The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (2 page)
Read The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 Online
Authors: Brian Fagan
7 The War Against the Glaciers
8 "More Like Winter Than Summer"
We are in a raft, gliding down a river, toward a waterfall. We
have a map but are uncertain of our location and hence are unsure of the distance to the waterfall. Some of us are getting nervous
and wish to land immediately; others insist we can continue safely
for several more hours. A few are enjoying the ride so much that
they deny there is any immediate danger although the map clearly
shows a waterfall.... How do we avoid a disaster?
-George S. Philander, Is the Temperature Rising?
April 1963: The waters of the Blackwater River in eastern England were
pewter gray, riffled by an arctic northeasterly breeze. Thick snow clouds
hovered over the North Sea. Heeling to the strengthening wind, we
tacked downriver with the ebb tide, muffled to our ears in every stitch of
clothing we had aboard. Braseis coursed into the short waves of the estuary, throwing chill spray that froze as it hit the deck. Within minutes, the
decks were sheathed with a thin layer of ice. Thankfully, we turned upstream and found mooring in nearby Brightlingsea Creek. Thick snow
began to fall as we thawed out with glasses of mulled rum. Next morning,
we woke to an unfamiliar arctic world, cushioned with silent white.
There was fifteen centimeters of snow on deck.
Thirty-five years later, I sailed down the Blackwater again, at almost
the same time of year. The temperature was 18°C, the water a muddy
green, glistening in the afternoon sunshine, skies pale blue overhead. We
sailed before a mild southwesterly, tide underfoot, with only thin sweaters
on. I shuddered at the memory of the chilly passage of three decades before as we lazed in the warmth, the sort of weather one would expect in a California spring, not during April in northern Europe. I remarked to my
shipmates that global warming has its benefits. They agreed....
Humanity has been at the mercy of climate change for its entire existence. Infinitely ingenious, we have lived through at least eight, perhaps
nine, glacial episodes in the past 730,000 years. Our ancestors adapted to
the universal but irregular global warming since the end of the Ice Age
with dazzling opportunism. They developed strategies for surviving harsh
drought cycles, decades of heavy rainfall or unaccustomed cold; adopted
agriculture and stock-raising, which revolutionized human life; founded
the world's first preindustrial civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and
the Americas. The price of sudden climate change, in famine, disease, and
suffering, was often high.
The Little Ice Age survives only as a dim recollection: depictions in
school textbooks of people dancing at fairs on a frozen River Thames in
London in the jolly days of King Charles II; legends of George Washington's ragtag Continental Army wintering over at Valley Forge in 1777/78.
We have forgotten that only two centuries ago Europe experienced a cycle
of bitterly cold winters, mountain glaciers in the Swiss Alps were lower
than in recorded memory, and pack ice surrounded Iceland for much of
the year. Hundreds of poor died of hypothermia in London during the
cold winters of the 1880s, and soldiers froze to death on the Western
Front in 1916. Our memories of weather events, even of exceptional
storms and unusual cold, fade quickly with the passing generations. The
and statistics of temperature and rainfall mean little without the chill of
cold on one's skin, or mud clinging to one's boots in a field of ruined
wheat flattened by rain.
We live in an era of global warming that has lasted longer than any
such period over the past thousand years. For the first time, human beings with their promiscuous land clearance, industrial-scale agriculture,
and use of coal, oil, and other fossil fuels have raised greenhouse gas levels
in the atmosphere to record highs and are changing global climate. In an
era so warm that sixty-five British bird species laid their eggs an average of
8.8 days earlier in 1995 than in 1971, when brushfires consumed over
500,000 hectares of drought-plagued Mexican forest in 1998 and when
the sea level has risen in Fiji an average of 1.5 centimeters a year over the
past nine decades-in such times, the weather extremes of the Little Ice Age seem grotesquely remote. But we need to understand just how profoundly the climatic events of the Little Ice Age rippled through Europe
over five hundred momentous years of history. These events did more
than help shape the modern world. They are the easily ignored, but
deeply important, context for the unprecedented global warming today.
They offer precedent as we look into the climatic future.
Speak the words "ice age," and the mind turns to Cro-Magnon mammoth hunters on windswept European plains devoid of trees. But the Little Ice Age was far from a deep freeze. Think instead of an irregular seesaw of rapid climatic shifts, driven by complex and still little understood
interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean. The seesaw brought
cycles of intensely cold winters and easterly winds, then switched
abruptly to years of heavy spring and early summer rains, mild winters,
and frequent Atlantic storms, or to periods of droughts, light northeasterlies, and summer heat waves that baked growing corn fields under a shimmering haze. The Little Ice Age was an endless zigzag of climatic shifts,
few lasting more than a quarter century. Today's prolonged warming is an
anomaly.
