2014/09/01 by Morgan Kelly, Cormac Ó Gráda
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · Mathematics · #Atmospheric temperature #Climate change #Climate variability and models #Climatology #Fifteenth #Geography #Geology #History #Little ice age #Mathematics #Oceanography #Physical geography #Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics #Series (stratigraphy) #Smoothing #Spurious relationship #Statistics #Tree-ring climate responses #Uncorrelated #Variance (accounting) #stat.AP
paper · pdf · doi:10.1214/14-aoas753
published as Annals of Applied Statistics 2014, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1372-1394 · Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS753 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)
openalex publication_date 2014/09/01 · arxiv created 2014/11/20 · arxiv updated 2014/11/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We analyze the timing and extent of Northern European temperature falls during the Little Ice Age, using standard temperature reconstructions. However, we can find little evidence of temporal dependence or structural breaks in European weather before the twentieth century. Instead, European weather between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries resembles uncorrelated draws from a distribution with a constant mean (although there are occasional decades of markedly lower summer temperature) and variance, with the same behavior holding more tentatively back to the twelfth century. Our results suggest that observed conditions during the Little Ice Age in Northern Europe are consistent with random climate variability. The existing consensus about apparent cold conditions may stem in part from a Slutsky effect, where smoothing data gives the spurious appearance of irregular oscillations when the underlying time series is white noise.