ABSTRACT
Around 1700 the prevailing temperatures in all parts of the world for which assessments are available were below twentieth-century levels. The difference registered by the thermometer record in England for the last forty years of the seventeenth century (see p. 211) may reasonably be taken as a first approximation to the world average. The cooling was certainly greater in parts of the Arctic fringe and less-it seems to have been almost zero —in parts of the subtropical oceans. Only in the Antarctic are there suggestions that at this time conditions were somewhat milder than a few centuries earlier or than they became in the nineteenth century.
