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Climate from 1800 to 1970 in North America and Europe

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The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Edwards, 2010.

  2. 2.

    E.g., Hopkins and Moran, 2009; Slonosky, 2015.

  3. 3.

    E.g., Hopkins and Moran, 2009; Slonosky, 2015; Burnette et al., 2010; Baker et al., 1985.

  4. 4.

    E.g., Wilson, 1985.

  5. 5.

    E.g., Przybylak and Vizi, 2005.

  6. 6.

    Fleming, 1999; Anderson, 2005.

  7. 7.

    E.g., Naylor, 2015.

  8. 8.

    Edwards, 2010.

  9. 9.

    E.g. Dupigny-Giroux and Mock, 2009.

  10. 10.

    Edwards, 2010.

  11. 11.

    Schurer et al., 2014.

  12. 12.

    Callendar, 1938.

  13. 13.

    Revelle and Suess, 1957.

  14. 14.

    Schlesinger and Ramankutty, 1994.

  15. 15.

    Bindoff et al., 2013.

  16. 16.

    Raible et al., 2016.

  17. 17.

    Krämer, 2015; Luterbacher and Pfister, 2015.

  18. 18.

    Klingaman and Klingaman, 2013; Post, 1977.

  19. 19.

    Wood and Overland, 2010.

  20. 20.

    Nordli et al., 2014.

  21. 21.

    Thompson et al., 2015; Schlesinger and Ramankutty, 1994; Delworth and Knudson, 2000.

  22. 22.

    Schubert, 2004.

  23. 23.

    Cook et al., 2009, 2014. The once common view that farmers of the 1920s were ploughing already submarginal land has since been called into question—see Cunfer, 2005, and Sylvester and Rupley, 2012.

  24. 24.

    Worster, 1979; Hurt, 1981.

  25. 25.

    Brönnimann et al., 2009.

  26. 26.

    Brönnimann et al., 2004.

  27. 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. 28.

    Brönnimann et al., 2015.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Stefan Brönnimann

  2. Department of History, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Sam White

  3. McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Victoria Slonosky

Authors
  1. Stefan Brönnimann
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  2. Sam White
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  3. Victoria Slonosky
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Sam White

  2. Institute of History, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change, Bern, Switzerland

    Christian Pfister

  3. Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Franz Mauelshagen

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_25

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43020-5

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