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

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Brian Fagan claims that "we can now track the Little Ice Age as an intricate tapestry of short-term climatic shifts that rippled through European society during times of remarkable change - seven centuries that saw Europe emerge from medieval fiefdom and pass by stages through the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Enlightenment, the French and Industrial revolutions, and the making of modern Europe."

The interesting question is to what extent did these climatic shifts alter the course of European history?

In some distinct cases, in my opinion, the answer is quite clear-cut. Norse settlement in Greenland, for example, became impossible because of the cooler temperatures after the 13th century. Famine in rural areas throughout the Middle Ages was also an undisputed consequence of sudden weather shifts. The damage done to the Spanish Armada in 1588 by two savage storms is patently climatic in origin, too.

In most cases, however, the climate is just one - mostly minor - factor out of many that contributed to the occurrence of major historical events like the French Revolution, for example. Fagan rightly calls climatic change "a subtle catalyst." Finally, if we look at historical developments that unfolded over centuries - like the Renaissance or the making of modern Europe - the influence of the climate does not explain anything.

A book like Fagan's "The Little Ice Age" is most interesting for historians who examine grass roots history, such as the daily lives of farmers and fishermen in the Middle Ages. At first I thought the climate would provide answers for economic historians, too. But as Fagan shows, the human response to deteriorating weather differs widely from region to region. The conservative French farmers stuck to growing wheat, which is notably intolerant of heavy rainfall, whereas English and Dutch farmers diversified their crop (and became much less vulnerable to bad weather). The weather alone does not explain this development. Obviously, an economic historian who is interested in the question "why are people better off in this country (or region, society, etc.) than elsewhere?" has to look to other factors than the weather when he seeks for answers.

So far, the climate has been a footnote in World History. Nonetheless, this footnote can be quite interesting, as "The Little Ice Age" shows. The book is divided into four parts. Part One describes the Medieval Warm Period, roughly from 900 to 1200. Parts Two and Three describe how people reacted to the cooling weather, and how devastating climatic changes are for societies whose agriculture is at subsistence level. Part Four covers the end of the Little Ice Age and the sustained warming of modern times. All four parts make for fascinating, sometimes even disturbing reading; and for the reader new to the field Fagan offers the basic explanations of the effects of oceanic currents and air pressure on the climate in Europe.

Bottom line: A good introduction to the subject aimed at the general reading public. It largely exploits earlier literature on the subject, however. And while asking very broad questions, the book bases its answers on a narrow range of data mostly pertaining to northern Europe.

_The Little Ice Age_ by Brian Fagan is a fascinating, very readable, and well researched book on the science and history of a particular period of climatic history, the "Little Ice Age," which lasted approximately from 1300 to 1850. Despite the name, the Little Ice Age (a term coined by glacial geologist Francois Matthes in 1939, a term he used in a very informal way and without capitalized letters) was not a time of unrelenting cold. Rather, it was an era of dramatic climatic shifts, cycles of intensely cold winters and easterly winds alternating with periods of heavy spring and early summer rains, mild winters, and frequent and often devastating Atlantic storms as well as periods of droughts, light northeasterly winds, and intense summer heat. The Little Ice Age was "an endless zigzag of climatic shifts," few lasting more than 25 years or so.

Nevertheless the climate of the time proved difficult and overall was uniformly cooler, often considerably so, than the time before and afterwards. The Little Ice Age was an era when there used to be winter fairs on the frozen River Thames during the time of King Charles II, one that produced the great gales that devastated the Spanish Armada in 1588, was when George Washington's Continental Army endured a brutal winter in Valley Forge in 1777-1778, when pack ice surrounded Iceland for much of the year, when Alpine glaciers destroyed villages and advanced kilometers from their present positions, when hundreds of poor died of hypothermia regularly every winter in London late into the 19th century. It was also a time of massive rainy periods, such as the immense rains of 1315 and 1316 that helped stop the armies of French King Louis X from crushing the rebellious Flemings and produced an immense famine as crops couldn't survive the near unending rain.

Piecing together the climatic history of the Little Ice Age has been a challenge, one that required a multidisciplinary approach. Fagan recounted how reliable instrument records only go back a few centuries and then primarily only for Europe and North America. Researchers have instead relied on information obtained from tree rings, ice cores, lake and marine bottom sediment cores, wine harvest records, analysis of the weather portrayed in art of the period, and anecdotal written records of country clergymen and gentleman scientists to piece together what the weather was like during the time period.

