from pages 84 and 85:
"Detailed written archives for the last 500 to 1,000 years enable to perform some historical climate reconstructions for periods were we lack instrumental measures.
Historians have detailed documents that give indications of the weather at a particular time: descriptions of harsh winters, rotten or too dry summers, dates of the first snows, of the setting of rivers by ice, dates of harvests, grape harvests, sometimes even flowering, direct or indirect estimates of cereal yields from tithes, the advance or retreat of glaciers attested by texts, the disappearance of hamlets, iconographic or cartographic documents (Le Roy Ladurie, 1967, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2017; Le Roy Ladurie et al., 2009, 2011, 2017).
These elements taken individually do not allow firm conclusions to be drawn, as poor wheat yields can result from a rotten summer or a too dry spring, just as glacial advance can result from snowier winters or cooler summers that limit the ablation of ice.
But the long series of French and German wine harvest dates and quality reports indicate that early harvests resulted from warm springs and summers characterized by anticyclonic conditions and the late ones from cold springs and summers with cool and cloudy conditions.
Of course, the dates of the harvest used without discernment do not mean much since a late harvest can be the result of a very cool summer as well as the result of a change in viticulture techniques used, for example to obtain a higher alcohol content.
An early harvest can also be explained, independently of the climate, by an increased need to supply the market with wine (Nichols, 1972).
But all the elements juxtaposed and analyzed together undoubtedly make it possible to trace the climate history from an historical perspective over the last millennium.
Le Roy Ladurie (1967) describes the Little Ice Age in Chapter IV of the book in the most detailed way.
The author studies with extreme attention the Alpine glaciers and the maximums of 1600, 1820 and 1850 and the glacial flood which also affects Scandinavia and Iceland.
Chamonix hamlets are destroyed in 1601 (the year is specified thanks to the tithes counts) whereas they had been established in the Middle Ages during the climatic optimum.
... These archives are extremely rich and document with irrefutable evidences the harsh swings experienced over the last millennium (though more accurately for the last 500 years) with extremely cold or mild winters and rotten rainy and cool summers or to the contrary very dry and scorching summer with heatwave and none of these climatic disasters can be attributed to CO2 or industrial and transportation emissions, simply as they were none!
The work done by Le Roy Ladurie and his co-workers through the painstaking analysis from European temperature proxies then available are imaginative, evocative, and persuasive, it definitely makes mockery of global warming or cooling or climate change, it's gone on for centuries, millennial, instead millions of years.
As reminded to us by Le Roy Ladurie and Rousseau (2009) there has been no shortage of climate catastrophes in the well documented French and European history.
In 1168, the Sarthe river dried up.
During the summer of 1351 the price of wheat was multiplied by three because of its rarity, as a result of "scalding"100, which led to very early harvests.
There are also a series of consecutive scorching summers, climatic micro eras: 1331-1334, four summers in a row, 1383-1385, three summers.
Year 1420 is marked by a very severe drought (Le Roy Ladurie et al., 2017).
The first half of the 16th century is particularly mild, where we can speak of a small age of warming, during summer the glaciers retreat a lot and the snow melts very high and in, e.g. 1540, many witnesses living in the Alps noted this.
But from 1560 onwards, we enter the LIA, and hot summers become rarer and climate deteriorates significantly.
In any case, excess of rain is enemy number one, more so than anything else: rotten summer is more feared than hot summer.
On the other hand, mortality rises in hot summers due to dysentery.
The level of rivers and streams drops, the water drawn for living and drinking is muddy, infected, polluted, and the mortality is spectacular.
500,000 deaths during the summer of 1636 or 1705, 700,000 during the hot summers of 1718-1719, with even the appearance of swarms of locusts and a form of Saharan climate in the “Ile-de-France” region.
These deaths were mainly babies and young of the year.
Of the so many events that make the historical recounting of climate a long list of catastrophes, one can mention at least the following:
The famine of 1693:
is essentially a famine pushed to the extreme, due to the rain (1692-1693) and the cold, with a little scalding (1693) to complete the disaster.
It is within the framework of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), and more specifically the Late Maunder Minimum or LMM (1675-1715).
The number of additional deaths in 1693 and 1694 is an astounding 1,300,000 people, i.e. 5.8% of the French population.
This is by far the greatest demographic catastrophe that France has experienced since the 1680s to the present day; a France, let us remember, which had at the time 20 to 22 million inhabitants.
The great winter of 1708-1709:
The icy and deadly winter of 1708-1709 was perhaps prepared by four volcanic eruptions, Vesuvius and Santorini in the nearby (Mediterranean) area; Fujiyama, in Japan, and Piton de la Fournaise, in Reunion Island.
Seven winter cold spells were counted and on January 20, 1709, the temperature plunged to -20.5°C in Paris (-23.1°C according to Fuster (1845) p. 300).
The demographic deficit calculated using the same methods as in 1693 is 600,000 people who died in addition to the normal.
During the hot summers of the 18th century, the losses can be estimated at about 200,000 people in three years (1705, 1706 and 1707).
This excess of deaths is the result of deadly epidemics, some of which (dysentery in 1706 and 1707 in particular) were probably favored by episodes of very severe drought and summer heat, by the infection of rivers and water tables that had become too low and too sensitive to the invasion of pathogenic germs.
Summers of the two years 1718-1719:
The hot and dry summers led to early harvests, the earliest in duo (since the quartet of 1683-1686), with African locusts as far as Languedoc.
In 1719, this same torrid summer caused the pollution of waters that had become too scarce and all the dirtier.
It leads to an outburst of a terrible epidemic of dysentery which contributes to the enormous mortality of the time, more than 400 000 additional deaths in the year 1719 alone.
There was another considerable, albeit less marked and less deadly, but not insignificant heatwave in 1747, with a fatal surplus of about 200,000 people.
After two years of heat, notably in the summer and autumn of 1778 and 1779, epidemics of dysentery broke out in early September 1779, a date which was recorded in the north of France; the number of deaths was around 200,000 people above the normal average annual death figures for the decade 1770-1779.
Would the 18th century thus be essentially a heatwave?
In fact, there are also large mortalities due to wheat crop failure (1693-1694) because of excess rainfall as recorded in 1692-1693.
There have been classical type famines since the Middle Ages and since the "modern" era, famines of 1315 and 1661, which were extremely aggressive.
In 1740 (great winter plus subsequent rains) and in 1770 (heavy rainfall), there was a real rainy assault on wheat production with fairly significant lethal consequences, even though there were no more than a million deaths in the years 1693- 1694.
Messier (1793) reported 40°C in Paris (France) on July 8th, 1793 and the thermometer had marked 40° at half past three on August 17th, 1701
Since, Paris-Montsouris has a record high temperature of 42.6°C on July 25th, 2019, the second hottest heat was recorded at 40.4°C on July 28 th, 1947 but these record-highs only apply to the instrumental period and not to all the centuries before which might have registered higher values."