LIA Megadroughts In India
By Paul Homewood
I regularly get sent scientific papers relevant to my interests sent to me by the Academia website. Many like this one are a few years old, but also highly relevant:
It is already known that Indian monsoons weakened during the global cooling of the 1960s and 70s, and now this study has established that the same thing seems to have taken place during the Little Ice Age.
When the climate gets colder in extratropical latitudes, the ITCZ gets squeezed nearer the equator, something which HH Lamb has frequently commented on. And the graph below shows not only the megadroughts linked to the LIA, but also the much wetter climate during the MWP:
Fig. 8. Stacked time series of proxy records of temperature from the extratropical latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere (color coded). The records from top to bottom are temporal
duration of Swiss glacial advances (Holzhauser et al., 2005), biomarker based sea ice reconstruction (Massé et al., 2008), Icelandic shelf SST (Sicre et al., 2008) and a composite SST
estimate from the Atlantic region (Mann et al., 2009). Vertical gray bars represent temporal duration of MMDs as delineated in Fig. 5 (for interpretation of the references to colour in
this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article).
Climate idiots now believe that building solar farms will somehow put and end to droughts in India, but as the paper notes the real world prospects are much scarier:
The prospect of a repeat of those LIA megadroughts is truly terrifying.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
N.Atlantic SST looks weird at the end, almost as if it were mann-ipulated!
so, its WEATHER then.
Fatehpur Sikri itself was founded as the capital of Mughal Empire in 1571 by Emperor Akbar, serving this role from 1571 to 1585, when Akbar abandoned it due to a campaign in Punjab and was later completely abandoned in 1610.
O/T John Kerry has lost the plot:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11646103/John-Kerry-says-extra-terrestrial-force-brought-people-Davos-save-planet-speech.html
No … John Kerry is part of the plot:
What a coincidence.I have just been reading a very informative book-There is no Climate Crisis-by David Craig (2021),where he notes that in 1303 and 1304,the Seine,the Loire,the Rhine and the Danube,were passed over dry footed.
The author does note inside the front cover,that brief quotations may be used within the context of a book review.For your info Paul.
I also notice that he uses Gaillards Medical Journal as I do in my historical research into past climates and weather events.
His book is worth obtaining.He has done an excellent job.
“impetus for periodic locking of the monsoon into this mode may have been provided by cooler temperatures at the extratropical latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere which forced the mean position of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone [ ITCZ ] further southward in the Indian Ocean ”
The ITCZ highlighted by H.H Lamb and Paul was probably squeezed toward the equator depriving the Indian subcontinent , China and Indochina of regular monsoonal rains. However the picture is more complex – and global . The deteriorating cooling temperatures and climatic instability at the start of the LIA circa AD 1300 – 1350 were not just confined to the northern hemisphere and the authors of the Asian monsoon drought paper understood this as the ‘global context ‘ is there in the headline .
Mike Baillie in his 2006 landmark book ‘ New Light on the Black Death” plotted a composite European oak chronology and the Fennoscandian pine series with the smoothed southern hemisphere New Zealand Cedar chronology [ See Fig .12 ,p14 ] and the juxtaposed dendro -chronologies display correlated reduced growth /temperature 1320 – 1350 . A Tasmanian Huon pine study in the E Cook et al paper ” Tree Rings and Climatic Reconstruction in Tasmania ” categorizes the years 1318 and 1321 as narrow growth bands and 1319 as a frost damage ring . Antarctic peninsula ice
core records and New Zealand lake sediment stratigraphies also show
a dramatic proliferation in black carbon concentrations starting around
1300 AD indicative of biomass burning in the south Pacific that archaeologists and paleo-ecologists such as McConnell et al [ Nature ,2021 ] blamed on Maori colonist burning practices .Such an assumption may be mistaken as there is compelling circumstantial evidence of
meteor impacts in the southern hemisphere in the decades spanning 1300 – 1350. Now, returning to the Icelandic Shelf SST’ and North Atlantic SST anomaly series above, notice the sea surface temperature downturns commence around the same timeframe – approximately AD 1315 – 1322 – coinciding with the Great Famine years of freezing temperatures incessant rainfall for months on end, repeated crop failures , massive livestock losses and the deaths by starvation and malnutrition of somewhere between 12 – 17 million Europeans .
