Why history’s vineyards, famines, and frozen rivers laugh in the face of “unprecedented” climate claims
To all those wandering into my little corner of the internet for the first time, I offer a word of warning. I am a self-professed lukewarmer. That is not a new yoga position, nor a trendy Scandinavian sauna ritual. It simply means this:
- I do not deny climate change. In fact, I embrace it with the calm certainty of someone who has read a history book. The climate has always changed. Since the planet acquired a skin of gases, it has shifted, swayed, warmed, cooled, and muttered to itself in cycles both grand and petty.
- I do, however, question the significance of the human fingerprint upon it. If humanity has any measurable impact on planetary climate, it is likely negligible—a faint smudge on a canvas already dripping with volcanic tantrums, solar mood swings, orbital eccentricities, and deep-ocean convulsions.
- Which means, dear reader, that if you are here to have your panic affirmed and your carbon-guilt massaged, you may want to click elsewhere. You have been warned.
Now, let us proceed with the obvious: Climate Change is real. It always has been. It was real long before Greta learned to scowl at cameras, long before Al Gore discovered the commercial potential of PowerPoint, long before mankind crawled out of its caves to bang rocks together in the name of progress.
This post first appeared in 2020, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
The earliest Earth was wrapped in an atmosphere so thick with carbon dioxide that today’s climate commissars would faint from shock. Volcanic outgassing belched CO₂ for hundreds of millions of years, creating a sky hostile to our lungs but quite cozy for the primitive lifeforms that squirmed into being under it. These microscopic pioneers would have found our present, oxygen-rich air positively toxic. Yet they, too, were carbon-based—just like us—and they plundered the carbon in the air to build their fragile little cells, accidentally releasing oxygen as a waste product.
Oxygen, in other words, was originally pollution. Life was once its enemy. Let that sink in the next time someone lectures you on how unnatural carbon dioxide is.
But let’s not get lost in the great saga of atmospheric evolution. This isn’t a biology lecture. This is about proxies—the imperfect breadcrumbs by which we reconstruct climates past. And instead of trudging back millions of years into the primordial murk, let’s set our sights on a more intimate slice of history: the last 2,000 years.
Why 2,000? Because evidence beyond that starts getting fuzzy, like a badly tuned radio. Because the closer we get to the present, the more corroborating material we have—from ice cores to pollen counts to written records. And because, not incidentally, 2,000 years ago the greatest bean-counting empire the world had ever seen was in its prime: Rome.
The Inconvenient Warmth of Antiquity
According to the high priests of Climate Alarmism, the warming we experience today is unique. Never before, they claim, has Earth endured such rapid and perilous heating, and never before has humanity been so recklessly responsible.
And yet—how awkward for them—history tells another story. Two significant warm periods occurred within the last two millennia: the Roman Warm Period (roughly 250 BC to 400 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (about 900–1300 AD).
During these balmy intervals, agriculture flourished, populations boomed, and empires rose to glory. Rome itself thrived in a Mediterranean climate more generous than today’s, while medieval Europe burst out of the so-called “Dark Ages” into the High Middle Ages—an era of cathedral-building, scientific curiosity, and voyages that stretched the known world.
Why did these civilizations blossom? Simple: warmth feeds life. Growing seasons lengthened. Grapes ripened in northern latitudes where today they struggle. Grain harvests multiplied, feeding armies and artisans alike. Even Greenland, so named by Erik the Red not as a real-estate scam but because it was, in fact, green, hosted thriving Norse settlements.
Contrast this with colder eras—the so-called “Dark Ages” after Rome’s collapse and the Little Ice Age from the 14th to 19th centuries—when famine, plague, and social collapse stalked the land. Cold shrivels harvests, stunts livestock, and drives populations into desperate migrations. Civilization flourishes not in frost, but in warmth.
This is not ideology. This is not “denial.” This is recorded history.
The Problem of Proxies
Here lies the dilemma: we cannot stroll back into the year 200 AD and stick a thermometer into the soil. Thermometers didn’t exist until the 17th century, and reliable global records are barely two centuries old. What we have instead are proxies—indirect measurements that hint at past conditions.
These include:
- Ice cores drilled from Antarctica and Greenland, trapping ancient air bubbles.
- Pollen grains preserved in lake sediments, whispering which plants once flourished.
- Ocean sediments layering clues of marine life and mineral shifts.
- Tree rings, each a diary of growth or struggle.
- Mollusk shells, encoding chemical ratios tied to temperature.
