Climate change and plague history in Europe
2018
Previous research that reported the linkage between climate change
and plague activity primarily refers to the immediate effect of short-term
climatic variation. Yet, decades of discussion about the climate-plague
association cannot determine the precise role of climate in shaping
plague dynamics. One reason for this discrepancy originates from the
narrow selection of spatio-temporal settings for comprehensive analysis
of the correlation, leading to a limited consideration of the complexity
of possible dynamics. By analyzing a 414-year long record of plague
outbreak in pre-industrial Europe and the corresponding climatic data
in multi-scale, we find little evidence to support climate-plague
correlation in (1) both climatic variations and large-scale climatic
phenomena, (2) both country scale and continental scale, (3) annual
to inter-annual scale, and (4) both linear and non-linear analytic
approaches. The null-result should not be viewed as a general rejection
of other recent findings related to climate-plague association; nevertheless,
it suggests that a wider consideration of scales, sensitivity checks
and consideration of contexts should be included in explaining and
predicting plague transmission under contemporary global climate conditions.
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