Glaciers have been retreating since Victorian times Hulton Archive/Getty

She would not have been amused. The omens were there that the world was starting to warm as early as Queen Victoria’s reign – but Victorian scientists seem to have missed them.

Retreating glaciers and early melting of ice on lakes were all beginning to appear shortly after the industrial revolution.

“The signs were there for this period, mainly in Europe and North America,” says Victor Venema of the University of Bonn, Germany.


Venema re-examined temperature and meteorological data recorded between 1850 and 1920 in Europe’s industrialised heartland and North America.

Previous estimates of the average global temperatures for that time period suggested there was no warming – or that if there was any it was negligible, Venema says.

Indeed, the UK’s Met Office uses 1850-1900 as a baseline for pre-industrial temperatures when measuring global warming.

Temperature rise

But closer examination of land temperatures in Europe suggests they did rise over this timespan by around 0.4°C, which is a lot given that we are now at around 1.5°C above the preindustrial level for land temperatures, says Venema.

Ice records are also telling. Ponds and lakes now begin to freeze over 20 days later, on average, than they did in 1850, with melting also starting earlier by the same margin.

The freeze and melt dates had already shifted by four to five days in Europe between 1850 and 1920, Venema found.

Likewise, data gathered from that period by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that glaciers were already retreating, at least in Europe.

It is unsurprising that no one noticed the signs at the time: “They didn’t have any global data sets, so they might at best have noticed local warming trends,” says Venema.

Venema presented his preliminary findings this week at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria.

Read more: Rhyme and reason: The Victorian poet scientists

Clarification: Since this article was first published, we have clarified that the temperatures discussed were land temperatures