This Isn’t the First Time in Human History Our Winters Have Become Milder
By Paul Homewood
Euan is firing on all cylinders now!!
Sir, with reference to the letter from Ivan Reid, 18th October. He is of course totally correct; our winters have become less snowy and milder than during our youth. I recall the deep snow drifts on Kirriemuir Hill in the 1960s.
And during my grouse beating days in Glen Clova in the 1970s they used to set aside a half day to shoot hares and another half day to shoot capercaillie. Times have changed, and in 2020 illegal shooting of mountain hares (culling) was banned in Scotland (Wikipedia). Thousands used to be shot every year. It does not seem to be necessary to call on climate change to explain the demise of the mountain hare. Hopefully the population will soon recover.
In the countryside I frequent most often in Aberdeenshire and Perthshire, there is an abundance of buzzards and ospreys, red-dear and roe-dear, seals, beavers and sadly many dead badgers along our main roads.
Melting Alpine glaciers are perhaps the most poignant symbol of a slowly warming world. However, a little-known fact is that Alpine glaciers have all but melted completely 12 times in the last 10,000 years (since the end of the last glaciation). This is known through Carbon 14 dating of woody fragments found in the ice. These dates form clusters signifying times when trees grew in the ice basins from where the glaciers now flow.
The exact cause of these cyclical changes in glacier length is unknown, but a likely candidate is cyclical changes to ocean currents. The depth of the last cold and snowy trough occurred around 1850 and warming will likely continue for another few hundred years until the glaciers have all but disappeared as was the case when Hannibal crossed the Alps with his elephants in 218 BC at a time called The Roman Warm Period. Perhaps Scotland’s climate is affected by these same cyclical forces?
PS With reference to Mr. Hannan, 19th October: pre-industrial CO2 in the atmosphere was 0.028% and today it is 0.042%. 3% is on the threshold of being harmful, but current levels are nowhere near this dangerous threshold.
Dr Euan Mearns
Aberdeen
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Hannibal’s elephants a splendid cudgel to beat the climate crazies with. I wield it all the time…
Current CO2 levels are near record lows.
Contrary to the oft-repeated mantra that today’s CO2 concentration is unprecedentedly high, our current levels of carbon dioxide are at near-historic lows. The average CO2 concentration in the preceding 600 million years was more than 2,600 ppm, nearly SEVEN times our current amount and 2.5 times the worst case predicted by the IPCC for 2100.
We don’t have too much CO2, we don’t have enough!
Scientific Details here —
https://co2coalition.org/facts/current-co2-levels-are-near-record-lows-we-are-co2-impoverished/
Excellent. Well-written and researched. Good for Euan and the paper for printing it, I suspect, in full.
Some Aberdonian would be better qualified than I am to comment on Mearns and the P&J. I lived in that city for a short time in the late 60s and the paper then would certainly have printed this sort of well-researched piece from a local man of Mearns’ reputation as a service to its readership.
Unfortunately, 60 years on local press has largely fallen into the hands of one or other of the media conglomerates for whom the bottom line is the only thing that matters or, worse, has died or is dying at the hands of the BBC’s 42 local radio stations.
They would never consider such a letter in the first place because they wouldn’t understand it and secondly because they would assume that their readership was as dim as they are. Only once, and that 30 years ago, did I work for a proprietor who treated his readers as grown-ups and was heartily praised for it.
I was resident in Aberdeen from 1965 – 68 and would concur with your views of the P&J.
https://www.bbc.com/lnp/ldrs
BBC Local “democracy” reporters – 165 of them employed by BBC but embedded with local media outlets (tv, radio, press, online etc) and no doubt ensuring that the BBC policies and bias are maintained at the local level
The Press and Journal is now owned by and printed by DC Thomson, located in Dundee. Their policy is to publish a spectrum of opinion. They are receptive to these letters on the back of anti-wind and ant-grid protest groups located in the Highlands who have been writing letters for a while. Energy in general is also a hot potato in Aberdeen and Scotland. The worrying thing for me is that there is no political dissent to net zero. The SNP are now anti oil and anti nuclear – having fought the 2014 referendum claiming 30 billion bbls of reserves (or some ludicrous number). The Tories are pro-oil and pro nuclear although very adept at keeping the latter secret. But also as you know committed to net zero suicide.
The difficulty is that rationality is ignored when “existential climate change threats” are present. A lady doctor was on womans-hour today claiming (unchallenged of course) that climate change is increasing still births and affecting childrens’ health etc in the UK. She also claimed that concern over climate change is causing massive anxiety in children: very ironic as it is her type of drivel that is causing the angst, not any measurable change in our climate. Propaganda rules!
I’m sure this doctor will be very proud of proving the “big lie” adage of Joseph Goebbels
I wonder what is really causing the increase in still births? It’s on the tip of my tongue. But at least they now admit it is happening.
It’s probably the way in which death certificates are signed off. Today, for instance, I read of a family who complained that the death of their 90+ year-old grandfather, who had been admitted to hospital with end-of-life illnesses, but who had then caught covid (in hospital!), had cause of death recorded as Covid. They were told that putting covid down as cause if death took only one doctor to certify it; anything else needed two doctors!
How could an imperceptible change in an average increase stillbirths? And why would it in the UK when we are much cooler than even southern France?
Indeed , here’s the ONS:
“Stillbirths
In 2022, the number of stillbirths in England and Wales was 2,433. This was a 6.3% decrease compared with 2021 (2,597). The number of stillbirths in 2022 was lower compared with the 2,522 stillbirths observed in 2019 before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.”
