Scotland In The Little Ice Age
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
Talking of glaciers, this BBC report from eight years ago was a bit more balanced:
A glacier was still in place in Scotland within the past 400 years – 11,000 years later than previously thought – it has been suggested.
Dundee University geographer Dr Martin Kirkbride said a glacier may have survived in the Cairngorms as recently as the 18th Century.
Britain’s last masses of slow-moving ice and snow were understood to have melted 11,500 years ago.
Dr Kirkbride studied the formation of corries in the Cairngorms.
A corrie is a basin-shaped feature created by glaciations in the mountains.
Using a technique called cosmogenic 10Be dating, Dr Kirkbride showed that a small glacier in a Cairngorms corrie piled up granite boulders to form moraine ridges within the past few centuries, during the period of cool climate known as the Little Ice Age.
Dr Kirkbride said: "Our laboratory dating indicates that the moraines were formed within the last couple of thousand years, which shows that a Scottish glacier existed more recently than we had previously thought.
"The climate of the last few millennia was at its most severe between 1650 and 1790.
"There are some anecdotal reports from that time of snow covering some of the mountain tops year-round. What we have now is the scientific evidence that there was indeed a glacier."
Dundee University said scientists had speculated that glaciers may have re-formed in the Highlands around the time of this Little Ice Age but hard evidence has proved to be elusive.
Dr Kirkbride teamed up with Dr Jez Everest at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, and the Cosmogenic Isotope Analysis Facility at the Scottish Universities Environmental Reactor Centre in East Kilbride, to carry out the research.
Dr Everest said: "This is exciting news, as for the first time we have shown that climatic conditions in Scotland allowed glaciation within the last half millennium, at a time when other glaciated areas, such as Scandinavia, Iceland and the Alps saw their glaciers grow to some of their largest sizes since the end of the last Ice Age.
"This has great importance when we start to reconstruct climate change in Scotland and the wider region over the last few centuries."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-25824673
It has actually been known for some years that glaciers reformed in Scotland during the Little Ice Age. In 1982 HH Lamb wrote about this and the famines which resulted from the much colder climate:
Climate, History and The Modern World
This is the world that UNESCO would like us to return to!
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Was it the Clan Macpherson who had land in Badenoch whose fortunes waxed and waned depending on the size of a particular Cairngorm snowfield?
I’m sure there was one but I can’t remember which one.
I think this 8 years old report by BBS (pun) was trying to connote that the glaciers finally gave up the ghost when we started burning stuff in the 18th Century.
It’s just an attempt to erase the MWP from public knowledge.
Can UNESCO tell us why it was colder then, e.g. harvests failing in the 1690s?
The accepted period of the Little Ice Age was about 1650 to 1715. There was a later cold event which correlates with low sun activity – The Dalton Minimum -about 1790 to 1830. The following is circumstantial evidence for this. It is common for the River Spey to rise a few feet in the spring as snow in the Cairngorms melts. It August (!!) 1829 the river flooded to such a level that it went down in history as the Muckle Flood. i.e. huge beyond belief. There is the famous bridge at Craigellachie built by Thomas Telford in 1814. Telford wondered if he had designed it high enough above the river, and after consulting a local farmer instructed the foreman to raise the height of the bridge by 5 feet over the original design height. During the flood the river reached a height of 15 1/2 feet above normal. There must have been a huge amount of snow, even as late as August which melted in 3 days of rain. The water was half way up the curve of the arch. The bridge survived but nearly every other bridge in north east Scotland was either washed away of was badly damaged.
What are you saying????? Has not the great, and not to be disputed lest you end up in court w/ him, Michael Mann told us that neither the Medieval Warm Period nor the Little Ice Age existed??? Are you trying to put bends back into his “Hockey Stick ‘Curve'”???
Why, you must be one of those “science deniers”…..along w/ myself and a vast number in the population at large.
Hi Joan,
Good for a laugh. When I am trying to suggest to someone who swallows the ‘official’ line, I stick to verifiable facts and often point them to NOTALOTOFPEOPLEKNOWTHAT and to the post re the Holocene where the reconstructed temperature graph is. The basic message is that the about 1000+year maxima show a steady decrease.
Regards, Thomas
PS I usually read your posts
Lamb ought to be compulsory reading for the so-called climate scientists who think climate began in the 1970s. They abuse paleoclimatology regularly, but do not seem the appreciate that there is knowledge (i.e. science) outside of mathematical models.
Models schmoedels. Only empirical data count. See Telford for details.
I have said that a semester of paleobotany would cure those notions.