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3 Documentary and Historical Evidence
Pages 38-44

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From page 38...
... · Europe and East Asia are the two regions of the world where tempera ture series more than 200 years long have been successfully developed from documentary evidence in a repeatable and consistent way. This evidence shows that both regions experienced overall medieval warming and Little Ice Age cooling, but because of their paucity and sometimes poor data quality, it is very difficult to know from these sources alone if the medieval period was as warm as, or warmer than, the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
From page 39...
... Historical paintings of alpine landscapes, for example, allow us to pinpoint the former extent of glaciers at precise moments in time, thus contributing to the temperature reconstructions derived from glacier length records discussed in Chapter 7. Similar, but potentially more continuous, time series of sea ice cover have been derived from Antarctic whaling records and from observations of drift ice around the coast of Iceland (e.g., Ogilvie 1992, de la Mare 1997)
From page 40...
... Historical observations are typically discontinuous through time and, as such, one of their most valuable roles is in providing a cross-check on reconstructions based on other proxy records, such as tree rings, and on the validity of paleoclimate model simulations. For example, modeling experiments show marked warming in Siberia during the winters immediately following major explosive volcanic eruptions, such as that of Pinatubo (Shindell et al.
From page 41...
... (wrt -1 anomaly -2 -3 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 emperatureT East China winter temperature 1­1995 3 2 C° 1 anomaly 0 -1 emperatureT -2 -3 0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750 2000 Years AD FIGURE 3-1 Seasonal temperature reconstructions based on historical evidence from Europe and China with standard errors (2 standard deviations for Europe, 1 standard deviation for China)
From page 42...
... It is not possible, however, to glean systematic, quantitative temperature data across Europe during the medieval period from historical documents alone. Although historical evidence provides important anecdotal evidence for this era, it is very difficult to know -- from these limited and rather imprecise sources alone -- if there were medieval time periods lasting a decade or more when the climate was as warm as, or warmer than, the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
From page 43...
... . In Iceland, an increase in storminess and in winter sea ice cover during the Little Ice Age hampered seaborne communications across the North Atlantic, on which the island's population was critically dependent.
From page 44...
... During the period of the Little Ice Age, the Inuit peoples had to adapt to changing environmental conditions once again. For example, to continue whaling, their populations on Alaska's North Slope congregated in the few places on the coast where open water could still be reached, such as Nuvuk (Point Barrow)


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