Around 1250 A.D., historical records show, ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic. Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island. From 1275 to 1300 A.D., glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth. The period known today as the Little Ice Age was just starting to poke through.

Summers began cooling in Northern Europe after 1300 A.D., negatively impacting growing seasons, as reflected in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out. The last, surviving, written records of the Norse Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in 1408 A.D. in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.

Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually. The first River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1607. In 1607-1608, early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June. In January, 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen. By the end of the 17th century, famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.

Reflecting its global scope, evidence of the Little Ice Age appears in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Sediment cores from Lake Malawi in southern Africa show colder weather from 1570 to 1820. A 3,000 year temperature reconstruction based on varying rates of stalagmite growth in a cave in South Africa also indicates a colder period from 1500 to 1800. A 1997 study comparing West Antarctic ice cores with the results of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) indicate a global Little Ice Age affecting the two ice sheets in tandem.

According to predictions of the French Canal Meteo, there is a 70% chance of a complete absence of summer in Western Europe this year, making it one of the coldest and wettest summers since 1816 - almost 200 years.

This would occur because this year's long, late winter has cooled the ocean, which, coupled with weak solar activity in recent months, could have a direct effect on the climate.

The last time this happened was in 1816, known as the "year without a summer" or "the year of poverty." At that time the sun was in the midst of the Dalton Minimum, when magnetic activity was extremely low, and Tambora volcano erupted in Indonesia with a column of smoke so thick that it caused a decline in world temperatures.

It's been a cold 2013 so far in Central and Western Europe. Last weekend snow fell in Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
Europeans are wondering whatever happened to global warming. Climate institutes, who just years ago predicted warm, snow-less winters, have turned 180° and are now insisting that the Little Ice Age-like conditions that have gripped Europe over the last 5 years are actually signs of global warming after all! Fortunately, very few people believe them.

Some retirees golf. Some dream of buying a boat and sailing the world. Anton and Maria Chobot spent 30 years of their retirement digging up artifacts of the Clovis culture on their property near Buck Lake, Alberta, and now, they may have provided some of the evidence needed to settle a long debate in the science community.

Roughly 13,000 years ago, something touched off the 'Big Freeze' - a 1,300-year-long cold snap formally called the Younger Dryas stadial - that caused major climate changes and droughts.

These have been blamed for the extinction of the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, and also the downfall of the ancient Clovis culture. However, what that something was has been debated for years.

One idea that's proven popular over the years is that a meteorite or comet struck the planet, somewhere around what is now Hudson Bay. However, if something big enough to melt the Laurentide ice sheet had hit the planet there should have been some indication of it, in the form of a crater, or shocked and melted rocks, or 'impact spherules'. And, until recently, the evidence was lacking.

If you've been looking forward to spending your Spanish summer sunning yourself by the pool, don't pack away your winter clothes just yet.

France's main weather channel has announced that there is a 70 percent chance of this summer being cold and wet across Spain, France, Portugal, Germany and Austria.

Cold maritime fronts and weak solar activity during the winter months have not only given us a chillier Spanish spring than normal, they're also going to make the summer months unusually dreary and rainy.

According to Meteo, June and July are only likely to have short periods of summer heat which will in turn bring heavy storms in August.

September and October are likely to register higher average temperatures and less rain, the French weather agency announced on Monday.

The year without summer, 1816, is not an old wives' tale.

Overcast skies and cold temperatures across the northern hemisphere led to severe crop failures and food shortages in France, England, Ireland and the US during the summer months of that year.

The National Guard has helped evacuate residents from a small community in Alaska's interior where a river ice jam caused major flooding, washing out roads and submerging homes and other buildings. State officials estimate several hundred people have left the town of Galena, which remained mostly underwater Tuesday with the Yukon River ice jam firmly in place, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.
National Weather Service meteorologist Christopher Cox said 90 percent of the community's roads were flooded, and many buildings had 7 feet of water in them. Some of the people who were displaced said they escaped in rafts battered by ice chunks and floating debris.

After rising floodwaters breached a wall protecting the Galena airport, the National Guard flew in to evacuate any remaining residents who wanted to leave the community of nearly 500, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Evacuee Shane Edwin stepped off a flight to Fairbanks on Tuesday afternoon and described the scene he left behind as "a whole bunch of chaos." "The roads are all gone," he said. "The houses are flipped over. It's just trashed. I couldn't grab anything, not even my ID. The water came so fast."

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Plants that were frozen during the "Little Ice Age" centuries ago have been observed sprouting new growth, scientists say.

Samples of 400-year-old plants known as bryophytes have flourished under laboratory conditions.

Researchers say this back-from-the-dead trick has implications for how ecosystems recover from the planet's cyclic long periods of ice coverage.

The findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They come from a group from the University of Alberta, who were exploring an area around the Teardrop Glacier, high in the Canadian Arctic.

The glaciers in the region have been receding at rates that have sharply accelerated since 2004, at about 3-4m per year.

Rain over the weekend and this week will drag out late season plantings of corn and soybeans in the United States that are already at a historically slow pace, an agricultural meteorologist said on Tuesday.

John Dee, meteorologist for Global Weather Monitoring said from 1.0 to 3.0 inches or more of rain fell over the weekend in the central Midwest and 0.5 inch to 1.5 inches is expected at midweek in the northern Midwest.

"The only planting that will take place will be in the southern two-thirds of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio the next couple of days," he said. "If it were all planted this would be perfect, there was pretty good planting progress last week but not like the week before."

Farmers have been scrambling to plant corn and soybeans through mid and late May in an attempt to catch up from weather delays in April and early May.

In its weekly crop progress report released on May 20, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said corn planting was 71 percent complete, up from 28 percent a week ago but still behind the 79 percent five-year average seeding pace.

USDA has projected U.S. 2013 corn plantings at 97.3 million acres, the largest land area devoted to its production since the 1930s.

Soybean planting progress rose to 24 percent from 6 percent a week earlier, USDA said.

USDA will release updated planting data in its weekly crop progress report late on Tuesday.

The recent weather in Germany indicates everything but global warming and widespread drought, which climate experts have been telling us would be the case unless we stopped burning fossil fuels fast.
Today the online Augsburger Allgemeine reports that the statistics for the 2013 German meteorological spring (March-April-May) have been 95% tabulated and show that this year's German spring is the "coldest in in decades". The Chiemgau24 news site reports that it is the coldest spring in 40 years.

This past weekend, snow even fell in parts of Germany at elevations down to 600 meters.

No reasons are cited as to why the spring 2013 is so cold. The Arctic is covered with ice and so it can't be an exposed Arctic sea disrupting atmospheric patterns.

Starting last weekend and into the past week, birders in Duluth witnessed one of the most dramatic bird "fallout" events in many years

Starting last weekend and into the past week, birders in Duluth witnessed one of the most dramatic bird "fallout" events in many years.

Wind, rain and fog coming off Lake Superior forced migrating warblers and other species to take refuge on Park Point, where they flocked in trees and on the ground, resting and searching for food.

"It was fantastic," said Duluth birder Mike Hendrickson. "It was one of the best fallouts of migrants in my life, and I've been birding Duluth for 31 years."

It was good for birders, but tough on the birds, Hendrickson noted. He saw one dead warbler, but no other dead birds were reported.

In a message sent on the Minnesota Ornithological Union listserv, Duluth's Peder Svingen wrote that last Sunday, May 19, he and other birders identified 24 warbler species on Park Point. Only two of the 26 warbler species that can be observed in Duluth were missing, and they were later seen by others.