The Little Ice Age

Author: Brian Fagan
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541618572
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Only in the last decade have climatologists developed an accurate picture of yearly climate conditions in historical times. This development confirmed a long-standing suspicion: that the world endured a 500-year cold snap -- The Little Ice Age -- that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 until 1850. The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable and often very cold years of modern European history, how climate altered historical events, and what they mean in the context of today's global warming. With its basis in cutting-edge science, The Little Ice Age offers a new perspective on familiar events. Renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold affected Norse exploration; how changing sea temperatures caused English and Basque fishermen to follow vast shoals of cod all the way to the New World; how a generations-long subsistence crisis in France contributed to social disintegration and ultimately revolution; and how English efforts to improve farm productivity in the face of a deteriorating climate helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and hence for global warming. This is a fascinating, original book for anyone interested in history, climate, or the new subject of how they interact.

The Frigid Golden Age

Author: Dagomar Degroot
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108317588
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Book Description
Dagomar Degroot offers the first detailed analysis of how a society thrived amid the Little Ice Age, a period of climatic cooling that reached its chilliest point between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The precocious economy, unusual environment, and dynamic intellectual culture of the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century Golden Age allowed it to thrive as neighboring societies unraveled in the face of extremes in temperature and precipitation. By tracing the occasionally counterintuitive manifestations of climate change from global to local scales, Degroot finds that the Little Ice Age presented not only challenges for Dutch citizens but also opportunities that they aggressively exploited in conducting commerce, waging war, and creating culture. The overall success of their Republic in coping with climate change offers lessons that we would be wise to heed today, as we confront the growing crisis of global warming.

A New Little Ice Age Has Started

Author: Lawrence Pierce
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781515158516
Category : Cold waves (Meteorology)
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
The debate is over. Science has been proven right by the events of the last eighteen years. Climate is changing: global warming does not exist, but a New Little Ice Age has already started. The Author, one of B.C.'s leading trial lawyers, now retired, has assembled all the evidence to convince even the most devout global warming believer including: - The opinions of dozens of scientists who predict a return to Little Ice Age conditions. - An explanation of the connection between low sunspots and cold weather. - Analysis of the solar cycles that bring climate change and ice ages to Earth. - Discussion of the conditions during the last Little Ice Age (1300-1850). - Comparison of today's weather events with past ice ages. - A complete debunking of the "Global Warming" theory. He discusses the totally corrupt practices of the U.N. IPCC, the organization that delivered the global warming and ocean acidification scares to the world, and warns of the certainty of mass starvation, disease and social unrest, particularly among the poor in Canada and the U.S. and in the Third World. There is hope for North Americans. Warm Zones exist and based on his own experiences as a 'Back to the Land" advocate in the 1970s, he suggests ways to survive and prosper during the next 50 difficult years. Part of the proceeds of the sale of this book will go to the homeless and hungry in Canada and the United States.

A Cold Welcome

Author: Sam White
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674981340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
Cundill History Prize Finalist Longman–History Today Prize Finalist Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize “Meticulous environmental-historical detective work.” —Times Literary Supplement When Europeans first arrived in North America, they faced a cold new world. The average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia. The effects of this climactic upheaval were stark and unpredictable: blizzards and deep freezes, droughts and famines, winters in which everything froze, even the Rio Grande. A Cold Welcome tells the story of this crucial period, taking us from Europe’s earliest expeditions in unfamiliar landscapes to the perilous first winters in Quebec and Jamestown. As we confront our own uncertain future, it offers a powerful reminder of the unexpected risks of an unpredictable climate. “A remarkable journey through the complex impacts of the Little Ice Age on Colonial North America...This beautifully written, important book leaves us in no doubt that we ignore the chronicle of past climate change at our peril. I found it hard to put down.” —Brian Fagan, author of The Little Ice Age “Deeply researched and exciting...His fresh account of the climatic forces shaping the colonization of North America differs significantly from long-standing interpretations of those early calamities.” —New York Review of Books

The Little Ice Age

Author: Jean M. Grove
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134857462
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 869

Book Description
The evidence for the Little Ice Age, the most important fluctuation in global climate in historical times, is most dramatically represented by the advance of mountain glaciers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their retreat since about 1850. The effects on the landscape and the daily life of people have been particularly apparent in Norway and the Alps. This major book places an extensive body of material relating to Europe, in the form of documentary evidence of the history of the glaciers, their portrayal in paintings and maps, and measurements made by scientists and others, within a global perspective. It shows that the glacial history of mountain regions all over the world displays a similar pattern of climatic events. Furthermore, fluctuations on a comparable scale have occurred at intervals of a millennium or two throughout the last ten thousand years since the ice caps of North America and northwest Europe melted away. This is the first scholarly work devoted to the Little Ice Age, by an author whose research experience of the subject has been extensive. This book includes large numbers of maps, diagrams and photographs, many not published elsewhere, and very full bibliographies. It is a definitive work on the subject, and an excellent focus for the work of economic and social historians as well as glaciologists, climatologists, geographers, and specialists in mountain environment.

Nature's Mutiny

Author: Philipp Blom
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1509890424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold.' - Christopher Marlowe In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe. While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and ‘frost fairs’ were erected on a frozen Thames – with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city. Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this ‘Little Ice Age’, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature’s Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.

The Crisis of the 14th Century

Author: Martin Bauch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110657961
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
Pre-modern critical interactions of nature and society can best be studied during the so-called "Crisis of the 14th Century". While historiography has long ignored the environmental framing of historcial processes and scientists have over-emphasized nature's impact on the course of human history, this volume tries to describe the at times complex modes of the late-medieval relationship of man and nature. The idea of 'teleconnection', borrowed from the geosciences, describes the influence of atmospheric circulation patterns often over long distances. It seems that there were 'teleconnections' in society, too. So this volumes aims to examine man-environment interactions mainly in the 14th century from all over Europe and beyond. It integrates contributions from different disciplines on impact, perception and reaction of environmental change and natural extreme events on late Medieval societies. For humanists from all historical disciplines it offers an approach how to integrate written and even scientific evidence on environmental change in established and new fields of historical research. For scientists it demonstrates the contributions scholars from the humanities can provide for discussion on past environmental changes.

The Little Ice Age

Author: Jean M. Grove
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134980663
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 594

Little Ice Ages Vol2 Ed2

Author: Jean M Grove
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134701829
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

Author: Philipp Blom
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631494058
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
“A sweeping story, embracing developments in economics and science, philosophy and exploration, religion and politics. . . . Beautifully clear.”— John Lanchester, The New Yorker Hailed as an “arresting” (Lawrence Klepp, New Criterion) account, Nature’s Mutiny chronicles the great climate crisis of the seventeenth century that totally transformed Europe’s social and political fabric. Best-selling historian Philipp Blom reveals how a new, radically altered Europe emerged out of the “Little Ice Age” that diminished crop yields across the continent, forcing thousands to flee starvation in the countryside to burgeoning urban centers, and even froze London’s Thames, upon which British citizens erected semipermanent frost fairs with bustling kiosks, taverns, and brothels. Highlighting how politics and culture also changed drastically, Blom evokes the era’s most influential artists and thinkers who imagined groundbreaking worldviews to cope with environmental cataclysm. As we face a climate crisis of our own, “Blom’s prodigious synthesis delivers a sharply-focused lesson for the twenty-first century: the profound effects of just a few degrees of climate change can alter the course of civilization, forever” (Laurence A. Marschall, Natural History).