Global-warming query: Was Erik a mousse man?

Roy M. Stanley II
Date published: 8/4/2006
The "Inconvenient Truth" is that either Al Gore is one of the dimmer bulbs in the chandelier, or he is being duped by environmentalist charlatans, or he is cynically trying to parlay the environment into political power--or all of the above ["Global warming? Don't believe the hype ," July 26].
Of course the world is warming. We are still coming out of the "little ice age" that lasted from about 1550 to 1850.
The worst years for America were following a series of volcanic explosions in Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Caribbean between 1812 and 1816.
"The year without a summer" was 1816, when it snowed in New England in July and August.
Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth used to walk on River Thames ice and, in the early 1700s, winter carnivals were held on the frozen Thames at London.
Before the "little ice age," wine grapes were grown as far north as Yorkshire, and England exported wine to France.
As the Northern Hemisphere cooled, alcohol in England and northern Europe shifted to grain-based (beer, ale, and malt liquors). The Pilgrims were headed for Virginia but landed at Plymouth because they ran out of beer.
We are not yet back to the warmth at the end of the first millennium that allowed Vikings to establish farms in southern Greenland. Those settlements lasted for several hun-dred years, then were driven into extinction by protracted cooling.
The second aspect of this issue is the arrogance that maintains that SUVs and hairspray are the cause of the warming.
The Earth had been cycling through cooling and warming long before the Industrial Revolution, and what we do is almost insignificant compared to volcanic activity, small changes in distance from the sun, and changes in solar activity.
Fouling our air and water is another matter, and we should be aware of those dangers, but spare me the global-warming panic unless you can tell me what hairspray Erik the Red used in A.D. 800 to warm the land west of Iceland.
Roy M. Stanley II
Spotsylvania