The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (36 page)

The spring of 1848 was cold, following heavy snow in February. People were optimistic that the cold winter would prevent the reappearance
of blight and made every sacrifice to plant potatoes everywhere they
could. The weather was favorable through May and June but turned cool
and very wet in July. The blight struck almost overnight. By August, the
extent of the new disaster was becoming apparent as heavy rain also damaged wheat and oat crops. The failure of the 1848 potato crop was as
complete as that of 1846. Thousands defaulted on their rents and were
evicted from their lands by landlords, who were themselves heading toward insolvency because of overwhelming debt. Everyone who could
scrape together the money contemplated emigration. Not only the poor
left, but farmers, some of considerable property, whom the country could
ill afford to lose. The countryside was becoming deserted. Thousands of
hectares of land around Ballina in County Mayo in the northwest looked
like a devastated battlefield. In Munster, the landlords could not deal
with the abandoned farms. Paupers squatted on empty arable land, too weak to cultivate it, living in ditches. Trade ground to a standstill all over
the country. Shops were boarded up and "thousands are brought to the
workhouse screaming for food and can't be relieved."20 Nearly 200,000
people crowded into workhouses designed for 114,000. Jails became a
refuge. Desperate young men committed crimes so they could be sentenced to transportation. Barrister Michael Shaughnessy reported that
many poor children "were almost naked, hair standing on end, eyes
sunken, lips pallid, protruding bones of little joints visible." He asked:
"Am I in a civilized country and part of the British Empire?"21

The final casualty figures from An Ghorta Mor, "The Great Hunger,"
will never be known. The 1841 census records 8,175,124 people living in
Ireland. In 1851, the number had fallen to 6,552,385. The Census Commissioners of the day calculated that, with a normal rate of increase, the
total should have been just over 9 million. Two and a half million people
were lost, a million to emigration, the remainder, mostly in the west, to
famine and associated disease. These estimates are probably conservative.
A combination of highly unpredictable climate, overdependence on a single crop, and official indifference killed over a million people in a Europe
that, thanks to greatly improved infrastructures, was becoming increasingly isolated from the ravages of hunger.

Thus the Little Ice Age ended as it began, with a famine whose memory
resonated through generations. Ireland changed radically as a result. The
population continued to decline for the remainder of the nineteenth century due to emigration, delayed marriages, and celibacy. Emigration rates
remained high, reaching a peak in 1854. Ninety thousand people still left
annually in the 1860s, a level reached by no other country until Italy after
the 1870s. By 1900 Ireland's population was half the prefamine level,
making it unique among European nations. The population decline did
not reverse until the 1960s.

Blight mostly disappeared by 1851, but the destruction wrought by
the famine continued. The lasting physical effects among the survivors
included a high incidence of mental illness. Disease and mortality re mained high among the poor. Irish society now contained high proportions of the old and the very young, contributing to social conservatism
and torpor. But the huge loss of population, tragic as it was, brought
some long-term advantages. There was less competition for employment,
while remittances from emigrants kept many stumbling farms in the west
alive. The structure of Irish agriculture changed radically: land holdings
became larger and more streamlined, and farming more commercial.
Livestock replaced grain as farmers adjusted to the realities of a far smaller
workforce.

The living standards of the poor remained very low. In the west, many
continued to subsist on potatoes. Crop yields dropped considerably,
partly because of less intensive use of fertilizer, because of much waste
land and occasional local outbreaks of blight. The Lumper gave way to
more palatable potato strains. Peoples' diets gradually became more diverse as the market economy grew and railroads spread through the country. But they were still vulnerable to occasional food shortages that
brought scenes like those of the 1840s, though never on the same scale.
Death from starvation was unusual. But the poor harbored deep resentments against the wealthier farming neighbors, who shared little of their
prosperity with their laborers. Memories of the Famine, fears of starvation and eviction, were profound political realities for the remainder of
the nineteenth century. The psychological scars of the Famine and hate of
the English still run deep in Irish society.

An Ghorta M6r was not the last European famine. Catastrophic food
shortages owing to crop failures and cold weather developed in Belgium
and Finland in 1867/68. The politically driven Volga famine of 1921 and
the terror famine of the Ukraine in 1932/33 dwarf the Irish disaster. But
for sheer shame, the Great Hunger has no rivals.

