New Study on Climatic Complexity

New Study on Climatic Complexity  (18.12.2015)
Research on the climate of the past 1000 years has tended to focus on two periods that have come to be known as the "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Climatic Optimum" and the "Little Ice Age". As new palaeoclimatic proxy data are developed and refined it becomes increasingly clear that such terms are inadequate to describe climatic periods that varied considerably in time and space (Ogilvie and Jónsson, 2001). A recent study by Young et al. (2015) has suggested that the Norse settlement of Greenland around AD 985 occurred at a time when glaciers in southern Greenland were advanced, and that they continued in this phase for the entire period that the Norse remained (to ca. AD 1450). This undermines the climate deterministic theory that the Norse went to Greenland during a period of favourable climate, and died out when it became colder.

In "Inside Climate News", the Stefansson Arctic Institute‘s climate historian, Dr Astrid Ogilvie, suggests that the new study provides further evidence for the climatic complexity of the period when the Norse remained in Greenland and that the term "Medieval Warm Period" is an unhelpful misnomer.