Paul Homewood is the guy that authors https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/glacial-advance… age/ … for example. In this post he relies heavily on HH Lamb's book, 'Climate, History, and the Modern World' which says that sea level has increased since the 19th century as a result of melting glaciers. However, we also known that the same glaciers were growing rapidly during the Little Ice Age period, so we can say that 20th century sea level rise is a natural process.
No hint of global warming or negative flagging about human fossil fuel emissions. Lamb was a realist. He goes on to relate a story from about an Alpine village in the 16th century, one so deprived it was racked by poverty and suffering as it was situated in the shadow glaciers, an impoverished area of barren mountains never far from glaciers and frosts etc.
HH Lamb's book, 'Climate Past, Present and Future' also said that glaciers advanced in the Iron Age period, peaking around 500BC. It is unclear if this represents the peak in cold weather as in the Little Ice Age glaciers were still growing in the 19th century – long after the worst of the weather. We can suppose the peak in cold weather in the Iron Age was somewhat earlier than 500BC – but there are no clues as to what caused it. Thereafter Homewood appears to ignore the Iron Age glacial advances and concentrates instead on the LIA – as that is the point from which climate scientists measure modern sea levels and global warming ( a distinctly cold point of reference which makes the rise in temperatures in the 20th century look more pronounced than they really are. Glaciers in the Bronze Age (in Europe, namely the second half of the second millennium BC, were an order of 5 times less than in the LIA and Iron Age (an awful lot warmer).
Ingolfsson (see https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/iceland-glacier… … which is a subjective claim and open to error. Nevertheless, it does show that glaciation on Iceland increased during the LIA. Ingolfsson's study says Iceland was under a thick sheet of ice during the Late Glacial Maximum, as one would expect. It rapidly retreated between 17,500 and 15,400 years ago, coinciding with rising sea levels. There is a pattern with Homewood in that he wants to have melting glaciers run parallel with rises in sea level, which is more or less what Basil Cracknell said in his book some years ago. The idea sea level rise may also relate to other factors is absent, and the melting of the ice sheet is just a convenient hook to hang the problem. He then says that in the Younger Dryas episode, which was cold, glaciers re-advanced but thereafter retreated once again with further evidence of sea level change. During the Mid Holocene climate optimum, roughly 8000 to 6000 years ago, some of the present day ice caps on Iceland were absent – but expanded again after 4000BC, and 3000BC. Most glaciers on Iceland, he said, reached their maximum extent during the LIA (no mention of Iron Age advances by Ingolfsson), which he dated between 1300 and 1900AD.
Over in Greenland, ice cores show that the LIA was the coldest over the last 10,000 years, we are told (but more recent studies say the LIA has been overplayed and was not as cold as alleged by some parties). More importantly, Ingolfsson said that temperatures in Greenland were warmer 1000 years ago than they are now – hence the Viking farmers. The Greenland ice sheet appears to have retreated far from its current position – although glaciers still existed, just as they did in Norway (and the interior of Greenland has never lost its thick ice sheet).
Homewood ends up by saying, 'there is no written law of nature that says glaciers shall be the size they were in Victorian times …', which sums up the meddlesome CAGW narrative, and the doomsayings about melting modern glaciers. They have been growing and declining throughout the Holocene period (the las 10,000 years).