Category: Climate change
Trump Admin Withdrawing From ‘Anti-American’ Global Climate Change Regimes
‘Wasteful international organizations’
Global warming powered an empire that dwarfed the Vikings
Popular culture loves its image of Norsemen shivering in fur pelts, raiding British monasteries, and braving the icy North Atlantic. Yet while Vikings struggled to survive on the thawing margins of Greenland, a far richer and more formidable maritime power flourished thousands of miles away in the tropical warmth of southern India.
That power was the Chola Empire.
A modern golden age remains within reach — provided we do not cripple ourselves with fear of the very conditions that have so often underwritten human prosperity.
At its height between 985 and 1044 A.D., the Cholas projected force on a scale that made Viking longships look like backyard skirmishers. Their ships were technological marvels — floating fortresses capable of transporting cavalry, infantry, and weeks of provisions across vast distances.
The Cholas mounted a major naval expedition against the Srivijaya Empire, a dominant maritime power based in what is now Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula. This was an amphibious assault conducted thousands of miles from home ports, a logistical achievement comparable to modern naval operations. The Cholas toppled rulers, secured the vital Malacca Strait, and guaranteed safe passage for merchant guilds trading from the Middle East to China.
On land, they maintained a standing army that included thousands of war elephants.
Their wealth also found expression in stone. The Great Living Chola Temples — now recognized as UNESCO World Heritage sites — stretch across southern India and neighboring islands. Built without modern machinery, these monumental structures relied on elephants to haul massive stones from distances of up to 60 miles.
Chola society possessed abundant labor, food, and wealth. The question is why.
What enabled a civilization to generate the immense caloric and economic surplus required to build stone monuments and launch armadas across the Indian Ocean? A large part of the answer lies in climate — specifically, global warming.
The rise of the Chola Empire coincided with the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted roughly from 900 to 1300 A.D. This relationship between warmth and human flourishing is inconvenient for the modern climate-industrial narrative, which treats rising temperatures as an unqualified catastrophe.
Warmth strengthens tropical monsoons, the lifeblood of agrarian economies like the Cholas’. Recent scientific research confirms that fluctuations in the Indian summer monsoon shaped agricultural output and the rise and fall of major dynasties. Indian civilization flourished during the Roman Warm Period, fractured during the Dark Ages Cold Period, and reached new heights under the Cholas during the Medieval Warm Period.
The Chola Empire was sustained by the very kind of warming modern activists describe as an “existential threat.”
RELATED: ‘Green Antoinettes’ live large, preach small
ajijchan via iStock/Getty Images
In the Cauvery Delta — the empire’s heartland — this favorable climate transformed the region into the “Rice Bowl of the South.” Three harvests a year became common. Granaries overflowed. Revenues surged.
That surplus freed labor from subsistence farming and redirected it toward imperial ambition. Chola trade guilds thrived, exporting textiles, spices, and grain to the Chinese Song Dynasty — another civilization that prospered during this warm epoch.
Today, we find ourselves in another warming phase, emerging from the depths of the Little Ice Age that ended in the mid-19th century. Global crop yields have repeatedly reached record highs. India has re-emerged as a major grain exporter. The planet is experiencing a measurable “greening” effect as higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels fertilize plants and warmer temperatures expand cultivable land.
Yet, we are told to feel guilty.
Coal, oil, and natural gas — fuels that protect humanity from the elements and power modern economies — are vilified. Environmental extremists implicitly argue for a colder world, despite the historical record showing that colder periods brought famine, disease, and social collapse.
The Chola Empire stands as a reminder of what human ingenuity can achieve when the climate cooperates. Its ships sailed on prosperity sustained by warmth. Its temples rose from a society rich in calories and confidence. Its civilization commanded respect across continents.
We face a similar opportunity today. A modern golden age remains within reach — provided we do not cripple ourselves with fear of the very conditions that have so often underwritten human prosperity.
