What have the vikings got to do with climate change?

Question

I have seen a number of answers here recently that talk of the medieval warm period and the little ice age and connect that to the Vikings dying out (or leaving) Greenland.

Answer 1

The vikings farmed areas of greenland, the reason this is important is it demonstrates it was warmer in the past than it is today without our current co2 production and that it is instead natural, stomatal records also show co2 was higher during that warm period. This also shows that Mann's reconstruction of climate from varies proxies is horibbly wrong (thats well accepted now), this graph was one of the main pieces of evidence for AGW and was used by the IPCC and Al Gore in his film.

It also demonstrates that when it was warmer back then, the climate was mild and the sea didnt rise and swallow the earth, and of course the coral reefs and polar bears survived the warmth. This demonstrates a lot of the climate change predictions are merely unsubstanciated scare mongering to scare people into action and global warming can happen naturally without human input.

Answer 2

The ability to farm and keep plentiful livestock is the basis for the Viking argument . They did have to abandon Greenland because of climate change as their society was based on this . Hard to say exactly how this  

would play out in todays world but... a fair comparison can be drawn .

Answer 3

Vikings don't affect global warming much - that's a common misconception.  

Global warming has been found to have an inverse relationship to the number of pirates in the world.  

Answer 4

The fact is no one really knows for sure what happened to the Vikings of Greenland did they just go back to Iceland, did the Inuit finish them off or increasing cold as the little ice age closed in. It was probably a combination of all these things even during the warm period it was still a pretty harsh place in winter, of the 24 ships that formed the first settlers only 14 made it there, and farming seems to have only worked for a short time as the ground wasn't very fertile and probably stopped being productive well before the little ice age started up, they were living on animals feed on the short green grass that still grows there. The Vikings arrived there ~1000 the Inuit ~1200 and they had a number of conflicts over limited resources. The Vikings only ever occupied the ice free South and South West coastal regions which have remained ice free to this day.

They used up the small numbers of dwarf trees fairly quickly for fuel which just added to their problems. Using up resources with no regard for the future seems to be something we have in common with them, at least they could claim ignorance of the consequences.

Answer 5

It is pretty much they suffered the downside of global cooling when the climate of the medieval warm period that provided good growing seasons when they settled there began to cool off as the little ice age began.

http://www.archaeology.org/online/featur...

http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/histori...

http://www.irelandseye.com/irish/people/...

http://www.fenitharbour.com/saintbrendan...

Answer 6

The Vikings did spend a short period ranching on southern Greenland during the late medieval warming period, which tells us that that warming period had continued longer than our present warming period. The fact that that warming period ended without any human intervention is then extrapolated to suggest that the same will happen with this warming period.

While the analogy is not unreasonable, we should be aware that, had it not ended spontaneously, it would have gone on to create conditions that would support creation of a major ice age.

It did create a minor ice age when it collapsed. but the oceans had not yet warmed enough to support the evaporation needed to create major glaciers.

It is not really that Vikings had anything to do with climate change, but that their experience, discovering that Greenland had lost a lot of its ice and starting ranching there, demonstrates that our present warming period has not yet progressed as far.

Today, if you use google earth to look at the south west coast of Greenland, you will see that there are green areas that go a hundred miles inland in summer. Which does not mean much more than that some Lapp elk might be able to live there already.