People were tried for witchcraft for all manner of reasons. If you didn’t particularly like someone you could accuse them of witchcraft and there was a good chance they’d be put on trial. People just looked for some incident such as food spoiling, an animal dying or a person being unwell and accused another of having caused it. I’d not specifically heard of bad weather being blamed on witches but I’m sure this would have been quite common.

Once accused, there was often a reluctance to prosecute and it was sometimes difficult to assemble a judge and jury. Somewhere between 50% and 70% of people accused of witchcraft were never tried.

Once the jury had been assembled it was more or less a foregone conclusion that the accused would be found guilty.

However, often they weren’t “burned at the stake”. Quite often the witch would be strangled, beheaded, garrotted, tortured to death, drowned, hanged or crushed. Such was the fervour in some countries that a witch would be killed several times over, perhaps first by drowning, then hanging, then beheaded and then burned.

Some witches certainly were burned at the stake but it was also common practice to place the accused on top of a pyre. Prudishness at the thought of seeing a person naked (after their clothes had burned off) also meant that many of the victims that were burned inside the fire.

We tend to think of Joan of Arc as having been burned at the stake, the body on display for all to see (not that she was killed for being a witch). Being executed in France meant she would have been burned inside the bonfire, out of view of spectators.

As for the ending of the Little Ice Age… some time ago someone asked on here what the carbon footprint was when cremating a body, it worked out to be 36kg. Cremation isn’t the same as being burned for witchcraft but if we assume 36kg of CO2 then you’d need to burn a billion people every year to create the amount of CO2 that we’re currently producing.

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201...

As the global population back then was less than a billion, you’d have to burn everyone many times over to have caused an end to the LIA.

I think it might have more to do with increased solar activity than burning witches, but I’m pretty sure you already knew that. Good question though.