World Meteorological Organization

Authors: World Meteorological Organization (WMO), World Meteorological Day

Through a wide variety of proxy records, including ice cores, tree rings, sediments, corals, rocks and fossils, among others, the modern science of paleoclimatology reveals that climate variability and change were present on our planet long before our ancestors. More recently, there are several references in our recorded history to unusual periods in some parts of the world, such as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly and the subsequent Little Ice Age, as well as exceptional events like the “year without a summer” of 1816, attributed to the colossal 1815 Mount Tambora eruption.