Title: |
The Little Ice Age |
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Author: |
Brian Fagan |
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Category: |
Non Fiction |
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Rating: |
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Date Reviewed: |
December 1, 2023 |
The Little Ice Age begins with the Medieval Warm Period - this was a long span of time in which Europe was actually warmer than modern times (warmer than the year 2000, which is when the book was written). This warm spell made the ice retreat, allowing the Norse to settle Greenland and Vinland. But when the Little Ice Age began and the ice increased, those colonies could not survive and were abandoned. Fagan describes a whole lot of periods where cold or wet weather ruined crops and people perished. Since his book covers 550 years of history and most of Europe, there are many natural disasters for him to write about. What is amazing is how fast the population bounces back - as soon as there is a stretch of years with benign weather, the population surges back. (The population is always on the brink of starvation but it grows whenever the food supply increases). Confronted with crop failures, the Europeans responded with religious processions, carrying relics and statues to entreat God to give them better weather. There was self-flagellation and prayers. Sometimes witches were burned. Amazingly, these measures sometimes seemed to work! Finally, in England, they switch from subsistence farming - in which each family grows all of their own food - to enclosed fields with rotating crops and ranching. A big innovation was growing turnips in a field for a year. The livestock would eat the turnip greens and their manure would fertilize the soil, which next year would be planted with crops the resulted in a higher yield. Of course, this forced a lot of peasants off of the land and into the cities, but it did produce a bigger and more reliable food supply. France did not follow England's innovations in agriculture. They continued with subsistence farming, and kept growing grains for their bread, despite the frequent crop failures due to the cold weather. Fagan thinks this was a big factor that led to the French Revolution that began in 1787. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic church banned people from eating "hot flesh" during Lent (no cows, chickens, pigs, sheep), which created a huge market for "cold flesh" - fish and whale meat. Fleets of fishing boats surrounded Iceland, hauling in bountiful catches of cod by the ton. Cod is an ideal fish - it is easily dried and salted and so is easily stored and transported. I was surprised to read that a medieval ship could bring back tons of fish. Cod thrive when water temperatures are between 2C and 13C. As the water got colder and the fisheries around Iceland were depleted, the fishermen chased the cod to the Grand Banks, and subsequently all the way to the coast of North America. European fishermen were common in the waters off of North America before the Mayflower landed and established a permanent colony there. Fagan devotes a chapter to the tragedy of the potato famine in Ireland. A blight destroyed the potato crop, and bad weather made it impossible to grow other crops. The British rulers showed remarkable indifference to the starving masses, believing that "market forces" should solve the problem. There was food available for purchase in Ireland, but none of the peasants could afford to buy it. The result was catastrophic starvation and emigration. The Irish still resent the British for their callous behavior in the face of tragedy. The Little Ice Age drove tens of thousands from Europe to emigrate to the Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The result was a massive clearing of the land to grow crops. A square kilometer of virgin forest holds about 30,000 metric tons of carbon; a square kilometer of prairie stores about 5000 metric tons of carbon. As all of these lands were brought into cultivation all of that carbon cost was released into the atmosphere. The industrial revolution is blamed for releasing so much CO2 into the air, but the clearing of so much of the Earth's surface also was a big contributor that started our current warming trend. At the end of the book, Fagan warns that it is not just CO2 and methane that warm the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons also trap heat. Ironically, air pollution cools the Earth temporarily. Until the airborne soot gets washed out of the air, the particles reflect the sun rays and prevents them from reaching the ground. This is why volcanic eruptions temporarily cool the earth, like the devastating Krakatau eruption in 1883 which led to crop failures around the globe. Although air-borne particles temporarily cool the earth, air pollution causes more than a hundred thousand premature deaths a year, which is why modern economies are cleaning up the dirty fuels like diesel and sulfur in ships. Cleaning the air ironically is leading to even more warming. At the end of The Little Ice Age Fagan warns that humanity would be wise to heed just how destructive climate change can be to human civilization. He advises that the world should work together to find away to control CO2 emissions lest we tip the climate into a disastrous state. Of course, in the 23 years since the book was published, humans have instead ramped up CO2 to ever higher levels and shrug off any notion that there might be consequences from our rash actions. Fagan ends his book with a quote from Sir Crispin Tickell: “We mostly know what to do but we lack the will to do it”. |
