E Pur si Muove

There is something disarmingly strengthening when you hear that innocent piping voice of history whispering from the unencumbered past, ‘excuse me, but I think you are perhaps mistaken…”

I am not a climatologist, but…

I am certain that the congregation of the pro-warmist faith is probably 99 per cent made up of people just as ill-qualified as me to pontificate. Still, as they do, so shall I. Here goes. Warmists of course hide behind their elect — their priesthood of ‘experts’ who all agree that the Earth is warming as never before. Every chance storm or dry spell is another “I told you so”.

Warmists concede that the Romans had it hot across northern Europe and that Chaucer basked in a Mediterranean climate, but thereafter it was downhill — just look at all those Dutch master paintings of frozen canals, they opine. They call it the Little Ice Age and it persisted till pesky man blew carbon dioxide up its back passage.

Peter Collinson (1694 — 1768) was in the wool trade, but his hobby was scientific enquiry and his greatest love was gardening. He corresponded with such luminaries as Linnaeus and Ben Franklin. He was a Londoner. Like any gardener he delighted in looking over the garden wall of other such enthusiasts — not in a spirit of envy or competition, but, as befitted his Quaker upbringing, with admiration for a fellow tiller of the soil who made a success of their plot.

So it was, that three years before his death he went to call upon a professional grower in what was then the countryside but is now the expensive and sought after continuation of Chelsea along the King’s Rd towards Fulham, a suburb known as Parson’s Green. This is what he noted in his diary.

“Oct. 18, 1765. I went to see Mr. Rogers’s vineyard at Parsons Green, all of Burgundy grapes, and seemingly all perfectly ripe. I did not see a green, half-ripe grape in all this great quantity. He does not expect to make less than fourteen hogsheads of wine [63 US gallons in each hogshead barrel, by the way]. The branches and fruit are remarkably large, and the vines very strong.”

So way into the little ice age it was so hot in October that grapes ripened so regularly that they could be commercially made into wine. As Galileo would say to the fascistic tendencies of the righteous in science… ‘Epur si muove’.