The rise in temperature simply earlier than the Little Ice Age can train us one thing about fashionable international warming – what is the level?
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Patric Seifert, a tropospheric researcher at the Leibniz Institute in Germany, there was a large increase in temperature shortly before the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Seifert doesn’t think global temperatures are about to crash, but he believes conditions in Europe are similar enough to 14th century that historical reconstructions of this medieval heatwave, the Dantean Anomaly, can help us understand what to expect if the world continues to warm.
Extreme droughts of the 14th century can provide insight into our climate crisis
CARLY CASSELLA
9 JANUARY 2021
Scientists are studying a major medieval drought in Europe to better understand how extreme weather events indicate rapid climate change.
In the years before the Little Ice Age, between 1302 and 1307, many regions of the European continent were exposed to exceptional heat and droughtaccording to historical records and data from tree rings and sediment cores.
While these extreme natural events are not caused by human emissions, they share characteristics similar to recent weather anomalies and could help us better predict the course of today’s climate change.
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“Even if it was a period of cooling in the Middle Ages and we are now in a phase of living [hu]Man-made warming, there could be parallels, ”says Patric Seifert, tropospheric researcher at the Leibniz Institute in Germany.
“The transition period between two climatic phases could be characterized by smaller temperature differences between latitudes and cause longer lasting large-scale weather patterns that could explain an increase in extreme events.“
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Even the Middle East reported severe droughts during this period.
“The water level in the Nile, for example, was exceptionally low,” says Thomas Labbé, also from the Leipzig Institute.
“We therefore believe that the 1304-06 drought was not just a regional phenomenon, but likely had transcontinental dimensions.”
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The study was published in Climate of the Past.
Read more: https://www.sciencealert.com/extreme-14th-century-drought-holds-similar-patterns-to-modern-day-climate-change
The abstract of the study;
A forerunner of the Dantean anomaly: the rainfall seesaw and droughts from 1302 to 1307 in Europe
Martin Bauch1, Thomas Labbé1,3, Annabell Engel1 and Patric Seifert2
- 1Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig
- 2 Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), Leipzig
- 3Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Dijon, USR 3516 CNRS, Dijon, France
Correspondence: Martin Bauch (martin.bauch@uni-leipzig.de) – Received on March 3rd, 2020 – Start of discussion: May 20th, 2020 – Revised on October 2nd, 2020 – Accepted on October 5th, 2020 – Published on March 25th, 2020 November 2020
The cold / wet anomaly of the 1310s (“Dantean Anomaly”) has attracted a lot of scholarly attention as it is widely interpreted as a signal for the transition between the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). . The tremendous variability that can be observed during this decade, such as the high interannual variability that was observed in the 1340s, has been highlighted as a side effect of this rapid climate transition. In this article we show that between 1302 and 1304 a multi-year drought of nearly two years occurred in the Mediterranean Sea, followed by a series of hot, dry summers north of the Alps from 1304 to 1306. We propose that this outstanding dry anomaly, unique in the 13th and 14th centuries, along with cold anomalies of the 1310s and 1340s, is part of climate change from MCA to LIA. Our reconstruction of the prevailing weather patterns of the first decade of the 14th century – based on documentary and proxy data – identifies several European precipitation seesaw events between 1302 and 1307 with similarities to the seesaw conditions that prevailed in continental Europe in 2018. The extent to which the period from 1302 to 1307 can be compared with what is currently being discussed about the influence of the phenomenon of Arctic amplification on the increasing frequency of persistent stable weather patterns since the late 1980s. In addition, this paper looks at socio-economic and cultural responses to drought risks in the Middle Ages, as set out in contemporary sources, and provides evidence that there is a significant correlation between pronounced drought seasons and fires that devastated cities.
Read more: https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/16/2343/2020/
I must say that I am surprised by this claim that a geographically large hot drought anomaly occurred shortly before the Little Ice Age.
Here I thought that the Medieval Warm Age and Little Ice Age never happened or were purely regional events on a small scale. According to Michael Mann’s hockey stick, global temperatures were flat like a pancake for the past thousand years up to the start of the modern warm period, hence the shape of the hockey stick (do I need the / sarc label?).
Original “hockey stick” temperature diagram in Nature, 1998. The Y-axis shows the mean temperature of the northern hemisphere in degrees Celsius; The zero line corresponds to the mean value from 1902 to 1980. Credit: “Global temperature patterns and climate protection in the last six centuries” by Michael E. Mann et al. in Nature, Vol. 392, April 23, 1998
If the modern warm period is being driven by quasi-periodic natural forces rather than anthropogenic CO2, the ominous similarity between current conditions and the immediate prelude to the Little Ice Age could be more than just a coincidence. However, this does not seem to be a possibility that the researchers at the Leibniz Institute have considered.
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