Climate Change
February 2024
| Internet publication
Climate is produced through the complex dynamics of earth’s interacting systems. It is affected by external forcing, such as volcanic and solar activity. On the planetary scale, two significant climatic regimes prevailed during the period. These are known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (ca. 800-ca.1260) and the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300-1850). Within these broad tendencies, there was variability at every scale and across time. Advances in the study of past climates bring together proxy data from the ‘archives of nature’, sometimes combining it with evidence from written sources. Historians now have access to a mass of data about conditions from the global to the local, and must address challenging questions about how to understand the relationships between climate change and societal change. Three case studies, Angkor, Cahokia and the Mongol expansion, are given to indicate the probable impacts of changing climates on human societies and the course of historical events. Thinking about how past societies responded to climate change is of great contemporary importance, bringing medievalists into urgent public conversations.
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Angkor, Cahokia, climate change, historical climate, medieval climate anomaly, medieval climate variability, Mongol empire