Over the last six months weather in Britain has been a little bit freaky. From several bouts of snow – the heaviest and most frequent to have fallen for a good few years – to several periods of doom and gloom and torrential downpours, it’s been something of a grey blur, and the spring doesn’t look set to kick in either: with April approaching, the usual ‘April showers’ are giving way to torrents of rain and little sunshine.
Given that sunshine was a little too sparse for some last summer too, the grey haze that has been an eradication of “traditional” seasons could be worrying for some Take a little comfort, then, from recent information which suggests that the Middle ages were even wetter; in fact, one study is linking the strange lack of sunshine to the “black death”.
Ominous indeed: what could the adverse effects of our changing seasons be? Though calls for a new weather induced-black-death-pandemic would be a little on the ridiculous side, what this information does show is that climate can have a real effect on a given population. Now, this wouldn’t be the place for speculation on what that effect could be in the modern era, but it’s certainly food for thought the nonetheless.
And it dispels that view that things in the good ol’ days of yore were better, doesn’t it?
Faint witticisms aside, it does represent an interesting thought experiment: is our climate just fostering a misery in us or is it going to have biological effects too? Whilst the link between climate and the plague of the Middle Ages certainly represents an exceptional circumstance, it raises certain questions about what we’re doing not only to the “environment” around us but also ourselves, in our society of high-carbon output;.
Hmm.
And if you’re wondering how people worked out that the Middle Ages had wetter summers, here follows the answer, from Professor Dr Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz:
“Annual growth rings provide us with an accurate indication of summer droughts for each individual year, dating back to late medieval times”
Who knew the insides of trees could be that interesting?
