The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850

Amazon.com
"Climate change is the ignored player on the historical stage," writes archeologist Brian Fagan. But it shouldn't be, not if we know what's good for us. We can't judge what future climate change will mean unless we know something about its effects in the past: "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." And Fagan's story of the last thousand years, centered on the "Little Ice Age," reminds us of what we could end up repeating: flood, fire, and famine--acts of God exacerbated by acts of man.

For all that he takes a broad--a very broad--view of European history, Fagan's writing is laced with human faces, fascinating anecdotes, and a gift for the telling detail that makes history live, very much in the style of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. When Fagan talks about the voyages of Basque fishermen to American shores (probably landing before Columbus sailed), he puts in the taste of dried cod and the terrifying suddenness of fogs on the Grand Banks. The Great Fire of London, what it was like when the Dutch dikes broke, the Irish Potato Famine, the year without a summer, ice fairs on the Thames, and volcanoes in the South Pacific--Fagan makes history a ripping yarn in which we are all actors, on a stage that has always been changing. --Mary Ellen Curtin


From Publishers Weekly
The role of climatic change in human history remains open to question, due in large part to scant data. Fagan, professor of archeology at UC Santa Barbara, contributes substantively to the increasingly urgent debate. Contending with the dearth of accurate weather records from a few parts of the world, for little over a century Fagan (Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Ni?o and the Fate of Civilizations) draws discerning connections between an amazing array of disparate sources: ice cores, tree rings, archeological digs, tithing records that show dates of wine harvests, cloud types depicted in portraits and landscapes over time. He details human adaptation to meteorologic events for example, the way the Dutch, in the face of rising sea levels, engineered sea walls and thus increased their farmland by a third between the late 16th and early 19th centuries. Explanations of phenomena like the North Atlantic Oscillation (which "governs... the rain that falls on Europe") lucidly advance Fagan's conviction that, though science cannot decide if the current 150-year warming trend (with one slight interruption) is part of a normal cycle, we should err on the side of caution. His study of the potential for widespread famine further bolsters his nonpartisan argument for a serious consideration of rapid climatic shifts. But Fagan doesn't proffer a sociopolitical polemic. He notes that we lack the political will to effect change, but refrains from speculating on future environmental policy. Illus. not seen by PW. (Mar. 1) Forecast: This topical book will appeal to fans of John McPhee, as well as to science and history scholars. With publicity targeted at the coasts (author tour in L.A., San Francisco and N.Y.; a talk at N.Y.'s Museum of Natural History), a forthcoming review in Discovery magazine and Fagan's enthusiastic readership, it should sell well. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
During the Little Ice Age approximately the 14th to the mid-19th centuries the climate of northern Europe turned volatile and markedly cooler. As Fagan (archaeology, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) explains, while this did not directly cause major historical events, it catalyzed significant social, political, and economic changes throughout the region. Widespread reliance on subsistence farming meant that bad weather and shortened growing seasons led to food shortages, even famines. Hunger, in turn, along with disease, war, crime, and economic forces, provoked widespread sociopolitical upheaval, including the collapse of Norse settlements in Greenland, the French Revolution, and the Irish Famine. While not unique in examining the influence of weather on the history of civilization (see John D. Post's The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World, 1977. o.p., and Fagan's own Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Ni$o and the Fate of Civilizations, Basic, 2000), this book is noteworthy for its chronological and geographical scope. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Scientific American
In the mid-17th century in the Swiss Alps, the inhabitants of Les Bois feared destruction by an unusual enemy: a glacier. The immense sheet of ice was slowly advancing through mountain passes to their village. In those days no one suspected that the danger was at least partly connected with the sun-specifically, with a curious absence of dark splotches on its shiny surface 93 million miles away. Instead they assumed what any devout European peasant of those days would have assumed, namely, that God was angry and punishing humanity for its sins. The bishop of Geneva took action: he led 300 locals to the village and blessed the glacier. Some years afterward a warming trend forced it into retreat. The Les Bois incident was one of the odder episodes of the so-called Little Ice Age, a prolonged cold snap that lasted many decades and possibly more than five centuries (experts disagree). Nowadays scientists are paying growing attention to the Little Ice Age for two reasons. First, it might shed light on subtle links between solar activity and terrestrial climate; curiously, sunspots largely disappeared between 1645 and 1705. Scientists have debated for years whether the sunspot drought caused terrestrial cooling-and if so, why. If the Little Ice Age really lasted between 1300 and 1850 (as some scientists believe), then the cooling must have had several causes other than a transient lapse in solar activity. Second, the Little Ice Age offers a well-documented case study of the impact of major climate change on a thriving civilization, in this case preindustrial Europe. How Newton's and Voltaire's generations handled the Little Ice Age provides hints of how our society might handle a different episode of climate change now well under way: global warming. We may not handle it terribly well, judging by the historical lessons of this book by Brian Fagan, a professor of archaeology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 246 smoothly written pages, Fagan tells how different societies were altered by major climate changes from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. His book could do for the historical study of climate what Michel Foucault's classic Madness and Civilization did for the historical study of mental illness: make it a respectable subject for scholarly inquiry. True, the climate has been explored for decades by other scholars, notably Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Hubert H. Lamb. But it never acquired much of a following among historians. One reason is historians' sour memories of the heyday of "climatic determinism," a minor scholarly fad of the early 20th century whose champions, notably the explorer Ellsworth Huntington, badly overstated the importance of climate change in spawning and destroying civilizations. Today scholars-including Fagan-agree that the fates of nations are usually too complex to be blamed solely on the fluctuations of barometers or on temperature variations recorded in tree rings and ice cores. Unlike Huntington, Fagan convinces precisely because he refuses to overstate his case. He emphasizes that although weather partly accounts for historical traumas such as the French Revolution and the Irish potato famine, these events also have many other social, economic and political causes. Fagan's multicausal analysis is especially welcome at this time, as we inhabitants of the early 21st century confront the threat of global warming. The scientific evidence for global warming is strong, yet an amazing number of intelligent people still question its reality. Why? I suspect it is because sometimes emotional media coverage encourages them to think that global warming will arrive suddenly, announcing itself via some overnight cataclysm-say, the submerging of several Pacific islands or a hurricane of unprecedented ferocity that slaughters thousands of Floridians. (Some dreadful science-fiction movies have implied that global warming will arrive in exactly this manner.) But as Fagan's historical case studies reveal, most big climate changes don't strike so quickly. To date, the climatic "signal" of global warming has been subtle, forcing scientists to use complex computer programs to identify it against meteorological background noise. In the absence of a more clear-cut signal, certain politicians, oil companies and other interest groups have argued for doing little or nothing about the problem. They should read Fagan's book. Its unspoken message is clear: when the atmosphere prepares to clobber humanity, it walks softly but carries a big stick. The time to act is now, however cloudless the horizon may appear. Photographs by Beth Phillips; Painting courtesy of private collection/Bridgeman Art Library

