Levänluhta is a unique archaeological site with the remains of nearly a hundred Iron Age individuals found from a water burial in Ostrobothnia, Finland. The strongest climatic downturn of the Common ...Era, resembling the great Fimbulvinter in Norse mythology, hit these people during the 6th century AD. This study establishes chronological, dietary, and livelihood synthesis on this population based on stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic and radiocarbon analyses on human remains, supported by multidisciplinary evidence. Extraordinarily broad stable isotopic distribution is observed, indicating three subgroups with distinct dietary habits spanning four centuries. This emphasizes the versatile livelihoods practiced at this boundary of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems. While the impact of the prolonged cold darkness of the 6th century was devastating for European communities relying on cultivation, the broad range of livelihoods provided resilience for the Levänluhta people to overcome the abrupt climatic decline.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Lack of documentation on past harvest fluctuations limits the exploration of long-term trends in crop production and agricultural adaptation strategies. A long-term perspective is needed, however, to ...understand the wide spectrum of potential human responses to environment and climate change. Therefore, we used tree-ring density series as proxy data to reconstruct climate-mediated yield ratio (harvested grain in relation to sown) in central and northern Finland over the period ad 760–2000. The reconstruction explains 50% of the variance in recorded yield ratio variability over the calibration period (ad 1866–1921). The reconstruction illustrated several intervals of increased and reduced yield ratio over the past 13 centuries. The long-term development of the agricultural prerequisites is characterized by distinct intervals defined statistically as ad 760–1106 (highest yield ratios), 1107–1451, 1452–1694, 1695–1911 (lowest yield ratios) and 1912 onwards. The results provide insight into the establishment and development of crop cultivation in the agricultural margin. The reconstruction suggests that continuous crop cultivation was established in the study region during a favourable period of climatic conditions supporting high yields. Thereafter, the climate-mediated yield ratio declined in the long run until the turn of the 20th century. Periods of agricultural transformations, those previously demonstrated in pollen data and historical documents, followed the onsets of the low yield ratio phases indicated by our reconstruction. Thus, we suggest that ever since the establishment of crop cultivation, climate can be considered as an important factor contributing to the development of the agricultural history in the north.
Large tropical volcanic eruptions can have considerable impact on climates and societies far away from the physical source of the eruption. Past examples of how volcanism caused abrupt climatic ...changes, and how societies responded to such changes, may provide us with potential lessons to help us better prepare for the changes that climate change will bring. This paper explores the climatic, agricultural and societal responses to tropical eruptions in the Finnish province of Southern Ostrobothnia during the seventeenth century. Our results suggest that in the studied area more than half of the seventeenth-century agricultural crises which had traceable human consequences resulted from volcanism caused cooling. A sharp agricultural response followed every large tropical eruption. Moreover, sudden impoverishment, and in some cases even elevated mortality and famine, succeeded these agricultural crises. Thus, there is strong evidence that climatic changes caused by volcanism can directly paralyze sensitive food systems that are based on primary production. In this regard, if geoengineering solutions, like emulating volcanic forcing to cool global climate, are considered to be a future mitigation strategy, the case study presented here stresses the need to explore all possible unintended human consequences of any such solutions.
•Explores the socio-environmental impacts of tropical eruptions in the far north.•Demonstrates that cooling caused by volcanism led to severe crop failures in seventeenth-century Ostrobothnia, Finland.•Shows that more than half of the agricultural crises in the study region can be associated with cooling caused by volcanism.•Demonstrates that the agricultural crises were followed by impoverishment and hunger.•Demonstrates that the adverse social impacts were most profound among tenant farmers.
Climatic factors have affected subsistence strategies throughout human history. In northern Europe and Russia, short-term climatic anomalies and weather extremes are commonly thought to underlie ...famines in the Middle Ages. However, medieval subsistence crises were not just natural disasters and medieval people were not passive victims of climatic anomalies. In addition, the capacity to cope with climatic anomalies has varied temporally and spatially throughout the Middle Ages. Yet only a few studies have explored the climatic impact on regional medieval food systems comprehensively. This article examines the significance of climate variability on subsistence crises in medieval Novgorod and Ladoga (Russia), focusing on the relationship between short-term climate anomalies and crop cultivation. In addition, this paper evaluates the impact of crop failures, frosts, and other weather phenomena on the food system. The materials are drawn from medieval sources, paleoclimatological reconstructions, and archaeological evidence. The results show that short-term climatic anomalies alone rarely lead to severe subsistence crises, and during every famine period there is evidence of other contributing factors, such as unfavourable weather phenomena, disease, or social unrest. The variety of cultivated crops and agricultural techniques is shown to increase the region's resilience to climatic anomalies and to crop failures.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long provoked subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational collapses among ...human societies. This scholarship, which we term the 'history of climate and society' (HCS), is pursued by researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians, linguists and palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the wide interest in HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical sources. Here we propose an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate-society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties inherent in discerning that influence across different spatiotemporal scales. Although we acknowledge that climate change has sometimes had destructive effects on past societies, the application of our framework to numerous case studies uncovers five pathways by which populations survived-and often thrived-in the face of climatic pressures.
Climate and society in European history Ljungqvist, Fredrik Charpentier; Seim, Andrea; Huhtamaa, Heli
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Climate change,
March/April 2021, Letnik:
12, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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This article evaluates 165 studies from various disciplines, published between 2000 and 2019, which in different ways link past climate variability and change to human history in medieval and early ...modern Europe (here, c. 700–1815 CE). Within this review, we focus on the identification and interpretation of causal links between changes in climate and in human societies. A revised climate–society impact order model of historical climate–society interactions is presented and applied to structure the findings of the past 20 years' scholarship. Despite considerable progress in research about past climate–society relations, partly expedited by new palaeoclimate data, we identify limitations to knowledge, including geographical biases, a disproportional attention to extremely cold periods, and a focus on crises. Furthermore, recent scholarship shows that the limitations with particular disciplinary approaches can be successfully overcome through interdisciplinary collaborations. We conclude the article by proposing recommendations for future directions of research in the climatic change–human history nexus.
