The heat of sommer is in June, July, and August, but commonly the coole breeses asswage the vehemency of the heat. The chiefe of winter is halfe December, January, February and halfe March. But the next yeare, for 8, or 10 dayes of ill weather, other 14 dayes would be as Sommer. We tend to think of John Smith as the authority on early Virginia, but one needs to remember that he was talking from the perspective of just a few years. He was experiencing weather, not climate.
Weather can sometimes run through a sequence of many years of cold, or hot, or wet, or dry weather.
USGS research scientists Stacey Verardo and Tom Cronin suggest that the Chesapeake Bay may have been slowly warming for the better part of four centuries, judging from the preserved remains of minute planktonic dinoflagellates preserved in the Bay's sediments. But, during this time there was both a Medieval Warm Period, well-documented by historians from the 12th through 14th centuries, followed by what scientists call the Little Ice Age in the 15th and 16th centuries, up until about the time of European contact with the Chesapeake environment. The USGS scientists count their upward trend in temperatures from that time forward, and suggest it may have been related to the progressive deforestation of the basin and its reduction to agricultural uses. The reason of which is this, when the country was covered with woods and the swamp with bush, the rain that fell was detained by these interruptions and so had time to insinuate into the earth and contribute to the springs and runs. Another writer, Lester DeCoster, indicated that 142 years later, in 1895, more than two-thirds of Pennsylvania's 27 million forest acres had been cleared.