What Was Life Like In The Little Ice Age? – Part I

        It is widely accepted that the planet has warmed up by a degree or so since the end of the Little Ice Age about 150 years ago. We are regularly told that this increase in temperature has already  caused  widespread damage to the global environment, from dead polar bears and rising sea levels to extreme weather and famine. The implication is clear – the world was a much better place 200 years ago. But what was it like back then? Were conditions then really better than now?

         There is an interesting book out called “The Little Ice Age” which describes life during those times. The author, Brian Fagan, is a Professor of Archaeology and I should add that it is clear from his book that he is a firm believer in AGW. It contains a good deal of useful information. (Everything that follows is based on the book).

Medieval Warming Period

A look back to the Medieval Warming Period offers an insight into how things changed in the following centuries. Most people are aware that the Vikings colonised and farmed parts of Greenland in ways that are still to this day not possible. In Europe summer temperatures were between 0.7C and 1.0C warmer than 20th Century averages. Central European summers were even warmer, as much as 1.4C warmer than now. During the height of the Warm Period, so many lords quaffed prime English wines that the French tried to negotiate trade agreements to exclude them from the Continent.

Populations rose sharply during medieval times. Numerous examples are quoted which show how crops were grown at altitudes where crops cannot be supported today such as Dartmoor and the Pennine Moors. In Scandinavia farming spread 100 to 200 meters farther up valleys and hillsides in central Norway, from levels that had been static for more than 1000 years. To the south in the Alps, tree levels rose sharply and farmers planted deeper and deeper into the mountains. During late prehistoric times, numerous copper mines had flourished in the Alps until advancing ice sealed them off; late medieval miners reopened some of these when the ice retreated.

This quote from the book seems to sum up the times.

For five centuries, Europe basked in warm, settled weather, with only the occasional bitter winters, cool summers and memorable storms. Summer after summer passed with long, dreamy days, golden sunlight and bountiful harvests. Compared with what was to follow, these centuries were a climatic golden age.

Greenland

Eirik the Red is credited with discovering Greenland in the 10th Century and Viking colonists followed him to set up farming settlements as far north as Godthab. They found the green summer pastures were better than either back home in Norway or Iceland. However in the 13th Century Greenland and Iceland experienced increasing cold. Sea ice spread south creating difficulties for Norse ships sailing from Iceland as early as 1203. By 1250 many fewer ships made the crossing to Greenland and those that did had to take a more hazardous route further south in the open Atlantic to avoid pack ice off southeastern Greenland.

Around 1350 a Norse party from the Eastern settlement in Greenland ventured north to aid the Western settlement around Godthab. They found the settlement deserted and discovered that the inhabitants had butchered their dairy cows (in direct violation of ancient Norse Law) and finally resorted to eating their prized hunting dogs. The ice core analysis for 1343-1362 reveal two decades of much colder summers than usual.

In 1492 Pope Alexander VI remarked “shipping to Greenland is very infrequent because of the extensive freezing of the waters – no ship having put into shore, it is believed, for eighty years”. Around this time the Norse gave up their foothold at the warmer Eastern settlement. The Little Ice Age had started.

 

Extent of the Little Ice Age

There is been plenty of historical evidence which confirms the existence of a much colder climate in much of Europe between the 14th and 19th Centuries. This is not surprising because there is such a wealth of historical records and documents which has been handed down from the Europe of those days. The book however presents considerable evidence that the phenomenon was a worldwide one:-

1) In New Zealand the Franz Joseph glacier was “a mere pocket of ice on a frozen snowfield nine centuries ago”…. “Then Little Ice Age cooling began and the glacier thrust downslope into the valley below smashing into the great rain forests that flourished there, felling giant trees like matchsticks. By the early 18th Century, Franz Joseph’s face was within 3 km of the Pacific Ocean” .

“ The high tide of glacial advance at Franz Joseph came between the late 17th Century and early 19th Century, just as it did in the European Alps”.

2) “ Glaciers in the European Alps advanced significantly around 1600 to 1610, again from 1690 to 1700, in the 1770’s and around 1820 and 1850”.

