Medieval Warm Period Concepts

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore · 16 Oct 2017 · 335pp · 89,924 words

riches and civilizations of Central and East Asia but poorer by far,22 in a time made by weather. We begin in feudal Europe. The Medieval Warm Period was a climate anomaly that ran from about 950 to 1250 in the North Atlantic.23 Winters were mild and growing seasons were long. Cultivation

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land use, a radical, sixfold increase over the previous five centuries, much of it realized at the expense of forests.27 Feudal Europe rode the Medieval Warm Period until its peak around 1250, when the climate turned colder—and wetter. After centuries of relative food security, famine returned, and with a force all

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transition never happened, and feudal arrangements staggered on until receiving a final coup de grace in 1347: the Black Death.33 Europe emerged from the Medieval Warm Period in poor shape. The structures that had produced sufficient food to nourish peasants and cities from the beginning of the second millennium weren’t able

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Eleventh-century bodies exhumed from English cemeteries show better health than those from the thirteenth century.35 The food shortages at the end of the Medieval Warm Period made European bodies more vulnerable to disease, and the Black Death turned this vulnerability into an apocalypse. Wiping out between one-third and one-half

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is withdrawn they can crumble. Rome boomed in the centuries following the onset of the Roman Climatic Optimum (c. 300 BCE–300 CE).13 The Medieval Warm Period (c. 950–1250) gave a helping hand to new states across Eurasia, from Cambodia to France.14 Feudal Europe got its assist from a climate

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Norway and the Low Countries. The death toll was higher than it might have been, because of the socioecological turmoil at the end of the Medieval Warm Period that we discussed in the introduction and chapter 1. Medieval Europeans had alternative facts. One influential account, from Louis Sanctus of Beringen in 1348, had

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Araghi, Farshad, 158 Arrighi, Giovanni, 87 Asia: capitalism and, 220n50; global power shift and, 46; global production shift and, 46; global silver trade and, 85; Medieval Warm Period, 48. See also specific nations assembly lines, 98, 100, 104, 109, 135 Atkins, John, 130 Australia, xiv–xv map 1; Aboriginal Australians, 99, 200 automotive

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, 62–63; China and, 71; feudalism and, 49; flooding, 221n58; flooding and, 221n58; green-house emissions, 174; labor effects of, 13; Little Ice Age, 48; Medieval Warm Period, 9, 11, 48; peat and, 167–68; renewable energy, 179; responsibility for, 24 colonialism: African slaves and, 92; anticolonial resistance, 197–98; early colonialism, 48

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, 195 Marx, Karl, 10, 26–27, 27, 101–2, 174, 216n71 materialism, 52–53, 58 Mayans, 98, 114–15, 129 McCarthyism, 109 Meade, James, 21 Medieval Warm Period, 8–9, 11, 11–13, 48, 184 Mercator, Gerard, 55–58 merchant class, 82; bourgeois democracies, 195–97; in Dutch Republic, 169; Genoese banking and

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began

by Valerie Hansen · 13 Apr 2020

less than 40 million in 1000 to 75 million in 1340 (before the Black Death struck in 1347). This increase in population coincided with the Medieval Warm Period, which began in 1000, peaked around 1100, and had ended by 1400. Because climate historians do not yet know whether the warming trend occurred all

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950 and continued until 1250. Scholars don’t yet know what types of climate change the Americas may have experienced when Europe was experiencing the Medieval Warming Period. But the collapse of Maya society in its tropical lowland heartland and the hiatus in building in Chichén Itzá between 900 and 950 point to

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consulted shamans. He also observed that the weather was unusually cold, a sign that the regional climate was cooling just as Europe was entering the Medieval Warming Period. By the late 900s many of the Oghuz had settled just east of the Aral Sea, where their leader, Seljuk ibn Duqaq, converted to Islam

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. “cerealization”: R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (2000): 30–39, 30 (doubling of population), 33 (population of Córdoba), 46–48 (cerealization). Medieval Warm Period: H. H. Lamb, “The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and Its Sequel,” Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology 1 (1965): 13–37. Medieval Climatic Anomaly: PAGES 2k Consortium, “Continental

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6 (2013): 339–46. For a map of the world showing cooling and warming trends as well as drought and wet periods, see the online Medieval Warm Period mapping project led by Sebastian Lüning: http://t1p.de/mwp. See also the essays by Quansheng Ge et al. about China, and Christian Rohr et

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Terminal Classic crisis in, 69 transfer of metalworking know-how from Andes to, 73–74, 76 Mayapán, Mexico, 77 Medieval Climate Anomaly, 11, 48, 70 Medieval Warm Period, population increase during, 11 Menzies, Gavin, 17 merchant guilds, 191–92, 193 metalworking know-how Rus people and, 89 trade within Andean region and, 74

