of his superior intellect on this site.
That whole UEA Climategate fiasco, was a real travesty when it comes to the practice of science. One of the good folks mined a database of some 250 trees in the Yamal Peninsula cored for dendrochronology. He cherry-picked 20 trees which gave him his desired outcome. Another used THREE trees. If this is science, I will eat my rather large framed diploma AND my framed certificate of full membership in Sigma Xi The Scientific Research Society.
I love the expose by McInture and McKitrick. Is is not fascinating to see the same sorts of data and maneuvering going on today with the virus?
A thought experiment
It is said we have already discovered how to make it warmer on average everywhere on the planet. We just need to burn enough coal. We are expecting to be able to make it cooler soon, or at least not as warm as it would otherwise become, by not burning any coal at all for a few decades. What we are implicitly trying to accomplish is the control of the world’s weather, using technology, leading to the need for the world’s population to elect a world government that controls how that technology is applied to give us the weather we have voted for.
Just imagine what life will be like when mankind develops the technology to cause global cooling or global warming at will. This will enable us to keep the average global temperature more-or-less constant, at whatever we all agree was the best temperature to have. It’d be like setting the thermostat in our living rooms.
Granted we might have to fight against nature to get our own way sometimes, releasing more CO2 when the sun cooled or sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere when the sun got a bit too hot. But as long as we had oodles of almost free nuclear power for the times when, like now, we are supposed to be making an effort to reduce CO2, we can stay on top of nature.
I enjoy asking climate alarmists what average global temperature they’d vote for now, if that day had already come. I show them a graph of the estimated average global temperature over the past 4,500 years, revealing what a wide range of choices for the thermostat setting had already proved safe for earlier generations.
The alarmists are confused by this thought experiment. They don’t enjoy thinking about having to choose at an election of a world government between parties with different climate policies. Parties, that promise to set the thermostat differently, to give us white Christmases, or long hot summers every year, or something in between (subject to voters in countries nearer to the poles or the equators not voting against our climate preferences in the UK.
If climate alarmists cannot tell us what average global temperature is best, they are in no position to tell us that the temperature forecast in fifty years time (unless we do something) will be too high. Without the concept of “just right” (like the baby bear’s porridge), there is no such thing as “too hot” or “too cold”.
Hah!! If (in your thought experiment) we were able to have a globally agreed thermostat, if it was anything like my house whatever I set the thermostat to is immediately over-ridden by whatever SWMBO decides!
I had thought somebody might make exactly that quip. But my serious point was that no climate alarmist can say that the predicted average global temperature at the end of this century will be too high unless we do this or that in time, if they cannot first say what the maximum safe average global temperature is, why it is what they think it is, and why we are still here centuries after enjoying or enduring allegedly unsafe, even higher temperatures than predicted if we do absolutely nothing about global warming. Or (as I said), there can b no “too hot” or “too cold” if one has no idea what temperature would be “just right” (like the bears’ porridge). This argument shocks climate alarmists into stunned silence in my experience.
Totally agree, John. I have used the very same argument for very many years. I even contend that the very idea of a global average temp is a nonsense and a propagandist device to fool people into believing the mm CC argument.
You don’t really believe we (the common man) would have any say whatsoever in the decision. The optimum temperature will be determine by our betters and will be applied whether we like it or not.
You stated: “The alarmists are confused by this thought experiment.”
No wonder they were confused. Liberals do not operate on thought and logic. They totally operate on emotions. They have the “correct” emotion and response to anything and thus have fulfilled the requirements of “caring.” It is always feelings and never results.
Newly discovered? The Mail Online has RE-discovered all that? The work has been going on since 2011.
Norse/Viking artifacts…
“The summer of 2014 was hectic in this respect. In Oppland County alone, Pilø and his colleagues found 400 objects, now emerged from the deepfreeze. Among these were a horse skull and hiking staffs from the Viking Age. An arrow shaft found by the archaeologists is from the Stone Age. An ancient route over the mountains once passed by the glacier where Lars Pilø and his colleagues conducted field work. People crossed the mountains with livestock, and went back and forth to their high summer farms – or simply travelled from one place to another. They have left a wide array of artefacts in their wake over the centuries, to the delight of 21st century archaeologists.
“We often find things associated with hunting. There are also ordinary objects such as mittens and shoes and the skeletons of horses that died on the trek across the mountains. This makes it a real thrill,” says Pilø.”
Yes, some are still having trouble putting 2 + 2.
Thing is, afaik, the nature of glaciers is that they move: descending from higher (and colder) heights before they melt. So, the artefacts actually came from – were carried along – from an even colder area – which was once warmer.
It shows how effective their stone shelters were. Very nice find.
Perhaps climate change should be called Global Rewarming.
By the way, Hubert Lamb is the founding director of the CRU. His book is available free online as a pdf. Another such a free pdf treasure is by Peter V. Hobbs, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. He specialized in cloud and aerosol effects and left us his book on Atmospheric Science as a free pdf online: ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE BY PETER V. HOBBS
The late great Peter Hobbs.
The NY Times does the same story –
Not a mention of climate either for why the ice is melting now or why the pass didnt have ice when the “pass was used from about A.D. 300 to 1500”
The thing about glaciers is that they tend to flow, and the thing about ice is that it tends to melt. Unlike diamonds, ice is not forever. But climate science sees all ice melt as harbingers of planetary doom.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/16/globalwarming-greenland-ice-melt/
I don’t think it’s a case of not being able to add 2+2, Paul. Rather it’s refusing to do so because of the inconvenient facts that they know will result.
Rather than refusing the sum I think it’s more a case of declaring the answer to be 3 or 5 or whatever suits the moment.
Mr. Allman says…”But my serious point was that no climate alarmist can say that the predicted average global temperature at the end of this century will be too high unless we do this or that in time, if they cannot first say what the maximum safe average global temperature is…”
NASA physicist James Hansen has done that. He has suggested, demanded, that we return the atmosphere to a ‘safe’ 350 ppm…its value in 1987. That would set the ‘safe’ global temperature to whatever it was back then. Of course, he has ignored the fact that nobody can take 65 parts-per-million of CO2 out of the atmosphere… ~500 gigatons.
What was so special about the CO2 level in 1987 that made it “safe”? How much higher or lower than this target would be needed to create danger? Does Mr Hansen say? Have you got a reference for his suggestion?