Re, Benjamin Franklin Dec 06, 2017 Ben Franklin, Climate...

  1. 27,200 Posts.
    lightbulb Created with Sketch. 467
    Re, Benjamin Franklin


    Dec 06, 2017
    Ben Franklin, Climate Science, and National Security


    Benjamin Franklin, the first American Ambassador to France, was both a statesman and a scientist. On September 3, 1783 he co-signed the Treaty of Paris at the Hotel d’York, in which the British acknowledged the American Colonies to be free and independent States, ending the American Revolution.

    Franklin’s political eye was focused, but his scientific eye was attentive too. All was not well in the French countryside, where one of the worst environmental calamities of modern history was just beginning to unfold. That summer was the hottest on record, and a mysterious “dry fog” had settled across Europe. The combination of heat and air pollution was too much for the weak and elderly. Mortality spiked among farm workers and laborers across the continent. ...

    ... The heat was so intense that meat went bad the day after it was butchered, and swarms of flies made life miserable.
    The seeds of climate science in America were very possibly being planted as Franklin observed the changes 200+ years ago. Conditions went from bad to worse as Europe and North America were plunged into a deep freeze that winter. In its first peacetime year as an independent nation, the United States had to contend with more extreme weather than the colonies had ever experienced. New England suffered a record below-zero weather streak. The Mississippi River froze as far south as New Orleans. Ice appeared in the Gulf of Mexico.
    Other parts of the world were also in trouble. Monsoons in Africa and India were extremely weak, and rain barely moistened the African Sahel. Agriculture collapsed in the Nile Valley leading to mass starvation. Volney, the French historian, wrote, “Soon after the end of November [1784], the famine carried off, at Cairo, nearly as many as the plague; the streets, which before were full of beggars, now afforded not a single one: all had perished or deserted the city.” Within a year, Egypt had lost a sixth of its population. ...

    All of it:

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-boslough/ben-franklin-climate-scie_b_2512146.html


    The Power of CO2 !!
    Last edited by birdman29: 18/09/18
 
arrow-down-2 Created with Sketch. arrow-down-2 Created with Sketch.