autto.net

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpa ... in_th.html

Apparently, climate change is now responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. Never mind the rise of the barbarians, forget the rise of the Catholic church, and pay no mind to the fiat currency, or all the hedonism. It was, climate change.

So what do you think?

What do I think? I think we need to get a President who will put an end to this global warming bull crap and I think we need to drive the liberals into insane asylums where they belong.

sorry, Moe beat you to it
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 935AAoM1nZ

The hypothesis that climate affected the rise and fall of the Roman Empire is not new. There have been a number of historical studies to try to test the hypothesis. The last one I recall was a couple of years ago, looking at stalactites in Israel to measure changes in rainfall in the Roman period. I know it's hard to believe, but researchers actually do research. I guess some people just figured their history books wrote themselves.

What this "question" is, is an great example of how many denier theories there are -- none of which have scientific foundation. We get a lot of rants here that the very current warming has to be natural because climate changed in the past. But here we get someone mocking a study that finds past climate change and is ranting that there cannot have ever been changes in climate, or that changes in climate could never have had the slightest effect on history.

For those interested, the conclusions of the study's authors:

"Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration. Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from ~AD 250 to 600 coincided with the demise of the Western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period. Historical circumstances may challenge recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change."

It was published this month in the journal, Science.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early ... 5.abstract

Don't look now but they snuck climate change into the Bible too--check out the story with Noah.

See, the problem with the History like with any other science, it is not precise science (including math). Especially History... History usually written by winners. Currently crazy extreme left wing wackos are winners. They can rewrite History anyway they want and can. Especially when they write in Washington Post. Nice place to get your latest news... You can with the same success just walk to the first idiot on the street corner or to the Washington Post distribution kiosk, you will get the same news and stories...

We get a lot of rants here that the very current warming has to be natural because climate changed in the past. But here we get someone mocking a study that finds past climate change and is ranting that there cannot have ever been changes in climate, or that changes in climate could never have had the slightest effect on history.

It's an example of continuing to investigate real-world phenomena, of collecting empirical data, and in developing new hypotheses. That's the way the epistemology of human knowledge works.

Napoleon and Hitler both made the same mistake of invading Russia during major El Nino events. Good thing they were as ignorant of climate science as deniers, huh?

The author of the Washington post article has it all wrong, The article that appeared in science, 2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility, has said what many critics of global warming have said it along; The earth`s climate is not stable, and periods of warming have coincided with prosperity and periods of cooling with misery. The fall of the Roman Empire coincided with a period of warming that made the passage of the Alps possible.

http://notrickszone.com/2011/01/14/new- ... -the-past/

(As a bonus anyone who clicks on the link can see an avator of Dana with is photo)

For the record the temperature reconstruction was based on tree rings and they did say that current temperatures are unprecedented. I am curious if these authors were able to solve the divergence problems and if they used Mike's Nature trick.

Famine due to climate change could have been a factor in the fall of Rome, but not the only factor. If Rome had not faced invasions from barbarians, it would have survived such a famine. However, such a famine would have weakened the Roman Empire, making it more vulnerable to such invaders.

"here we get someone mocking a study that finds past climate change"

Well said, Darla Cooper