Christian Pfister

Universität Bern | UniBe · Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research

This paper presents a precipitation reconstruction that is based on the continuous observations by Louis Morin in Paris from 1665-1713. Morin usually recorded precipitation intensity and duration three times each day (sometimes up to six times) when it snowed or rained. The continuity of his observations can be calculated considering all measuremen...

The Thirty Years' War, which took place from 1618 to 1648 CE, was an armed military conflict in Europe. It resulted from the culmination of theological differences between advocates of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as a power struggle for European political hegemony. This war brought about extensive devastation to Europe. Base...

This study investigates the validity of wine must quality as a summer (JJA) temperature proxy between 1420 and 2019 based on expert ratings and quality measurements from Germany, Luxembourg, Eastern France and the Swiss Plateau. The evidence was reviewed according to the best practice of historical climatology. Expert ratings tended to agree with O...

This paper discusses what is, to our knowledge, the oldest subdaily measurement series of humidity taken over several years. Louis Morin performed the measurements in Paris, three times a day, between May 1701 and June 1711. A correlation analysis of Morin’s humidity measurements with various meteorological variables yields results comparable to th...

Documentary climate data describe evidence of past climate arising from predominantly written historical documents such as diaries, chronicles, newspapers, or logbooks. Over the past decades, historians and climatologists have generated numerous document-based time series of local and regional climates. However, a global dataset of documentary clim...

The Thirty Years’ War, which took place from 1618 to 1648 CE, was an armed military conflict in Europe. It resulted from the culmination of contradictions between advocates of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches during the 17th-century reformation, as well as a power struggle for European political hegemony. This war brought about extensive...

This paper presents a precipitation reconstruction that is based on the continuous observations by Louis Morin in Paris from 1665–1713. Morin usually recorded precipitation intensity and duration, when it snowed/rained, three times each day (sometimes up to six times). The consistency of his observations can be calculated from his other measurement...

The association between climate variability and grain harvest yields has been an important component of food security and economy in European history. Yet, inter-regional comparisons of climate–yield relationships have been hampered by locally varying data types and use of different statistical methods. Using a coherent statistical framework, consi...

Christian Pfister / Heinz Wanner, Klima und Gesellschaft in Europa. Die letzten tausend Jahre. Bern: Haupt Verlag 2021. 424 S., zahlr. Farb- und s/w Abb. ISBN 978-3-258-08152-3. Geb. € 49,–

We have digitized three meteorological variables (temperature, direction of the movement of the clouds, and cloud cover) from copies of Louis Morin's original measurements (source: Institute of History/Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern; Institut de France) and subjected them to quality analysis to make these data avail...

The Little Ice Age (LIA), which lasted from about 1250 to 1860 AD, was likely the coldest period of the last 8000 years. Using new documentary data and analyses of alpine glacier fluctuations, the complex transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the LIA and the ensuing high variability of seasonal temperatures, are described and interpreted...

We have digitized three meteorological variables (temperature, direction of the movement of the clouds, and cloud cover) from copies of Louis Morin’s original measurements (Source: Institute of History / Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern) and subjected them to quality analysis to make these data available to the scient...

Information about past ecosystem dynamics and human activities is stored in the ice of Colle Gnifetti glacier in the Swiss Alps. Adverse climatic intervals incurred crop failures and famines and triggered reestablishment of forest vegetation but also societal resilience through innovation. Historical documents and lake sediments record these change...

Droughts and heatwaves are both dangerous natural hazards with a potential significant impact on human societies. In order to understand these hazards, it is important to examine such extreme events in the past. During the years 1471 to 1474, warm and dry weather conditions are described in most parts of Europe. Until now, these extraordinary years...

Records of grape harvest dates (GHDs) are the oldest and the longest continuous phenological data in Europe. However, many available series, including the well-known (Dijon) Burgundy series, are error prone because scholars so far have uncritically drawn the data from 19th century publications instead of going back to the archives. The GHDs from th...

Records of grape harvest dates (GHD) are the oldest and the longest continuous phenological data in Europe. However, many available series including the well-known (Dijon) Burgundy series are error prone, because scholars so far uncritically drew the data from nineteenth century publications instead of going back to the archives. The GHD from the f...

his paper provides coherent evidence on what Europe might expect in the case of a worst-case heat and drought event The record-breaking heat in 1540 was an analogous case to the 2003 event, albeit more intense, longer lasting and affecting a !arger area-extending from France to Poland and from ltaly to Germany, also including Spain and Morocco. Bot...

When investigating the well-being of a society, the living conditions of females are of special importance, not only due to the immediate impact for those directly involved, but also because of the potential intergenerational effects. Studying the dimorphism in the mean height helps to depict variation in the basic biological sex difference due to...

Severe climatic anomalies in summer 1816, partly due to the eruption of Tambora in April 1815, contributed to delayed growth and poor harvests of important crops in Central Europe. Coinciding with adverse socio-economic conditions, this event triggered the last subsistence crisis in the western World. Here, we model reductions in potential crop yie...

The Euro-Climhist data base (http://www.euroclimhist.unibe.ch/de)/ presents evidence about weather and climate in space and time mostly originating from the archives of societies. It facilitates the cross-checking of proxy data with contemporaneous high-resolution narrative weather reports. Contemporary and non-contemporary data are distinguished f...

The year 1540 is known in German cultural history for the persecution of alleged arsonists (Mordbrenner) blamed for starting frequent town, village, and forest fires . Most fires were related to a ten-month long and Europe-wide record-breaking heat wave and drought . Proceeding from the blaze of the German town in Einbeck which resulted in a confes...

