Climate Change history

Rewind to 1984, and I'm doing my Geography degree at Huddersfield Polytechnic, specialising in hydrology with (now Professor) Tim Burt. Outside of lecture time, I got involved in some fairly offbeat stuff, which I won't be recounting here (none of it illegal), and met Conor Kostick, who was studying Maths at York University at the time. We kept in touch over the years, as Conor showed the range of his talents as a gamer, writer, chess player and historian. He runs tours of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and became a Medieval historian, where he lectures at Trinity College, Dublin and became an expert in the Crusades. Along the way, he also wrote a series of award-winning and rather fine children's books, particularly the book 'Epic', which drew together a lot of his interests.

Conor came up in my Twitter feed yesterday, as he was actually at the Royal Geographical Society (along with a few other people that I know) for a Historical Geographers' conference, and it turns out that he's turned his historical talents to a geographical 'cause': climate change.
As part of his current work at Nottingham University, funded by a number of prestigious research grants, he has looked through medieval manuscripts to find any mention of phenomena which could be connected with volcanic eruptions or other events which could have a short term impact on climate.

Conor contributed to a paper published in 'Nature'.