Tea at Trianon: The Vikings and Global Warming

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

The Vikings and Global Warming

From Archaeology News Network:

After reconstructing southern Greenland's climate record over the past 3,000 years, a Northwestern University team found that it was relatively warm when the Norse lived there between 985 and 1450 C.E., compared to the previous and following centuries.

"People have speculated that the Norse settled in Greenland during an unusually, fortuitously warm period, but there weren't any detailed local temperature reconstructions that fully confirmed that. And some recent work suggested that the opposite was true," said Northwestern's Yarrow Axford, the study's senior author. "So this has been a bit of a climate mystery."

Now that climate mystery finally has been solved. The study published in the journal Geology. Axford is an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The study is a part of Northwestern Ph.D. candidate G. Everett Lasher's dissertation research, based in Axford's lab.

To reconstruct past climate, the researchers studied lake sediment cores collected near Norse settlements outside of Narsaq in southern Greenland. Because lake sediment forms by an incremental buildup of annual layers of mud, these cores contain archives of the past. By looking through the layers, researchers can pinpoint climate clues from eons ago. (Read more.)

julygirl said...: There is evidence of a warmer climate at that time based on the fact that Grapes were grown and wine making was done in the British Isles area. Upon the arrival of the 'mini ice age' agriculture changed to products that grow in cooler climates such as wheat and thus wine production changed to beer.; February 27, 2019 at 10:11:00 AM EST