Reconstructing the climate changes of the past is extremely difficult,
because reliable instrument records are but a few centuries old, and even
these exist only in Europe and North America. Systematic weather observations began in India during the nineteenth century. Accurate meteorological records for tropical Africa are little more than three-quarters of a
century old. For earlier times, we have but what are called proxy records
reconstructed from incomplete written accounts, tree rings, and ice cores.
Country clergymen and gentleman scientists with time on their hands
sometimes kept weather records over long periods. Chronicles like those
of the eighteenth-century diarist John Evelyn or monastery scribes are invaluable for their remarks on unusual weather, but their usefulness in
making comparisons is limited. Remarks like "the worst rain storm in
memory," or "hundreds of fishing boats overwhelmed by mighty waves"
do not an accurate meteorological record make, even if they made a deep
impression at the time. The traumas of extreme weather events fade
rapidly from human consciousness. Many New Yorkers still vividly remember the great heat wave of Summer 1999, but it will soon fade from
collective memory, just like the great New York blizzard of 1888, which stranded hundreds of people in Grand Central Station and froze dozens
to death in deep snowdrifts.
A generation ago, we had a generalized impression of Little Ice Age climate compiled with painstaking care from a bewildering array of historical sources and a handful of tree-ring sequences. Today, the scatter of treering records has become hundreds from throughout the Northern
Hemisphere and many from south of the equator, too, amplified with a
growing body of temperature data from ice cores drilled in Antarctica,
Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, and other locations. We are close to a
knowledge of annual summer and winter temperature variations over
much of the Northern Hemisphere to as far back as A.D. 1400. Within a
few years, these records will go back deep into the Middle Ages, perhaps
to Roman times. We can now track the Little Ice Age as an intricate tapestry of short-term climatic shifts that rippled through European society
during times of remarkable change-seven centuries that saw Europe
emerge from medieval fiefdom and pass by stages through the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Enlightenment, the French and Industrial revolutions, and the making of modern Europe.
To what extent did these climatic shifts alter the course of European
history? Many archaeologists and historians are suspicious of the role of
climate change in changing human societies-and with good reason.
Environmental determinism, the notion that climate change was a primary cause of major developments like, say, agriculture, has been a dirty
word in academia for generations. You certainly cannot argue that climate drove history in a direct and causative way to the point of toppling
governments. Nor, however, can you contend that climate change is
something that you can totally ignore. Throughout the Little Ice Age,
and even as late as the nineteenth century, millions of European peasants
lived at the subsistence level. Their survival depended on crop yields: cycles of good and poor harvests, of cooler and wetter spring weather,
could make a crucial difference between hunger and plenty, life and
death. The sufficiency or insufficiency of food was a powerful motivator
of human action, sometimes on a national or even continent-wide scale,
with consequences that could take decades to unfold. These same climatic verities still apply to millions of people living in less developed
parts of the world.
In The Little Ice Age I argue that human relationships to the natural environment and short-term climate change have always been in a complex
state of flux. To ignore them is to neglect one of the dynamic backdrops
of the human experience. Consider, for instance, the food crises that engulfed Europe during the Little Ice Age-the great hunger of 1315 to
1319, which killed tens of thousands; the food dearths of 1741; and
1816, "the year without a summer"-to mention only a few. These crises
in themselves did not threaten the continued existence of Western civilization, but they surely played an important role in the formation of
modern Europe. We sometimes forget how little time has passed since
Europeans went hungry because of harvest failure. Some of these crises
resulted from climatic shifts, others from human ineptitude or disastrous
economic or political policy; many, like the Irish potato famine of the
1840s, from a combination of all three-and a million people perished in
that catastrophe. Its political consequences are still with us.
Environmental determinism may be intellectually bankrupt, but climate change is the ignored player on the historical stage. This is partly
because of a long-held and erroneous assumption that there were few significant climatic shifts over the past millennium that could possibly have
affected human societies, and also because few archaeologists or historians have followed the extraordinary revolution in paleoclimatology over
the past quarter-century. Now we know that short-term climatic anomalies stressed northern European society during the Little Ice Age, and we
can begin to correlate specific shifts with economic, social, and political
changes, to try to assess what climate's true impact may be. (I focus on
northern Europe in these pages, because this is the region that was most
directly affected by atmospheric/ocean interactions during the Little Ice
Age and where climatic data are most abundant. The effects on Mediterranean lands are still little understood.)