Climate change and plague history in Europe

Abstract

Previous research that reported the linkage between climate change and plague activity primarily refers to the immediate effect of short-term climatic variation. Yet, decades of discussion about the climate-plague association cannot determine the precise role of climate in shaping plague dynamics. One reason for this discrepancy originates from the narrow selection of spatio-temporal settings for comprehensive analysis of the correlation, leading to a limited consideration of the complexity of possible dynamics. By analyzing a 414-year long record of plague outbreak in pre-industrial Europe and the corresponding climatic data in multi-scale, we find little evidence to support climate-plague correlation in (1) both climatic variations and large-scale climatic phenomena, (2) both country scale and continental scale, (3) annual to inter-annual scale, and (4) both linear and non-linear analytic approaches. The null-result should not be viewed as a general rejection of other recent findings related to climate-plague association; nevertheless, it suggests that a wider consideration of scales, sensitivity checks and consideration of contexts should be included in explaining and predicting plague transmission under contemporary global climate conditions.