Annals of climate

S uppose you want to track climate over the past century. That's easy enough to accomplish with existing records - but what if you want to go back 500 years? What about 1,000 years? What if you want to go back even further? That's where Harvard historian Michael McCormick comes in. McCormick, the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History and chair of the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard, will lead a project aimed at constructing the most detailed historical record yet of European climate. "Until now, researchers - including myself - have been analyzing climate signals from ice cores in Greenland and trying to deduce what the impacts are for Europe and the Middle East," McCormick said. "This project is a game changer in that respect, because we will now have signals right from the heart of Europe. For climate scientists, it should shed wonderful new light on climate conditions in historical Europe, and it should also allow us to calibrate what we find in Greenland." McCormick expects the project to provide valuable insight into the sway climate held over ancient societies. "In recent years, historians have become increasingly aware of two things.