By Jonathan Leake, Times Online, UK
Britain’s great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have survived from the 17th century onwards.
The logbooks kept by every naval ship, ranging from Nelson’s Victory and Cook’s Endeavour down to the humblest frigate, are emerging as one of the world’s best sources for long-term weather data. The discovery has been made by a group of British academics and Met Office scientists who are seeking new ways to plot historic changes in climate.
“This is a treasure trove,” said Dr Sam Willis, a maritime historian and author who is affiliated with Exeter University’s Centre for Maritime Historical Studies.
“Ships’ officers recorded air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and other weather conditions. From those records scientists can build a detailed picture of past weather and climate.”
A preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks has produced results that raise questions about climate change theories. One paper, published by Dr Dennis Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene, details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s. Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850.
Wheeler and his colleagues have since won European Union funding to extend this research to 1750. This shows that during the 1730s, Europe underwent a period of rapid warming similar to that recorded recently – and which must have had natural origins. Hints of such changes are already known from British records, but Wheeler has found they affected much of the north Atlantic too, and he has traced some of the underlying weather systems that caused it.
His research will be published in the journal Climatic Change. The ships’ logs have also shed light on extreme weather events such as hurricanes. It is commonly believed that hurricanes form in the eastern Atlantic and track westwards, so scientists were shocked in 2005 when Hurricane Vince instead moved northeast to hit southern Spain and Portugal. Many interpreted this as a consequence of climate change; but Wheeler, along with colleagues at the University of Madrid, used old ships’ logs to show that this had also happened in 1842, when a hurricane followed the same trajectory into Andalusia.
Full story here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4449527.ece
Heh, I got to approve a post by Nigel Calder.
I’m an interested layman and have been reading an edited version Lamb’s Climate, History and the Modern World online (Google Book Search: 1995 edition).
I find it of particular interest because it was written, for the most part, before the present CO2 hysteria took hold.
It is also interesting how the current generation of ‘climate scientists’ (e.g. W. M. Connolley) have tried to erase this pioneer’s important work.
When we talk about the climate during colder climate, we look at storminess and shorter growing seasons in temperate regions.
I have found, after research, that during periods of colder climate “solar minima, such as during Dalton and Maunder” that the monsoon over India tended to fail more often.
Similar reduction in monsoon activity during those periods should also have happened in other areas in the tropics which were dependent in monsoon rainfall for their harvest. I’m sure that in British archives a lot of information on this can be found.
This being the case it doesn’t look good for future food production if or when we now enter a solar minimum with reduced food production in temperate as well as in tropical regions.
Input anyone?
The noted anthropologist Brian Fagan highlighted the skills of forensic or paleometeorologists who reconstructed the basic synoptic patterns of the North Atlantic and North Sea during the LIA. Scientists at Cambridge, using ships logs of the British Royal Navy, as well as the surviviing ships of the Spanish Armada, were able plot out the track and intensisty of 3 intense Mid-Latitude Cyclones that changed the course of History (these cyclones did much more damage to the Spanish Fleet than did Sir Francis Drake). They also were able to deduce the genesis and track of an autumn hurricane near the Azores, which tracked northeastward into the British Isles in 1681. This storm went extra-tropical and then slammed into Great Britain. London recorded its lowest surface pressure ever in Oct of 1681. The intense northeasterlies which preceeded this storm center buried a few large Scottish Estates under 90 foot of sand.
What is ironic if thier analysis is correct, is the fact that many North Atlantic Baisn tropical storms during the coldest decades of the LIA tracked well off shore of North America, evolved into strong mid-latitude cyclones, and then slammed into Northwest Europe. Dutch cities and coasal English cities like those in East Anglia were threatened yearly with massive storm surges from these cyclones.
We can deduce from all of this detective work, that the tropical Atlantic remained active during the LIA. If anything, the SSTs appeared to hold thier own. While, none of this work has the kind of precision that scientists today demand, it does provide an accurate outline of the large scale synoptic patterns of past centuries.
“a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s”: those years were known in Scotland as “King William’s ill years”. People starved.
Off topic, but thought provoking:
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech/Last-Ice-Age-happened-in.4351045.jp
How about vintage records from western Europe dating back to the Middle Ages? The great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie depended heavily on them in his classic work__Times of Feast, Times of Famine__.
Nice painting of the Cutty Sark in full rig at the top of the post Anthony.
