History Of Climate Research Paper

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1. Introduction

Climatologists and climate historians have assembled robust evidence that the world’s climate has changed significantly over the past millennium. However, for most historians climate still is an unacknowledged constant. There remain serious intellectual and practical obstacles to understanding and using the new evidence that is now becoming available (Richards 2001). The first section of this research paper reviews the discussion on the issue. The second section examines the evidence and the approaches used for reconstructing past weather and climate. The third section reviews the main trends of climate variability over the last millennium. In the last section the assessment of climate impacts on premodern societies is considered.

2. The Discussion On ‘Climate And History’

Every society develops philosophical and mythical interpretations about the role of the natural environment in human affairs. Enlightenment thinkers concluded that cultures were determined or strongly shaped by climate. Economists and geographers (e.g. Stanley Jevons, Eduard Bruckner) assumed that economic life was affected by climatic cycles. Environ-mental determinism was carried to an extreme by the geographer Ellsworth Huntington in the early twentieth century (Fleming 1998). Sociologist Emile Durkheim summarily rejected efforts to link human performance to climate changes. He postulated that social issues could be explained solely by social factors (Glaeser 1994). The discussion on the social significance of climatic variations was resumed by historians of the French Annales School (e.g., Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie) after World War II. Ladurie suggested that historical climate should first be reconstructed for its own sake without considering its potential significance for human history. This issue should only be addressed in a second step based on reliable reconstructions of past climate. However, he was skeptical in this respect, postulating that ‘the narrowness of the range of secular temperature variations and the autonomy of the human phenomena which coincide with them in time make it impossible for the present to claim that there is any casual link between them’ (Le Roy Ladurie 1971, p. 293). The English meteorologist Hubert Lamb (1988), who took an active interest in history, became Le Roy Ladurie’s most prominent opponent. Lamb was convinced that weather and climate had affected human affairs in the past and that humankind would do well to examine some of the lessons provided by nature.

From the early 1990s the framework of the discussion changed. On one hand the issue of the increased greenhouse effect was put on the agenda stimulating efforts towards reconstructing past climates. In this respect historical climatology co-operated with scientific disciplines. Remarkable progress was made from mostly isolated attempts at reconstructing local climate histories, to successful attempts at boiling down regional evidence into quasi-homogeneous highly correlated monthly time series of temperature and precipitation indices on the supra-regional scale (Pfister et al. 1999). In the late 1990s historical climatology was moving at the center of the controversial detection debate about anthropogenic climate change, because documentary data is the only evidence for assessing the frequency and clustering of rare but socioeconomically significant disasters such as intense storms, severe floods, and droughts.

On the other hand the mainstream of historians turned away from structural history and the ‘longue duree’ in favor of discourse analysis. As a consequence the incentive to investigate the impacts of the climatic variability being detected by climate historians declined. In the context of the ongoing debate the issue of the social perception of (reconstructed) climate change may become attractive for historians of ideas.

3. The Reconstruction Of Weather And Climate From Natural And Manmade Archives

The global climate of the last millennium is reconstructed using evidence from both natural and man-made archives. Data from natural archives (e.g., tree ring or ice core data) is essential for those periods of history and those regions of the world for which documentary evidence is sparse or nonexistent, such as precolonial North America. However, most reconstructions from natural archives cannot be broken down into sufficiently short units of time (e.g., months or seasons) and into specific parameters (temperature and precipitation) (Bradley 1999) that would be needed for conclusive investigations into the human dimension of climatic change.

Data from manmade archives (i.e., documentary evidence) is well researched in Europe and East Asia. Investigations have hardly begun in Latin America. The evidence for Africa is spotty. In the Islamic world the possibly abundant evidence remains to be explored.

Documentary evidence is classified into descriptive and proxy data. Descriptive data includes chroniclers’ narratives of weather patterns characteristic of a particular region. Chinese historians have drawn upon observations found in local gazetteers maintained by local gentry in nearly every district. In order to portray more objectively the character of extreme events, chroniclers referred to the duration of snow cover or the freezing of bodies of water, to the development of crops, and to high and low water levels. In Europe daily weather observations were promoted by the rise of planetary astronomy from the late fifteenth century. Regular instrumental measurements of weather began in the late seventeenth century. From 1860 national meteorological networks came into being.

Evidence providing an indirect measure of climate is mostly drawn from administrative records. These may yield long, continuous, and quasi-homogeneous series of climate related data that reflect the beginning of agricultural activities (e.g., the vine harvest), agricultural production (e.g., yield of vineyards), or the time of freezing and opening up of waterways (Pfister et al. 1999).

Records of rogations (i.e., standardized religious ceremonies to put an end to a meteorological stress situation) are a promising source for the Spanish-speaking world. In Spain rogations were recorded in the account books of both the municipalities and the church (Martin and Barriendos 1995).