Bei der Erstellung der Gefahrenkataster und -karten zur Umsetzung der Wald- und Wasserbaugesetzgebung spielt die Kenntnis von vor- und frühinstrumentellen Extrem ereignissen eine zentrale Rolle. Die Witterungs- und Klimageschichte dokumentiert die natürliche Klimavariabilität vor dem Einsetzen der globalen Erwärmung, nicht zuletzt sehr seltene Extr...

There is strong evidence that the year 1540 was exceptionally dry and warm in Central Europe. Here we infer 1540 summer temperatures from the number of dry days (NDDs) in spring (March–May) and summer (June–August) in 1540 derived from historical documentary evidence published elsewhere, and compare our estimates with present-day temperatures. We t...

Objective: The global obesity epidemic continues, new approaches are needed to understand the causes. We analyzed data from an evolutionary perspective, stressing developmental plasticity. Methods: We present diachronical height, weight, and BMI data for 702,902 Swiss male conscripts aged 18-20 years, a representative, standardized and unchanged...

Conflicts over food, energy and resources in general were an essential aspect of the First World War. Although formally neutral in the war, Switzerland could not escape from this. Its open economy and its dependency on imports of everyday goods made the country vulnerable and changed the course of the war. Nevertheless these aspects have not yet be...

The spatial context is critical when assessing present-day climate anomalies, attributing them to potential forcings and making statements regarding their frequency and severity in a long-term perspective. Recent international initiatives have expanded the number of high-quality proxy-records and developed new statistical reconstruction methods. Th...

This paper provides coherent evidence on what Europe might expect in the case of a worst-case heat and drought event. The record-breaking heat in 1540 was an analogue case to the 2003 event, albeit it was more intense, longer lasting and affecting a larger area extending from France to Poland and from Italy to Germany, also including Spain and Moro...

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The 1815 eruption of Tambora caused an unusually cold summer in much of Europe in 1816. The extreme weather led to poor harvests and malnutrition, but also demonstrated the capability of humans to adapt and help others in worse conditions. L arge volcanic eruptions in the tropics can temporarily alter climate around the world, causing global coolin...

The 1815 eruption of Tambora caused an unusually cold summer in much of Europe in 1816. The extreme weather led to poor harvests and malnutrition, but also demonstrated the capability of humans to adapt and help others in worse conditions. L arge volcanic eruptions in the tropics can temporarily alter climate around the world, causing global coolin...

The international standardisation of national meteorological networks in the late nineteenth century excluded biotic and abiotic observations from the objects to be henceforth published in the yearbooks. Skilled amateurs being in charge of three meteorological stations in Canton Schaffhausen (Switzerland) and their successors managed to continuousl...

The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent reconstruction of spring-summer temperatures for WE resulted in the likelihood of significantly h...

27 Der Aufsatz setzt das Abfallprofil einer Gesellschaft zu ihren dominanten Energiequellen, ihrem Grundwerk-stoff und den relativen Preisen von Arbeit und Energie in Beziehung. Diesbezüglich unterscheidet er zwischen Agrargesellschaft, Industriegesellschaft und Konsum-gesellschaft. Der Übergang von der Industriegesellschaft zur Konsumgesellschaft...

The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent reconstruction of spring–summer temperatures for WE resulted in the likelihood of significantly h...

The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent Climatic Change (2014) 125:349-363 351 weather report sources originating from an area of 2 to 3...

The heat of summer 2003 in Western and Cen-tral Europe was claimed to be unprecedented since the Mid-dle Ages on the basis of grape harvest data (GHD) and late wood maximum density (MXD) data from trees in the Alps. This paper shows that the authors of these studies overlooked the fact that the heat and drought in Switzerland in 1540 likely exceede...

The heat of summer 2003 in Western and Cen-tral Europe was claimed to be unprecedented since the Mid-dle Ages on the basis of grape harvest data (GHD) and late wood maximum density (MXD) data from trees in the Alps. This paper shows that the authors of these studies overlooked the fact that the heat and drought in Switzerland in 1540 likely exceede...

Am Zentrum für Evolutionäre Medi-zin (Anatomisches Institut) und am Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Zürich werden seit einigen Jahren die historischen und modernen medizinischen Daten der Aushebungen in der Schweiz und in Deutschland untersucht. Anthropo-metrische Daten der Rekrutierung bieten die Möglichkeit, in repräsen-tativer...

Two European temperature reconstructions for the past half-millennium, January-to-April air temperature for Stockholm (Sweden) and seasonal temperature for a Central European region, both derived from the analysis of documentary sources and long instrumental records, are compared with the output of climate simulations with the model ECHO-G. The ana...

Past climate variations in the pre-instrumental period can be estimated from different kinds of proxy data. Apart from natural proxy archives, important information can be found in documentary non-instrumental man-made sources, primarily for Europe and a few other regions with a long tradition of keeping documentary records related to weather and c...

The paper presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of flood variability and forcing of major European rivers since AD 1500. We compile and investigate flood reconstructions which are based on documentary evidence for twelve Central European rivers and for eight Mediterranean rivers. Flood variability and underlying climatological causes are...

We use long instrumental temperature series together with available field reconstructions of sea-level pressure (SLP) and three-dimensional climate model simulations to analyze relations between temperature anomalies and atmospheric circulation patterns over much of Europe and the Mediterranean for the late winter/early spring (January–April, JFMA...

Download the dataset here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/historical/europe/switzerland/swiss-phenology2007.xls