What can a medieval climate crisis teach us about modern-day warming? Andrew Simms

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/22/what-can-a-medieval-climate-crisis-teach-us-abou
Sat in the centrally heated school Christmas concert, I sang, like countless others, In the Bleak Midwinter, not knowing the half of it. Christina Rossetti’s mournful, yearning poem, later set to music by Gustav Holst, was written in 1872, but speaks of a “bleak midwinter, long ago”, relocating the nativity to a chill northern landscape where, “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”

If Rossetti conjures a folk memory, the best candidate for that bleak history is the decade from 1430-1440, according to a new paper published in Climate of the Past, the open access journal of the European Geosciences Union. It was a period of “exceptional cold” driven by “chaotic internal variability within the climate system”. Crops failed, food and fuel prices rose. Malnutrition and famine struck many parts of Europe. Weakened populations fell prey to disease and pestilence, themselves worsened by environmental and living conditions
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/22/what-can-a-medieval-climate-crisis-teach-us-about-modern-day-warming

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1. link did not work nt

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3. I was having real trouble getting that to link but it works now