The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (13 page)

Antarctic deep-water production may have increased about eight hundred years ago during the fourteenth century, precisely when Europe experienced its first significant cooling, then slackened off as conditions
warmed again after 1850. The end of the Little Ice Age saw two warming
stages, one from the late nineteenth century to about 1945, the other
from after 1975 to the present. Scientific observations over the past quarter-century display no signs of higher production, so most likely the
deep-water production rate slowed well before the 1940s.

There are no easy answers to the conundrum of the Little Ice Age, but
we can be certain that such minor "ice ages" occurred many times earlier
in the Holocene, even if we still lack the tools to identify them. We would
logically expect another such episode to descend on the earth in the natural, and cyclical, order of climate change, were it not for increasingly compelling evidence that humans have altered the climatic equation irrevocably through their promiscuous use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. We may be in the process of creating an entirely new era
in global climate, which makes an understanding of the Little Ice Age a
high scientific priority.

Climate has never been a fashionable topic in historical circles, largely because, until recently, paleoclimatology was a crude and infant science.
Only a handful of scholars, among them the French scholar Le Roy
Ladurie, Swiss climatic historian Christian Pfister, and the late British climatologist Hubert Lamb have paid careful attention to the social effects
of volatile climatic shifts in the Little Ice Age. Most historians discount
the importance of climate in shaping the events of the recent past, reacting, quite rightly, against the notion that climate change was a primary
and simple trigger for major historical events. No one would argue today
that climate change "caused" the French Revolution or that the bitter
cold of twelfth century Greenland "caused" the medieval Norse to abandon their northernmost farms. This kind of environmental determinism,
with its simple cause-and-effect arguments, is long vanished from serious
discussion and with good reason.

The historian's caution was entirely appropriate in an era before treering networks, ice cores, and sophisticated statistical treatments of historical data. Today, a climatologist's portrait of the annual fluctuations of the
Little Ice Age looks like a fine-toothed comb gone mad-a graph of
sharp-edged spikes of cold and warm, of cycles of cooler and warmer conditions plotted above and below a benchmark for today's climate. The
curve never stays still, but moves up and down, sometimes sharply and
without warning, at other times trending more gently. It is as if we have
set sail on a climatic sea, tossed to-and-fro from the moment we set out
on our journey through time. We will rarely experience true stability, just
the occasional calm spot: a decade of settled, warmer weather or more intense cold. The constant reality is unpredictable change fueled by complex interactions between atmosphere and ocean, by pressure swings on
the other side of the world.

For the first time, we place a detailed graph of changing climate alongside the momentous historical events of the Little Ice Age, not as a remote
backdrop but as a critical, and long neglected, factor in a complex equation of harvests, subsistence crises, and economic, political and social
changes. We can see how cycles of cold or of excessive rainfall rippled
across Europe, affecting monarch, noble, and commoner in different
ways, changing the course of wars and the prosperity of fisheries, and fostering agricultural innovation. Climate change was a subtle catalyst, not a
cause, of profound change in a European world where everyone lived at
the complete mercy of a subsistence farming economy, where the ripple
effects of poor wine harvests could affect the economic welfare of the
Hapsburg empire. The Little Ice Age is the story of Europeans' struggle
against the most fundamental of all human vulnerabilities.

As soon as the great ocean has been traversed there is such a
great superfluity of ice on the sea that nothing like it is known
anywhere else in the whole world and it lies so far out from the
land that there is no less than four or more days journey thereunto on the ice.

-Konungsskuggsja (The King's Mirror), c. 1250

ailors on the northern reaches of the medieval world began to experience the effects of increasing cold a century before the great famine of
1315-21. The cooling first intensified in the northeast, around Franz
Josef Land and Spitzbergen, and then spread westward across the Arctic.
Many winters, thick pack ice moved further south than it had for centuries, then lingered in the stormy waters between Iceland and Greenland
through early summer, hampering an already tricky ocean passage. Not
every winter was exceptionally cold, but harsh conditions, freezing late
spring temperatures and persistent pack ice more frequently compounded
sailors' difficulties.

In Eirik the Red's day, Norse merchant ships (knarrs) had taken the
most direct route from Iceland to East Greenland, along Latitude 65°
north, then coasted south and west round Cape Farewell to the Eastern
Settlement. Even in those warmer times, ships foundered in offshore
gales, were dashed to pieces against the rugged Greenland and Icelandic
coasts, capsized when overloaded, or were simply blown off course never to be seen again. Only a few of these maritime tragedies have left a record
in history. In about 1190, a Norwegian knarr named Stangarf6li was set
off course by a gale while bound from Bergen to Iceland and wrecked on
the east coast of Greenland. A decade later, some hunters found the
wreck, the skeletons of six men, and the perfectly preserved, frozen body
of Icelandic priest Ingimund Thorgeirsson. Beside him lay wax tablets inscribed with crabbed runes that recorded his death from starvation.'

