The Little Ice Age: A World Systems Approach
In today’s world, after more than a century of the internal combustion engine and the large-scale burning of fossil fuels, the climate has come to the forefront of public debate. As both sides use evidence from past climates to support their points, at the heart of this debate is history. For this reason, as well as for the political implications that the polemics of this issue engenders, objective science and objective historical study must figure prominently, however objectivity should not be subsumed for conformity. Debate is part of the process that brings science closer to truth. The study of climate is no different and the Little Ice Age is an area of study in which there is currently a healthy debate going on. Scholars’ opinions differ on numerous aspects of this period, even to the point of disputing its existence. Topics ranging from a definition of the characteristics of the period to its starting date, and its impacts on human society and history are all part of this debate. Among the multiplicity of issues surrounding the Little Ice Age, these are chief and, in order to follow a comprehensible thread, will be the focus of this paper. Describing and analyzing the major views relating to these issues (proposed by historians and non-historians alike) should provide a relatively full picture of the debate and shed light on current thought about the topic.
The importance of climate to human history is an issue that has interested historians only relatively recently. According to M.J. Ingram, “(t)he majority of historians have been content largely to ignore” the implications of long-term climatic change on human societies.[1] Year-to-y...
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...s the ‘Little Ice Age’?” in T. Mikame (ed.) Proceedings of the International Symposium on the “Little Ice Age” Climate. (Tokyo, Department of Geography, Tokyo Metropolitan University 1992) 3
[11] Landsberg 62
[12] Landsberg 62
[13] Landsberg 62
[14] Jean M. Grove. The Little Ice Age. (London and New York, Routledge 1988) 394
[15] Grove, “The Initiation of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Regions Round the North Atlantic” 63
[16] Grove The Little Ice Age 260
[17] Ibid 416
[18] Ibid 416
[19] Ibid 391
[20] Grove “The Initiation of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Regions Round the North Atlantic” 73
[21] Lamb 307
[22] Ibid 307
[23] Ibid 278
[24] Ibid 219
[25] Ibid 218
[26] Brian Fagan. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850. (New York, Basic Books 2000) xviii
[27] Ibid 58
[28] Ibid 165
[29] Ibid 48
[30] Ibid 59
Quinn, David B. North America From Earliest Discovery to First Settlements. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977.
In his piece on climate change, Richard Lindzen addresses his stance on the heated debate of global warming. He claims that there is, in fact, no ongoing catastrophic temperature increase. Lindzen, a Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a recipient of the Jule Charney award from the American Meteorological Society (Richard Lindzen), believes that the earth goes through natural phases of warming and cooling. In this piece, he examines why he believes people have a false conception of Earth’s climate shifts.
In his essay, “Global Warming is Eroding Glacial Ice,” Revkin is arguing that global warming is constantly changing the ...
During the medieval warm period the spread of the Norse occurred. The Norse raided, traded, ventured from Scandinavia across the North Sea into France along with the Low Countries. The Norse was known as peaceful traders who kept their knowledge close on a personal level. They kept their knowledge from generations to generations. Their knowledge was always in constant use. “Nose navigators lived in intimate association with winds and waves, watching sea and sky, sighting high glaciers from afar by the characteristics ice-blink that reflects from them, predicting ice conditions from years of experience navigating near the pack” (Fagan, 5). The climate
...Clague, John J., Luckman, Brian H., Wiles, Gregory C. “Tree-Ring Dating of the Nineteenth-Century Advance of Brady Glacier and the Evolution of Two Ice- Marginal Lakes, Alaska.” The Holocene 21.4 (2001): 641-649. Sage Journals. Web. 9. Feb. 2014.
Crosby, A. (1986). Ecological imperialism the biological expansion of Europe. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Weisner, Merry E., William Bruce Wheeler, Franklin M. Doeringer, Kenneth R. Curtis. Discovering the Global Past: A Look at the Evidence. Vol.1: To 1600. Ed. 3. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. 20-43.
