Archival and palaeoenvironmental documentation of extreme climate events reveals generational amnesia in collective memory.

Historical climate archives from northern China (1470–1900) show severity judgments for extreme events are systematically biased toward recent experience, not absolute anomalies, with generational offsets.

• Why it matters: Collective memory likely shapes responses to extreme climate events, but it is unclear how perceptual bias in that memory changes over centuries.
• What they did: The study combined four centuries of northern China climatic archives with tree-ring hydroclimate reconstructions, validated against instrumental Wet/Dry Index data (1901–2000). It then tested whether correlations improve when natural series are re-standardised using 20–40-year sliding windows and used a heuristic agent-based model to reproduce the resulting pattern.
• The result: Correlations increase after 20–40-year re-standardisation, and the model suggests generational amnesia is sufficient to explain perceptual offsets in environmental change severity. This implies archives retain a generational imprint useful for bias-aware corrections in risk assessment, adaptation, and paleoclimate reconstruction.

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