scholarly journals Did the Roman Empire affect European climate? A new look at the effects of land use and anthropogenic aerosol emissions

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anina Gilgen ◽  
Stiig Wilkenskjeld ◽  
Jed O. Kaplan ◽  
Thomas Kühn ◽  
Ulrike Lohmann
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Anthropogenic Aerosol ◽  
Entire Study ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
European Climate ◽  
Agricultural Burning ◽  
Emissions Scenarios ◽  
Aerosol Emissions

Abstract. As one of the first transcontinental polities that led to widespread anthropogenic modification of the environment, the influence of the Roman Empire on European climate has been studied for more than 20 years. Recent advances in our understanding of past land use and aerosol-climate interactions make it valuable to revisit the way humans may have affected the climate of the Roman Era. Here we drive the global aerosol-enabled climate model ECHAM-HAM-SALSA with land use maps and novel estimates of anthropogenic aerosol emissions from the Roman Empire at its apogee to quantify the effect of humans on regional climate. In a factorial study, we used the HYDE and KK11 anthropogenic land cover change scenarios with three estimates (low, medium, high) of aerosol emissions from fuel combustion and burning of agricultural land. Land use effects on climate varied from no influence using the HYDE scenario to a significant warming over land of 0.15 K with KK11 relative to a no-land use control. This warming is primarily caused by regional decreases in turbulent fluxes, in contrast to previous studies that emphasised changes in albedo and evapotranspiration. Aerosol emissions from agricultural burning were greater than those from fuel consumption, but on the same order of magnitude. All emissions scenarios result in an enhanced cooling effect of clouds over a no-emissions control scenario. As a consequence, the land surface temperature averaged over our entire study domain decreased significantly by 0.17 K, 0.23 K, and 0.46 K for the low, the intermediate, and the high emissions scenarios, respectively. Cooling caused by aerosol emissions is largest over Central and Eastern Europe, while warming caused by land use occurs in parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Our results suggest that the influence of Roman Era anthropogenic aerosol emissions on European climate may have been as important as that of deforestation and other forms of land use. Our model may overestimate aerosol-effective radiative forcing, however, and our results are very sensitive to the inferred seasonal timing of agricultural burning practices and natural aerosol emissions over land (wildfire emissions and biogenic emissions). Nevertheless, it is likely that human influence on land and the atmosphere affected continental-scale climate during Classical Antiquity.

scholarly journals Effects of land use and anthropogenic aerosol emissions in the Roman Empire

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 1885-1911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anina Gilgen ◽  
Stiig Wilkenskjeld ◽  
Jed O. Kaplan ◽  
Thomas Kühn ◽  
Ulrike Lohmann
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Radiative Forcing ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Sea Surface ◽  
Sea Surface Temperatures ◽  
Surface Temperatures ◽  
Aerosol Emissions ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. As one of the first transcontinental polities that led to widespread anthropogenic modification of the environment, the influence of the Roman Empire on European climate has been studied for more than 20 years. Recent advances in our understanding of past land use and aerosol–climate interactions make it valuable to revisit the way humans may have affected the climate of the Roman era. Here we estimate the effect of humans on some climate variables in the Roman Empire at its apogee, focusing on the impact of anthropogenic land cover and aerosol emissions. For this we combined existing land use scenarios with novel estimates (low, medium, high) of aerosol emissions from fuel combustion and burning of agricultural land. Aerosol emissions from agricultural burning were greater than those from fuel consumption but of the same order of magnitude. Using the global aerosol-enabled climate model ECHAM-HAM-SALSA, we conducted simulations with fixed sea-surface temperatures to gain a first impression about the possible climate impact of anthropogenic land cover and aerosols in the Roman Empire. While land use effects induced a regional warming for one of the reconstructions caused by decreases in turbulent flux, aerosol emissions enhanced the cooling effect of clouds and thus led to a cooling in the Roman Empire. Quantifying the anthropogenic influence on climate is, however, challenging since our model likely overestimates aerosol-effective radiative forcing and prescribes the sea-surface temperatures.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

Monumentality and the Roman Empire

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Close Link ◽  
The Public ◽  
Roman Italy

The quality of "monumentality" is attributed to the buildings of few historical epochs or cultures more frequently or consistently than to those of the Roman Empire. It is this quality that has helped to make them enduring models for builders of later periods. This extensively illustrated book, the first full-length study of the concept of monumentality in Classical Antiquity, asks what it is that the notion encompasses and how significant it was for the Romans themselves in molding their individual or collective aspirations and identities. Although no single word existed in antiquity for the qualities that modern authors regard as making up that term, its Latin derivation--from monumentum, "a monument"--attests plainly to the presence of the concept in the mentalities of ancient Romans, and the development of that notion through the Roman era laid the foundation for the classical ideal of monumentality, which reached a height in early modern Europe. This book is also the first full-length study of architecture in the Antonine Age--when it is generally agreed the Roman Empire was at its height. By exploring the public architecture of Roman Italy and both Western and Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire from the point of view of the benefactors who funded such buildings, the architects who designed them, and the public who used and experienced them, Edmund Thomas analyzes the reasons why Roman builders sought to construct monumental buildings and uncovers the close link between architectural monumentality and the identity and ideology of the Roman Empire itself.

