| I went to primary school in the Netherlands in the 70's. From those 8 years (2 years 'kleuterschool' (preschool) and 6 years 'lagere school' (primary school), a few high points: - we had 'tropenrooster' (tropical schedule) several times when the temperature went above 30°C, this entailed an early start to the school day so we could go home around noon. The main reason was that the heat in the class rooms was too much to bear. - roads were closed several times because of the asphalt melting from the heat - ...while at the same time I skated (as in ice skates) to school several times, once even over the roads when they were covered in a few cm of ice We had some hot summers and some cold winters, this was in the same period when there were warnings of "a new ice age". That ice age did not materialise just yet [1], nor did those hot summers mark the beginning of a trend. During my first years at university I lived in a little house on a farm somewhere in the countryside. The first winter I was snowed in for a week. The toilet froze, there was a snow ledge on the inside of the front door. The "Elfstedentocht" - a 200+ km ice skating marathon between 11 cities in Friesland - was held twice during my time at university after a hiatus of several decades. It has not been held since. All of this is anecdata but the story it tells is clear: it was hot back then, it was cold back then. It was hot in between, it was cold in between. It can be hot now, it can be cold now. It would be possible to draw a regression line in an attempt to show some trend but whatever it would show would be misleading, the period is too short and the data points too few. Have a look at the temperature graph for the Holocene [2] to see a trend line over a somewhat longer period, in this case about 11.800 years. Even there it is necessary to even out the bumps over several hundreds of years to get at the real trend which was a stark rise from ~11.800 years ago culminating in a maximum around ~8500-4000 years ago followed by a slow decline. Looking closer the "Little Ice Age", the Viking age warm period and the Roman warm period can be recognised, all of which had a large impact on human activities and development. As to whether the "Little Ice Age" never saw hot summers or the Viking/Roman warm periods never saw cold winters we can only assume they did, just like the supposedly cooler 70's saw some hot summers while the supposedly warmer 90's and early 2000's saw some cold winters. [1] ...or rather we are still in the same ice age as before, to be more specific in the Holocene interglacial period which is probably running on its last legs if previous interglacials are something to go by, just a few thousand years from now there will most likely be a new glaciation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene... |