Although the causes of the Little Ice Age are not completely understood, much of it had to do with the actions of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a "seesaw" of atmospheric pressure between a persistent high over the Azores and an equally prevalent low over Iceland. Using charts and maps, Fagan showed how the NAO governs the position and strength of the North Atlantic storm track and thus Europe's rainfall. The NAO index shows the constant shifts in the oscillation between these two areas, with a high NAO index indicating low pressure around Iceland and high pressure in the Azores, a condition producing westerly winds, powerful storms, more summer rains, mild winters, and dry conditions in southern Europe. A low NAO index signaled high pressure around Iceland, low pressure in the Azores, weaker westerlies, much colder winters, with cold air flowing from the north and east. The exact reasons for the shifts in the NAO result from a complex interaction between sea-surface temperatures, the Gulf Stream, distribution of sea ice, and solar energy output. Additionally, several massive volcanic eruptions had an effect on the climate of the time, notably Soufriere on Saint Vincent in the Caribbean in 1812, Mayon in the Philippines in 1814, and the titanic Tambora eruption in Indonesia in 1815 (the latter with one hundred times the ash output of Mount Saint Helens).

The author noted that placing the climatic events of the Little Ice Age in a proper context in terms of human history has been subject to some debate. Many archaeologists and historians are suspicious of environmental determinism, of the notion that climate change alone was the reason for such major developments as agriculture or a particular war. However, others had felt that climate had played very little or no role in human history, and that Fagan completely rejects, primarily because throughout the Little Ice Age (even as late as the 19th century), millions of European peasants lived at the subsistence level, their survival dependent totally upon crop yields, generally what they themselves grew on land they owned or rented. It was centuries before even parts of Europe (at first the Netherlands and Britain) developed modern specialized commercial agriculture (with intensive farming and growing of nitrogen-enriching plants and animal fodder on previously fallow land) and reasonably reliable transportation networks to distribute food to larger areas. During most of Europe for the Little Ice Age, cycles of good and bad harvests, of cooler and wetter springs, meant the difference between hunger and plenty. This sufficiency or insufficiency of food was a powerful motivator for human action. Fagan wrote that while environmental determinism may be "intellectually bankrupt," climate change is the "ignored player on the historical stage."

Fagan recounted several times when the climate of the Little Ice Age played an important role in the historical events of the time. For instance while Flanders and the Netherlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and England in Stuart times really began to modernize agriculture, little innovation occurred in France, with late eighteenth century French agriculture very little different from medieval agriculture, leaving millions of poor farmers and city dwellers at the edge of starvation and at the mercy of the vagaries of climate. While the decision to not modernize rested in the hands of the nobility (who were uninterested) and in the peasants (who were often deeply suspicious of change and wedded to tradition), it was the climatic events of the late eighteen century that lead to the awful harvest of 1788, the politicization of the rural poor, and the path to the French Revolution.

Major climatic events impact history. Most of the time the impacts are short lived although severe at the time, e.g. the class 4 and 5 hurricanes that batter the U.S. Rare are the events that though short lived, have long term consequences, e.g. the bitter winters that contributed to Napoleon's and Hitler's ill-fated invasions of Russia. Or the storms that sank the Spanish Armada. Rarer still are climatic events that are themselves long-lived and have profound historical repercussions for human societies. Brian Fagan has now produced two books about these latter type of events - an earlier book about the impacts of el Nino, and the present book on the period of intense cold that gripped Europe and much of the rest of the world for about a 500 year period that ended in the middle of the 19th century. Although the writing occasionally appears hasty, or to suffer from rather incomplete editing, this is a story well told. Fagan draws upon extensive historical documents, both formal and informal, to describe the impact of a climate that not only was on average somewhat colder than that of the 20th century, but also highly variable. Indeed, the often rapid and large swings in temperature and rainfall appear to have had a severer effect on human societies than the cold itself. After all, once you know that it is going to be colder or hotter than average - and stay that way - you can take appropriate measures (at least within certain limits). But wide and unpredictable swings in temperature and precipitation can have devastating effects. Fagan is able to convey these effects in a very personal way. Fagan concludes with thoughts on the potential effects of the present global warming.

