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Cordula Scherer, Francis Ludlow, Al Matthews, Patrick Hayes, Riina Klais, Poul Holm, A Historical Plankton Index: Zooplankton abundance in the North Sea since 800 CE, Holocene, 2024,
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Climate, Violence and Ethnic Conflict in the Ancient World in, editor(s)Ben Kiernan, Tracy Maria Lemos, Tristan Taylor , The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume 1: Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp150 - 182, [Ludlow, F., Kostick, C., Morris, C.],
Notes: [Studies of past or possible future climatic contributions to genocide are rare, perhaps partly due to the terrible scale and relatedly lesser incidence of the phenomenon relative to other violence, and an imperative to unravel its more explicitly human causes. Relevant, too, are doubts over the status of premodern cases as genocides. This chapter concentrates largely on climate and state violence (sometimes arguably amounting to genocide) in the ancient Near East, particularly involving the well-documented Neo-Assyrian Empire and internal revolt in Egypt"s Ptolemaic state.],
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Guillet, S., Corona, C., Oppenheimer, C., Lavigne, F., Khodri, M., Ludlow, F., Sigl, M., Toohey, M., Atkins, P., Yang, Z., Muranaka, T., Horikawa, N., Stoffel, M., Lunar Eclipses Illuminate Timing and Climate Impact of Medieval Volcanism, NATURE, 616, 2023, p90 - 95,
Notes: [Explosive volcanism is a key contributor to climate variability on interannual to centennial timescales. Understanding the far-field societal impacts of eruption-forced climatic changes requires firm event chronologies and reliable estimates of both the burden and altitude (that is, tropospheric versus stratospheric) of volcanic sulfate aerosol. However, despite progress in ice-core dating, uncertainties remain in these key factors. This particularly hinders investigation of the role of large, temporally clustered eruptions during the High Medieval Period (HMP, 1100"1300"CE), which have been implicated in the transition from the warm Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age. Here we shed new light on explosive volcanism during the HMP, drawing on analysis of contemporary reports of total lunar eclipses, from which we derive a time series of stratospheric turbidity. By combining this new record with aerosol model simulations and tree-ring-based climate proxies, we refine the estimated dates of five notable eruptions and associate each with stratospheric aerosol veils. Five further eruptions, including one responsible for high sulfur deposition over Greenland circa 1182"CE, affected only the troposphere and had muted climatic consequences. Our findings offer support for further investigation of the decadal-scale to centennial-scale climate response to volcanic eruptions.],
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Kostick, C., Hill, A., McGovern, R., Medenieks, S., Yang, Z., Ludlow, F., Vulkaanuitbarstingen in de Oudheid: Reacties op Plotselinge Klimaatschommelingen in de Eerste Acht Eeuwen voor Christus [Volcanic Eruptions in Antiquity: Responses to Sudden Climatic Variability in the First Eight Centuries BCE], Phoenix, 69, (1), 2023, p6 - 27,
Notes: [Major eruptions can thus deliver climatic `shocks" often linked to famine, disease, and conflict. It is possible indeed to treat historical eruptions that induced sudden climatic changes as potential `revelatory crises" that tested the resilience and vulnerability of societies, exposing political, economic and ideological tensions and fault-lines that might otherwise have remained latent or hidden to us. With advances in ice-core science improving the dating of past eruptions, which are discernible in annual layers of polar ice when elevated sulphate levels are detected, and with advanced Earth System modelling recreating post-volcanic climate effects with ever greater detail, it has become possible to identify and extract insights from previously unrecognized co-occurrences between eruptions and periods of societal stress in the first millennium BCE.],
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Jobbova, E., McLeman, R., Crampsie, A., Murphy, C., Ludlow, F., Hevesi, C., Sente, L., Horvath, C., Institutional management and planning for droughts: a comparison of Ireland and Ontario, Canada, Biology and Environment, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 123, 2023, p1-24 ,
