Publisher's Synopsis
This is an up-to-date assessment of how climate had varied over the last few hundred years. The period since about A.D. 1500 was chosen for this study because this was the interval for which the most data could be assembled, and it was also a period of particular interest, encompassing the so-called "Little Ice Age", as well as a period of unusual solar activity (the Maunder minimum) and several exceptionally large explosive volcanic eruptions. The main criterion for selecting types of data was to consider only those sources which had annual (or better) resolution, which largely meant a focus on historical documentary records, dendroclimatic data and ice cores. The book contains three main sections divided along these lines. There is also a fourth section dealing with potentially important forcing factors (causes of climatic change) which have relevance for understanding the records described in the preceding sections.;No chapters deal with ice cores from Greenland and the Canadian Arctic because there is simply not enough known to produce a study of Africa and South Asia. In fact, tropical regions in general are poorly represented by high resolution paleoclimatic data. An aim of the book is that it will lead to the application of new techniques to reconstruct paleoclimatic conditions of the past, and to the further assessment of reconstructions.
