Hmm: Baghdad snowfall records don't seem to support the idea that CO2 is overheating the planet

BBC News - Snow in Baghdad, and other ancient climates

...It's hard to judge what "heat" and "cold" mean in this context, with nothing against which to measure them. But we get a better idea when he tells us that in summer, people spent most of the day in the coolness of rooms dug below ground-level, but their nights on open roofs under the stars.

And having established these habits, we get a better idea of the transformation wrought in AD920, when the city was caught in a snap so unseasonably cold that people took their blankets indoors in the height of summer.

Dr Dominguez-Castro calculates the temperature may have been about 9C below normal that month - related, he speculates, to a major volcanic eruption.

The records written by al-Ya'qubi and his successors also yield information on the frequency of droughts, floods, rainfall, hail, winds, hot and cold spells and locust swarms.

Snow was reported regularly in winters between 832 and 998. In 909, one writer records: "There were four fingers of snow on the ground, and the cold was intense. Water, vinegar, eggs and unguents froze."

Things sound even more extreme in 926, when "sherbet and rose-water froze, as well as vinegar.

"The scholar known as Abu Zakaria sat in the middle of the Tigris, on the ice, and gave lessons of the Prophetical Tradition."

 Later scholars recorded no snow.

So here we have evidence of a change of climate, which appears to have occurred at the same time as some parts of the world were entering the Medieval Warm Period (MWP).

So this would support the idea that Baghdad, and by extension the rest of the Mesopotamian region, experienced the MWP as well.

2008: First snow for 100 years falls on Baghdad

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Light snow fell in Baghdad early on Friday in what weather officials said was the first time in about a 100 years.