Philipp Blom writes:

The Little Ice Age offers a historical point of cautious comparison for the most existentially urgent problem of the present. Cooling is not heating, of course, and the Little Ice Age was almost certainly not man-made. Yet while the cultural, economic, political, and technological context was quite different, it was exactly these areas of human life that would change dramatically as direct or indirect consequences of societies being forced to adapt to climate change.

A whole world had been turned upside down. During the most intensive period of the Little Ice Age, roughly from 1570 to 1685, feudal economies had changed into market-based ones; urban centers flourished; trade was becoming international, funded through stock markets and banking systems; the scientific method of theorizing and seeking empirical proof emerged; vast numbers of schools and universities were founded; an unprecedented number of slaves were sold and exploited; warfare was revolutionized and professionalized; and ideas such as freedom and equality, tolerance and universalism, had ceased to be sheer heresy and were being taken seriously—the first step toward the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

A medieval world had pivoted toward a modern one—not simply because of a domino effect beginning with the Little Ice Age but through a series of interlinked developments, all of which owed part of their urgency and dynamism to changes made necessary or encouraged by climate change. This was a global phenomenon, its reach well documented down to the local level by scientific analyses and modeling. At the same time the world saw global waves of hunger and power struggles, according to contemporary observers, parts of Ming China lost half their inhabitants; during the so-called Smutnoye Vremya, or Time of Troubles, Russia suffered a famine that killed two million and plunged into civil war and peasant rebellions; and even South American societies suffered periods of instability and agricultural collapse, though the existing documentation does not support a direct link with cooler temperatures in these regions. [Continue reading…]