By 1250, many fewer ships made the crossing to the Norse colonies.
Those that dared traveled a much more hazardous route, far from land in
the open Atlantic. A skipper now sailed a day and a night due west from
Iceland, then altered course southwestward to avoid the pack ice off
southeastern Greenland. The new routing involved more time out of
sight of land and a higher risk of foundering in the savage westerly gales
that can blow in this part of the North Atlantic even in high summer. Inevitably, Greenland became more isolated from Norway and Iceland. Two
and a half centuries later, in 1492, Pope Alexander VI remarked in a letter
that "shipping to that country [Greenland] is very infrequent because of
the extensive freezing of the waters-no ship having put into shore, it is
believed, for eighty years."2 Alexander suggested that voyages might be
possible in August. Political ties between the ancient Norse homeland
and its western colonies loosened, and, in the case of Greenland, became
almost nonexistent. However, the Pope was misinformed. Where the
Norse no longer sailed, others now voyaged, among them Basque and
English mariners in new designs of sailing vessels equipped to handle the
roughest of winter weather. Ironically, they traveled to Iceland, Greenland, and beyond because the Church had declared fish a legal food on
religious holidays.

In northwestern Europe at the end of the thirteenth century, few noticed that the spikes of colder, more stormy years were coming closer together. Those who suffered through cold winters and increasingly frequent sea floods perhaps thought of these occasional catastrophes of
extreme cold or storm as manifestations of divine vengeance. At a distance of eight hundred years, we can discern a different pattern: the first
signs of climatic deterioration. The winter of 1215 in particular was exceptionally cold in eastern Europe and caused widespread famine. Thousands of hungry Polish farmers headed in desperation for the Baltic coast, where they vainly believed fish were to be found. While hunger was rarer
in the west, the swings of the North Atlantic Oscillation were growing
wider and faster.

Making landfall on the eastern shores of the North Sea is always dangerous, especially in the narrows leading to the English Channel. Ever
shifting sandbanks protect the low-lying shore with its endless beaches
and narrow creeks. Even in good weather with a commanding breeze, the
sailor approaches carefully, chart in hand, eyeing the featureless coast in
search of rare conspicuous landmarks such as a tall church spire or a lighthouse. The shallows usually lie far offshore, ready to take off one's keel in
a few catastrophic poundings from the short, steep seas. Heaven help the
skipper who is caught close to land when a howling northwester makes
the coast a dangerous lee shore. He tries to claw offshore, hard on the
wind, pounding against steep seas that break over the bow as the stomach
churns-partly from the motion, partly from fear. Thousands of sailors
have perished in these violent waters over the centuries.

Ten thousand years ago, the southern North Sea was a marshy plain
where elk and deer wandered and Stone Age foragers hunted and fished.
England was part of the Continent until as recently as 6000 B.C., when
rising sea levels caused by post-Ice Age warming filled the North Sea. By
3000 B.C., the ocean was at near-modern levels. Sea levels fluctuated continually through late prehistoric and Roman times but rose significantly
after A.D. 1000. Over the next two centuries, the North Sea rose as much
as forty to fifty centimeters above today's height in the Low Countries,
then slowly retreated again as temperatures fell gradually in the north. The
North Sea was brimful on the calmest days. When exceptionally high tides
coincided with gale-force winds, raging waters surged over thousands of
hectares of coastal farmland in a few short hours. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had more than their share of such catastrophes.

Seven centuries ago, the North Sea washed coastlines very different
from those of today. For instance, a now-vanished shallow estuary extended deep into East Anglia, making Norwich and Ely important ports.
Countless narrow creeks and channels penetrated into the farmlands, harboring thousands of small craft, traders, and fishermen. The lumbering
grain ships and cargo vessels that plied these waters went well armed, for
pirates would pounce on them from muddy hiding places deep in the coastal marshlands and sandy islands of the low shorelines between the
Baltic and the English Channel. The same infiltrating creeks made the
surrounding low-lying coastlines vulnerable to unpredictable storm
surges, which would sweep up the narrow defiles and flood the land on
either side, forcing entire villages to evacuate or drowning them almost
without warning. We can imagine the scene, repeated so many times over
the generations. Huge waves of muddy water attacked the shore, spray
blowing horizontally in the dark mist masking the ground. The relentless
ocean cascaded up beaches and into narrow inlets, devouring everything
before it. Thatched farmhouses tumbled end-for-end in the waves; pigs
and cattle rolled like dice across inundated fields. Bedraggled families
clung to one another in trees or on rooftops until the boiling waters swept
them away. The only sound was the shrieking wind, which drowned out
everything-the growl of shifting gravel beaches, the desperate cries of
drowning victims, the groaning branches of tree lashed by the gale. When
the sky cleared, the sun shone on an enormous muddy lake as far as the
eye could see, a desolate landscape devoid of human life.