Climate Changes, in Context

 The climate is changing, This is nothing new. In fact it has always been changing throughout the history of planet Earth. But it is best understood in the larger context.

The recent hot temperatures in western Canada and the western USA have resulted in hundreds of deaths and broken records set during the climate crisis of the 1930s. From the late 1920s to the late 1930s, a combination of high temperatures, drought, and high winds turned some areas of "the great plains" into "the great dustbowl", where fields, roads, fences. and even buildings were buried under topsoil carried from afar.   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

A buried farm in 1936 in Kansas

My mother's parents moved 3 times during the 1920s and 1930s trying to find a place where they could still farm successfully. At this time most farmers were using horses, so atmospheric C02 levels were probably very low. But the climate crisis was very real. My parents and grandparents lived in fear of it happening again.

We sometimes see the alarming words "Existential Climate Change" used to describe the current trend of higher temperatures, giving the impression that temperatures used to be stable but have suddenly began rising. But until relatively recent times we have not been able to measure temperatures reliably.

During the 1600s and 1700s the first thermometers were developed from the earlier "thermoscopes" that detected heat but had no way to measure temperature. By 1724, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit introduced a reliable thermometer and the temperature scale that bears his name. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermometer

So the ability to actually measure temperatures is about 300 years old, although temperatures prior to that can often be estimated from other circumstances. 

For example, since the ancient Romans grew Mediterranean grapes in Britain, we can infer that temperatures there were probably warmer then than they are now. 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Meadows_(archaeologist) 

And during the "medieval warm period", Norse settlers farmed in Greenland until the "little ice age" arrived in the 1500s. This cold period lasted into the 1800s.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/why-did-greenland-s-vikings-disappear

Does this mean there is no climate crisis? Not necessarily, it just means that warmer temperatures and colder temperatures existed for prolonged periods of time in the past. The current warming trend can probably be seen more clearly when we look at it in the larger context. 
 

INTERESTING
I just now came across a presentation by the University of California in Irvine which does a good job of making many of these same points in a more entertaining way. Earth System Science 21. On Thin Ice. Lecture 21. Ice Age World and Past Impact of Ice on Humans 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHi-NHax78
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHi-NHax78

ALSO WELL DONE
This video describes a well-documented sudden drop in temperatures across Europe that led to millions of deaths by exposure and starvation.
The Mysterious Deadly Frost Of 1709 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXcjKrLuTV4