As eminent earth scientist Professor Ian Plimer has said, we must be the first generations in human history to be afraid of a warming climate. Warming climates are historically associated with abundance and thriving life. Which is what we’re seeing in the current, mildly warming climate: the Earth is measurably greening and wildfires have declined remarkably.
Cold climates, on the other hand, are associated with famine, plague and death. For all the Climate Cult’s bellowing about heatwaves, far, far more people die in cold weather, every year. Cooling climates are miserable.
And one cooling climate a million years ago erased our species from the European continent.
An extreme cooling event in Europe caused an extinction of early humans on the continent around 1.1 million years ago, a study suggests.
The abrupt climate changes saw ocean surface temperatures off Lisbon dropping below 6C – conditions that would have made it hard for archaic humans to survive, according to the researchers.
The UCL scientists said their findings, published in the journal Science, challenge the widely held belief that after arriving from South-West Asia by about 1.4 million years ago, these humans were able to survive through multiple climate cycles and adapt to increasingly harsh conditions.
It also challenges the Climate Cult’s conviction that a mildly warming climate is an existential threat to, not just human life, but all life.
It also challenges the religious conviction of the green-left that we must urgently dismantle our modern, industrial society and return to some kind of imaginary, pre-industrial utopia.
Lead author Dr Vasiliki Margari, of UCL Geography, said: “To our surprise, we found that this cooling at 1.1 million years ago was comparable to some of the most severe events of recent ice ages.”
Co-author Professor Nick Ashton of the British Museum said: “A cooling of this magnitude would have placed small hunter-gatherer bands under considerable stress, especially since early humans may have lacked adaptations such as sufficient fat insulation and also the means to make fire, effective clothing or shelters.”
The experts then ran a climate simulation to capture the extreme conditions during this time.
Study co-author Professor Axel Timmermann, of the IBS Centre for Climate Physics at Pusan National University in South Korea, said: “The results showed that 1.1 million years ago climate around the Mediterranean became too hostile for archaic humans.”
Luckily, they were able to escape to warmer climates, where the living was easier.
Combined results suggest that Iberia, and more generally southern Europe, became devoid of human population and remained so for the next 200,000 years.
The Independent
Tell me again why we should be afraid of a mildly warmer climate?