Notes: [Severe drought conditions in 2018 prompted concerted efforts by Irish authorities to establish a formal planning process for drought risks as part of the wider national water management strategy. More than two decades had passed since Ireland had experienced a socioeconomically significant drought, but recently reconstructed long-term data have shown that drought is a much more frequent hazard than previously thought. With climate change impacts likely to affect the temporal and spatial distribution of precipitation in coming decades, there is an ongoing need for further planning and preparation to reduce the vulnerability of the Irish water system to droughts. In this article we report results of a systematic comparison of Irish drought management plans and policies with those in southwestern Ontario, Canada, a region that shares many similar drought risk factors and management challenges but has longer established institutional practices for managing droughts. Key recommendations for Irish water managers emerging from this project include: fostering a culture of water conservation among the Irish public; using catchments as the spatial unit for drought monitoring and management decisions; creation of standing drought management teams that involve and broaden key stakeholders and user groups; and, further refining data collection to support planning for future challenges associated with climate change. Pursuing future opportunities for peer-to-peer learning between Irish water managers and their counterparts in other jurisdictions is a wider opportunity for developing best practices for drought management in the Irish context.],
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Hoyer, D., Bennett, J. S., Reddish, J., Holder, S., Howard, R., Benam, M., Levine, J., Ludlow, F., Feinman, G., Turchin, P. , Navigating Polycrisis: Long-Run Socio-Cultural Factors Shape Response to Changing Climate, PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, 2023, p1-15 ,
Notes: [Climate variability and natural hazards like floods and earthquakes can act as environmental shocks or socioecological stressors leading to instability and suffering throughout human history. Yet, societies experience a wide range of outcomes when facing such challenges: some suffer from social unrest, civil violence, or complete collapse; others prove more resilient and maintain key social functions. We currently lack a clear, generally agreed-upon conceptual framework and evidentiary base to explore what causes these divergent outcomes. Here, we discuss efforts to develop such a framework through the Crisis Database (CrisisDB) programme. We illustrate that the impact of environmental stressors is mediated through extant cultural, political, and economic structures that evolve over extended timescales (decades to centuries). These structures can generate high resilience to major shocks, facilitate positive adaptation, or, alternatively, undermine collective action and lead to unrest, violence, and even societal collapse. By exposing the ways that different societies have reacted to crises over their lifetime, this framework can help identify the factors and complex social-ecological interactions that either bolster or undermine resilience to contemporary climate shocks.],
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The Irish Annals and Climate, Fifth to Seventeenth Centuries CE in, editor(s)Malcom Sen , Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp52 - 78, [Conor Kostick & Francis Ludlow],
Notes: [Ireland in the fifth century ce hosted a body of Christian scholars in monasteries that were comparatively undisturbed by the overrun of the Roman Empire by Germanic tribes. These scholars, at first writing in Latin, together with secular learned professionals were able to develop a literary culture that flourished over the centuries in the production of a variety of genres, such as hagiography, poetry, epic, and voyage tales or immrama. Here, our focus is on the emergence of an annalistic tradition, as the form of literature that perhaps most easily lends itself to an investigation of the relationship between Irish literature and the historical environment, though Saints" Lives and other literary forms might, despite the challenges involved in addressing them, also be valuable sources for insights into the relationship between society and the historical environment.],
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Cowboys, Cod, Climate and Conflict: Navigations in the Digital Environmental Humanities in, editor(s)Charles Travis, Deborah Dixon, Luke Bergmann, Robert Legg, Arlene Crampsie , Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities, , London, Routledge, 2022, pp30 , [Charles Travis, Poul Holm, Francis Ludlow, Conor Kostick, Rhonda McGovern, John Nicholls],
Notes: [Concerns of the DEH include, firstly, how we come to know " with masses of information becoming increasingly available in diverse forms and platform " and secondly, how we work " in collaborative, "glocally" scaled endeavours that integrate physical and virtual environments which are changing techniques, workflows, and the ontology of research and teaching practices " and thirdly, how we understand " as cybernetic tools and methodologies provide radically new insights into and integrations of "old analogue," "new digital," and "natural archival" types of data. These concerns inform the three DEH case studies featured in this chapter. The first offers a geo-literary eco-digital geo-hermeneutic on 19th-century US expansion and environmental degradation in the American West; the second offers a "data canon" precis on the North Atlantic "Fish Revolution" between 1500 and 1800; and the third features computer-automated readings of ancient astronomical diaries to analyse ancient relations between climate and conflict in the Fertile Crescent kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria.],
