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Climate change and plague history in Europe

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Abstract

Previous research that reported the linkage between climate change and plague activity primarily refers to the immediate effect of short-term climatic variation. Yet, decades of discussion about the climate-plague association cannot determine the precise role of climate in shaping plague dynamics. One reason for this discrepancy originates from the narrow selection of spatio-temporal settings for comprehensive analysis of the correlation, leading to a limited consideration of the complexity of possible dynamics. By analyzing a 414-year long record of plague outbreak in pre-industrial Europe and the corresponding climatic data in multi-scale, we find little evidence to support climate-plague correlation in (1) both climatic variations and large-scale climatic phenomena, (2) both country scale and continental scale, (3) annual to inter-annual scale, and (4) both linear and non-linear analytic approaches. The null-result should not be viewed as a general rejection of other recent findings related to climate-plague association; nevertheless, it suggests that a wider consideration of scales, sensitivity checks and consideration of contexts should be included in explaining and predicting plague transmission under contemporary global climate conditions.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Hui Oi-Chow Trust Fund (Grant Nos. 201502172003 & 201602172006) and Research Grants Council of The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (Grant Nos. HKU745113H & 17610715).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Department of Geography, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Ricci P. H. Yue & Harry F. Lee

  2. International Center for China Development Studies, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Ricci P. H. Yue & Harry F. Lee

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Yue, R.P.H., Lee, H.F. Climate change and plague history in Europe. Sci. China Earth Sci. 61, 163–177 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-017-9127-x

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