Irish chronicles reveal links between cold weather and volcanic eruptions

Medieval chronicles have given an international group of researchers a glimpse into the past to assess how historical volcanic eruptions affected the weather in Ireland up to 1500 years ago. By critically assessing over 40,000 written entries in the Irish Annals and comparing them with measurements taken from ice cores, the researchers successfully linked the climatic aftermath of volcanic eruptions to extreme cold weather events in Ireland over a 1200-year period from 431 to 1649.

Their study, which has been published today, 6 June, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, showed that over this timescale up to 48 explosive volcanic eruptions could be identified in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) ice-core, which records the deposition of volcanic sulfate in annual layers of ice.

Source: e! Science News

Now ye may all tink of Paddy as bein' tick, but dem auld medival Paddies knew a ting or two so.

Ireland is of course actually home to or the origin of many scholars and scientists, poets and writers, and of course singers and musicians.

Not only a country of great beauty but also of culture, so it comes as no surprise to me that Ireland should have kept good records of the weather! We do after all get a lot of weather here.

The dating and reliability of the Annals can be gauged by comparing reported events to those which are independently known, such as solar and lunar eclipses.

"With a few honourable exceptions, the Irish record of extreme events has only been used anecdotally, rather than systematically surveyed and exploited for the study of the climate history of Ireland and the North Atlantic, and so the richness of the record has been largely unrecognized," continued Dr Ludlow.

Perhaps they should use the records a bit more then?

One example is the 1600 eruption in Peru of Huaynaputina, which the researchers found, against expectations, to be associated with extreme cold winter weather in Ireland in the following years.

What they forgot to say is that old volcano is still affecting the weather. It has been cold as yer mothers tomb since 1600 as far as I can remember, well except today which is a staggering 23°C and has given us a rare chance to see the Altojumbus clouds which we normally never get to see,

Click image for the bigger picture

Surprising that Ireland, as an old nation with a clearly different approach about how to manage the place...
Also created these observation archive.
It's nice what you can do when a way of life offers you the time invest in other things of interest.

These notes show climate change, clearly caused by volcanic activity right ?
The dates also give us a time of change in weather elsewhere.

Do they all fit in our list of unexplained or misunderstood changes in weather conditions etc ? Cause that would be really cool.

Yeah Irish !

Nice thread !

I love Ireland, even now despite her ugly troubles. I've been several times, my Grandmother still lives there along with my dad who moved back to take care of her as well and my Grandfather before he passed. I'm not surprised to learn that they have weather records, as anyone familiar with the Book of Kells can tell you the great lengths the Irish have gone through to hang on to their knowledge, culture and history.

That said, this thread would have been very interesting were it not a thinly disguised attempt to dismiss modern Climate Science and it's theory of AGW. Especially considering that we've known active volcanic ash plumes, which contain high levels of sulphuric acid that when shot up into the atmosphere can block and reflect energy from the sun and keep it from entering the lower atmosphere, thus can cause some cooling, for some time. That's also why energy cartels are funding geoengineering research based on the known effect of sulphuric acid... you know to combat the warming they say doesn't exist... maybe they're nice people though after all, and didn't want to scare people until they had a free market solution.

This seems to me to just be another attempt to point every direction but the right one. If that's not the case, then my apologies. I did a thread recently on understanding the effects of the melting Arctic on the Jet Stream, maybe you could give it a glance when you have time to watch some videos, maybe you could also point out any increase in sulphuric acid in our atmosphere, the volcanoes responsible... that led to our horrible, cold winter this year in the Northern Hemisphere? I don't think you'll have much luck though.