An excellent book which examines the effects of climate on civilizations but over a much longer period and in a more quantitative fashion than does Fagan is the 2nd edition (1995) of H. H. Lamb's "Climate History and the Modern World".

One need not have taken sides in the "climate debate" that is ongoing to enjoy reading this book and come away with a greater understanding of how human populations react to environmental stress. Although Fagan clearly sides with the growing number of scientists who think that global warming is primarily being forced by anthropogenic causes (e.g. emission of greenhouse gases), in this book he has presented some exciting narrative history on a topic that is often neglected.

Quite possibly, there is a great book trapped inside of this one, but the absence of a cohesive narrative line and an annoying tendency to digress make the end product a frustrating "could have been".

The topic, that of how climactic shifts influenced European history, is fascinating, and the author demonstrates a command of his topic and a well-researched point of view. However, the absence of linear story-telling (be it chronological, national, episodic) or causal relationships (the author avoids overt links between climate and historical events) makes the book read more like a series of weather reports than a well-researched treatise on the role climate played in European development. The book is at its strongest in the rare instances where the author takes a single event (the Irish Potato famine, the French revolution) and details the role of climate over a period of time. The book is at its weakest when it jumps from season to season over a period of years, detailing the weather and its causes, and drops snippets of detail from various parts of Europe. Unfortunately, the latter predominates.

In the end, I found the book frustrating. First, because of the distracting, dizzying, and often digressive narrative style. Second, because the topic has so much meat I wanted more.

Hasn't the weather been amazing lately? I mean, lately over the past hundred years, since we left the ice age? If you don't think of the weather on this scale of climate, it would be a good idea to take a look at _The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300 - 1850_ (Basic Books) by Brian Fagan. The weather has been amazing during our most recent century, but it is always more or less unpredictable, and has always fascinated people. However, the particular conditions of the Little Ice Age were peculiar, indeed, and we haven't seen anything like them for more than a century.

There are plenty strange events described in Fagan's book, things like glaciers which no longer threaten us. It is best, however, at giving a broad view of the Little Ice Age and how it affected history. Fagan does not make the mistake of "climatic determinism," carefully showing how human behavior, economics, as well as climate produced historic changes, but his links to the weather is convincing because he accepts weather as only a partial explanation. His explanations, for instance, of weather's involvement in the Viking retreat, the French Revolution, and the Irish Potato Famine are excellent.

Fagan's book makes clear that climate has affected civilization, and that humans have not always handled its changes well. His book is not a polemic about the current warming, but he acknowledges that the carbon dioxide levels and coal burning may have been among the mechanisms that produced it. Since we understand such changes only imperfectly, and since they are best shown in computer models upon which corporations can cast doubt, a surprising number of people think that global warming is not a real phenomenon. Fagan shows that the warming is real, and that our weather these days is greatly different from the Ice Age before. More importantly, he shows that people responded to the changes of the past in often lamentable ways; if ever learning from history was vital to prevent repeating it, we would do well to look at past mistakes.

Since I had found Brian Fagan's book Floods, Famines and Emperors very thought provoking, I decided to read his more recent book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850. I was not disappointed.

Professor Fagan carries on a tradition (which he freely admits was discredited in the past but is now enjoying a renaissance because of newer information) of viewing history through the eyes of a paleoclimatologist. Much of what he had said in the earlier text, namely that many of mankind's major social and cultural transitions have been climate and weather driven, made a good deal of sense to me. Episodes such as the Sea People's invasion of the ancient Levant with the ultimate collapse of the Hittite empire and the reduction of the Egyptian during the late second millennium B.C.E. have long been thought to have been the result of droughts experienced in northern Europe. Similarly the demise of the Moche in Peru, of the Mayan civilizations in Middle America, and of the pueblo cultures in the Southwestern US are believed to have been the result of el Nino/la Nina weather changes, massive rains in the case of the Moche and severe drought in the latter two cases. Although no one would say that any of these historic human changes occurred purely in response to climate, it is abundantly apparent that the economic impact of especially prolonged climate changes on large subsistence level populations tend to leave the more inflexible social systems at great risk.