- Glacial deposits, testaments to advances and retreats of ice.
These proxies are invaluable. They also come wrapped in layers of assumption, interpretation, and statistical massaging.
Take Michael Mann’s infamous “Hockey Stick” graph, concocted from tree-ring data and statistical sleight-of-hand. It depicted a thousand years of flat temperatures followed by a sudden 20th-century spike—a blade forged conveniently in time for political exploitation. For a while, it was paraded as gospel. Today, it is largely discredited, surviving only in the sermons of zealots and the pages of alarmist media.
Tree rings, after all, are decent calendars but dreadful thermometers. Growth depends on water, soil, disease, sunlight, and a dozen other variables besides temperature. To read climate directly from tree rings is like trying to gauge the wealth of a society from the length of its fingernails.
Rome, Wine, and the Warmth That Was
Here is where Rome’s obsessive record-keeping rescues us from the fog of proxies. Romans did not simply conquer—they documented, taxed, and archived. Their bean-counting bureaucracy left us a trove of indirect climate data.
Consider Britain. When Emperor Claudius invaded in 43 AD, he set about Romanizing the misty island. Among the cultural imports was wine. Evidence shows that within decades, Britain was producing wine locally—enough that Emperor Domitian later issued edicts to restrict vineyard expansion. Amphorae workshops sprang up near London to supply the trade.
Why does this matter? Because Britain is not, by modern standards, prime wine country. Even today, with improved cultivation techniques and warmer microclimates, British viticulture is a boutique curiosity, not an agricultural backbone. For vineyards to thrive nearly to Hadrian’s Wall, the climate must have been significantly warmer than now.
When the Roman Warm Period ended around 400 AD, Britain cooled, and with it the vines withered. Later, during the Medieval Warm Period, vineyards flourished again. And when the Little Ice Age arrived, rivers froze solid in the Low Countries, livestock starved, and famine bit deep. Dutch painters immortalized ice fairs on canals—scenes alien to the same locations today.
Thus, vineyards serve as proxies as reliable as any ice core. Wine is a sensitive crop. It does not thrive in chill. Its very presence in Roman Britain shouts a truth that climate alarmists despise: the current “unprecedented” warming is not unprecedented at all. It is modest by comparison.
The Cold Truth About Warmth
If warmth is life and cold is death, what does our present era tell us?
Today’s “Modern Warm Period” is, paradoxically, the coldest warm period in the known record. Each successive warm interval—Roman, Medieval, Modern—appears weaker than the last, as though Earth is shuffling reluctantly toward its next great glaciation.
The glaciers will return. They always do. In geological terms, we are living on borrowed heat, a brief intermission before the ice. Humanity may one day look back on the 20th century’s “warming crisis” as a golden lull, an Edenic reprieve.
And yet, our modern discourse treats warmth as apocalypse and cold as salvation. Governments tax carbon dioxide as if it were cyanide, ignoring that plants—the very basis of life—drink the stuff greedily. Schoolchildren are taught to fear sunny days as omens of doom. Meanwhile, the historical record, from Rome’s vineyards to Greenland’s farms, tells us warmth is the ally of civilization.
Proxies, Narratives, and the Shaky Throne of Alarmism
What do we learn from all this? That proxies can illuminate—but also mislead. That history supplies abundant evidence of natural, cyclical climate change independent of human activity. And that the loudest voices in today’s debate are less interested in truth than in narrative.
For the alarmist priesthood, the game is control. A frightened populace is a pliable one. If people can be convinced that their breath, their cows, their furnaces, their very existence is poisoning the planet, then the machinery of taxation and regulation can expand indefinitely.
But proxies like vineyards, ice paintings, and written records undermine this narrative. They whisper inconvenient truths: it has been warmer before; civilization thrived when it was. It has been colder before; civilization suffered and shrank. Our current age, far from catastrophic, is merely another modest crest in the restless tide of climate.
Closing Thought: Drink Deep
If Rome’s scribes and amphorae tell us anything, it is that the climate is a fickle host. It has offered humanity warmth and abundance, and it has snatched them away in frost and famine. What it has never been is stable.
So drink deep, friends, while the vineyards still thrive. Warmth is not the enemy. Cold is. And if our current “crisis” feels tepid compared to history, that is because it is.
The Lukewarmer’s heresy is simply this: the planet is bigger than us, the climate older than us, and the cycles grander than our brief, noisy presence upon it. We would do well to remember that before we bankrupt ourselves in ritual penance to carbon gods.
