Measuring Climate Change

We begin this piece with one of the most crucial issues of our time: climate change. And before we can begin to understand our present predicament, we need to take a few big steps back in time. The end of the Roman Empire was a time of great crisis and a major contributor to the shifting historical landscape was climate change.

The history of climate change

Environmental history investigates the relationship between humans and the ecosystem through various lines of study, including agricultural practices, technological innovation and sources of energy. The primary concern of environmental historians is to draw attention to the central role that the environment has played in human societies:

How has the environment shaped human decisions and actions?

Finding “proxies” in natural science

Thus began the hunt for “proxy” measures, natural archives generated by natural phenomena that could be understood to preserve some kind of climate signal.

Ice core analysis

_{Ice core section from TUNU (Greenland)}

_{Ice-core records of sulfur from two ice cores in Greenland and two ice cores in Antarctica, used among others to infer atmospheric deposition (yellow circles)}

Speleothems

_{Azish or Azishskaya cave in Adigeya, Russia}

Lake sediment

Climate Change Archives

The integration of archaeological evidence with historical sources and scientific measurements is helping explain many aspects of ancient and medieval times.

In relation to the post-classical period, a time of profound change, we must investigate to what degree important climatic variations (which started in the third century) influenced the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and helped shape the medieval landscape, and how humans reacted, adapting or modifying the environment in turn.