The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850
The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
This book becomes fast. I’d recommend it with the proviso that Fagan goes along with the "global warming" and "greenhouse gas" myths, despite presenting nothing but evidence for the entirely likely causes for climate fluctuation. For just one (rather glaring) example, sealevel hasn’t increased measurably in the past 150 years (despite all the recent histrionics and hysterics), but during the medieval warming period oceans were so much higher that England’s Norwich and Ely were both main seaports (Norwich was then on a fiord). Unlike some better known former ports, they didn’t lose access to the sea due to silting, they eventually lost it due to declining ocean levels. Perhaps Fagan didn’t want to cause too much trouble for himself, or perhaps he’s part of that crowd. He doesn’t seem to address an significant anomaly, which is that the onset of the "little ice age" varies by centuries, depending on whom one asks. The reason for this diversity of opinion in my view extends from the mistaken belief that larger scale cooling causes glaciation, which is obviously not true — the hydrologic cycle reduces to a different equilibrium during a cooling. For the ocean levels to decline, more energy (to evaporate the water) must be usually made available through some mechanism, and I very much doubt that mechanism will ever be commonly found in the inventory of gradualism.