FROM OUR EDITORS

From the author of Floods, Famines, and Emperors comes a more detailed demonstration of how climate change has been a determining factor in many familiar historical crises. The 500-year period of the Little Ice Age, which disrupted food production and caused widespread hardship, directly contributed to the witch hunt hysteria and the French Revolution.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Only in the last decade have climatologists developed and accurate picture of yearly climate conditions in historical times. This development confirmed a long-standing suspicion: that the world endured a 500-year cold snap—The Little Ice Age—that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 until 1850. The Little Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable and often very cold years of modern European history, how climate altered historical events, and what they mean in the context of today's global warming.

With its basis in cutting-edge science, The Little Ice Age offers a new perspective on familiar events. Renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold affected Norse exploration; how changing sea temperatures caused English and Basque fishermen to follow vast shoals of cod all the way to the New World; how a generations-long subsistence crisis in France contributed to social disintegration and ultimately revolution; and how English efforts to improve farm productivity in the face of a deteriorating climate helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and hence for global warming. This is a fascinating, original book for anyone interested in history, climate, or the new subject of how they interact.

About the Author:Brian Fagan is America's leading writer on archaeology. A Professor of Archaeology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he is the author of Floods, Famines, and Emperors, The Great Journey, and many other popular works, and the editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

FROM THE CRITICS

Amicus Journal

There could not be a more auspicious time for Brian Fagan's book. The author has written a remarkably original and lucid account of weather's contribution to major historical events in northern Europe from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

History Magazine

A brilliant survey of history founded on an unusual common thread.

Daily Telephraph

Brian Fagan, one of America's leading archeologists, has written a most timely and riveting book.

Anthony Aveni

As Sagan was to planets and Gould is to fossils, Fagan has become our foremost explicator of the material record concerning the human past..

James Hansen

A fascinating account of the role of climate change in human affairs. —NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Read all 13 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

In The Little Ice Age, Brian Fagan demonstrates that generations we can > almost touch were profoundly influenced by nature's fickleness. As Sagan > was to planets and Gould is to fossils, Fagan has become our foremost > explicator of the material record concerning the human past.  — (Anthony Aveni, Author of Conversing with the Planets)

Fagan makes it clear, in a magisterial and meticulously even-handed survey that covers over a thousand years of history, that we ignore the power of climate at our peril. And he does so in lucid prose, with passages reminiscent of Patrick O'Brian, that every reader will find compelling. — (Theodore K. Rabb, Department of History Princeton University)