In 2024 a commentary in one of the gazillion Nature subjournals (called npj Climate Action in this case) caught our attention because the author, Prof. Ulf Büntgen of Cambridge University, pleaded for his fellow climate scientists lay off all the climate activism. “I am foremost concerned by an increasing number of climate scientists becoming climate activists, because scholars should not have a priori interests in the outcome of their studies... I see potential conflicts when scholars use information selectively or over-attribute problems to anthropogenic warming.” And he warned that the tendency towards hype could harm their credibility and “possibly cause a wider public, political and economic backlash.” As it has, predictably if in some ways unhelpfully. Mind you, a commenter at the time pointed out that Büntgen needed to follow his own advice, having published a paper the year before arguing that the hot summer of 2023 proved the urgency of measures to fight climate change. Ah well, old habits and all that. So we decided to see what he had been up to since then, and spotted an interesting new study by him and a long list of coauthors addressing an old question about the famous violins of Antonio Stradivari, better known as “Stradivarius” or “Antonius Stradivarius” because in those good old days the lingua franca of Europe was Latin: what made them sound so good? Obviously he knew his trade but so did many others whose names we do not know. And the answer, according to the authors, is that the spruce he used was unusually dense because of where it was grown and when, namely at high elevations in the Italian Alps during the cold years known as the Maunder minimum, when sunspot activity was reduced. Which is a nod to the reality of the Little Ice Age, something that caught our attention. As does the apparent admission that there was a connection between the sun and global cooling.
Obviously global cooling had nothing to do with the lack of greenhouse gas emissions from a violin maker in Cremona. Or indeed lack of such emissions generally; if CO2 drives temperature the Little Ice Age is something of a mystery, like the Medieval Warm Period, which is why people like Michael Mann tried to dispose of them using tree rings. But the tree rings have the last laugh, including those tightly packed in that spruce.
What’s more, according to the study, the wood Stradivari(us) used came from spruce trees growing at elevations where, due to the cold, new saplings could no longer survive, nor can they to this day, suggesting that it must have have been even warmer in the century before the Little Ice Age:
“Even when accounting for potential environmental variables, the characteristics of the wood that Stradivari used seem to indicate that it came from altitudes even higher than those currently occupied by spruce in the Alps. We hypothesize that the formation of growth rings was influenced by the enhanced limiting factor of lower temperatures and/or low insolation, possibly associated with the Maunder Minimum. This period lasted from 1645 to 1715 and was characterized by reduced solar activity, which led to a drop in global average temperatures by between 1 and 2°C.”
Well well. Reduced solar activity led to global cooling of 1-2°C? And what, we ask, was the effect of the subsequent increase in solar activity over the next three centuries?
Something to ponder as we listen to a bit of Brahms being played on an original Stardivarius.
