[GladesGuru]

The University of East Anglia is home to the METS computer model which achieved lasting noteriety when it predicted that the summer rainfall in Ireland and the Central Sahara were the same.

As for any claim that the present is as warm as the period when the Vikings were in Greenland, consider that the Chinese fleet of the 1420's sailed around Greenland during the summer. Somehow, I suspect that isn't going to be possible this summer.

And next summer doesn't look good either.

[sangrila]

"consider that the Chinese fleet of the 1420's sailed around Greenland during"


Could you please souce this. I have never heard that and am interested in reading about it. I do know that Greenland is said to have been much warmer in the time of Leif Erickson.

[dufekin]

That's entirely bogus. The last record of the Vikings in Greenland occurred in 1408, although they presumably lasted somewhat longer; perhaps Basque pirates finally annihilated them. But the Little Ice Age was in full swing, taking its toll on European-style animal husbandry as wintertime snowfalls melted later for increasingly fewer pasturage days during the summer. Ice floes usually blocked European fleets from reaching the Greenland settlements, and many (perhaps even most) simply sank and disappeared in the viciously stormy seas.

Greenlanders abandoned the Western Settlement circa the 1350s. The Chinese fleet never reached European shores. Although they *MIGHT* have reached America somewhere, the Chinese could not have circumnavigated Greenland, then an ice-choked island populated solely by Inuit.