The Little Ice Age

December 4, 2000
The role of climatic change in human history remains open to question, due in large part to scant data. Fagan, professor of archeology at UC Santa Barbara, contributes substantively to the increasingly urgent debate. Contending with the dearth of accurate weather records from a few parts of the world, for little over a century Fagan (Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Ni o and the Fate of Civilizations) draws discerning connections between an amazing array of disparate sources: ice cores, tree rings, archeological digs, tithing records that show dates of wine harvests, cloud types depicted in portraits and landscapes over time. He details human adaptation to meteorologic events for example, the way the Dutch, in the face of rising sea levels, engineered sea walls and thus increased their farmland by a third between the late 16th and early 19th centuries. Explanations of phenomena like the North Atlantic Oscillation (which "governs... the rain that falls on Europe") lucidly advance Fagan's conviction that, though science cannot decide if the current 150-year warming trend (with one slight interruption) is part of a normal cycle, we should err on the side of caution. His study of the potential for widespread famine further bolsters his nonpartisan argument for a serious consideration of rapid climatic shifts. But Fagan doesn't proffer a sociopolitical polemic. He notes that we lack the political will to effect change, but refrains from speculating on future environmental policy. Illus. not seen by PW. (Mar. 1) Forecast: This topical book will appeal to fans of John McPhee, as well as to science and history scholars. With publicity targeted at the coasts (author tour in L.A., San Francisco and N.Y.; a talk at N.Y.'s Museum of Natural History), a forthcoming review in Discovery magazine and Fagan's enthusiastic readership, it should sell well.

February 15, 2001
During the Little Ice Age approximately the 14th to the mid-19th centuries the climate of northern Europe turned volatile and markedly cooler. As Fagan (archaeology, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) explains, while this did not directly cause major historical events, it catalyzed significant social, political, and economic changes throughout the region. Widespread reliance on subsistence farming meant that bad weather and shortened growing seasons led to food shortages, even famines. Hunger, in turn, along with disease, war, crime, and economic forces, provoked widespread sociopolitical upheaval, including the collapse of Norse settlements in Greenland, the French Revolution, and the Irish Famine. While not unique in examining the influence of weather on the history of civilization (see John D. Post's The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World, 1977. o.p., and Fagan's own Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Ni$o and the Fate of Civilizations, Basic, 2000), this book is noteworthy for its chronological and geographical scope. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2001
Life in early 1300s northern Europe was prosperous. Vineyards flourished in England, Vikings settled Greenland, and a wealthy church admired the recently built Gothic cathedrals. The good times stopped rolling in 1315. A deluge ruined spring planting, which caused widespread famine. Centuries of erratic cooling persisted until after the Industrial Revolution had begun. Piecing the period together, Fagan acquaints readers with the fascinating subject of paleoclimatology. Acknowledging that scientists don't agree over the dates of this so-called little ice age (some confine the appellation to the 1650-1715 period, when the Thames regularly froze), Fagan still convincingly presents the half-millennium-long freeze-out as a coherent event. Its trigger, climatologists believe, was the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a seesaw of high and low pressure that governs westerlies flowing over Europe. The NAO's effect on human history is indirect yet substantial enough to license Fagan's intriguing connections between climate and the influential cod fishery (see Mark Kurlansky's " Cod," 1997), France's agricultural backwardness before the revolution, and the Irish potato famine. A nimble, lively, provocative book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)