Manmade archives are interpreted by historical climatology, which serves as an interface between climatology and history. It is directed towards three objectives (Pfister et al. 1999):

(a) reconstructing weather and climate as well as natural disasters prior to the creation of meteorological networks;

(b) investigating the vulnerability of past societies to climatic extremes and natural disasters;

(c) exploring past discourses on and social representations of climate.

Usually the evidence available for a given month or season is converted to ordinal indices for temperature and precipitation. The computing of transfer functions with instrumental series allows temperature and precipitation to be assessed for the pre-instrumental period. Series of indices were also included in statistical models to reconstruct monthly mean air pressure at sea level for the eastern North Atlantic-European region (25 W to 30 E, and 35 N to 70 N) back to 1659 (Luterbacher et al. 2000).

4. Climatic Trends And Anomalies Over The Last Millennium

4.1 Three Main Phases

Palaeoclimatologists and climate historians describe three main phases of climatic change over the past millennium: A ‘Medieval Warm Period’ to 1300 (Hughes and Diaz 1994); a subsequent cool phase lasting to the late nineteenth century that is labeled ‘Little Ice Age’ because glaciers in most regions of the globe were expanding during that time (Bradley and Jones 1996). The twentieth century is the warmest period of the millennium, partly as a consequence of the increased greenhouse effect. However, such generalizations on the global level mask a broad array of contrasting regional and local trends. Moreover, in order to investigate human vulnerability to climatic stress, the perspective of ‘ages’ needs to be broken down to regional monthly or seasonal temperature and precipitation patterns. So far, this level of detail is only available for Europe and China.

4.2 Central Europe

After a cold phase in the twelfth century, winters were prevailingly warm from 1180 to 1300. From 1300 to 1900 the winter half-year was colder than today. This is related to more frequent and sustained advection of cold, dry continental air-masses from the (north) east. Severe winters were frequent from 1306 to 1328, 1430 to 1490, 1565 to 1615, 1655 to 1710, 1755 to 1860, and 1880 to 1895. From 1365 to 1400, 1520 to 1560, and from 1610 to 1650 moderate winters prevailed. Springs were extremely cold in the 1690s and in the 1740s.

Summers do not show distinct long-term characteristics. Those in the thirteenth century were prevailingly warm and dry. In the fourteenth century clusters of cold and wet summers occurred repeatedly (e.g., in the 1310s and 1340s). From 1380 to 1430 and again from 1530 to 1565 the summer half-year was as warm as today. Over the last third of the sixteenth century cold spells and long rains in midsummer expanded at the expense of warm anti-cyclonic weather. This tendency culminated in the 1590s (Pfister et al. 1999). Summers at the beginning and end of the seventeenth century were prevailingly cool while those from 1630 to 1687 were moderate. In the 1700s several warm decades (the 1720s, the 1730s, and the 1780s) stand out in England and in Central Europe, whereas the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly the 1810s, was markedly cooler (Bradley and Jones 1996).

4.3 Russia

Winters became more severe at the end of the sixteenth century, in particular from 1620 to 1680 and in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In the summer half-year droughts were frequent from 1201 to 1230, 1351 to 1380, and 1411 to 1440. A period of comparatively warm conditions in all seasons stands out during the first half of the sixteenth century. Subsequently, cold spells occurred more often from 1590 to 1620 and from 1690 to 1740 with a peak in the 1730s. Droughts occurred frequently from 1640 to 1659 and from 1680 to 1699. The six decades from 1770 to 1830 were warm, and droughts were frequent from 1801 to 1860. Summers from 1890 to 1920 were by far the coldest in the last 500 years. This included an unusually large number of extreme dry and wet seasons (Bradley and Jones 1996).

4.4 China

In South China the thirteenth century was the warmest of the last millennium. Three cold periods—1470 to 1520, 1620 to 1740, and 1840 to 1890—are identified, the 1650s being by far the coldest decade. Rainfall during the seventeenth century was extremely variable. Temperatures during the eighteenth century, unlike in Europe, rarely climbed to twentieth century levels, but precipitation conditions were more favorable. Climate variability increased markedly throughout the nineteenth century to a maximum in the early twentieth century. In North China two cold periods—1500 to 1690 and 1800 to 1860—stand out over the last six centuries. Considering all seasons, the period from 1650 to 1670 was the coldest, but the summer half-year was almost equally cold from 1580 to 1600 (Wang 1991).

4.5 The Mediterranean

After a cold twelfth century the period 1200 to 1400 was very warm in the southwest. Annual precipitation in Morocco was generally lower from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries (Bradley and Jones 1996). In Catalonia (northeastern Spain) dry spells in the winter half-year were frequent in the mid-sixteenth century, but almost absent from 1580 to 1620. Numerous autumnal floods were reported from 1580 to 1630, from 1770 to 1800, and again from 1840 to 1870 (Martin and Barriendos 1995).