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Poul Holm, James Barrett, Cristina Brito & Francis Ludlow, New challenges for the Human Oceans Past agenda, Open Research Europe, 2, (114), 2022, p1-24 ,
Notes: [We contend that the harvest of marine resources played a critical, but as yet underappreciated and poorly understood, role in global history. In a review of the field of marine environmental history and archaeology we conclude that while much progress has been made, especially in the last two decades, fundamental questions remain unanswered. In order to make full use of the rapid growth of Big Data and ongoing methodological breakthroughs there is a need for collaborative and comparative research. Such joint efforts on a global scale must be guided by a focus on common, simple yet challenging, questions. We propose a Human Oceans Past research agenda to call for multi- and trans-disciplinary archaeological, historical and palaeoenvironmental/palaeoecological research to investigate: (1) when and where marine exploitation was of significance to human society; (2) how selected major socio-economic, cultural, and environmental forces variously constrained and enabled marine exploitation; and (3) what were the consequences of marine resource exploitation for societal development. We contend that this agenda will lead to a fundamental revision in our understanding of the historical role of marine resources in the development of human societies.],
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Stoffel, M., Corona, C., Ludlow, F., Sigl, M., Huhtamaa, H., Garnier, E., Helama, S., Guillet, S., Crampsie, A., Kleemann, K., Camenisch, C., McConnell, J. and Gao, C., Climatic, Weather and Socio-Economic Conditions Corresponding with the mid-17th Century Eruption Cluster, Climate of the Past, 18, (5), 2022, p1083 - 1108,
Notes: [The mid-17th century is characterized by a cluster of explosive volcanic eruptions in the 1630s and 1640s, climatic conditions culminating in the Maunder Minimum, and political instability and famine in regions of western and northern Europe as well as China and Japan. This contribution investigates the sources of the eruptions of the 1630s and 1640s and their possible impact on contemporary climate using ice core, tree-ring, and historical evidence but will also look into the socio-political context in which they occurred and the human responses they may have triggered. Three distinct sulfur peaks are found in the Greenland ice core record in 1637, 1641"1642, and 1646. In Antarctica, only one unambiguous sulfate spike is recorded, peaking in 1642. The resulting bipolar sulfur peak in 1641"1642 can likely be ascribed to the eruption of Mount Parker (6""N, Philippines) on 26 December 1640, but sulfate emitted from Komaga-take (42""N, Japan) volcano on 31 July 1641 has potentially also contributed to the sulfate concentrations observed in Greenland at this time. The smaller peaks in 1637 and 1646 can be potentially attributed to the eruptions of Hekla (63""N, Iceland) and Shiveluch (56""N, Russia), respectively. To date, however, none of the candidate volcanoes for the mid-17th century sulfate peaks have been confirmed with tephra preserved in ice cores. Tree-ring and written sources point to cold conditions in the late 1630s and early 1640s in various parts of Europe and to poor harvests. Yet the early 17th century was also characterized by widespread warfare across Europe " and in particular the Thirty Years' War (1618"1648) " rendering any attribution of socio-economic crisis to volcanism challenging. In China and Japan, historical sources point to extreme droughts and famines starting in 1638 (China) and 1640 (Japan), thereby preceding the eruptions of Komaga-take (31 July 1640) and Mount Parker (4 January 1641). The case of the eruption cluster between 1637 and 1646 and the climatic and societal conditions recorded in its aftermath thus offer a textbook example of difficulties in (i) unambiguously distinguishing volcanically induced cooling, wetting, or drying from natural climate variability and (ii) attributing political instability, harvest failure, and famines solely to volcanic climatic impacts. This example shows that while the impacts of past volcanism must always be studied within the contemporary socio-economic contexts, it is also time to move past reductive framings and sometimes reactionary oppositional stances in which climate (and environment more broadly) either is or is not deemed an important contributor to major historical events.],
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