Earliest Human Concern About Climate Change

[Kovax]

There are indications that many of the Norse settlements on Greenland were abandoned or failed due to the change in climate around and after the time of Leif Erikson's discovery of the American continent.

Many of the irrigation canals dug throughout the middle east may have been to restore water to the areas as the swampy soil gradually dried out and turned to desert. It was noticed on a local level, but probably didn't become apparent as a regional or larger phenomenon until later, when empires arose which spanned many such areas, and could observe the "bigger picture". Until relatively modern times, the ability to coordinate climate data over longer periods of time and larger geographical areas was difficult or impossible for most of the world.

 

[Wagonlitz]

There are indications that many of the Norse settlements on Greenland were abandoned or failed due to the change in climate around and after the time of Leif Erikson's discovery of the American continent.

The climate indeed got considerably harsher and the settlements disappeared somewhere after around 1410---wedding guests from the settlement---and the mid 17th century where Christian IV sent out an expedition to locate the settlements; they probably disappeared closer to 1410 than to 1650, but the exact time isn't known as far as I am aware. It also didn't help that the settlements cut down the forests and was dependent on regular shipments of e.g. wood; after the plague ravaged Scandinavia the shipments eventually stopped.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

Not sure if the two (Nile and climate) are linked, by maybe the records of the Nile inundations, from 3000BC? The egyptians noticed decline of the height the floods reached after the 1st dynasty, and must have been terrified by it.

They were. That's why they accepted the rule under a Pharaoh and built great pyramids for him. He claimed to control the flood waters, so please him thou must.

Funny enough, just came not long ago from reading a dialogue from c.1550 between Italian Renaissance savants Giovanni Ramusio and Girolamo Fracastoro on the causes of the Nile floods. They link it to the varying heat of the sun at different latitudes as the Nile approaches the equator.

Of course, regular climate changes because of varying seasons and the like, e.g. the Indian Ocean monsoon, etc. were talked about. But I don't think that's what the OP has asked for. He's asking for gradual changes over a long period of time.

I don't think you'll get many examples of that. To repeat, the data simply wasn't there. People's knowledge of the past was very limited - usually a generation or two back. Beyond that, it morphs into an unchronological and undifferentiated past clogged with myths. To ask them to remember how the weather was like hundreds of years earlier is not likely to produce anything but blank stares.

 

[Henry IX]

Indeed, almost any conversation with an old person would have led to the belief that the weather was getting better - "I remember a winter/summer that was so cold/hot that the whole river froze/dried out..."

The idea that climate changes requires lots of data - the local patterns of the weather drown out the signals of the climate unless you have heaps of data spanning long periods.

 

[magritte2]

Indeed, almost any conversation with an old person would have led to the belief that the weather was getting better - "I remember a winter/summer that was so cold/hot that the whole river froze/dried out..."

The idea that climate changes requires lots of data - the local patterns of the weather drown out the signals of the climate unless you have heaps of data spanning long periods.

I seriously doubt that would have been true in 17th century Iceland. The reason it's true in our time is that the weather has been warming up for the past two hundred years. The old people saying that they remember worse snowstorms and colder weather are not wrong. Memories may exaggerate things but they don't consistently make the past worse or better; people are just as likely to be nostalgic for the better times of their youth as to claim that things were tougher.

 

[Amallric]

The thing is, people may remember one particularly cold(or hot) year, and even be perfectly honest and correct about it, but it is still not enough to make conjectures about long-term climate change patterns. Climate fluctuate a lot and there may very well be an exceptionally cold winter in the middle of a trend that is actually towards warming. What you need to understand the latter is a lot of dull, seemingly meaningless numbers from meteorological observations, spread over decades. Nobody cared about doing that kind of things in the middle ages. Exceptional events are actually well remembered. We all know that year when Venice's lagon froze, but no one knows when exactly Greenland stopped being green and when wineyards disappeared from England.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

Except that the French never could walk to Stonehenge.

They can do that now.