The earlier book described the probable role of el Nino/ la Nina cycles on world climate, while more briefly discussing the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and it's effects. It was also concerned with much earlier cultures. The current book discusses the North Atlantic Oscillation in much greater detail and outlines it's specific effects on the climate and social environment of Europe and North America during more recent times. The material is dealt with in a very clear manner and was not difficult to understand even with my average person's more casual understanding of weather and climate.

Because the history is of events in more recent time, especially in the last half of the book, the narrative clearly has greater implications for the modern reader than the earlier book does. The Irish potato famine, for instance, was an event of great social significance whose impact on the modern politics in the United Kingdom and on the population demographics of the United States and Australia continues to this day. Certainly pertinent is the lesson of the political upheavals suffered by European governments in the 18th and 19th centuries. Those that ignored the precariousness of the lives experienced by the bulk of their population, choosing to do little or nothing to alleviate their suffering during famines, did so at their own peril. Those that refused to improve their management of their agricultural and natural environment also suffered more acutely. Even now as over half of the world's population suffers from hunger, poor sanitation, little or no health care, and a growing sense of hopelessness, the governments and people of the developed world face similar challenges and choices. Dealing with the inequities and injustices has now grown from a national to a global scale, but ignoring them could easily have the same consequences as it did for the upper and lower classes of the nascent nations. Similarly, the degeneration of the environment through overpopulation and mismanagement is looming large on our international horizon and can not be ignored for much longer.

My only complaint is that the last half of the book is riddled with dates to the point of distraction. I realize that accuracy is much to be appreciated when it comes to historic events, but in this case "before" and "after," "earlier" or "later" might have been perfectly adequate. I found that as long as I was aware of the general character of the times, its historic personalities and events, I could ignore the dates without being too misled as to time frame. I am aware that individuals like Eric the Red and Lief Erickson were not contemporary with Louis the XVI or Napoleon but that Thomas Jefferson was, etc. Someone less familiar with the events of history might find the dates more helpful.

I would definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in climatology, paleoclimatology, social change, and early modern history. For those with an interest in earlier cultures, I'd suggest Fagin's previous book Floods, Famines and Emperors

As a meteorologist, I take special interest in books such as this which relate weather to the bigger picture of world history and events. Sometimes, however, it seems as though authors (be it intentionally or simply through ignorance) sacrifice scientific integrity in favor of a more interesting story or to avoid confusing the reader, or fall into the related trap of getting really bogged down in a quagmire of equations and esoteric scientific terminology which have little place in a book written for the lay-person.

This book successfully avoids both of these traps. The author (an archaeologist) clearly demonstrates that he went to considerable effort to understand the science behind what he is discussing, and he effectively relates the climate fluctuations experienced in the "Little Ice Age" to the evolution of society at the time. This is done in a manner that anyone can understand, as he explains important concepts in a very readable fashion embedded within the text. Also, he is careful to note how little we still really understand about climate change, and shies away from the "Chicken Little" doomsday sensationalism so prevalent today. This said, he also notes that climate change is definitely an issue we should be concerned with, as one way or another it will have a strong impact on our future and should not be ignored.

Overall, I found this to be a very interesting book that read very well and recommend it to anyone interested in how weather can affect human life and world history. Fellow meteorologists out there may wish for a few more technical details, but hey, that's what the AMS journals are for. :-)

In this fascinating book, Professor Fagan introduces something of a climactic history of Europe. The first chapter covers the Medieval Warm Period of 900 to 1300 AD, when Greenland supported a thriving dairy-producing economy, and when French vintners sought protection against the import of fine English wines! Also sprinkled through the book are references to a Mini-Ice Age that extended from 500 to 900 AD, and an earlier warm period extending from 100 to 400 AD.

The second chapter chronicles the traumatic ordeal that Europe experienced as the planet cooled and weather took on new, harsher patterns. The author then continues on to document the tribulations of Little Ice Age Europe, and the changes that the new environment spurred. In the final chapter, the end of the Little Ice Age is covered, along with the author's thoughts on Global Warming.

This book is absolutely fascinating. Most history books do not mention the climate, except as background. Professor Fagan, on the other hand, rightly shows how the climate can be a major factor. The book is easily read (and not academic in tone), and very informative.

