Climate Change in the Recent Past Selected Climate Events from Historical Records Executive Summary

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: Freed; Greenland; Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.397.5136; http://www.fcpp.org/pdf/FB050ClimateChangeintheRecentPastApr52007.pdf

Rapid climate change is not an unusual phenomenon in our planet’s history. Warmer periods have generally been better for people than cooler ones. During the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), large groups of Norwegians settled in Iceland and Greenland. The MWP allowed European farmers to cultivate crops much further north and at higher elevations than today. Bountiful harvests freed up surplus manpower, which was subsequently tapped to build cathedrals and bridges. When the Earth cooled at the end of the MWP, Europe was hit with a deluge of extreme weather, floods and storms that remade the landscape and killed thousands of people. The Little Ice Age that ensued caused great havoc and, as with the MWP, played a key role in changing Europe’s history. The histories of glacial activity and cloud formation provide further evidence of recent, rapid climate change. When the consequences of rapid global warming are compared with those for rapid global cooling, it’s clear that mankind suffers more harm from the latter.