Freak winter is Europe's warmest for 700 years

[babylonsister]

http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12098-freak-winter-is-europes-warmest-for-700-years.html

Freak winter is Europe's warmest for 700 years

* Catherine Brahic

Last autumn-winter season was Europe's warmest for more than 700 years, researchers say.

The last time Europeans saw similar temperatures to the autumn and winter of 2006-07, they were eating strawberries at Christmas in 1289, according to Jürg Luterbacher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and colleagues.

European climate measurements and temperature records stretch back several hundred years – UK records are the longest available, going back to 1659. Estimating historical temperatures beyond then involves scrutinising contemporary documents and diaries.

"People in churches, or doctors, wrote diaries, and usually they also included information about weather and climate. Climate historians can use and interpret this information and translate it into a temperature value," explains Luterbacher, who worked with climate historians to compare past and recent temperatures.

Early blooms

Separately, the temperatures experienced during autumn 2006 and winter 2007 are likely to have been the warmest in 500 years, they say. But the sequential combination of two such warm seasons is a still rarer event – probably the first since 1289.

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[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Since the medieval warm period.

Don't give away those winter coats - the medieval warm period ended with the kicking off of the Little Ice Age. Break the thermohaline circuit and all kinds of interesting things may happen.