Filling the Eastern European gap in millennium-long temperature reconstructions
Open Access
- 14 January 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 110 (5), 1773-1778
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211485110
Abstract
Tree ring–based temperature reconstructions form the scientific backbone of the current global change debate. Although some European records extend into medieval times, high-resolution, long-term, regional-scale paleoclimatic evidence is missing for the eastern part of the continent. Here we compile 545 samples of living trees and historical timbers from the greater Tatra region to reconstruct interannual to centennial-long variations in Eastern European May–June temperature back to 1040 AD. Recent anthropogenic warming exceeds the range of past natural climate variability. Increased plague outbreaks and political conflicts, as well as decreased settlement activities, coincided with temperature depressions. The Black Death in the mid-14th century, the Thirty Years War in the early 17th century, and the French Invasion of Russia in the early 19th century all occurred during the coldest episodes of the last millennium. A comparison with summer temperature reconstructions from Scandinavia, the Alps, and the Pyrenees emphasizes the seasonal and spatial specificity of our results, questioning those large-scale reconstructions that simply average individual sites.Keywords
This publication has 47 references indexed in Scilit:
- Identification of Chinese plague foci from long-term epidemiological dataProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012
- An Ill Wind? Climate Change, Migration, and HealthEnvironmental Health Perspectives, 2012
- Insights from past millennia into climatic impacts on human health and survivalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012
- Causes and Consequences of Past and Projected Scandinavian Summer Temperatures, 500–2100 ADPLOS ONE, 2011
- Modeling the epidemiological history of plague in Central Asia: Palaeoclimatic forcing on a disease system over the past millenniumBMC Biology, 2010
- Two millennia of North Atlantic seasonality and implications for Norse coloniesProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010
- Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to U.S. crop yields under climate changeProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Homelessness Is Not Just a Housing ProblemPLoS Medicine, 2008
- Plague: Past, Present, and FuturePLoS Medicine, 2008
- Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human historyProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007