Merovingian Religious Architecture

2020 ◽  
pp. 656-692
Author(s):  
Pascale Chevalier
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Religious Architecture ◽  
Construction Techniques ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
New Research ◽  
Functional Content

For nearly 270 years, between the end of the Roman Empire and the advent of the Carolingian dynasty, the Merovingian territories experienced an intense flowering of religious construction, which recent archaeology has documented with increasing detail. This chapter sheds light on new research and recent discoveries; however, rather than reviewing all of the sites and studies of Merovingian churches and the contemporary sources mentioning them, it gives some new clues and reflections about so-called Merovingian architecture and the broad vision of an architectural form that was expressed in quite simple but majestic designs. These structures, constructed of stone (or wood), reveal a society progressively Christianized under the leadership of bishops, clerics, and monks, as well as by the Merovingian sovereigns. Without any break with classical antiquity, the Merovingian centuries fit into a continuous legacy that transformed the monumental landscape in both cities and countryside. The various forms of Christian monuments of the fifth to eighth century thus illustrate this heritage, sometimes through an extreme simplification of antique patterns and sometimes through the enrichment of aesthetic forms brought by the arrival of immigrant populations. Within a changing world, religious buildings appear to have been a catalyst for cultural exchanges as places of visibility and gathering, as witnesses of the building fever of the period. Our understanding of religious architecture in Merovingian Gaul is gradually becoming more accurate. We now know an increasing amount about the establishment, planning, forms and sizes, construction techniques, ornamentation, and liturgical and functional content of all these structures. These structures, which were so varied in size and use, reveal extensive artistic plurality.

Land Use in the Roman Empire

2000 ◽  
Vol 104 (2) ◽  
pp. 408
Author(s):  
J. G. Manning ◽  
Jesper Carlsen ◽  
Peter Orsted ◽  
Jens Erik Skydsgaard
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Roman Empire

The local and remote atmospheric impacts of Africa’s 21st century aerosol emission trajectory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wells ◽  
Apostolos Voulgarakis
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate ◽  
Emission Region ◽  
Anthropogenic Aerosol ◽  
Remote Locations ◽  
Aerosol Emission ◽  
Radiation Fluxes ◽  
The World ◽  
Aerosol Emissions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Lower Biomass

<p>Aerosols are a major climate forcer, but their historical effect has the largest uncertainty of any forcing; their mechanisms and impacts are not well understood. Due to their short lifetime, aerosols have large impacts near their emission region, but they also have effects on the climate in remote locations. In recent years, studies have investigated the influences of regional aerosols on global and regional climate, and the mechanisms that lead to remote responses to their inhomogeneous forcing. Using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios (SSPs), transient future experiments were performed in UKESM1, testing the effect of African emissions following the SSP3-RCP7.0 scenario as the rest of the world follows SSP1-RCP1.9, relative to a global SSP1-RCP1.9 control. SSP3 sees higher direct anthropogenic aerosol emissions, but lower biomass burning emissions, over Africa. Experiments were performed changing each of these sets of emissions, and both. A further set of experiments additionally accounted for changing future CO<sub>2</sub> concentrations, to investigate the impact of CO<sub>2</sub> on the responses to aerosol perturbations. Impacts on radiation fluxes, temperature, circulation and precipitation are investigated, both over the emission region (Africa), where microphysical effects dominate, and remotely, where dynamical influences become more relevant. </p>

scholarly journals Variation in the Continuity of Land-Use Patterns through the First Millennium AD in Lowland Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon ◽  
Ralph Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Land Use Patterns ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
Use Patterns ◽  
Land Use Types ◽  
First Millennium

AbstractThis paper explores the contribution that palaeoenvironmental evidence, and in particular palynology, is making to our understanding of landscape evolution in Britain during the 1st millenniumAD. This was a period of profound social and economic change including a series of invasions, some associated with a mass folk migration. Archaeologists and historians continue to debate the significance of these events, and palaeoenvironmental evidence is now starting to provide an additional perspective. Key to this has been obtaining pollen sequences, although there remains a need for more evidence from lowland areas, alongside higher resolution sampling and improved dating. It is suggested that although the 1st millenniumADsaw some significant long-term shifts in climate, these are unlikely to have had a significant causal effect on landscape change in lowland areas (both in areas with and without significant Anglo-Saxon immigration). The analysis of pollen data from across Britain shows very marked regional variations in the major land-use types (arable, woodland, improved pasture, and unimproved pasture) throughout the Roman and Early Medieval periods. While Britain ceasing to be part of the Roman empire appears to have led to a decline in the intensity of agriculture, it was the ‘long 8th c.’ (the later 7th to early 9th c.) that saw a more profound change, with a period of investment, innovation, and intensification, including an expansion in arable cultivation.

scholarly journals Effect of anthropogenic aerosol emissions on precipitation in warm conveyor belts in the western North Pacific in winter – a model study with ECHAM6-HAM

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Joos ◽  
Erica Madonna ◽  
Kasja Witlox ◽  
Sylvaine Ferrachat ◽  
Heini Wernli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
North Pacific ◽  
Aerosol Particles ◽  
Conveyor Belt ◽  
Radiation Balance ◽  
Anthropogenic Aerosol ◽  
Model Study ◽  
Conveyor Belts ◽  
Winter Time ◽  
Warm Conveyor Belts ◽  
Aerosol Emissions

Abstract. While there is a clear impact of aerosol particles on the radiation balance, whether and how aerosol particles influence precipitation is controversial. Here we use the ECHAM6-HAM global cli- mate model coupled to an aerosol module to analyse whether an impact of anthropogenic aerosol particles on the timing and the amount of precipitation from warm conveyor belts in low pressure systems in the winter time North Pacific can be detected. We conclude that while polluted warm con- veyor belt trajectories start with 5–10 times higher black carbon concentrations, the overall amount of precipitation is comparable in pre-industrial and present-day conditions. Precipitation formation is however supressed in the most polluted warm conveyor belt trajectories.

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