Little Ice Age was Global, Impacting Europe and America

A team of UK researchers has shed some new light on the climate on the Little Ice Age. They've discovered that the most extreme episodes of the Little Ice Age were global as opposed to just in Europe and North America.

Scientists have long wondered whether the Little Ice age, which extended from the early 15^th to 19^th centuries, was global. Now, they've taken a closer look at this period. The researchers conducted studies on past climate by examining peat from a bog. This allowed them to reconstruct past climates over the past 3,000 years at close intervals throughout a vertical column of peat.

So what did they find? It turns out that the most extreme cold phases of the Little Ice Age were synchronous in Europe and South America. While in the continental northwest Europe bogs became wetter, though, in Tierra del Fuego they became drier.

"It seems that the sun's quiescence was responsible for the most extreme phases of the Little Ice Age, implying that solar variability sometimes plays a significant role in climate change," said Frank Chambers one of the researchers, in a news release. "A change in solar activity may also, for example, have contributed to the post Little Ice Age rise in global temperatures in the first half of the 20^th Century. However, solar variability alone cannot explain the post-1970 global temperature trends, especially the global temperature rise in the last three decades of the 20^th Century, which has been attributed by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

The findings reveal a bit more about past climate conditions. This, in turn, may be able to inform future research.