Whatever caused the 14th century Asian megadroughts it wasnt volcanic eruptions as there are no upper scale VEI volcanic signals between 1300 – 1343 . Nor was the 1280 – 1350 Wolf Solar Minimum alone responsible . The most plausible culprit was cometary debris impacts and extraterrestrial dust loading of the atmosphere and this hypothesis is vindicated by chemical residues such as ammonium and nitrate values in the ice cores and historical records . If one cares to examine Lars Franzen and Roger Cropps peat mire cosmic dust index the sharp escalation in Co and REE indices commences around that magic timescale again – AD 1300 – 1320 – with the REE spike dominating the REE / Cobalt sequence at a time of well documented comet and bolide sightings , ‘quakes ‘ shoreline fish die offs and atmospheric disturbances . Read the eyewitness testimonies of the Paris Medical Faculty and the German historian Heckers description , preceding the Cyprus earthquake of 1347 of the ” fiery meteor ” that struck the Earth ” far in the East…..infecting the air far and wide ” The historian Zeigler mentions a “corrupted atmosphere visible in the form of mist or smoke ” and “one chronicler ‘ specifically recounting what may well have been a marine impact event in “the Indian Ocean ” where the ‘waters of the ocean were drawn up as a vapour …….an evil noxious mist contaminating all it touched ” . Weighing up all the evidence the 14th century Asian monsoon weather systems may have been disrupted by regional meteor impacts striking Central Asia the Indian and Pacific oceans and given Mike Baillies book was published in 2006 it is indeed mystifying that the contributing authors to this 2011 Asian megadroughts paper had not considered Baillies research . It just so happens there is a sub peak in Ted Bryants south eastern Australia paleo tsunami deposit chronology corresponding to 1300 – 1350 AD and another tsunami dump on New Zealands Stewart Island dated to 1324 AD during a time of inaugural LIA temperature decline in both the northern and southern hemispheres
I concur with Paul : the prospect of a return of these LIA megadroughts is truly terrifying . Even more horrifying is what caused them
And this is what caused the plummeting temperatures visible in the northern and southern hemisphere tree ring chronologies and SST reconstructions : the Earth intersected a Beta Taurid swarm in late June 1321 loading and veiling the atmosphere with cometary debris . There are clues in historical records such as the showers of stones that devastated a Chinese province in 1321 together with this subtlely interpreted French source found in John Kelly’s ‘ The Great Mortality ” describing a “blood sun ” phenomenon lasting hours and black smudges observed on the lunar surface reminiscent of the 1994 SL9 comet fragments striking Jupiter
” at the end of June , during a solar eclipse in Anjou and Touraine [ for ] a period of four hours on the twenty sixth , the afternoon sun appeared swollen and horribly engorged as if bursting with blood ; then during the night , hideous black spots dimpled the moon as if the craters …”
‘ Tunguska , Asteroids and the Mystery of the Beta Taurids https://youtube.com/watch?v=VrUPA1s6x4Q
More long-duration ice = less rainfall isn’t hard to imagine.
Did someone mention Hubert Horace Lamb?
Now he was a real climatologist.
Thank you Philip . To my embarrassment I had never heard of him . What an interesting and admirable man he was
Mindful of the limitations of his nascent field of climatology H.H Lamb was a prescient and brilliant man Philip
Thanks Stuart.More good info.
I wonder if the Dandak speleothem records the climate further back in time than the LIA or if it’s a relatively young formation. If it does go back to 6,000b.c. or older would it corroborate the data from a speleothem from a cave in the Meghalya (spelling may not be correct) region of central India which shows an overall cooling trend starting in roughly 4,200b.c. (with obvious ups and downs along the way). On the basis of this speleothem roughly 4 years ago the international union for stratigrophy (responsible for naming geological time periods) declared a new period of geological time, the Meghalyan.
Environmentalists sometimes claim that we’re in the Anthropocene (although it’s a while since I last saw this term used). This is just a term that they invented, and can’t even agree when it started. It’s worth listening to the scientists (for once) and if anyone mentions the Anthropocene pointing out that the science says we’re actually in the Meghalyan.
Correction. It’s the Megahalyan and began 4,200 years ago, not in 4,200b.c.
Maybe I should do a bit of research before posting a comment, rather afterwards.
It’s so easy to get this stuff completely backwards. Those drought periods in the Dandak cave proxy were also dry and hot in northwest Europe, and none of it was actually during the centennial solar minima.
Click to access weather1.pdf
“It is already known that Indian monsoons weakened during the global cooling of the 1960s and 70s,”
That was when stronger solar wind states were driving a colder AMO and multi-year La Nina, during centennial solar minima the AMO is warmer and El Nino conditions normally increase.