“Note: What I find most interesting is the ‘Surge in the frequency’ of storms in cold periods. – Anthony”
In the lower latitudes… below 40 degs…. there are numerous storms each year that are brutal. Its not refered to as the roaring 40s for nothing.
I suspect as the planet cools the southern storms move up in latitudes.
Just over a week ago a huge storm hit the north island of New Zealand. Its central pressure on landfall was 962 millibars…. somewhat low that far north I suspect.
Mike Bryant (05:26:35) :
This might explain all the frozen mammoth carcasses found in Siberia
“The River Thames. It used to freeze from time to time, especially when the ancient London Bridge clogged the stream”
A bit off-topic, perhaps, but the alarmists love to attribute the freezing of the Thames to the clogging of the stream by the bridge. A few problems with this, though:
1) If you effectively ‘dam up’ a river, you create a lake upstream. There’s no record, of which I’m aware, of this having happened.
2) Static bodies of water (lakes) around London haven’t frozen over since the end of the LIA.
3) Regardless of how slowly the water’s flowing, you still need a long period of well-below freezing temperatures to freeze a body of water the size of the Thames.
Also when the Thames froze over, there are often other historical accounts of other rivers in England or France or Germany freezing over at the same time. How a bridge in England can cause rivers in France to freeze is a mystery.
A few researchers and writers have attempted to weave together the scientific with anecdotal material to create more balanced and believable accounts than either source would yield by itself.
One such study is “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Europe, A.D. 750-950, by McCormick, Dutton, and Meyewski, dealing with what must have been a rather nippy period in Europe before the Medieval Warm period.
http://www.medievalacademy.org/pdf/Volcanoes.pdf
The work plots the extreme weather (historic cold) events in the histories of Western Europe on a graph also showing the sea-ice advance in the North Atlantic, and SO4 deposition from volcanoes taken from Greenland Ice cores (GISP2).
They can therefor date winter events “absolutely and unambiguously”, while the volcanic events are “exact to 2.5 years”.
An example: Two historical cold spells fell between 821-22 and 823-24, coinciding with sea ice advance and a prolonged spike in volcanic ash deposition, and written records from the time that describe “low-lying lands inundated by flooding,” crop failures, and of 821, “a winter so long and harsh that it froze even the Rhine, Danube, Elbe, and Seine.”
One of the best chroniclers of day-to-day life in the thirteenth century (onset of the Wolf minimum) came from an independent-minded monk named Matthew Paris. Typical of his detailed observations about weather is the one on page 51 of this entry:
http://sul-derivatives.stanford.edu/derivative?CSNID=00001009&mediaType=application/pdf
Violent storms of wind and destructive inundations.
“On the day after the feast of St. Martin, and within the
octaves of that feast, great inundations of the sea suddenly
broke forth by night, and a fierce storm of wind arose, which
caused inundations of the rivers as well as of the sea, and
in places, especially on the coast, drove the ships from their
ports, tearing them from their anchors, drowned great
numbers of people, destroyed flocks of sheep, and herds of
cattle, tore up trees by the roots, overthrew houses, and
ravaged the coast. The sea rose for two days and…”
Arrrr.
People like to have something to worry about. First it was the Bomb, then it was the Ice age, then it was the Comet, now it is Global Warming. Once Iran gets the Bomb it will come full circle.
It typically makes Americans mad, but Europeans do have a lot more of history. I recall several examples from Portuguese history where AGW gets clearly questioned, including major warming and higher sea levels in the Medieval Warm Period and significant cooling in the Little Ice Age. Most problems of AGW people and Gore followers are that they don’t have a clue about history.
Ecotretas
Perhaps I should preface my Matthew Paris link, above:
This link is “Arrrgh! – rated” 500 pages of PDF, for anyone with slow browsers. And not about ship’s logs. Delete it if you think it’s OT.
It typically makes Americans mad, but Europeans do have a lot more of history.
But the Mideasterners beat out the Europeans. (I don’t suppose it’s fair to count the Shang Dynasty?)
How can this historical data not translate to modern climate change? Did you know that in 1600 a huge volcanic eruption in Peru occurred? In 1815 another large eruption [Tambora]. All of these large volcanic eruptions lead to devastating climate changes that caused famines.
Volcanic eruptions are timeless, and understanding the socioeconomic consequences that occur after a major eruption is essential. Eruptions like these would be WAY MORE ABRUPT than climate change due to our greedy need to exploit foreign countries for oil.