Stormcloud version 3
This seems preferable starts off with a coup de tonnerre
In the later part of the third quart of the 19th century, Ruskin makes at roughly the same time makes what amount to two apparently contradictory hypothesis about climate change : one of climate warming, and the other of climate cooling
In 1869, in the Preface to the Queen of the Air, he describe the pollution from the Industrial Revolution which has reached his beloved Alps, and which seems to have started melting its their glaciers and snows : ‘This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps.2 In that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others.3 The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is now defiled with languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires; their very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading,4 as if Hell had breathed on them;
‘This is written from at, from the same view which ……
He continues
"More than the life of Switzerland,—its very snows,—eternal, as one foolishly called them,—are passing away,2 as if in omen of evil. One-third, at least, in the depth of all the ice of the Alps has been lost in the last twenty years; and the change of climate thus indicated is without any parallel in authentic history. In its bearings on the water supply and atmospheric conditions of central Europe, it is the most important phenomenon, by far, of all that offer themselves to the study of living men of science:
Yet in much better known texts, gathered together and commented upon in the S19th C, in 1884, he seems to put forward a hypothesis of climate cooling
(The first of these dates from 1871)
in his S letters the first of these texts, written july 1871 Ruskin describes a new type of cloud never observed before, gloomy poisonous and malignant, which is expanding over the whole of Europe, and he argues later on, eventually, the whole world
He first observed it
month by month ….. put the sun out
Did this happen ? was there a regional climate cooling? possibly
Bit
Not in Ruskin’s lfetime
It started again in the 1940s
Lear like
chooses between the two in Leslie letter
He suggested that this may b
This has been taken up and all subsequent commentators
This happened later in the middle of the 20th century
Also predicts warming
it so happens that in the
The warmth hypothisre received some sonormation in 1938
