“A change in our climate is taking place very surely. Both heat and cold are becoming moderate within the memory of even the middle-aged, and snows are less frequent and less deep.”
– Thomas Jefferson 1804
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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You found something on Thomas Jefferson?!
an instant classic!
Here is the web text for that google book, there are some real gems:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch07.html
A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now. This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits. From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighbourhood of Monticello. An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the spring of the year, so fixed an ascendency as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their developement, from every danger of returning cold. The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those overflowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now.
Amazing! There MUST have been evil SUV’s and evil coal fire plants in Thomas Jeffersons day too! 🙂
Later in Jefferson’s life his carriage had four horses … quadrupling the CO2 output of the commoners in Virginia.
And yet, there was the little issue of a series of progressively cooler years, bottoming out around 1816 in the “year without a summer”.
But he wasn’t prognosticating.
Keep in mind that 1816, the “Year without a summer”, was caused by the Tambora volcano eruption. No relation with climate or sun cycles. Just a thought.