The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850
The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
Brian Fagan’s “The Little Ice Age” is, by definition, an introduction to the climate event of the same name. Actually, it is quite similar to a History Channel documentary of the same name. On page xix Fagan notes that historians are either “parachutists” (great picture) or “truffle hunters” (love all of the lists of one specific era or topic). Fagan warns that this is a parachutist book – an overview. So, what of this overview? Fagan starts with the Vikings and covers an area that is better completely covered by Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . However, his stories of how the fishing industry was moved by the shift to a colder climate was surprisingly interesting. A extensive discussion of how the colder climate change made further disease, famine and general mayhem is occasionally punctuated by the single best one page type of the changes in farming methods that eventually came about in the 1600-1700s that I have still read (page 107). An interesting (and too short) section on glaciers showed especially fascinating and should be involved only reading for those that point to the slowly melting of those “ancient” glaciers in our day as a cause for worry. If 200 years old is ancient, well… Frequent maps are a big positive but some of them are unnecessary. However, too many maps is much better than the normal too few that are in most books. The purpose of the book makes bogged down in the Irish Potato Famine. We go from being a parachutist to a Truffle Hunter in this section. The last chapter is a commentary on something out of the possibility of the book’s stated thesis. We leave the Little Ice Age and receive a lecture on Global Warming that is at variance with some of the things we’ve only read. Early on in the book he tells us the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than we are now (p. 17) and subsequently spent the superior section of 200 pages showing us that cooling brings famine, death and disease. Why is global warming so bad then? On page 206 he mentions cattle herding as a trace of methane over the last 150 years. In the United States at least, cattle herding was only possible by clearing out the deer and buffalo east of the Mississippi and by nearly killing off millions of buffalo out west (imagine herds from one horizon to the other in the Great Plains) to make room for millions of head of cattle. To me, that seems to be a methane trade-off. Regardless, this is really a nice little book. You’ll certainly learn something new. Skip the last chapter.