Does Modern Global Warming Exist? Late Reflections to a Scientific Polemic Cover Image

Létezik-e a jelenkori globális felmelegedés? Avagy kései reflexiók egy tudományos hitvitáról
Does Modern Global Warming Exist? Late Reflections to a Scientific Polemic

Author(s): Lajos Rácz
Subject(s): History
Published by: KORALL Társadalomtörténeti Egyesület

Summary/Abstract: The reality of modern global warming was an open question for scientists around the last millennium. Hungarian meteorologists were engaged in a scholarly debate about climate change, which was not possible to conclude with the research tools available at the time. The problem was further complicated by the fact that the climate of the Danubian Basin is in many respects different than either the global or continental European climate. The exact time or duration of the transition between the mini Ice Age (14th to 19th century) and recent global warming is difficult to determine in this particular region. On one hand, with regard to the beginning of global warming, using temperature increase statistics as the sole indicator would suggest that it had started as early as the last decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, using the decreasing volume of precipitation as indicator, global warming will be seen to have started in the 1940s, even if a marked drought tendency was not perceptible until the 1970s. On the other hand, with regard to the end of the mini Ice Age, considering a predominantly cool and wet climate as the main characteristic, its purest form dominated the climate in the Danubian Basin until the 1910s and in a looser interpretation it lasted down to the 1940s.

  • Issue Year: 2013
  • Issue No: 53
  • Page Range: 118-132
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Hungarian