Climate Change Dispatch
In a March opinion piece in the New York Times (“Lessons from the Little Ice Age”), historian Geoffrey Parker—author of Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century—suggests
the desperate climate of the years 1600 to 1700 is a template for a
collapse of civilization in the twenty-first century. But there’s one
massive flaw in his theory: The past cultural collapses have almost all
occurred during “little ice ages,” not during our many global warmings.
The seventeenth century was part of the 550-year Little Ice Age, the
most recent of at least seven “little ice ages” that have befallen the
planet since the last full Ice Age. Studying sediment deposits in the
North Atlantic, Gerard Bond of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
found such centuries-long little ice ages at 1300 AD, 600 AD, 800 BC,
2200 BC, 3900 BC, 7400 BC, 8300 BC, and perhaps at 9100 BC. These global
Dansgaard-Oeschger disasters have arrived on a semi-regular basis some
600 times over the past million years.
Each of these icy epochs blasted humanity with short, cold, cloudy
growing seasons, untimely frosts, and extended drought along with heavy
and violent rains. Naturally, crops failed. Cities full of people
starved to death, repeatedly, with seven collapses in Mesopotamia, six
each for Egypt and China, and two for Angkor Wat. The early cultures
gave the illusion of continuity—the Nile and the Yangtze always had at
least a little water to use for irrigation, for example. However, little
ice age hunger and disease drove human and animal migrations across
thousands of miles and over continents, leading to huge invasions such
as that of the Huns in Europe’s Dark Ages, and the collapse of kingships
and ruling dynasties around the globe. "
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