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Burgundy harvest data shows acceleration of global warming
A study, which plots the date of the Beaune harvest from 1354 to 2018 – the longest record of such data ever published – has found that the region has experienced “rapid warming” in the past 31 years.
The study, which was conduced by the University of Leipzig and published in the journal Climate of the Past, attempted to plot and explore the significance of the change in harvest date in Beaune.
Thomas Labbé, lead-author of the study, was responsible for collecting the data, which involved examining archives including wage payment records in order to plot the harvest dates through the ages. He then calibrated the results against the Paris temperature series which includes data from 1659 to 2018.
He said that other records available, including the Dijon series, are “error prone” as “scholars…have uncritically drawn the data from 19th century publications instead of going back to the archives”.
Labbé wrote wrote that the data was sub-divided into two parts.
“From 1354 to 1987 grapes were on average picked from 28 September on, but during the last 31-year period of rapid warming from 1988 to 2018, harvests began 13 days earlier (15 September).”
He revealed that since the hot summer of 2003, eight out of 16 spring-summer periods were reported as “outstanding” in terms of temperature, when compared to data from the last 664 years. Five of these occurred during the last eight years.
There were a total of 33 “extremely warm events” occurring over the period studied, which Labbé said were “unevenly distributed over time”.
21 of them took place between 1393 and 1719 (equating to one hot spell every 15 years), while only five instances occurred between 1720 and 2002.
Labbé said the data “demonstrates that outstanding hot and dry years in the past were outliers, while they have become the norm since the transition to rapid warming in 1988.”
He also noted how his data bore significant correlations to the “long Paris temperature series from 1659 to 2018” together with documentary and tree-ring data from 1354 to 1658.
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