When did the Little Ice Age end and the Recent Global Warming Startin Hungary? Late Reflections About a Scientific Faith Debate

We try to fi nd answer to the question: when did the Little Ice Age end and the Recent Global Warming start in Hungary? Based on the temperature time series of Budapest and data about the freezing of the Danube from the 1810s the cooling of the climate is perceiveable. The cool-cold and rainy climate system showed two centres of gravity during the 19th century, the fi rst in the 1830s and 1840s, the second in the last two decades of the 19th century. Furthermore, despite the rising of the temperature the climate remained mostly cool and wet until the 1940s. According to the global tendencies there is no obvious climate change trend, though the temperature became colder in decades’ average, but the fl uctuations were very hectic, as usual in transition periods. The diminution in the quantity of precipitation already started in the 1940s though, and proved to be stable. The breakthrough of the Recent Global Warming’s climate system became apparent from the 1980s based on the data of Budapest’s time series. That’s when the ’mediterranean climate-scissors’ opened, and the Danube’s basin became warmer and drier. Even if we examine the tendency of the temperature and precipitation changing in the 20th century separately, we can’t get a clear picture. The warming obviously shows from the last decade of the 19th century, but according to the researchers who are sceptic about Recent Global Warming we can’t use one of the biggest cooling downs in history that occured in the last third of the 19th century as a reference point. The climate regime that was signifi cantly more pluvial than the reference period lasted till the 1940s, and there are no signs of the climate becoming signifi cantly drier prior to the 1980s. If we consider the rise of temperature as the only indicator of the Global Warming, then the warming started in the last decades of the 19th century in Hungary as well. If we consider the decrease in the amount of precipitation to be decisive, then this process started in the 1940s, although there was no signifi cant drying tendency before the 1970s.