The Little Ice Age
How Climate Made History 1300-1850
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The groundbreaking history of how climate change transformed the world
“Fagan shows in this wonderful book how vulnerable human society is to climatic zigzags.”―New Scientist
The Little Ice Age tells the fascinating story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history. Using sources ranging from the business records of medieval monasteries to modern chemical analysis of ice cores, renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan reveals the five-hundred-year cold snap that began in the fourteenth century. As Fagan shows, the increasingly cold and stormy weather dramatically altered fishing and farming practices, and it shaped familiar events, from Norse exploration to the settlement of North America, and from the French Revolution to the Irish potato famine to the Industrial Revolution. History demonstrates that climate change does not come in gentle, easy stages—and its influence on human life is profound.
A lively and groundbreaking history, The Little Ice Age offers essential context for understanding today’s age of global warming.
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.
