SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

178 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
Professor Jones reckons that the worsening climate in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries played a large
part in the extinction of the Greenlanders. There are no
adequate reasons for accepting this explanation. It is
usually estimated that the climate of the Northern
Hemisphere got slightly colder after 1200 (the cold began
at the end of the Bronze Age and reached its climax in
Iceland between 1740 and 1850), but the figures which are
quoted of the temperature changes in Greenland are very
suspect. Recent researches in Iceland, by Pall Bergp6rsson,
the State Meteorologist, and others, lead to the
conclusion that the last forty years have been the mildest
since the Commonwealth period (930-1262). The climate
got a little cooler about 1200, and the cold continued into
the fourteenth century (the first cold period). The climate
then became milder up to the end of the sixteenth century,
when a period of severe weather began ("The Little Ice
Age"), and this lasted until the end of the nineteenth
century. Pall Bergp6rsson estimates that average
temperatures in the second cold period were 1.4"C. lower
than in the years 1930-60, and 1.6°C. lower in the worst
years of that time (1740-1840).2 Professor Jones's
assertion on p. 57 that "in southern Greenland annual
mean temperatures (during the 'climatic optimum' of
1000-1200) were 2 o-4°C. higher than now" does not seem
to be adequately supported. On the same page it is said
that "by c. 1430 Europe had entered a Little Ice Age",
but in fact it did not begin for another ISO years." All
statistics about temperatures in past ages rest on
probabilities and are deductions rather than proved
certainties. Lauge Koch has given more time than
anyone else to scientific research in Greenland, and in his
book The East Greenland Ice (Meddelelser fra Granland
2 My authority is a paper, not yet published, which Pall Bergporsson read
in June 1962 to the Conference on the Climate of the Eleventh and Sixteenth
Centuries.
a See e.g, D. J. Schove, 'European Temperatures A.D. 1500-1950', Quarterly
Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (1949), 175-9.