2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility

By U. Büntgen, Willy Tegel, K. Nicolussi, Michael McCormick, D. Frank, V. Trouet, Jed O. Kaplan, F. Herzig, K. Heussner, H. Wanner and 2 more. Science, 2011

1,208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Variability of central European temperature and precipitation shows correlations with some major historical changes. Climate variations influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of preindustrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution paleoclimatic evidence. We present tree ring–based reconstructions of central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years. Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration. Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from ~250 to 600 C.E. coincided with the demise of the western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period. Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ebbec9f7214e5e1bce7c5bb92297561cb1b1a05

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Citations in the corpus

Crop modelling for integrated assessment of risk to food production from climate change (2015, background): “While the past centuries have experienced relatively warm and cool periods, as well as periods with more variable and extreme weather than at present (Lamb, 1995; Büntgen et al., 2011), the recent rate of global warming is unprecedented.”
Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict (2013, background): “2011‖‖ 400 BCE–2000 Europe Decade Region Rain/temp Instability N – – – (62) Burke et al.”
Change Points and Temporal Dependence in Reconstructions of Annual Temperature: Did Europe Experience a Little Ice Age? (2014, background): “13For other accounts of past European weather see Büntgen et al. (2011), Hegerl et al.”
The Effects of Weather Shocks on Economic Activity: What are the Channels of Impact? (2018, neutral): “…been linked to fluctuations in climate (Dell, Jones, and Olken 2012; Kim 2014; Burke and Leigh 2010; Chaney 2013), and several historical cases of societal collapse have been compellingly attributed to climate change (Cullen et al. 2000; Haug et al. 2003; Buckley et al. 2010; Büntgen et al. 2011).”