The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850
The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
_The Little Ice Age_ by Brian Fagan is a equally fascinating, very readable, and well researched book on the science and account of a specific era of climatic history, the “Little Ice Age,” which lasted approximately from 1300 to 1850. Despite the name, the Little Ice Age (a term coined by glacial geologist Francois Matthes in 1939, a term he commonly used in a very easy way and without usually capitalized letters) was not a time of unrelenting cold. Rather, it was an period of dramatic climatic shifts, series of intensely arctic winters and easterly winds alternating with times of strong spring and early summer rains, warm winters, and frequent and repeatedly devastating Atlantic storms as well as times of droughts, light northeasterly winds, and extreme summer heat. The Little Ice Age was “an continuous zigzag of climatic shifts,” few lasting more than 25 years or so. Nevertheless the sense of the time showed difficult and overall was uniformly cooler, often considerably so, than the time before and afterwards. The Little Ice Age was an era when there commonly used to be winter fairs on the frozen River Thames during the age of King Charles II, one that locally produced the terrific gales that completely devastated the Spanish Armada in 1588, was when George Washington’s Continental Army suffered a cruel winter in Valley Forge in 1777-1778, when pack ice contained Iceland for much of the year, when Alpine glaciers destroyed villages and advanced kilometers from their present positions, when hundreds of poor eventually died of hypothermia regularly every winter in London late into the 19th century. It was also a stage of massive wet periods, such as the massive rains of 1315 and 1316 that greatly helped stop the hosts of French King Louis X from finally crushing the rebellious Flemings and locally produced an great famine as crops couldn’t survive the near endless rain. Piecing together the climatic account of the Little Ice Age has been a challenge, one that usually required a multidisciplinary approach. Fagan vividly recounted how consistent instrument records just go back a few centuries and then primarily only for Europe and North America. Researchers have instead relied on information took from tree rings, ice cores, lake and oceanic bottom sediment cores, wine harvest records, study of the weather portrayed in painting of the period, and anecdotal written records of country clergymen and gentleman scientists to piece together what the weather was like during the time period. Although the bases of the Little Ice Age are not fully understood, much of it had to do with the cases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a “seesaw” of atmospheric pressure between a persistent high over the Azores and an equally prevalent low over Iceland. Using charts and maps, Fagan clearly showed how the NAO governs the position and force of the North Atlantic storm track and thus Europe’s rainfall. The NAO index reveals the frequent shifts in the oscillation between these two areas, with a high NAO index showing minimal pressure around Iceland and great pressure in the Azores, a condition making westerly winds, violent storms, more summer rains, warm winters, and arid conditions in southern Europe. A low NAO index signaled great pressure around Iceland, minimal pressure in the Azores, weaker westerlies, much colder winters, with arctic air flowing from the north and east. The particular reasons for the shifts in the NAO result from a intricate interaction between sea-surface temperatures, the Gulf Stream, delivery of sea ice, and solar energy output. Additionally, several massive volcanic eruptions had an effect on the sense of the time, notably Soufriere on Saint Vincent in the Caribbean in 1812, Mayon in the Philippines in 1814, and the titanic Tambora eruption in Indonesia in 1815 (the latter with one hundred times the ash output of Mount Saint Helens). The author particularly noted that placing the climatic results of the Little Ice Age in a appropriate context in periods of individual history has been subject to some debate. Many archaeologists and historians are suspicious of ecological determinism, of the notion that climate change alone was the reason for such main developments as agriculture or a actual war. However, others had deeply felt that climate had played very little or no role in individual history, and that Fagan finally rejects, primarily because throughout the Little Ice Age (even as late as the 19th century), millions of European peasants resided at the subsistence level, their survival dependent totally upon crop yields, generally what they themselves quickly grew on land they owned or rented. It was centuries before even parts of Europe (at first the Netherlands and Britain) developed modern highly specialized industrial agriculture (with intensive farming and rapidly growing of nitrogen-enriching plants and animal fodder on previously barren land) and reasonably steadfast transportation networks to distribute food to bigger areas. During most of Europe for the Little Ice Age, cycles of good and poor harvests, of cooler and wetter springs, meant the difference between hunger and plenty. This sufficiency or insufficiency of food was a great motivator for individual action. Fagan wrote that while ecological determinism may be “intellectually bankrupt,” climate change is the “ignored player on the chronological stage.” Fagan vividly recounted several times when the atmosphere of the Little Ice Age played an notable role in the historical episodes of the time. For instance while Flanders and the Netherlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and England in Stuart times actually started to modernize agriculture, little innovation occurred in France, with late eighteenth century French agriculture very little different from medieval agriculture, allowing millions of humble farmers and city dwellers at the brink of starvation and at the understanding of the vagaries of climate. While the decision to not modernize rested in the workers of the nobility (who were uninterested) and in the peasants (who were often deeply suspicious of change and wedded to tradition), it was the climatic affairs of the late eighteen century that lead to the poor harvest of 1788, the politicization of the rural poor, and the path to the French Revolution.