Climate ‘science’:In vino veritas
Alistair Crooks
Not so long ago, I was watching a televisionclimate “expert” talking, as they all do, about “unprecedented warming.” Asproof of this he stood, arms outstretched, in one of the vineyards springing upacross southern Britain. Look, everyone, the temperatures have risen so muchthat it is now possible to have vineyards and a wine industry in Britain! Thisis — that word again — unprecedented, he assured us.
I was underwhelmed, scepticism directing mymind to consider the many and various items of documented evidence thatdemolish his claim as surely and thoroughly as did Phylloxera vitifoliae ravaged the Old World’s vineyards.
In earlier times I had been interested innumismatics — coin collecting, if you prefer — and I recalled reading of aBritish tribe, the Atrebates, who occupied Kent (perhaps the very spot fromwhich our “expert” was expounding) in pre-Roman Britain and produced one of thefirst coins ever minted there. A goldstater, it predates the Claudian invasion and features Verica, King of theAtrebates, in equestrian pose on one side and a vine leaf on the obverse.
As the climate-change spruiker droned on (andon and on and on) about his “unprecedented warming”, I wondered why thisthis pre-Roman coin was not prima facie evidence that vine growing in Britain was possibleeven before the Romans arrived in 43 AD? In what sense, then, is theexpanding of modern vineyards in Kent “unprecedented” if it was warm enough forthe Celtic Britons to grow grapes 2000 years ago?
As the alarmist tosh on the televisioncontinued, my mind wandered yet again into the past and to the Venerable Bede,whose quill-and-parchment best-seller, The Ecclesiastical Historyof the English Nation, dates to around 731 AD. In his opening chapter, Bede sets the scene for his magnum opus with a listing of Anglo-Saxon England’s agricultural products. Along with his description of eel farming we find
[England]also produces vines in some places, and has plenty of land andwaterfowls of several sorts; it is remarkable also for rivers abounding infish, and plentiful springs.
Seems that the news of vineyards inAnglo-Saxon England, circa 731AD, had reached Bede even way north inNorthumbria. Is this another example of yet one more period of “unprecedentedwarming”? As the alarmist beat his catastropharian drum and enumerated thehorrors to come on a fevered planet my mind wandered even further. What of theNorman Conquest and the Domesday Book, compiled around 1085, might that have light to shed? In that chronicle of taxable agricultural assets drawn up at the request of William The Conqueror Ifound this:
…Vineyardsare recorded at 45 places in Domesday Book, 32 of these in Great Domesday, allin south-eastern England. All these vineyards were in the hands of Normans orthe great abbeys…
…Therewere probably more vineyards in existence in 1086 than Domesday records. By theearly twelfth century vines were certainly cultivated where none are mentionedin Domesday. Henry of Huntingdon, for instance, claims that Winchester ‘wasrich in wine’, and William of Malmesbury that the wine of the vale ofGloucester was ‘abundant and of good quality’
As the TV climate evangelist persistedwith his “unprecedented warming”, I moved on to consider the monastic recordsof Britain dating up to Tudor times and the dissolution of the monasteries byHenry VIII in 1540. These accounts suggest monks were tending vineyardsand making wine as far north as Yorkshire and the Scottish bordercountry. Perhaps men of the cloth were favoured by God with anunprecedented climatic dispensation because the monasteries in central Russia,Norway, and southern Germany were also sustaining wine production.
It would appear the mercury still has some way to go before temperatures reach the “unprecedented warming” of the Middle Ages. Here I was reminded of an old Flanders and Swann song, In the Desert:
In thedesert
Acamel is approaching
Anothercamel is approaching
Athird camel is approaching
Afourth camel is approaching
Afifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth camel… until the entire horizon was full of whatthe TV climate guru would no doubt call “unprecedented” solitary camels.
It would appear from the climate record thatthe chilly period from around 1600 to 1800 was an anomalous stretch in the twothousand year history of England. This was the period time when grapes could not be grown, the Thames froze and English tastesswitched by necessity from wine to beer. Is it possible that climate “experts”are so ignorant of the historical climate record they have never come acrossthese freely available historical references? Or is that they have found itconvenient not to look and would prefer their audiences did not either? Atextbook detailing the historical climate record published by old schoolclimate scientist, ProfessorHubert Lamb, founder of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, since debasedbythe charlatan authors of the Climategate emails, must have beenstandard reading for today’s climate “experts” during their university days,but they don’t appear to have been too diligent with their homework. Maybe theywere outside enjoying the warmer weather during that lecture and missed thepage reproduced atop this article?
Roman Britain and the Atrebates … TheVenerable Bede and the Saxon Chronicles … William the Conqueror and the Domesday Book … Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries —each and every one recording an “unprecedented” moment, but only if you aresufficiently incurious, gullible or, to be blunt, sufficientlystupid to take careerist climate shills at their word.
Here I have looked at vineyards in southernBritain as a bogus proxy for “unprecedented warming”. But I suspect one couldtake any of the modern proxies and find that few stand up toscrutiny against the documented historical record. It is passing strange that aliterate society, which has made two thousand years of documentation no harderto access than the effort involved in clicking a mouse, chooses not only toignore such an invaluable storehouse of knowledge but to energeticallymanufacture an entirely illusory past. Sadly, like some pre-literate societymired in superstition and ignorance, we now appear to place more value on thanliving memory, anecdote, manufactured history and the lies of Disallowed“scientists” than the evidence so readily available.
We live in strange times. Indeed, we mightalmost say this age of fostered ignorance is genuinely unprecedented.
