Little Ice Age climate reconstruction from ensemble reanalysis of Alpine glacier fluctuations

Little Ice Age climate reconstruction from ensemble reanalysis of Alpine glacier fluctuations

Mountain glaciers sample a combination of climate fields – temperature, precipitation and radiation – by accumulation and melting of ice. Flow dynamics acts as a transfer function that maps volume changes to a length response of the glacier terminus. Long histories of terminus positions have been assembled for several glaciers in the Alps. Here I analyze terminus position histories from an ense...

Climatic warming, glacier recession and runoff from Alpine basins after the Little Ice Age maximum

Records of discharge of rivers draining Alpine basins with between 0 and 70% ice cover, in the upper Aare and Rhône catchments, Switzerland, for the period 1894–2006 have been examined together with climatic data for 1866–2006, with a view to assessing the effects on runoff from glacierized basins of climatic warming coupled with glacier recession following the Little Ice Age maximum. Annual ru...

Little Ice Age

Volume 1, The Earth system: physical and chemical dimensions of global environmental change, pp 504–509

The Economic Effects of Long-Term Climate Change: Evidence from the Little Ice Age, 1500-1750

Understanding the economic effects of long-term and gradual climate change, when people have time to adapt, is a central question in the current debate on climate change. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce. I study the economic effects of climate change over a period of 250 years during the Little Ice Age, a historical episode of climate change, between 1500 and 1750. Historians have argued...

The Maunder minimum and the Little Ice Age: an update from recent reconstructions and climate simulations