Part of the What Do You Know About That? series
by Ruth Orr
EUROPE — Folks, let me tell you, there are few things I like more than the concept of a Good Old Fashioned Christmas. I’m not talking about a big pile of presents purchased off someone’s Amazon list that get torn through in 10 minutes and then the rest of the day is spent alone in your room reading your new books (though I am very, very guilty of doing that exact thing). I’m talking about the Christmases of Yester Year, when folks set up Christmas Markets on the river and you could ice skate between stalls, drinking hot chocolate made on a stove and buying hand-carved and painted trinkets to stick in your loved one’s stockings, hanging on a mantle overflowing with evergreen boughs. Why don’t we do that anymore?
Well, it’s not just a matter of same-day shipping and mass production of gadgets that flash and go whir. We actually, literally can’t do that whole market-on-the-river thing anymore, because it’s just not cold enough. And while today’s story is a bit about the global warming crisis that faces us all, it’s actually more about the global cooling crisis that unleashed famine, disease, and war on the world.
Let’s back up. Climate scientists looking deep into Earth’s history have found that our planet has undergone periods of warming and cooling pretty much since the get-go. Every so often, something tips the scales, and the temperatures get weird. Plants and animals have to either adapt to their new world or die, and then when the cycle shifts back the descendants of those that made it work have to do the thing all over again.
I’ve mentioned before that we are technically all living in one of Earth’s ice ages right now. Within each ice age are periods of warming, called interglacials, when the glaciers have receded, and the interglacial we inhabit at this point started about 11,000 years ago. Prior to that, the ice sheets extended much further south, and we had wooly mammoths running around. But the fact is that, at least for now, we do still have glaciers around, ergo, ice age. We’ll see how long that lasts, at some point we will tip back into a warm period, and with the amount of greenhouse gasses we pump into the air every day, that could be sooner rather than later, but again, not the point here.
The point is that we have been hanging out in a balmy little interglacial, when temperatures are reasonable and most everything’s peachy. But even within our little hotspot in time, the temperatures haven’t always been very stable.
During the medieval period, about 900-1200 CE, the northern hemisphere went through a warm period, which scientists have inventively named the Medieval Warm Period. During these few centuries, temperatures were hypothesized to be warmer and the weather more reliable. This allowed for a great deal of human expansion—for example, Norse vikings settled in snow-covered Greenland, finding it at least reasonably habitable, with pastures to raise their animals in.
The warmer weather also allowed for a lengthened agricultural growing season, and crops could be grown further north as well. More food equals more people. So what happens if those warm temperatures start… dipping?
The Little Ice Age lasted from about 1300 to 1850 CE. The temperatures dropped by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit from where they’d been before. While that number doesn’t sound very dramatic, for millions of people it was the difference between life and death.
The Baltic Sea froze over entirely, twice. Farms and even entire villages in the Swiss Alps were overrun by glaciers. Iceland’s population fell by half, as sea ice encased the island for miles in every direction, cutting them off from all help as their crops failed. Greenland’s vikings starved or fled, and the sea ice encased that landmass too. The weather became increasingly erratic, with colder, wetter springs and longer winters. England’s glorious wine industry withered on the vine. Birds froze mid-flight and tumbled out of the sky. France was swept by intense flooding, killing people and wiping out farms. Portugal was buried in snowstorms. Massive storms battered the coast, resulting in the permanent loss of large areas of land from the Dutch, German, and Danish coastlines. In 1658, it got so cold that the Swedish king was able to march his entire army across the frozen sea to attack Denmark. Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army tried to march on Russia, but was defeated by the brutal cold.
Across Europe, crop practices had to be adjusted to reflect shorter and harsher growing seasons. Alpine villages that used to be able to feed themselves handily had to resort to eating bread made from ground nutshells. Widespread famines swept through the continent, lasting roughly a winter in each place they hit. In France, Norway, and Sweden, the famines wiped out roughly ten percent of each country’s population. Estonia and Finland had it harder, losing one-fifth and one-third of their populations respectively.
The cold wet weather, poor nutrition, and movement of people made for an excellent hotbed of disease. While having to fight off starvation, people from China to Britain and everywhere in between were also ravaged by a series of plagues, including multiple outbreaks of the bubonic plague— the Black Death, which ultimately killed up to 200 million people, thirty to fifty percent of the entire population of Europe.
Folks blamed anyone they could, leading to extensive witch hunts and the burning of innocents. Witchcraft used to be an “insignificant crime”, but when people started losing crops and livestock, they decided anyone they deemed a witch ought to pay, with their lives if needed, for the loss. The colder it got, the more people were declared witches.
Anti-semitism also skyrocketed with the bad weather, as western European states experienced multiple waves of Jew-bashing, who they blamed for the spread of disease, especially the Black Death. That attitude certainly didn’t help anyone caught up in the bloodbath that was the Spanish Inquisition.
The impact of all this is immense. The agricultural crisis was a death knell for the feudal system. Revolutions abounded, perhaps most famously, the one in France, which led to the beheading of the king and the installment of Napoleon. In China, the Ming dynasty was toppled by starving and diseased masses. Since folks could no longer rely on agricultural work, they moved into the cities instead. Money rather than trade became the common means of getting new goods. The merchant class exploded and trade expanded, and with it, ideas of building global trading empires. The Dutch in particular did really well for themselves, adapting to the new climate better than many of their neighbors. That led in no small part to the creation of the Dutch East India Company, and the British East India Company after, who sailed off to exploit everyone they could get their hands on.
It wasn’t all bad though. The cold weather also caused a revolution in clothing— to avoid the icy gusts, we developed the concept of using buttons and button-holes on all our clothes. We also started wearing custom-made underwear, so there’s that.
The violinmaker Antonio Stradivari, who produced the most exquisite violins that have ever been made, had the distinct advantage of using wood grown during the Little Ice Age. The trees, struggling against the climate, grew much more slowly, and so were much denser than trees growing under regular circumstances. That density changed the tone of Stradivari’s instruments, improving sound quality.
The frozen-over rivers and canals allowed for Frost Fairs to be set up on them, the ones I’ve always wanted to see. Still, if seeing that in person would require another ice age, maybe I’m better off just romanticising it in my head.
Eventually, the temperatures began to rise once more. That may be a direct result of humans pumping pollutants into the air— all those new folks in cities triggered the Industrial Revolution, and that saw them burning insane amounts of coal and pumping the air full of soot and greenhouse gasses. While the warming temperatures were a boon to folks shivering their way out of a cold snap, they’ve run away with us now.
If the Little Ice Age can teach us anything, it’s that dramatic shifts in climate can mean hard times for everyone involved. Maybe think about putting some drought-resistant grains on your wish list this year.
Happy, Merry, Joyous holidays, everyone!
