German scientists show natural climate cycles dominated over last 7000 years...Blaming man is "witch-hunting"

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German scientists show natural climate cycles dominated over last 7000 years...Blaming man is "witch-hunting"
Dec 21, 2013 | Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt \ No Tricks Zone

The pattern in society today is clear to see. Whenever a storm hits a region and submerges terrain in water, or if a drought destroys crops, then the one to blame is quickly found: It has got to be man and his debaucherous CO2-spewing lifestyle that is bringing the climate into a state of catastrophic instability. In former times witches and sorcerers were made responsible for meteorological extremes, and they were burned at the town square so that future bad weather could be prevented. Like today, back then no one really cared about scientific arguments.

But here one only needs to look over the scientific literature in order to recognize that storms and weather extremes have always been the case and things really aren't any different today. Yet another new study has just come out, appearing in the November 2013 edition of the Quaternary Science Reviews, by a team of scientists led by Tina Swierczynski of the Geoforschungszentrum (GFZ) Potsdam. The scientists examined sediment deposits taken from the Austrian Mondsee and they were able to identify the development of flooding phases of rivers in the region caused by heavy rainfalls in the spring and summers. The geological archive goes back more than 7000 years.

In total Tina Swierczynski and her colleagues found 271 flooding events that had occurred during 18 flood-rich phases, each having a duration of 30 - 50 years. The most important of these phases took place during the Neolithic (7100 - 7050 vyr BP and 6470 - 4450 vyr BP), the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age (3300 - 3250 and 2800 - 2750 vyr BP), the late Iron Age (2050 - 2000 vyr BP), throughout the Dark Ages Cold Period (1500 - 1200 vyr BP), and at the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (810 - 430 vyr BP). The scientists found that summer flood episodes in Lake Mondsee are generally more abundant during the last 1500 years, often coinciding with major advances of Alpine glaciers.

The study provides a historically important context that absolutely needs to be taken into account when assessing modern day flooding events. It is clear that there were always heavy rain phases in pre-industrial times. Therefore it also scientifically doubtful that the flooding events of today can be automatically connected to man-made climate change. Those who allow themselves to be seduced by the hypothesis of man-made climate are seriously under-estimating the potential of the natural fluctuation range of extreme weather occurrences.

(Translated, edited by P. Gosselin)