Monday, July 16, 2012

Hmm: Back when CO2 was at "safe" levels in the 1860s, there was evidently plenty of weather that Gore/Romm/Mann/Revkin would hold up today as proof that CO2 is dangerous

Encyclopedia Virginia: Weather During the Civil War
Meteorologically, the Civil War took place at the tail end of what is often termed the "Little Ice Age," a period of general cooling and unpredictability that most scholars date from roughly 1310 to 1850. Despite what its name suggests, the Little Ice Age actually encompassed dramatic fluctuations in weather, with one year bringing an intensely cold winter and easterly winds, and the next heavy rains and raging heat. On the whole, conditions began to warm after 1850, but during the war Virginia experienced extreme precipitation and alternate periods of blazing heat and bitter cold.
...Union general William T. Sherman proved that floods were no obstacle for a tenacious commander. Tremendous storms in South Carolina did not prevent him from taking Columbia and Charleston, though major rivers swelled in his army's path...
While stormy weather tested soldiers in battle, heat was also a worthy opponent. During the Battle of the Wilderness in May [5-6] 1864, the unseasonable heat helped fuel the forest fires that consumed dead and wounded men's bodies. Some soldiers, wearied by the fight and weather, collapsed on the subsequent march to Spotsylvania Court House.
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Soldiers also believed that weather could damage physical well-being. Charles Wright Wills, a soldier from Illinois, explained how weather ravaged his regiment's health while they were stationed near Corinth, Mississippi. "Nearly half the bad cases [of illness] are typhoid fever … Our boys are suffering from the change of climate and water, and as much as anything, the sudden change in temperature." Heat could also contribute to debilitating wounds, as one woman pointed out after the Battle of Gaines's Mill (1862): "The weather was excessively hot. It was midsummer, gangrene and erysipelas [a skin infection] attacked the wounded, and those who might have been cured of their wounds were cut down by diseases."

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