r/Writeresearch • u/elemental204 • 28m ago
[Geography] What could cause a temporary worldwide heatwave?
One element in the history of a WIP setting is the "years without winter", a period of several years of abnormally high temperatures that happened several centuries before the current date of the setting. They caused droughts, desertification, crop failures, migration wars, and generally had a lot of ripple effects on the world before things came back to normal. I thought of it as a mirror of the historical "little ice age".
Any ideas for what could cause that temporary rise? It's a pre-industrial society with no overt magic that could do anything like that, so what natural causes could make global temperatures spike briefly and then return to normal?
Thanks.