This article is categorized under:
Climate, History, Society, Culture > Ideas and Knowledge
(A) Temporal coverage of the 165 studies examining associations between climatic variations and human history for different regions between 700 and 1815 CE which were reviewed considering (B) a revised schematic model of historical climate–society interactions.
Past volcanic eruptions and their climatic impacts have been linked increasingly with co-occurring societal crises – like crop failures and famines – in recent research. Yet, as many of the volcanic ...cooling studies have a supra-regional or hemispheric focus, establishing pathways from climatic effects of an eruption to human repercussions has remained very challenging due to high spatial variability of socio-environmental systems. This, in turn, may render a distinction of coincidence from causation difficult. In this study, we employ micro-regionally resolved natural and written sources to study three 17th century volcanic eruptions (i.e., 1600 Huaynaputina, 1640/1641 Koma-ga-take–Parker, and 1695 unidentified) to look into their climatic and socioeconomic impacts among rural agricultural society in Ostrobothnia (Finland) with high temporal and spatial precision. Tree-ring and grain tithe data indicate that all three eruptions would have caused significant summer season temperature cooling and poor grain harvest in the region. Yet, tax debt records reveal that the socioeconomic consequences varied considerably among the eruptions as well as in time, space, and within the society. Whether the volcanic events had a strong or weak socioeconomic effect depended on various factors, such as the prevailing agro-ecosystem, resource availability, material capital, physical and immaterial networks, and institutional practices. These factors influenced societal vulnerability and resilience to cold pulses and associated harvest failures. This paper proposes that, besides detecting coinciding human calamities, more careful investigation at the micro-regional scale has a clear added value as it can provide deeper understanding of why and among whom the distal volcanic eruptions resulted in different societal impacts. Such understanding, in turn, can contribute to interdisciplinary research, advise political decision-making, and enhance scientific outreach.
New perspectives on historical climatology White, Sam; Pei, Qing; Kleemann, Katrin ...
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Climate change,
January/February 2023, 2023-01-00, 20230101, Letnik:
14, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Historical climatology is an interdisciplinary field of research encompassing the reconstruction of past climate and weather from written sources and artifacts, as well the application of climate ...reconstructions to the study of human history. Historical climatology has grown in recent years, and this growth has brought both insights and challenges. Research has expanded into new regions and periods and diversified into novel sources, methods, and interdisciplinary collaborations. At the same time, the heterogeneity of evidence and approaches has complicated the integration of multiple climate and weather reconstructions. Moreover, the diversity of disciplinary perspectives, terminologies, and perspectives can create miscommunication among scholars in the field, particularly on issues of historical knowledge and causation. Innovative approaches in the field, including Bayesian methods, may help address these challenges.
This article is categorized under:
Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives
Climate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical Perspectives
Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Representing Uncertainty
The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice
The first display at the Klimahuset of the Oslo Museum of Natural History presents a timeline of historical events within the growth rings of an old tree. It illustrates the overlay of human and natural histories and of written and physical evidence in simple but compelling fashion. Historical climatology draws on both archives of societies and archives of nature to reconstruct past climates and analyze their historical influence. This integration of diverse evidence and perspectives has proven both insightful and challenging (Photo by Sam White 2022).
Paleoclimate reconstructions have identified a period of
exceptional summer and winter cooling in the North Atlantic region following
the eruption of the tropical volcano Huaynaputina (Peru) in 1600 ...CE. A
previous study based on numerical climate simulations has indicated a
potential mechanism for the persistent cooling in a slowdown of the North
Atlantic subpolar gyre (SPG) and consequent ocean–atmosphere feedbacks. To
examine whether this mechanism could have been triggered by the Huaynaputina eruption, this study compares the simulations used in the previous study both with and without volcanic forcing and this SPG shift to reconstructions
from annual proxies in natural archives and historical written records as
well as contemporary historical observations of relevant climate and
environmental conditions. These reconstructions and observations demonstrate
patterns of cooling and sea-ice expansion consistent with, but not
indicative of, an eruption trigger for the proposed SPG slowdown mechanism.
The results point to possible improvements in future model–data comparison
studies utilizing historical written records. Moreover, we consider
historical societal impacts and adaptations associated with the
reconstructed climatic and environmental anomalies.
Abstract
Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated “early instrumental data.” They have played an important role in climate ...research as they allow daily to decadal variability and changes of temperature, pressure, and precipitation, including extremes, to be addressed. Early instrumental data can also help place twenty-first century climatic changes into a historical context such as defining preindustrial climate and its variability. Until recently, the focus was on long, high-quality series, while the large number of shorter series (which together also cover long periods) received little to no attention. The shift in climate and climate impact research from mean climate characteristics toward weather variability and extremes, as well as the success of historical reanalyses that make use of short series, generates a need for locating and exploring further early instrumental measurements. However, information on early instrumental series has never been electronically compiled on a global scale. Here we attempt a worldwide compilation of metadata on early instrumental meteorological records prior to 1850 (1890 for Africa and the Arctic). Our global inventory comprises information on several thousand records, about half of which have not yet been digitized (not even as monthly means), and only approximately 20% of which have made it to global repositories. The inventory will help to prioritize data rescue efforts and can be used to analyze the potential feasibility of historical weather data products. The inventory will be maintained as a living document and is a first, critical, step toward the systematic rescue and reevaluation of these highly valuable early records. Additions to the inventory are welcome.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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