Abstract
The climate history of North America and Europe from 1800 to 1970 has been relatively well studied. Climate reconstructions for the early nineteenth century largely depend on proxy data from natural archives, documentary evidence, and early instrumental series. The period marks a transition from the Little Ice Age to the current age of global warming. The climate underwent several fluctuations during these two centuries, with cold periods in the early and late nineteenth century and the cool mid-twentieth century interspersed with rapid warming, as in the early twentieth century. The establishment of American and European national weather services during the mid- to late nineteenth century marked a new era, with continuous standardized instrumental data. A global observation system gradually came into being, with particularly dense information for North America and Europe. This chapter provides an overview of the available data and main climatic trends for the period, followed by descriptions of major climate historical events.
Notes
- 1.
Edwards, 2010.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
E.g., Wilson, 1985.
- 5.
E.g., Przybylak and Vizi, 2005.
- 6.
- 7.
E.g., Naylor, 2015.
- 8.
Edwards, 2010.
- 9.
E.g. Dupigny-Giroux and Mock, 2009.
- 10.
Edwards, 2010.
- 11.
Schurer et al., 2014.
- 12.
Callendar, 1938.
- 13.
Revelle and Suess, 1957.
- 14.
Schlesinger and Ramankutty, 1994.
- 15.
Bindoff et al., 2013.
- 16.
Raible et al., 2016.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
Wood and Overland, 2010.
- 20.
Nordli et al., 2014.
- 21.
- 22.
Schubert, 2004.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
Brönnimann et al., 2009.
- 26.
Brönnimann et al., 2004.
- 27.
The role of food supplies and starvation has become an increasingly prominent feature of the history of the Eastern Front in World War II, as in Collingham, 2012.
- 28.
Brönnimann et al., 2015.
References
Anderson, Katharine. Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Baker, Donald et al. “The Minnesota Long-Term Temperature Record.” Climatic Change 7 (1985): 225–36.
Bindoff, N.L. et al. “Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: From Global to Regional.” In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Brönnimann, Stefan. Climatic Changes Since 1700. Berlin: Springer International Publishing, 2015.
Brönnimann, S. et al. “Extreme Climate of the Global Troposphere and Stratosphere in 1940–42 Related to El Niño.” Nature 431 (2004): 971–74.
Brönnimann, Stefan et al. “Exceptional Atmospheric Circulation during the ‘Dust Bowl.’” Geophysical Research Letters 36 (2009): L08802.
Brönnimann, Stefan et al. “Southward Shift of the Northern Tropical Belt from 1945 to 1980.” Nature Geoscience 8 (2015): 969–74.
Burnette, Dorian J. et al. “Daily-Mean Temperature Reconstructed for Kansas from Early Instrumental and Modern Observations.” Journal of Climate 23 (2010): 1308–33.
Callendar, G.S. “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 64 (1938): 223–40.
Collingham, E.M. The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. New York: Penguin Press, 2012.
Cook, Edward et al. “A Well-Verified, Multiproxy Reconstruction of the Winter North Atlantic Oscillation Index since A.D. 1400.” Journal of Climate 15 (2002): 1754–65.
Cook, Benjamin I. et al. “Amplification of the North American ‘Dust Bowl’ Drought through Human-Induced Land Degradation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009): 4997–5001.
Cook, Benjamin I. et al. “The Worst North American Drought Year of the Last Millennium: 1934.” Geophysical Research Letters (2014): 7298–305.
Cunfer, G. The Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005.
Delworth, Thomas, and Thomas Knudson. “Simulation of Early 20th Century Global Warming.” Science 287 (2000): 2246–50.
Dupigny-Giroux, Lesley-Ann, and Cary J. Mock, eds. Historical Climate Variability and Impacts in North America. Berlin: Springer, 2009.
Edwards, Paul N. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Fleming, James Rodger. Meteorology in America, 1800–1870. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Hopkins, Edward, and Joseph Moran. “Monitoring the Climate of the Old Northwest: 1820–95.” In Historical Climate Variability and Impacts in North America, edited by Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux and Cary Mock, 171–88. Berlin: Springer, 2009.
