Climatic Changes Since 1700

Over the last 300 years, countless climatic variations at different places and times have been witnessed, some affecting millions of people and changing the course of history, some going largely unnoticed. In this chapter, I discuss selected climatic changes in European and global climate history from about 1700, the end of the Little Ice Age, to the present. The 20 events start with the cold Maunder Minimum and end with the global warming hiatus, covering different aspects of the climate system. We will encounter continental-scale temperature dips, hydroclimatic anomalies, perturbations of the stratosphere, and changes in atmospheric composition. Thereby, we will see the mechanisms discussed in Chap. 3 at work: oceanic modes and atmospheric variability, volcanic eruptions, and humans changing their environment.