evidence: Tambora was the largest volcanic eruption since the end of the last Ice Age, one of a series of eruptions that pumped huge amounts of sunlight-reflecting gas into the atmosphere. This gas darkened and chilled summers in Europe. It weakened the monsoons in India and West Africa. It allowed glaciers to advance in the Alps. [...] In fairness, that wasn’t always clear. Decades ago, researchers talked about the past periods of climate change as global events. They cited the Little Ice Age, which began in roughly 1550 and ended around 1850, as an era when global temperatures fell everywhere. But this study—and work from other scholars—suggests that the Little Ice Age wasn’t global at all, and mostly lowered temperatures in western Europe and parts of North America. [...] "This study is another nail in the coffin of the idea of that there was a globally warm or cold period that fit tidily into a specific couple of centuries," said Yarrow Axford, a climate scientist at Northwestern University, in an email. She was not involved in writing the new paper. The idea that the Little Ice Age or eras like it were uniform global events was "already dying within the scientific community," she said, yet that idea remains "perennially popular with nonexperts who want to sow doubt about the significance of the dramatic and truly global warming that has occurred in the past century."