Americas by 14,000 ago” (O’Brien 12), after large portions of North America encountered the last ice age, which
The statement in question for this assignment puts forth various assertions: that the Little Ice Age cooled the climate worldwide, that it wasn’t the coldest period since the last ice age, and that because the earth is in a natural time of warming from this period, human-made greenhouse gasses are not plausible as a source of global warming. Some of these statements are true, but there are also fallacies within these assertions.
Palevitz, Barry A. (1999, July). Global Warming: Organisms Feel the Heat. The Scientist 13(14), 1.
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, by ecological historian Alfred W. Crosby explores how “portmanteau biota”, helped Europeans to eradicate whole societies in the Neo-Europes (xv, 89). Crosby believes that temperate zones, climates similar to that of Europe, allowed European biota to thrive, which allowed for European expansion. Crosby discusses the Norse invasions and the Crusades as examples of how Europeans were not able to expand. Crosby claims that climate was crucial to European expansion because it allowed portmanteau biota to thrive. The strength in Crosby’s argument is that he introduces ecology as a crucial factor in European expansion. However, he forgets that without technology, ecological factors would have had a limited role in European expansion to the Neo-Europes.
For these reasons, global warming stands as one of the most daunting policy issues facing our world today. This is compounded by the debate over the very existence of climate change. While countless sources of empirical evidence testify to the very real presence of climate change the world over, considerable denial of the phenomenon still exists. The argument has been made that evidence about climate change is a gross overstatement, or in some cases, a complete fabrication. Despite the evidence to the contrary, many interest groups with considerable political clout have successfully perpetuated the argument that documented changes in the environment are a product of natural cyclical changes in climate, and are not associated with human activities. However, even the acceptance of this particular brand of reality is no grounds for the disregard of environmental consciousness. Even if one accepts the premise that recent climate change is not resultant of human activity, the rationale behind environmental conservation remains ...
Just a couple weeks ago, we were complaining how winter was so cold and how it would never end in Canada; but imagine living in the glacial period, where there was a time when glaciers, large masses of ice, covered a huge portion of the Earth’s surface. Studies show that the polar ice caps, as we know them today used to cover approximately 30% of the Earth during our last Ice Age. The Earth remained in this state for thousands and thousands of years. Cold, right? According to geologists, there have been an approximate total of 5 major ice ages. They began appearing roughly 2, 300, 000 years ago, up until the most recent one, approximately 10,000 years ago; it was the ice age period/glacial period, and that’s was exactly what happened. Ice Ages are points in time when the temperatures around the world, including the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth, were cold consistently for a span of over multiple thousand years. Unlike the average temperature of 220C we have now, the ice ages were much colder, having an average of approximately 50C.
In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” he begins with “…the proposition that anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” With this initial statement, Chakrabarty declares that the advent of manmade climate change in the anthropocene, humans can no longer be considered separately from nature as they had been previously segregated by Enlightenment and western thinking. In other words, “humanism,” or human-centered thinking is neither relevant nor reasonable in the face of global climate change. According to Chakrabarty, since human and natural history are both intrinsically tied together, the fate of mankind is now
While critical of global warming alarmism, this documentary does not doubt that the earth is warming. Instead, they claim that scientific evidence demonstrates that such warming is but a natural variation in earth’s climatic history, similar to the Medieval Warm Period of the Little Ice Age. The documentary uses several lines of evidence to back up this claim, including ice core data that they claim when rightly interpreted shows carbon dioxide as having a lag time when earth’s climate has warmed in the recent and distant past, making it doubtful that it could be responsible for the increase in temperature that has been observed recently. The timing of the recent warming, which was most pronounced in the late Nineteenth Century through World War II, stopped and reversed to a cooling trend in the mid-Twentieth Century, and then rapidly warmed again in the past three decades, is dissected. Since this warming began before the advent of major human sources of greenhouse gas emissions and the period of most dramatic industrial...