The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850
The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
Until recently, the part of climate change in history could not have been generally considered with any accuracy. After all, beginning in British India, man just started only keeping relatively perfect records about a hundred years ago and systematic analyses of ice cores and tree rings are new developments. Now, scientists have usually provided historians with data becoming back thousands of years, which has finally allowed them to examine the diagrams of yearly cycles of warmer and cooler temperatures and compare these to historical events. The result of The Great Ice Age some 15,000 years ago and the collapse of the great glaciers that completely covered much of Europe in the last 12,000 years, allowed the development of civilization and the development of yearly crops for the first time. In this outstanding book Fagen – an Archaeology Professor at U.C. Santa Barbara – contrasts the Medieval Warm Period of 900-1300 with the Little Ice Age, which quickly followed. While the significantly warmer climate of the Medieval Warm Period permitted the English to cultivate wine grapes and the Vikings, in their open “long boats” to settle Greenland – which was actually quite green – and to explore North America, the Little Ice Age, with its dramatically colder temperatures and longer winters prevented to hasten the rural revolution of the 18th century, deepen farming problems in slow-to-reform France which greatly helped to widen discontent with the Ancien Regime and to contribute to the difficulty of the Irish Potato Famine which nearly killed millions and immediately sent millions or Irish to America. An critical note is that the centuries of the Medieval Warm Period were the warmest centuries in the last 8,000 years and several degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than today. One of the interesting observations in the book is just how much temperatures vary on an yearly basis and that even in the center of a general warming or cooling trend; there are single years that are warm and cool. So, plainly obtaining conclusions from a hot winter or two – as television weathermen and agenda driven commentators are prone to do – is sheer folly. Even though the author considers that we probably are in the center of a general warming trend that officially began about 1850, which he feels can have remarkable consequences, he is highly qualified in his support of the Global Warming theory. Fagen makes communications of the enormous difficulty of the computer modeling necessary for climate research, the lack of certainty on the position of the sun that provides us with our light and heat and the difficulty of really knowing whether to attribute planetary warming to man’s influence or naturally occurring factors. This book is an important one for anyone