As the Irish starved, warming conditions in the far north kept pack ice
away from Icelandic coasts. Warmer water brought by the Irminger Current led to a short boom in cod fishing off western Greenland between
1845 and 1851. Meanwhile, Europe was somewhat colder, as blocking anticyclones brought the easterly winds and harsh winters that plagued
the Irish poor. By 1855, the North Atlantic Oscillation had switched
again, and ice returned to Icelandic coasts. The prevailing westerlies over
the North Atlantic strengthened, bringing a milder climate to Europe
and the beginnings of sustained glacial retreats. The summer of 1868 was
exceptionally hot, with a record temperature of 38.1 'C at Tunbridge
Wells, south of London, on July 22 and many days with readings over
30°. The following winter was very mild, with a mean temperature closer
to that of warmer and more oceanic Ireland. The warmer years continued
through the 1870s, except for occasional cold Februaries and very wet
summers from 1875 onward.

Another cold snap in 1879 brought weather that rivaled that of the
1690s. December 1878 and January 1879 saw weeks of below-freezing
temperatures in England, followed by a cold spring and one of the wettest
and coldest summers ever recorded. In some parts of East Anglia, the
1879 harvest was still being gathered after Christmas. Coming at a time
of general agricultural decline, when Britain's grain market was flooded
with cheap North American wheat from the prairies, 1879s disaster
caused a full-grown agricultural depression. Farmers in the northwest
turned from grain to beef, but even livestock soon proved unprofitable
when frozen beef entered the country from Argentina, Australia, and
New Zealand. Thousands of unemployed farm laborers left the land for
the towns and emigrated to Australia, New Zealand, and other countries
with greater opportunities. The late 1870s were equally cold in China
and India, where between 14 and 18 million people perished from
famines caused by cold, drought, and monsoon failure. Glaciers advanced
in New Zealand and the Andes, and Antarctic ice extended much further
north than in Captain Cook's time a century earlier. Sailing ships traversing the Roaring Forties along the clipper route from Australia to Cape
Horn regularly sighted enormous tabular icebergs, with some seen as far
north as the mouth of the River Plate, just 35° south latitude.

The cold snap persisted into the 1880s, when hundreds of London's
poor died of accident hypothermia. As late as 1894/95, large ice floes
formed on the Thames in the heart of winter. Then prolonged warming
began. Between 1895 and 1940, Europe enjoyed nearly a half-century of
relatively mild winters. Only the winters of 1916/17 and 1928/29 were colder than usual, but they certainly never witnessed the prolonged subzero temperatures of the Little Ice Age.

By this time, human activities were leaving their mark on global climate, not only through the discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere but through pollution. The coldest European winter of the twentieth century was 1963, with a winter mean of-2°C and a January mean of
-2.1 C. Such air temperatures were cooler than many of the seventeenth
and eighteenth century, when Londoners held frost fairs on the frozen
Thames. This time, the river waters never fell below about 10°C and ice
never formed. A constant spew of industrial waste and other pollutants
kept the water at artificially high temperatures. Climatologist Hubert
Lamb remarks: "The progress of urbanization suggests ... the pastimes
in future cold winters will be to skate on the Thames at Hampton
Court-at the western limit of the metropolis-and then swim in it to
Westminster pier!"22

THE MODERN
WARM PERIOD

People in every generation ... have found their joys and happiness. Those in middle latitudes have thanked their gods for the
green Earth, the lilies of the field and the golden corn, those in
other latitudes for the beauty of the polar and mountain snows,
the shelter of the northern forests, the great arch of the desert
sky, or the big trees and flowers of the equatorial forest. How
many of our present problems arise from not understanding our
environment and making unrealistic demands upon it?"

-Hubert Lamb,

Climate, History and the Modern World, 1982

In the year 2060 my grandchildren will be approaching seventy; what will their world be like?

-Sir John Houghton, Global Warming:

The Complete Briefing, 1997

Nile writing this book, I found myself looking at paintings differently, from a climatic perspective. Look beyond the central theme of a
painting and you can explore house interiors and country landscapes,
find details of implements of tillage and cooking utensils, admire fine
musical instruments and watch a kaleidoscope of changing gentlemen's
and ladies' fashions. These fashions were perhaps influenced by persistent
cold winters. Women's fashions "exposed the person" somewhat daringly
in postrevolutionary France, but as the grip of cold weather increased, designers created warm underwear for their clients, including a "bosom
friend," which warmed the chest and hid cleavage that a few years earlier
had been daringly exposed.'