2025 Unfiltered: Politics, Pandemonium, and Peculiar Peace
January. Donald Trump officially returns to the White House. The global left assures us that this will bring death, war,…
Tom Steyer’s Affordable Energy Promises to California Are Unaffordable
Tom Steyer, the billionaire climate activist running for California governor, promises to cut electric bills by 25 percent by breaking…
Two Retractions Raise the Question: Is Climate Science Really Settled?
Sometimes papers are published that overturn the conventional wisdom. Other times papers are retracted since what they purported to be…
Five Not-So Quick Things: The Green Shoots Which Will Only Get Greener
Maybe it’s the natural contrarian in me. Or maybe it’s my irrepressible optimism (if you know me, you’ll know that’s…
The First Snowfall’s Bitter Welcome
The first snowfall isn’t magical; it’s a mess and always has been. Clean roads turn grimy overnight, coated with cinder,…
The Welcome Demise of Climate Change Catastrophism
Is the American Left finally waking up from its decades-long climate catastrophism stupor? For years, climate alarmism has reigned as…
Finland’s Globalist President Lectures the United States About a New World Order
Like an Ivy League university professor, Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, takes to the pages of Foreign Affairs to…
Climate hucksters wrong again: Study claiming climate change would make you poorer retracted over major flaws
German climate alarmists claimed in a study published last year in the journal Nature that even if carbon dioxide emissions were radically cut down, so-called climate change would still drive the world economy toward a global GDP reduction of 19%.
The alarmists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggested further that not only would global annual climate-change damages hit $38 trillion by 2049, but that under a high-emissions scenario, global GDP would be lowered around 60% relative to the baseline in 75 years — an impact reportedly three times larger than previous estimates.
‘Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number. So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart.’
According to the U.K.-based Carbon Brief, this was one of the most-cited climate papers by the media, including the Associated Press, CNN, Deutsche Welle, and Reuters.
Just the News highlighted that numerous activists and institutions also cited it, including Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) and the World Bank.
The problem for the climate alarmists and those who believed them was that the study’s conclusions were bogus.
A team of American economists pointed out in a commentary published by Nature in August that “data anomalies arising from one country in [the German researchers’] underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change.”
The economists revealed that if the questionable data pertaining to Uzbekistan were excluded, projected global losses in 2100 would be 23% as opposed to 60%, which is more in line with previous estimates.
RELATED: Al Gore wrong again: Study delivers good news for Arctic ice trends, bad news for climate hucksters
Photo by ALEX KENT/AFP via Getty Images
The economists noted further that the Germans underestimated “statistical uncertainty in their future projections of climate impacts.”
“Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” Solomon Hsiang, a Stanford University professor who co-authored the August commentary, told the New York Times. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart.”
‘We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger.’
The paper, which was originally published on April 17, 2024, was retracted on Wednesday.
The retraction notice indicates that “the results were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995-1999.”
While the German alarmists attempted to correct the data for Uzbekistan and make other adjustments, they found that “these changes led to discrepancies in the estimates for climate damages by mid-century, with an increased uncertainty range (from 11-29% to 6-31%) and a lower probability of damages diverging across emission scenarios by 2050 (from 99% to 90%).”
In other words, the original conclusions hyped by the liberal media were worthless.
When the now-retracted paper was first published in April 2024, the German researchers made no secret of the point of the exercise: justifying societal and industrial upheaval coded as “adaptation.”
“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly developed ones such as Germany, France, and the United States,” Leonie Wenz, lead scientist on the study, said in a release.
“These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them,” Wenz continued. “And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100.”
Wenz and her team are hardly the first climate alarmists to have their conclusions proven to be as incorrect as they are outlandish.
Failed presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance, concern-mongered in 2009 that in addition to the significant rise in the global sea level that was supposed to happen “in the near future” but never did, the entire polar ice cap was likely going to be seasonally ice-free, perhaps by as early as 2014.
Gore told the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that then-new research indicated there was “a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”
In September, a paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters revealed that Gore was dead wrong — that over the past 20 years, “Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”
Rather than wait to be proven horribly wrong, Bill Gates — who has spent years fear-mongering about the calamities that would supposedly visit humanity unless governments neutralized certain industries and regulated into extinction certain behaviors — admitted in October that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
