The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850
The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
A largely disappointing book about a especially absorbing subject. In places the book is well-written (The Year Without a Summer, An Ghorta Mor), but overall it is rather spotty. It is not excellent history or moral science. It is rather a hodgepodge of chronological recollections that are necessarily sparse prior to the 17th century. The book claims to recount the Little Ice Age (1300 – 1850), but spends more than a moderate amount of verbage on the Medieval Warm Period and the Modern Greenhouse. Perhaps a section of the subtitle ‘How Climate Made History’ would have been a more open title that reflects the authors central thesis (climate has an significant influence on individual history!). Scientifically, he does a fair charge of possibly explaining the North Atlantic Oscilation (NAO) and the large ocean conveyor as signs/mechanisms of rapid climate shifts. However, this reportedly said, the reasoning commonly used by the author to connect individual accounts with climate phenomena is not tight, in advantage of fact, it is rather flaky. In general, the book lacks functional graphs to show climate (temperature, rainfall) fluctuations particularly during the period of modern record-keeping when this information is readily available. In the end, I get the authors point…CLIMATE MAKES HISTORY!!!, but I am not finally convinced of this by any effective evidence-based connection. Heavy recollection Lite science is a dangerous formula for legendary success.