I must admit that this book has changed some of my opinions on Global Warming, and given me a great deal to think about. I am fascinated by the apparent yo-yoing of global temperatures throughout history, and hope to find a book that looks at the subject over a longer timeframe. This is a great book, and I recommend it to everyone.

Until recently, the role of climate change in history could not have been considered with any accuracy. After all, beginning in British India, man only began keeping relatively accurate records about a hundred years ago and scientific studies of ice cores and tree rings are recent developments. Now, scientists have provided historians with data going back thousands of years, which has allowed them to examine the graphs of annual cycles of warmer and cooler temperatures and compare these to historical events. The end of The Great Ice Age some 15,000 years ago and the recession of the massive glaciers that covered much of Europe in the last 12,000 years, allowed the growth of civilization and the cultivation of annual crops for the first time. In this excellent book Fagen - an Archaeology Professor at U.C. Santa Barbara - contrasts the Medieval Warm Period of 900-1300 with the Little Ice Age, which followed. While the significantly warmer weather of the Medieval Warm Period allowed the English to cultivate wine grapes and the Vikings, in their open "long boats" to settle Greenland - which was actually quite green - and to explore North America, the Little Ice Age, with its dramatically colder temperatures and longer winters helped to hasten the agricultural revolution of the 18th century, deepen farming problems in slow-to-reform France which helped to widen discontent with the Ancien Regime and to contribute to the severity of the Irish Potato Famine which killed millions and sent millions or Irish to America. An important note is that the centuries of the Medieval Warm Period were the warmest centuries in the last 8,000 years and several degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than today. One of the fascinating observations in the book is just how much temperatures fluctuate on an annual basis and that even in the midst of a general warming or cooling trend; there are individual years that are warm and cool. So, clearly drawing conclusions from a warm winter or two - as television weathermen and agenda driven commentators are prone to do - is sheer folly. Even though the author feels that we probably are in the midst of a general warming trend that began about 1850, which he feels can have dramatic consequences, he is qualified in his endorsement of the Global Warming theory. Fagen makes notes of the incredible complexity of the computer modeling necessary for climate research, the lack of certainty on the role of the sun that provides us with our light and heat and the difficulty of knowing whether to attribute planetary warming to man's influence or naturally occurring factors. This book is an important one for anyone

I'm amused by the observations of "professional meteorologists" and others who take offense at Brian Fagan's science. The Little Ice Age is more a storybook of hypotheses dressed out as plausible narratives than a scientific treatise. More importantly, it's an implicit paean to the sheer ingenuity of climatological researchers in building data sets--from tree rings, ancient ice cores, statisitical studies of cloud cover in European master paintings, and other hard-to-cull sources--to explore historical climate in general, and "the little ice age" in particular. Climatologists and meteorologists know all about the North Atlantic Oscillation (most of us have surely heard of El Niño, the Southern Oscillation) but few of us understand how the interaction of the NAO, currents, and the secular tendencies of air movements have helped create history. Most readers, I suspect, will be hooked early in the book by the tales of Viking sailors' westward explorations, facilitated by warming that allows them literally to skip along the retreating Arctic ice toward cod fisheries newly abundant in the warmer western waters. These and other stories of climate related history--droughts, famines, disease, conquest, and on and on--give the reader a fresh appreciation for the raw interconnectedness of, well, everything. (The Little Ice Age is, moreover, a useful companion to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, the admirers of which will find much to admire here.)

In addition to an occasional discursiveness that loses the reader in thickets of "climate" but little relationship to "thesis," Fagan also slips in his final observations on global warming and how it fits into the long pattern of weather from 1300 to the present. Unfortunately for his own argument--the rather conventional one that accepts the abnormality of contemporary variation in warming due to human, as opposed to natural cyclical, activity--Fagan stumbles over the fact that current temperatures are still only APPROACHING those of the period antedating the little ice age, c. 1000-1200. That is, before industrialization, six billion earthly inhabitants, all those carbon emissions, and the rest.

These shortcomings are, however, an acceptable price to pay. Fagan is an eminent antropologist, bringing to this book a wealth of cross-disciplinary data and much light on many topics. He is, moreover, a lively and entertaining writer who is, therefore, quite easy to recommend. And I do, heartily.