Thursday, January 09, 2020

Viking-Made Climate Change?

The Detroit News: Viking-era runestone may reflect fears of a climate disaster

The Vikings weren't known as any great users of fossil fuels, but a new interpretation of a portion of an ancient rune inscription shows they had worries of climate disasters all the same.

Of course, the main worry for them was for a Climate change of Global Cooling, rather than Global Warming.

The writing on a famous Viking-era runestone may reflect fears of an approaching climate disaster in 9th century Scandinavia, according to new research by a team of Swedish academics
....

“Before the Rok runestone was erected, a number of events occurred which must have seemed extremely ominous: a powerful solar storm colored the sky in dramatic shades of red, crop yields suffered from an extremely cold summer, and later a solar eclipse occurred just after sunrise. Graslund said. “Even one of these events would have been enough to raise fears of another Fimbulwinter.”

Apparently the author of that portion of the missive was named Greta Thunbergsdottir. In the inscription, she advocated the Vikings stop cutting trees and building longships as it was bad for the environment, and to stop children going to school and instead sacrifice them to the Norse gods to stop the change.

1 comment:

MrGarabaldi said...

Hey Aaron;

Right, gotta apply modern optics to stuff that happened 1000 years ago, then they wonder why things don't make sense.