3) “ Ice sheets in Alaska, the Canadian Rockies and Mount Rainier in the NW United States moved forward simultaneously”.

4) “ Glaciers expanded at the same times during the 19th Century in the Caucasus, the Himalayas and China.

5) “The Qualccaya ice core in Peru provides evidence of frequent intense cold from 1500 to 1720, with prolonged droughts and cold cycles from 1720 to 1860”.

6) “ High mountains in the Andes of Ecuador were perennially snow-capped until the late 19th Century”

7) “Travellers in Scotland reported permanent snow cover on the Cairngorm Hills at about 1200 meters”

8 ) “The late 1870’s were equally cold in China and India, where between 14 and 18 million people perished from famines caused by cold, drought and monsoon failure.

9)  Again in the 1870’s “Antarctic ice extended much further north than in Captain Cook’s time a century earlier.”… “Sailing ships traversing the Roaring Forties from Australia to Cape Horn regularly sighted enormous tabular icebergs, with some seen as far north as the mouth of the River Plate, just 35⁰ south latitude”

10) “In Norway, glaciers advanced destroying farms and burying valuable summer pasture”.

Glaciers

We tend to regard alpine landscapes today such as those in Switzerland as being picturesque and think that the people there live in an beautiful idyll. It was not always so. In the 16th Century the occasional traveller would remark on the poverty and suffering of those who lived on the marginal lands in the glacier’s shadow. At that time Chamonix was an obscure poverty stricken parish in “a poor country of barren mountains never free of glaciers and frosts…half the year there is no sun…the corn is gathered in the snow…and is so mouldy it has to be heated in the oven”. Even animals were said to refuse bread made from Chamonix wheat. Avalanches caused by low temperatures and deep snowfall were a constant hazard. In 1575 a visitor described the village as “a place covered with glaciers…often the fields are entirely swept away and the wheat blown into the woods and onto the glaciers”.

In 1589 the Allalin glacier in Switzerland descended so low that it blocked the Saas valley, forming a lake. The moraine broke a few months later, sending floods downstream. Seven years later 70 people died when similar floods from the Gietroz glacier submerged the town of Martigny.

As the glaciers relentlessly pushed downslope thousands of acres of farm land were ruined and many villages were left uninhabitable such as La Bois where a government official noted “where there are still six houses. all uninhabited save two, in which live some wretched women and children…Above and adjoining the village there is a great and horrible glacier of great and incalculable volume which can promise nothing but the destruction of the houses and lands which still remain”. Eventually the village was completely abandoned.

The same official visited the hamlet of La Rosiere in 1616 and found" “The great glacier of La Rosiere every now and then goes bounding and thrashing or descending…There have been destroyed 43 journaux of land with nothing but stones and 8 houses, 7 barns and 5 little granges have been entirely ruined and destroyed”.

Alpine glaciers, which had already advanced steadily between 1546 and 1590, moved aggressively forward again between 1600 and 1616. Villages that had flourished since medieval times were in danger or already destroyed. During the long period of glacial retreat and relative quiet in earlier times, opportunistic farmers had cleared land within a kilometer of what seemed to them to be stationary ice sheets. Now their descendants paid the price with their villages and livelihoods threatened.

Between 1627 and 1633 Chamonix lost a third if its land through avalanches, snow, glaciers and flooding, and the remaining hectares were under constant threat. In 1642 the Des Bois glacier advanced “over a musket shot every day, even in August”.

By this time people near the ice front were planting only oats and a little barley in fields that were under snow for most of the year. Their forefathers had paid their tithes in wheat. Now they obtained but one harvest in three and even the grain rotted after harvesting. “The people here are so badly fed they are dark and wretched and seem only half alive”.

In 1715 the village of Le Pre-du-Bar vanished under a glacier caused landslide. The glacial high tide in the Alps came around 1750 and gradually the glaciers began their retreat, much to the relief of the people who lived there.

 

[ Let me be absolutely clear – those who regret the retreat of glaciers in recent times show a total ignorance of and disregard for the horror and suffering of the communities that had to live with their constant threat.]

Part II – Storms, Floods and Famines – follows soon