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Title: The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850
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Manufacturer: Basic Books
List Price: $16.95
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| The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Basic Books Eye opening | Superbly done. The book really hammers out the crucial points of how dramatic historical events were somehow related to violent climate shifts that lasted over 500 years.
The book examines origins of these violent climate shifts, discusses life during the middle ages and talks about intriguing topics of world events shaped by global climate. Such famous events are the French Revolution, Bubonic Plague of the 1300's, Potato Irish Famine, JamesTown to name just a few.
The Arthur is very to the point and uses excellent statistics and data to back things up.
Truly an epic book that will completely change your outlook on history forever.
Its only 200 pages and can be finished in a weekend. Get it and enjoy.
| | The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Basic Books The Little Ice Age | | The book was in better condition than expected and arrived sooner than expected, Thank you. | | The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Basic Books Unbiased climate effects on Europe in centuries past | This book is a social history of Western Europe and other areas from c.1500-1900. It describes how volcanos, sunspots, ocean currents and other natural phenomena unknown or unappreciated by these people affected their lives. It's an easy read full of anecdotes with a dose of science and the many methods scientists use to determine climate so long ago.
It's politically neutral and emphasizes the complex processes involved but it's essentially a social history of a period where Winters and Summers were highly variable without much human influence. A great read for an easy understanding of some of the complexities behind the "climate debate". | | The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Basic Books imbalance | | Interesting with several unique approaches. The problem for me rests with his intricate explanations of causes of climate changes from North Atlantic Oscillation,Sun spots,solar flares, ocean currents, polar melting, volcanoes. methane release, and a host of other causes. Yet,he speaks in unsubstantated conviction that todays warming is due to mans fossil fuel use. Then he concludes with "The Little Ice Age reminds us that climate change is inevitable, unpredictable, and sometimes vicious.I would ask him does he believe this is really caused by man? | | The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Basic Books Must Read | Since Climate Change is now all the rage, and many partisans have taken decidely striden sides, this book may be a bit controversal. Dr Fagan is niether an Earth Scientist nor a Climatologist. However,he is a well known anthropologist with a decided interest in how Climate Change affects civilizations and individuals. This book was written for the layman and not for the professional climatologist.
This book focuses mainly on how Climate Change -namely a cooling climate- wrought misery and hardship to the Europeans. The period 1315 to 1860 has been dubbed the Little Ice Age (LIA). The main thesis of The Little Ice Age is that a cooling climate does not just bring colder temperatures, but an entire host of extreme weather events(floods, droughts, scorching summers, as well as frigid winters). Unlike the Medieval Warm Period), where the climate was more or less very warm and tranquil (mild winters, hot summers, occaisonal rains), the Little Ice produced an entire spectrum of disasterous weather phenomenon. Dr Fagan gives plenty of charts, and graphs to butress his arguments. His focus is primairily on the North Atlantic Oscillation (a weather oscillation that controls the prevailing winds and storm track for much of Europe and the Atlantic. He also takes advantage of forensic meterologists from Oxford who, using ships logs, were able to recreate synoptic weather patterns for much of the Atlantic and North Sea during this time period.
Dr Fagan's biggest success in this book is to write in vivid deatil the affect of the Little Ice on the individual. He recounts the histroy of the Great Famine (1315-1321), the catastrophic advanced of the Alpine Glaciers, the plight of the Norwiegian settlers in Greenland, as well as the role of climate in political affairs (The Spanish Armada, and French Revolution). As an anthropologist, Fagan's main concern is how humans lived and suffered during this period, and to his credit, he dug through farm journals, diaries, and mountains of forgotten documents to paint a very real narrative. Ultimately Climate Change is not about abstractions such as Principle Component Analysis or radiative forcing equations, but how it effects the individual. This book, paints in detail a tapestry of human suffering brought about by a cooling climate.
This book predates the partisan bickery over Dr Mann's Hockey Stick graph. This is important as Mann -a professional climate scientist- argues that the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period were only local events to Europe. Mann's famous temperature reconstruction has, however, come under severe scrutiny from professional statisticians in recent years. Despite its fall from grace, many climatologists still abide by the conclusions of the Hockey Stick. As a result, many people will dismiss Dr Fagan's book as mere ancedotal evidence done by a non-professional.
The biggest flaw in this book is that it was Eurocentric. Dr Fagan does extend his studies briefly into North America and New Zealand, where he gives evidence of the Little Ice Age in colonial times, as well as providing refrences to growth of New Zealand's Franz Joef Glacier from 1400-1850. The other flaw is the repitition. Readers may find his constant references to this drought or that famine a bit tedious. However, others may find that these repetions in detailing of human suffering only reinforce his thesis that cooling climate is very unhosptibale.
Overall, this book was written for a layman. I think the reader should also buy his other book The Great Warming, and read them back to back. Both books serve as a good reference point when examining the human implications of Climate Change. | | The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Basic Books Product Description | The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history, how this altered climate affected historical events, and what it means for today's global warming. Building on research that has only recently confirmed that the world endured a 500year cold snap, renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold influenced familiar events from Norse exploration to the settlement of North America to the Industrial Revolution. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in history, climate, and how they interact. | | The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Basic Books Amazon.com Review | | "Climate change is the ignored player on the historical stage," writes archeologist Brian Fagan. But it shouldn't be, not if we know what's good for us. We can't judge what future climate change will mean unless we know something about its effects in the past: "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." And Fagan's story of the last thousand years, centered on the "Little Ice Age," reminds us of what we could end up repeating: flood, fire, and famine--acts of God exacerbated by acts of man. For all that he takes a broad--a very broad--view of European history, Fagan's writing is laced with human faces, fascinating anecdotes, and a gift for the telling detail that makes history live, very much in the style of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. When Fagan talks about the voyages of Basque fishermen to American shores (probably landing before Columbus sailed), he puts in the taste of dried cod and the terrifying suddenness of fogs on the Grand Banks. The Great Fire of London, what it was like when the Dutch dikes broke, the Irish Potato Famine, the year without a summer, ice fairs on the Thames, and volcanoes in the South Pacific--Fagan makes history a ripping yarn in which we are all actors, on a stage that has always been changing. --Mary Ellen Curtin |
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