Tea at Trianon: Old Climate Clues Shed New Light on History

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 11, 2022

Old Climate Clues Shed New Light on History

From Wired:

Joseph Manning, a Yale University professor of ancient history, likes to recall the moment when he was shown an advance copy of a scholarly paper that pinpointed the timing of major volcanic eruptions over the last 2,500 years. As he read the paper, “I literally fell off my chair,” he said recently^⁠.
Relying on new geochemical techniques for analyzing ice core sediment to determine the dates of ancient volcanic activity down to the year or even season, the paper, published in Nature in 2015, showed that major eruptions worldwide caused precipitous, up-to-a-decade-long^⁠ drops in global temperatures. Later research pegged those drops at as much as 13 degrees F.^⁠
What stunned Manning, an Egyptologist, was that the paper recalibrated earlier chronologies by seven to eight years, so that dates of the eruptions neatly coincided with the timing of well-documented political, social, and military upheavals over three centuries of ancient Egyptian history. The paper also correlated volcanic eruptions with major 6^th century A.D. pandemics, famines, and socioeconomic turmoil in Europe, Asia, and Central America. The inescapable conclusion, the paper argued, was that volcanic soot—which cools the earth by shielding its surface from sunlight, adversely affecting growing seasons and causing crop failures — helped drive those crises.
Since then, other scholarly papers relying on paleoclimatic data—most of it drawing on state-of-the-art technologies originally designed to understand climate change—have found innumerable instances when shifts in climate helped trigger social and political tumult and, often, collapses. The latest is a paper^⁠ published last month^⁠ in Communications Earth and Environment that posited “a systematic association between volcanic eruptions and dynastic collapse across two millennia of Chinese history.” (Read more.)

From Ancient Origins:

Back in 2018, Science reported that the medieval historian Michael McCormick had stated that 536 “was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year.” In his historical work Historiae Ecclesiasticae , translating as “Church Histories”, the 6th century historian and church leader John of Ephesus wrote that “ the sun became dark and its darkness lasted for 18 months.”

Between the years 535 and 536, a series of major climatic events took place that could easily be described as a global cataclysm with catastrophic consequences. “Each day, it [the sun] shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow. Everyone declared that the sun would never recover its full light again,” detailed Ephesus. (Read more.)