QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; I have read your thesis on global warming and that this is only part of a natural cycle. I admit that you have persuaded me whereas the claims are false especially that New York City should have been under water by now according Al Gore. You mentioned that there was global warming which enabled the Vikings to reach America because the ice melted. My question is rather blunt. If we are headed now into a global cooling period, what is the historical evidence that society also declines?

Thank you in advance

PD

ANSWER: I have reported that the peat fires in Borneo and Sumatra have now exceeded all the emissions from the entire U.S. economy. This whole movement is simply to raise taxes on the bogus theory of global warming. We are not so powerful to alter the course of cyclical movement of the planet. Bouts of global cooling (ice ages) as well as warming periods predate the combustion engine and mankind. It is rather questionable analysis to claim we have altered the climate. We are capable of polluting things, true. But actually altering the climate is something beyond our power.

Volcanoes are a major issue in climate change. Yes, studies show that the Hawaiian Kilauea show that the eruption discharges between 8,000 and 30,000 metric tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere each day, which has been going on for more than 20 years. However, gas studies worldwide by volcanologists have calculated that global volcanic CO₂ production on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. But this is really in the absence of any really catastrophic eruptions.  Volcanoes emit also Sulfur dioxide  SO₂ which automobiles emit very little. When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18th, 1980, it produced 1.5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide on that one day and about 2 million metric tons for the entire event far more than automobiles.

Moreover, volcanic production of CO₂ is by far not really the issue in climate change. Instead of global warming from  CO₂, it is the plume of ash in the sky which actually blocks the sun and reverses the climate from warm to cold like sitting under an umbrella at the beach. I have discussed Mount Tambora  which erupted  in 1816 and threw into the air so much ash that it snowed during the summer in New York City. It became known as 18-hundred-and-froze-to-death. I have shown the correlation of that eruption to wheat prices.

I have also written about the Maunder Minimum which sent the Earth into a cold period 300 years ago from the perspective of the cycle energy output from the Sun. I have also gone into the evolution of science which has been set in motion by the very discovery of a frozen woolly rhinoceros which altered science in many fields. I have explain how the temperature at the time of the American Revolution was at its lowest point in the cycle.

All of that said, the ice core samples have revealed that there were two major volcanic eruptions in two major volcanic eruptions in 536 and 540 AD which sent Europe into an ice age and wiped out the Roman civilization. Flavius Odoacer (433–493) was a soldier who in 476 became the first King of Italy (476–493) after deposing Romulus Augustus, the last official Roman emperor in the West.

Odoacer was overthrown by Theodoric the Great (454-526), the Ostrogoth. He was followed by Athalaric (526-534), and a few others then finally Baduila (541-552). So while Rome officially ends in the West with Romulus Augustus, the Ostrogoths fade out after 552 due to the climate changes. In the East, the change in climate appears to have also possibly been linked to the Plague of Justinian (541–542) which was a pandemic that afflicted the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, especially its capital Constantinople, the Sassanid Empire, and port cities around the entire Mediterranean Sea. I have written about the political turmoil there in Byzantium which preceeded the plague during the Nika Revolt of 532AD. I have also written about how empires die. It does seem that when temperatures decline, civil unrest rises and this increases the risk of revolutions.

When Thera erupted around 1645-1650BC, this created a climate change and marked the end of the Minoan civilization. They were conquered by the Mycenae who also captured Troy. As the weather turned cold, Greece goes into a Dark Age. The Greeks migrated and other places called them the “sea people” since they did not know where they came from as the invaded Northern Africa. Homer wrote about the period before the Dark Age known as the Heroic Period. Scholars thought this was fiction about Troy and Mycenae until Heinrich Schliemann (1822 – 1890) set out and discovered that what Homer wrote about was history.

The historical evidence is rather extensive. It does appear that as we enter into a global cooling period, governments will fall, disease will increase, and the risk of Western Civilization declining sharply all become historically possible.