So she’s lying.
Exactly Phoenix, surely it is about time for some journalists or politicians to call these people out for what they are. She is a liar or possibly, failing that, grotesquely incompetent.
Seems like BBC’s Verify service is only used against sceptics.
An open and shut case for Mr Davie to rule on a complaint then. Try to note the time and the name of the doctor. Is it Emma?
A group of families affected by failures in NHS maternity care are calling for a full statutory public inquiry into maternity safety in England. Emily Barley from the Maternity Safety Alliance group told Jessica Creighton why she thinks fundamental reform is needed. And presenter Krupa Padhy draws on her own personal story of baby loss in her BBC Radio 4 investigation, How safe is maternity care?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001ryd3
I don’t have and refuse to set up a BBC account to go through the excruciation of listening for myself.
This ONS page has several relevant links, including much longer runs of data that are relevant to claims about climate change.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/stillbirths
Anyone want to take it on? Perhaps more than one complaint would be good, especially if some of our female readers make it.
I did find this which makes some tentative claims in relation to sub Saharan Africa, with an admission that more research is needed. There are likely to be so many competing confounding factors that the research will remain at best correlation and not causation.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210524092019.htm
And any interviewer worth her salt would — regardless of the rights or wrongs surrounding the climate change question — have challenged such a tendentious statement.
Left unchallenged she is at liberty, as you say, to continue with this unsubstantiated idea. Children react to what they are told. Young children need to be protected from climate panic just as they need to be protected from other bizarre ideas that appear designed to wreck their lives before they have barely started.
Yes, I heard that too. As you say unchallenged and I was telling at the radio, “Where’s the data? UK? Worldwide? ” Didn’t she mean pollution? And I came to the same conclusion as you; children’s mental health and their “eco-anxiety” is all because they’re fed a perpetual diet of doom. These people have no shame.
These days the train would be cancelled some days beforehand, light years from the can do generations past, they’d have put the plough on the front and off we go.
There is some great footage from over Bowes moor on the Darlington to Penrith line with the train backing up and ploughing into the huge snow drifts in an attempt to clear the line.
Apols to Euan, I can’t resist this:
“In the countryside I frequent most often in Aberdeenshire and Perthshire, there is an abundance of buzzards and ospreys, red-dear and roe-dear …”
Oh deer. 😀😀😀
That was very hare-brained of you??
If you read the article in the picture you’ll see it’s deer not dear. So I think that whoever transcribed the article is the one who made the error.
Ah, a stealth attack by the mis-named auto-‘correct’.
Double apols to Euan!
Unforgivable Joe 😦
My wife who has excellent spelling proof reads all my work.
I wonder what is really causing the increase in still births? It’s on the tip of my tongue. But at least they now admit it is happening.
On Scotland warming …
The Beeb reports: “Scotland had a glacier up to 1700s, say scientists”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-25824673
During the Little Ice Age some glaciers were expanding towards villages and if it had continued would have wiped them out. As we see from finds where glaciers have retreated, humans were active there in past times showing that it is nothing new.
Ice covered land is of no use to humans. Yet, they cry about glaciers receding.
A mental excercise: could humans, pre-industrial, have stopped glaciers? With pick and axe, could they have trimmed the front enough to keep it from overrunning their village?
No way they could have stopped the advance of a glacier.
There are accounts of the devastation of numerous villages in Alpine France by glaciation during the Little Ice Age. iirc one was written by Alexandre Dumas and records a glacier advancing by a musket shot in a day.
That was probably poetic licence but the loss of life, starvation and disappearing homes was real.
I keep meaning to track down the Dumas account. Must try harder!
Mikehig:
I think that the Dumas record came from the Tax Inspectors report on (the poor state of) Chamonix around 1709/1710. The land was owned by the Church but the Tax Inspectors decided that no tax was available from the remaining inhabitants.
Re Blue/Mountain Hares, when I was a Grouse Beater these were also culled. There were no Capercaillie. The reason often given was that three hares could eat as much as a single sheep, I’ve no idea if this is true or not. Nor am I sure that hares won’t eat saplings planted in rewilding projects in snowy winters when they make an easy target for hungry hares, rabbits and deer.
There was a BBC report recently about melting glaciers in Norway, very rapid melting due to you know what, ancient Viking artifacts uncovered, but strangely no mention of what that implies about the climate in Viking times (i.e. fewer/shorter glaciers than today).
you fool….obviously the old vikings drilled down into the glaciers so that they could hide the artefacts . It is so obvious that the BBC didnt have to explain this apparent inconsistency to the eternally gullible audience .
Viking graves on Greenland are melting out of permafrost. Evidently, the Vikings used to pick axe the permafrost to bury their dead.
Less cold is good for life – the winter of 2010 was a portent of what a long, bad, cold winter would look like
Minus 12degC, thick snowfall onto compacted ice – a prolonged period would cripple renewables and the country – it would certainly focus minds
I am pleased that you mention the winter of 2010 in England, as I thought I was missing something in the article, although Euan is talking about Scotland. Christmas Day in 2010 the temperature here in Cheshire was -12C, a year later it was 12 degrees. That’s climate change for you.
Within a radius of just 8 miles from where I live the recorded temperature extremes are minus 21.3°C (Elmstone) and plus 39°C
(Brogdale) – a weather variation of 60.3°C. This is the sunny south east, “Garden of England” in Kent. And yet we are supposed to be frightened by an “average” increase of less than 2°C…daft isn’t it.
Yes Ray, it is daft .