Water: A Biography

by Giulio Boccaletti · 13 Sep 2021 · 485pp · 133,655 words

et al., “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Europe.” One possibility is that the temporary regrowth: Goosse et al., “The Origin of the European ‘Medieval Warm Period.’ ” Whatever the cause, the milder climate: Büntgen et al., “2500 Years of European Climate Variability.” Rather, it administered the landscape indirectly: Mann, The Sources

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. Goosse, Hugues, O. Arzel, J. Luterbacher, M. E. Mann, H. Renssen, N. Riedwyl, A. Timmermann, E. Xoplaki, and H. Wanner. “The Origin of the European ‘Medieval Warm Period.’ ” Climate of the Past 2 (September 2006): 99–113. Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016

Collapse

by Jared Diamond · 25 Apr 2011 · 753pp · 233,306 words

us that the climate in Greenland was relatively mild, similar to Greenland's weather today or even slightly warmer. Those mild centuries are termed the Medieval Warm Period. Thus, the Norse reached Greenland during a period good for growing hay and pasturing animals—good by the standards of Greenland's average climate over

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shall see, the onset of the Little Ice Age was a factor behind the demise of the Greenland Norse. But the climate shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age was complex, and not a simple matter that "it got steadily colder and killed off the Norse." There had been

Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline

by Paul Cooper · 31 Mar 2024 · 583pp · 174,033 words

of the story of the city’s downturn may have been caused by shifts in the region’s climate, and the global transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age. Looking at the enormous canals to the south of Angkor, we see that around this time they became filled with

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond · 2 Jan 2008 · 801pp · 242,104 words

us that the climate in Greenland was relatively mild, similar to Greenland’s weather today or even slightly warmer. Those mild centuries are termed the Medieval Warm Period. Thus, the Norse reached Greenland during a period good for growing hay and pasturing animals—good by the standards of Greenland’s average climate over

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shall see, the onset of the Little Ice Age was a factor behind the demise of the Greenland Norse. But the climate shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age was complex, and not a simple matter that “it got steadily colder and killed off the Norse.” There had been

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and Mesoamerican culture population of power cycling of Tikal warfare of water management written records of McDonald’s Corporation McGovern, Thomas McIntosh, Bill McVeigh, Timothy Medieval Warm Period Mediterranean fruit fly Mesoamericans Mesopotamia methane Mid-Atlantic Ridge Miller, Chris Milltown Dam, Montana Mimbres society mining: in Australia bankruptcy proceedings in borax cleanup in

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris · 11 Oct 2010 · 1,152pp · 266,246 words

forced people to adapt, but left it up to them to decide just how to do that. In cold, wet northern Europe this so-called Medieval Warm Period was often welcome, and population probably doubled between 1000 and 1300. In the hotter, drier Islamic core, however, it could be less welcome. Overall population

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trade decay and even stopped minting coins. Cities shrank, irrigation canals silted up, and marginal villages were abandoned. In the hot, dry weather of the Medieval Warm Period farmers had to struggle constantly just to keep their precious fields from reverting to steppe and desert, but Seljuk policies made their job harder still

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state, and without the kind of political organization that the Fatimid kingdoms provided in North Africa, the Seljuk lands buckled under the pressures of the Medieval Warm Period. The timing was unfortunate, because the same weather that posed such challenges in southwest Asia created opportunities for the unruly raiders, traders, and invaders on

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European fringe. Equally important, warmer weather brought northern Europe longer growing seasons and higher yields, making previously marginal lands potentially profitable. By the time the Medieval Warm Period wound down, farmers had plowed up vast tracts of what had once been forest, felling perhaps half the trees in western Europe. Like all episodes

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flourished as raiders on Europe’s far northwest fringe in the ninth century but in the tenth progressed to grander forms of theft. As the Medieval Warm Period opened up the waters of the North Atlantic they took their longboats to Iceland, Greenland, and even Vinland in North America. They settled heavily in

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Jerusalem but Constantinople. Neither the crusading movement nor the Byzantine Empire recovered from this disgrace. The West was changing shape under the pressures of the Medieval Warm Period. The Muslim lands remained the core, but as social development stagnated in southwest Asia, Islam’s center of gravity shifted toward the Mediterranean, and even

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, though, they paled into insignificance compared with a second development going on at the same time, an economic explosion to rival ancient Rome’s. The Medieval Warm Period was a boon almost everywhere in China: lake sediments, the chemistry of stalagmites, and textual records all suggest that the semiarid north got more rain

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time for something like the Black Death to visit humanity, but it is hard to think of a worse time than the 1340s. The balmy Medieval Warm Period had drawn to a close, ushering in what climatologists often call the Little Ice Age. From Norway to China, glaciers grew. The Denmark Strait, separating

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mercury in the thermometer just keeps rising. In the past, higher temperatures often meant better agricultural yields and rising development (as in the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods), but this time may be different. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested in 2007 that “Altered frequencies and intensities of extreme

