Book Review: The Little Ice Age

Citation: Fagan, B.M. , 2000, The Little Ice Age: how climate made history, 1300-1850: New York, Basic Books
Link to Amazon.com

     In The Little Ice Age, author Brian Fagan explores the role of climate changes in shaping societies. Specifically he examines a period stretching from about 1000 AD to 2000 AD, which encompasses the climatic intervals known as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, and also covers our climate since the industrial revolution. He stresses that his story is not one advocating environmental determinism, but he does argue, convincingly, that changing climatic intervals indeed influenced major shifts in socioeconomic patterns (e.g. in England, the shift from "common" agricultural lands to privately owned farms practicing more diversified agriculture was partly a response to a less favorable climate interval where cereal crops failed more often and the security of a diversified food supply was warranted.). He accomplishes this by uncovering accounts (and in later centuries, measurement) of weather patterns, annual crop yields, fishery reports, changing diets, trade records, disease outbreaks, and occurrences of famine, for all of Europe. His focus is on Western Europe, perhaps because of more available information, but importantly his focus has a wide latitudinal range and he explores changes from Iceland to Spain. At times, some climatic changes would benefit the northern countries while negatively affecting mainland Europe, and vice versa. This of course is due to the complexity of our Earth's climate system, but in some ways the effect of a climate change on a society depends on how well prepared that society is to face it technologically, economically, culturally, and politically. For example, political and cultural systems in France delayed the shift to agricultural diversification and advanced crop rotation for hundreds of years after the Dutch and English transition. This was to the detriment of the French peasantry, who continued to suffer poor cereal harvests and bread shortages as colder and wetter years dominated. This delay was mainly due to 1) the lack of interest/investement in agriculture by French nobility and royalty, and 2) the adherence to cultural/gastronomical  norms and the resistance to new food products such as potatoes. Writes Fagan, "no one, whether monarch, noble, or peasant, gave much thought to broadening the diet or of encouraging new farming methods in the face of real declines in productivity (p.155)." Could we experience a similar problem as our population continues to grow?

     The lesson for us to learn is that failing to recognize and adapt to changing climate, economies, and/or land-use patterns (e.g. urabnization) can have deleterious affects on populations. Some of this adaptation can be facilitated by the government, but some of this adaptation also needs to be cultural. Recently, the UN released a report claiming the health and environmental benefits of eating insects, calling for a bigger role of insects in our diets (BBC news). Would you eat insects? Would it ever be the norm? Just imagine how long it will take for insects to be culturally accepted in a North American diet, considering we have known for a long time that eating a more vegetarian diet uses less energy than a meat-heavy diet and is healthier, but we (as nations) have made little attempt to change. We need to make decisions about our diet with our health and our environment in mind. Global food security should remain a concern in modern society, given the volatility of our changing climate. Hopefully we can implement changes before famine and disease force us to do so.
     Getting back to the book, the first two climatic intervals that Fagan explores, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, are not anthropogenically driven climate fluctuations. They are natural fluctuations of the climate system. The Medieval Warm Period was a time when sea travel in the North Sea and North Atlantic was graced with smaller ice packs and northern migration of cod populations, all positively influencing the Norse expansions to Iceland and later Greenland. Vineyards were commonplace in England. In contrast, the Little Ice Age, from ~1300 to 1850, was a period of generally cooler temperatures, but it was punctuated by abrupt warm intervals and severe cold periods. Overall, the Little Ice Age was a period of unpredictable weather extremes with many wet years that flattened cereal harvests and overly dry years that stunted growth. The lasting effect of this variability was prolonged famines and disease outbreaks, because often harvests would fail in consecutive years, putting extreme pressure on populations. Extremes in climate, fluctuating over yearly to multi-decadal scales, forced many to adapt diversified agricultural practices for improved food security. Sometimes these transitions were accompanied by marked political and economic changes, as with the French Revolution. Some places were too reliant on a single food source and eventually abandoned, such as the Norse settlements in east Greenland with cod populations that migrated south as the temperatures dropped. Even the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, while primarily driven by a potato blight, was exacerbated by an exceptionally wet period that allowed fungal spores to spread rapidly across Ireland. Political and economic factors also increased the scale of the famine.
     The last climatic interval explored is the modern industrial period from 1850 to 2000, where we have experienced an unprecedented warming trend, despite a brief cold period in the 1960s. Warming has shifted   the latitudinal ranges of major crops, opening up lands to cultivation that were previously too cold, but it has also made our climate system more extreme, and the lower latitudes experience stronger and more prolonged droughts. Fagan published this in 2000, before hurricanes Katrina, Ike, Irene, and Sandy could overexcite his mind, and even then he mentioned the presence of stronger storms and violent weather events as a consequence of warming climate. The slow comeback of modern cod fisheries has been attributed to warming waters, so as before, important food sources are affected by changing climate. Writes Fagan, "The Little Ice Age reminds us that climate change is inevitable, unpredictable, and sometimes vicious. The future promises exactly the same kinds of violent change on a local and global scale (p.214)." So then the question is, how do we prepare for climate change or climate variability? I think a proactive approach is the most sensible, given that this current climate change is driven by us! I think the wrong response is to live at the status quo and simply prepare for climate change by increasing food stocks and switching to crops better suited to a warmer climate. Unlike with the Little Ice Age, we have the capacity to reduce the rate and magnitude of climate change. 7,000,000,000 people occupy this planet (the number looks bigger written all the way out, doesn't it?). Of course our actions can affect the climate system! Importantly, we can affect the system in either direction.