Hurt, R.D. The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981.
Jones, P.D. et al. “Extension to the North Atlantic Oscillation Using Early Instrumental Pressure Observations from Gibraltar and South-West Iceland.” International Journal of Climatology 17 (1997): 1433–50.
Klingaman, William, and Nicholas Klingaman. The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
Krämer, Daniel. “Menschen grasten nun mit dem Vieh”: die letzte grosse Hungerkrise der Schweiz 1816/17: mit einer theoretischen und methodischen Einführung in die historische Hungerforschung. Basel: Schwabe, 2015.
Luterbacher, J., and C. Pfister. “The Year Without a Summer.” Nature Geoscience 8 (2015): 246–48.
Luterbacher, J. et al. “Extending North Atlantic Oscillation Reconstructions back to 1500.” Atmospheric Science Letters 2 (2001): 114–24.
Manley, Gordon. “Central England Temperatures: Monthly Means 1659 to 1973.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 100 (1974): 389–405.
Mann, M.E. et al. “Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations over the Past Two Millennia.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (2008): 13252–57.
Naylor, Simon. “Log Books and the Law of Storms: Maritime Meteorology and the British Admiralty in the Nineteenth Century.” Isis 106 (2015): 771–97.
Nordli, Øyvind et al. “Long-Term Temperature Trends and Variability on Spitsbergen: The Extended Svalbard Airport Temperature Series, 1898–2012.” Polar Research 33 (2014): 21349.
Pages 2k. “Continental-Scale Temperature Variability during the Past Two Millennia.” Nature Geoscience 6 (2013): 339–46.
Post, John D. The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Przybylak, Rajmund, and Zsuzsanna Vizi. “Air Temperature Changes in the Canadian Arctic from the Early Instrumental Period to Modern Times.” International Journal of Climatology 25 (2005): 1507–22.
Raible, C.C. et al. “Tambora 1815 as a Test Case for High Impact Volcanic Eruptions: Earth System Effects.” WIREs Climate Change 7 (2016): 569–89.
Revelle, Roger, and Hans Suess. “Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades.” Tellus 9 (1957): 18–27.
Schlesinger, Michael, and Navin Ramankutty. “An Oscillation in the Global Climate System of Period 65–70 Years.” Nature 367 (1994): 723–26.
Schubert, S. “On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl.” Science 303 (2004): 1855–59.
Schurer, A.P. et al. “Small Influence of Solar Variability on Climate over the Past Millennium.” Nature Geoscience 7 (2014): 104–08.
Slonosky, Victoria C. “Historical Climate Observations in Canada: 18th and 19th Century Daily Temperature from the St. Lawrence Valley, Quebec.” Geoscience Data Journal 1 (2014): 103–20.
Slonosky, Victoria C. “Daily Minimum and Maximum Temperature in the St-Lawrence Valley, Quebec: Two Centuries of Climatic Observations from Canada.” International Journal of Climatology 35 (2015): 1662–81.
Sylvester, Kenneth, and Eric Rupley. “Revising the Dustbowl: High Above the Kansas Grasslands.” Environmental History 17 (2012): 603–33.
Thompson, D.M. et al. “Early 20th Century Warming Linked to Tropical Pacific Wind Strength.” Nature Geoscience 8 (2015): 117–21.
Wilson, Cynthia. “The Little Ice Age on Eastern Hudson/James Bay: The Summer Weather and Climate at Great Whale, Fort George and Eastmain, 1814–1821, as Derived from Hudson’s Bay Company Records.” National Museum of Natural Sciences Climate Change Project; Climatic Change in Canada 55 (1985): 147–90.
Wood, K.R., and J.E. Overland. “Early 20th Century Arctic Warming in Retrospect.” International Journal of Climatology 30 (2010): 1269–79.
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern High Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brönnimann, S., White, S., Slonosky, V. (2018). Climate from 1800 to 1970 in North America and Europe. In: White, S., Pfister, C., Mauelshagen, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-43019-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43020-5
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)