At the nicely named web site www.breadandbutterscience.com there is a pdf of over 500 pages of text with the title, 'A chronological history of early weather events' by James Marusek (2010) as a counter to AGW hype concerning modern weather extremes – which are supposed to be coming thick and fast as a result of rising C02 levels. This composition shows that such a point of view is really rather juvenile and not worth commenting on to be truthful. However, weather anomalies are not just of interest to climate science buffs but are interesting also to catastrophists – pointing a finger, perhaps, at extraordinary cold or warm events that may have an origin in space. Unfortunately, lots of interesting information is missing – such as earthquake activity, meteoric activity, fireballs, aurorae etc., clues that would be invaluable in the right context (coinciding with C14 plateaus, narrow growth tree rings, or reports of strange phenomena in the sky). Nevertheless, some members of SIS might find it useful to go through the 500 pages of weather anomalies and see what they might glean. Happy hunting.
PS the composition does record famines however, which the author admits can be caused by a variety of things other than simply droughts or bad weather in general – such as war. I might add that a sudden drop in temperature might also result in famines – and the author has collected lots of reports on the distress caused by low crop yields, even in the reign of Augustus Caesar at the height of Rome's power. The Black Sea is said to have frozen over on a number of occasions – such as 400AD and 762AD (but was this that part of the sea before Constantinople/Byzantium.