4.6 Latin America

In both Spanish and Portuguese America there seems to have been a trend to greater aridity in the 1700s compared to the 1600s. Dendroclimatic evidence for the Santiago de Chile area indicates higher than average rainfall from 1450 to 1600 whereas droughts became frequent over the subsequent centuries (e.g., 1637 to 1640, 1770 to 1773, 1790s, 1810s). In the Buenos Aires region (Argentina) the 1700s were drier than the previous century. Prolonged droughts are recorded in the 1690s, the 1710s, the 1750s, and 1771 to 1774 (Claxton 1993).

4.7 ENSO

The El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the result of a cyclic warming and cooling of the ocean surface in the central and eastern Pacific that strongly affects rainfall in the areas around the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Archival data suggests that ENSO episodes from 1600 to 1900 had more intense and global effect than those of the twentieth century. For example, the worst droughts in the colonial history of India (mid 1590s, 1629 to 1633, 1685 to 1688, 1788 to 1793, 1877 to 1878) are related to ENSO connected failures of the monsoon. For the last two events the global dimension of these episodes is demonstrated (Grove and Chappell 2000).

5. The Historical Significance Of Climatic Change

The issue of whether climatic change has had a significant impact on history is controversial. It should not be overlooked that both ‘climate’ and ‘history’ are blanket terms located on such a high level of abstraction that relationships between them cannot be investigated according to the rules of scientific methodology. In order to become more meaningful, the issue needs to be broken down to lower scales of analysis e.g., by focusing on specific human activities and/or needs in relation to a given set of climatic variables. Regarding preindustrial societies this concerns primarily the availability of biomass (e.g., food, fodder) and energy (e.g., wind, water-power) but also processes of population dynamics (e.g., patterns of disease and epizootics, as well as fertility of men and livestock), and transport and communications as well as military and naval operations. Undoubtedly, beneficial climatic effects tend to enlarge the scope of human action, whereas climatic shocks restrict it or even lead to emergency situations. Which climatic constellations matter for energy availability and population dynamics depend on the environmental, cultural, and historical context.

Models of climatic effects on society are often framed as a chain of causation. Climatic patterns have a first order or biophysical impact on agricultural production or on the outbreak of diseases or epizootics. These may have second order effects on prices of food or raw materials, which may then ramify into the wider economy and society (third order impacts). The farther we move away from first order impacts, the greater the complexity of the factors masking the climatic effect. It is also plain that it is easier to investigate the effects of short-term impacts. In dealing with the effects of multidecadal climate variations we have to account for modifications in the economic, institutional, and environmental setting so great as to vitiate any attempt at strict comparison or measurement (Kates et al. 1985). Most climatic impacts were related to food scarcity or famines.

Crises were triggered by a slump in overall agricultural production. This could be a consequence of climatic shocks or warfare. In Central Europe severe climate induced crises (e.g., 1569–74, 1627–29, 1692– 94, 1769–72, 1816–17, 1853–55) were connected to a cumulation of unfavorable weather patterns, which made the traditional risk minimizing strategies in-effective (Richards 2001). Rainfall is the limiting factor in the subtropical and tropical zones; in higher latitudes it is summer warmth. Connections between climatic anomalies and diseases are complex. Some diseases (e.g., cholera) are climate related whereas others (e.g., bubonic plague) are not (Rotberg and Rabb 1983). The theory of pre-industrial trade cycles considers the harvest the critical determinant influencing urban income and rural employment levels. A sharp rise in food prices promoted widespread unemployment, begging, and vagrancy that further propagated infectious diseases and increased crisis mortality (Post 1985).

Crises represented a major challenge for political and social systems. Rather than investigating changes in average values, historical climatology should focus on changes in the frequency and severity of extremes. The evidence is growing that exogenous shocks (including natural disasters) have a tendency to cluster rather than being randomly distributed along the time axis, as is often believed. This allows us to distinguish between periods of high and low climatic stress.

An example is provided by sixteenth-century Europe: there was a sudden increase in the number of cold anomalies after 1565. Over the subsequent de-cades climate became more significant for food prices than population levels and increases in the money supply. The case is even more obvious for wine production which as a consequence of an almost uninterrupted series of cold summers nearly collapsed from 1585 to 1600 across a large region ranging from Switzerland to Hungary. The slump of vine production had far-reaching consequences for major social groups depending on vine growing. Many peasant communities suffered such a large collective damage from the effects of continuous crop failures that they pressed the authorities to permit witch hunts. Thousands of witches were burnt as scapegoats of climatic change (Behringer 1999).

Based on the new reconstructions that are becoming available, the significance of climatic variability needs to be reassessed in many contexts of economic, social, and environmental history without including deterministic overtones.

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