Captains' Logs Treasure Trove of Climate Data
It turns out that Royal
Navy’s four-century
collection of captains’ logs is yielding historical climate
data. Apparently they made meticulous observations of air pressure,
wind strength, air & sea temperature and other weather
conditions,
all of which is helping climate scientists study how the
global climate has changed over time.
Rather unsurprisingly, the observations demonstrate that there’s nothing new under the sun: phenomena which have been attributed to global warming actually did occur well before there was any such thing—indeed, during the Little Ice Age.