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, and the vivid account in Norwich 1992. Italian city-states: D. Waley 1988. Crusades: Maalouf 1984, Tyerman 2006. Old World migrations generally: A. Lewis 1988. Medieval Warm Period: Fagan 2008 is a readable account; Kerr et al. 2005 treat the causes. Temperatures: Oppo et al. 2009. China: Chu et al. 2002, J. Ji

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the 10th to 13th Centuries AD.” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 41 (1998), pp. 344–81. Chu, Guoqing, et al. “The ‘Medieval Warm Period’ Drought Recorded in Lake Huguagyan, Tropical South China.” The Holocene 15 (2002), pp. 511–16. Clark, Christopher. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia

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: Norton, 2008. Zeman, Adam. A Portrait of the Brain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Zhang, De’er. “Evidence for the Existence of the Medieval Warm Period in China.” Climatic Change 26 (1994), pp. 289–97. Zhang, E., et al. “Quantitative Reconstruction of the Paleosalinity at Qinghai Lake in the Past 900

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–23 Gilgamesh, King, 188 Glasgow University, 494 global warming, 96, 119, 291, 598–601, 603 at end of Ice Age, 81–85, 561; see also Medieval Warm Period; Roman Warm Period Glorious Revolution, 567 Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), 96 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 531 gold, 185, 188, 190, 200, 275, 294, 348, 414, 460

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, 15, 21, 503–506, 512–14, 544, 549, 566 Massachusetts, colonial, 470 Massagetae, 277, 278 Mauryan Empire, 284 Mecca, 349, 351, 408 Medes, 248, 278 Medieval Warm Period, 363, 366, 367, 371, 373, 376, 397, 599 Medina, 349 Meditations, The (Marcus Aurelius), 308n Mehrgarh, 105 Melbourne, Lord, 8, 12, 148 Memphis (Egypt), 187

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

by Matt Ridley · 17 May 2010 · 462pp · 150,129 words

did in previous warm episodes such as the Holocene (when the Arctic ocean may have been almost ice-free in summer), the Egyptian, Roman and medieval warm periods. The great droughts that changed history in western Asia happened, as theory predicts, in times of cooling: 8,200 years ago and 4,200 years

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-impact-of-climate-change-as-a-negative/#more-3138. p. 334 ‘previous warm episodes’. The famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that seemed to prove that the Medieval Warm Period never happened has since been comprehensively discredited. It relied far too heavily on two sets of samples from bristlecone pine trees and Siberian larch trees

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mirror modern temperatures, and it used statistical techniques that made a hockey stick out of red noise. Subsequent nontree-ring proxies have emphatically reinstated the Medieval Warm Period as warmer than today. See http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168. Holland, D. 2007. Bias and concealment in the IPCC process: the ‘hockey-stick’ affair

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

by Diane Ackerman · 9 Sep 2014 · 380pp · 104,841 words

is much easier in a warmer world. Not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, we had a famously balmy spell. During the Medieval Warm Period, from 950 to 1250, the Vikings found the lack of sea ice so good for travel that they established a colony in present-day Newfoundland

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–88 McGill University, 282, 284 McKibben, Bill, 112 McMurdo Station, 88–90 Meaney, Michael, 282–84 Mecanoo, 104 medical ecology, 300 medicine, 7, 12–13 Medieval Warm Period, 43 Mehler, Mark, 282 memories, 255 Men Who Stare at Goats, The (Ronson), 146 Mercedes, 236 mercury, 271 Mesopotamia, 235 metal alloy teeth, 253 methylation

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

by Mark Lynas · 1 Apr 2008 · 364pp · 101,193 words

the body cavity, and teeth marks from cannibalism. Indeed, the whole world saw a changing climate in medieval times. The era is commonly termed the ‘Medieval Warm Period’, a time when-so the oft-told story goes-the Vikings colonised Greenland and vineyards flourished in the north of England. Temperatures in the North

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sand dune systems are currently ‘stabilised’: covered by a protective layer of vegetation, so not even the strongest winds can shift them. But during the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures in the Great Plains region may only have been slightly warmer than now, these deserts came alive-and began to march across a

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151-3 Maldives 47 Mali 90 Manabe, Syukuro 194, 196 Marshall Islands 47 Matterhorn 29-30, 58 Mayans 131-5, 174, 175 Mead, Lake 142 Medieval Warm Period 5-7 Mediterranean 44-5, 61-3, 150, 178, 179, 182 Mega-Chad, Lake 20 Meghna delta 211 Meltwater Pulse 1a flood 66 Meridional Overturning

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16, 18, 20, 21, 61, 218 North America: ancient 197-8, 218, 219 desertification 194 drought 5-9, 173 extinctions 39-42 flooding 218, 219 Medieval Warm Period 5-7 see also Canada; USA North Sea 149, 207 Norway 10, 73, 131, 207 nuclear power 270, 271, 272 nuclear weapons 141, 212, 233