Climate change: the Little Ice Age (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 04, 2019, 19:33 (2061 days ago) @ David Turell

A definitive drop in temperature changed society according to this essay:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/how-the-little-ice-age-changed-history?ut...

"The reality is that our planet oscillates between phases with no ice, phases with all ice, and phases in the middle. The middle is where we happen to be right now—a fact that is responsible for our faulty perception of the earth’s climate as accommodating and stable.

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"During this epoch, often known as the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Compared with the extremes of snowball earth, that might not sound like much, but for people who lived through it the change was intensely dramatic. This was also the period between the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world. In a new book, “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present” (Liveright), the German-born, Vienna-based historian Philipp Blom argues that this is no coincidence—that there is a complex relationship between the social, economic, and intellectual disruption caused by the changed climate and the emerging era of markets, exploration, and intellectual freedom which constituted the beginning of the Enlightenment.

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"The cooling happened in phases, with an initial drop beginning around 1300, and a sharper and more abrupt onset of cold starting in 1570 and lasting for about a hundred and ten years. It is the latter period that provides the focus for Blom’s book. Agreement about the fact that the cooling occurred, however, is not matched by an equivalent consensus about why.

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"Although Blom’s focus is Europe, the most densely settled northerly area of the planet, he makes it clear that the effects of the Little Ice Age were global in scale. In China, then as now the most populous country in the world, the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, undermined by, among other things, erratic harvests.

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"The most consequential effect of the frigid weather, Blom argues convincingly, was to disrupt the harvest, especially the grain harvest. It led to a fundamental shift in the social order across Europe, and beyond. The Little Ice Age amounted to “a long-term, continent-wide agricultural crisis,” as Blom writes. Grain harvests did not return to their previous levels for a hundred and eighty years. That affected everything about how society worked. Before this moment in European history, society was largely organized along feudal lines. The bulk of the population consisted of peasants, living on land owned by a lordly overclass. Town life, meanwhile, was dominated by restrictive guilds, and, in Blom’s description, it “valued social capital—class and family standing, trustworthiness, competition—but did not encourage anyone to reach beyond his station.” This settled order, which had lasted for centuries, was overturned. At first, there were panics and uprisings, food riots and rebellions, and a spike in witch trials—because, in a pre-scientific world, the idea that witches were responsible for failing harvests made as much sense as any other explanation.

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"It is a book about a new economic system and the philosophical and cultural trends that accompanied it; climate is central to the story that it tells, but the connections don’t aim for the solidity of algebraic logic. Rather, Blom is seeking to give us a larger picture that is relevant to the current moment. His book is about links and associations rather than about definitive proof; it is about networks and shifts in intellectual mood, about correlations as much as causes. Despite that, Blom’s hypothesis is forceful, and has the potential to be both frightening and, if you hold it up to the light at just the right angle, a little optimistic. The idea can be put like this: climate change changes everything."

Comment: From snowball Earth to now the climate has been very cold and very hot, and has changed the way humans have acted and organized. we aer currently still warming from the Little Ice Age.