The US climate debate in the 18th Century

NYTimes.com : The controversy over the direction and temperature of the US climate has existed for hundred of years. Benjamin Franklin understood climatic forcing factors better than anyone, surmising in a 1763 letter to Ezra Stiles that “cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker."Franklin, later surmised (correctly) that a prevailing haze over parts of North America and northern Europe was associated with the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in June 1783 , and was possibly the source for the exceptional chill experienced in the winter of 1783-84 in the colonies.In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson opined in his " Notes on Virginia ” that “both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged.” Noah Webster quarreled with Jefferson, insisting that he relied too heavily on the memories of “elderly and middle-aged people” for his observation that the climate had moderated, a debate that was not resolved in Jefferson’s favor for years until more meticulous climate observations had been made.Says meteorologist Ben Gelber :

Now we have satellites monitoring high-latitude snow cover, thinning sea ice and deep-layered atmospheric temperature increases, coupled with ground observations revealing the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro (85 percent ice loss since 1912) and many other glaciers.The wealth of data now at our disposal, enhanced by high-resolution computer models that pioneer climatologists would have craved, has, curiously, not turned down the thermostat on the centuries-old global climate change debate, quite likely because the stakes are so much higher.