Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
The Little Ice Age wasn't actually an ice age, but it was a period of markedly colder temperatures that began in the 1200s and lasted into the mid-1800s, with the 1600s a particular low point. It was a time when London winter fairs were regularly held on the middle of a frozen Thames river, glaciers grew, and sea ice expanded. That episode of climate disruption may give us some insights into how current global warming may impact society.
Weather changes in the Little Ice Age were less unidirectional and less globally uniform than current climate change. Different places hit their lowest temperatures at different times, and there were often large gyrations in temperatures from year to year. One cause was that sun's radiation decreased for unknown reasons – there were decades with no sunspots at all. There were also an unusual number of huge volcanic eruptions, which caused some of the worst periods. Other causes are still being debated.
Climate denialists are fond of using the Little Ice Age as evidence of "natural fluctuations" in climate. But we know that this isn't true of current climate change – if anything, natural forces would be making the planet cooler again if we weren't dumping so much carbon in the atmosphere. Moreover, it appears that the magnitude of the temperature shift was smaller than what we have already experienced today, let alone what is in store for the future.
Despite all these differences, the Little Ice Age does have something to teach us about the societal impacts of climate disruption. By and large, the effects were not good. Widespread famines took place, causing many deaths directly and others by making people vulnerable to disease. The famines led to massive social unrest, often threatening governments, and also shifted the military balance of power. For instance, the French Revolution followed on the heels of years with terrible harvests. Extreme weather events of various kinds increased. An unprecedented storm was a major reason why the Spanish Armada was destroyed. Some of the richest countries like France suffered the most.
The Dutch were a rare exception. They were already a trading people, which was an advantage at a time when crops often failed in some places more than others. They pioneered new agricultural methods to increase crop yields, along with improved ship designs. Roads were often impassable, but they had the advantage of an extensive system of canals for transportation. They had a head start in dealing with floods, though even they were overwhelmed at some point. Indeed, the Dutch Golden Age took place in the deepest depths of the Little Ice Age.
Although we have much more advanced technologies, the world also has far more mouths to feed and vast numbers of people who already live in dire poverty. There is no reason to expect that our societies will be free from the disruptive effects of climate change, any more than the societies of the Little Ice Age. The Dutch are an object lesson in the possibility of managing to cope with the turmoil of climate disruption. But it remains to be seen whether U.S. society will prove to be as nimble and inventive as the Dutch in responding to the challenges.
Top image is a painting by Bartholomeus Johannes van Hove and is in the public domain.
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Daniel Farber | February 18, 2020
The Little Ice Age wasn't actually an ice age, but it was a period of markedly colder temperatures that began in the 1200s and lasted into the mid-1800s, with the 1600s a particular low point. It was a time when London winter fairs were regularly held on the middle of a frozen Thames river, glaciers grew, and sea ice expanded. That episode of climate disruption may give us some insights into how current global warming may impact society.
Matthew Freeman | February 12, 2020
When I was a 7th grader living in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., my school system was one of many around the nation to launch a program of school busing to desegregate its schools. After 18 years, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education finally traveled a handful of miles down the road from the Supreme Court and arrived in Prince George’s County, Maryland. I was reminded of that as I listened to the latest episode of Connect the Dots, CPR’s podcast hosted by Rob Verchick, on the Juliana v. United States case
Katie Tracy | February 5, 2020
Last week, more than 100 advocates, academics, and reporters joined the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) for a webinar with three leading experts on climate migration and resilience. Presenters discussed the biggest challenges that communities and workers are facing due to the climate crisis.
James Goodwin | February 4, 2020
On Thursday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee's Environment Subcommittee will hold a hearing to examine the harm to children posed by the Trump administration's attack on one of the most wildly successful clean air protections in American history: the Obama-era Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS). The rule, adopted in 2012 after literally decades in the making, has reduced coal-fired power plant emissions of brain-damaging mercury by more than 81 percent, acid gases by more than 88 percent, and sulfur dioxide by more than 44 percent. Altogether, its pollution reductions have saved thousands of lives.
Karen Sokol | January 28, 2020
On January 17, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a much-awaited decision dismissing Juliana v. United States, a climate case that gained more traction in the courts than anyone had expected, given, as U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken stated in her opinion denying the motions to dismiss in the case, it was "no ordinary lawsuit."
Joel A. Mintz | January 27, 2020
From time to time, a judicial decision from a federal court has the potential to have a profound impact on American society and government policy. Such a case is Juliana v. United States, in which a group of 21 young people, together with an environmental organization and "a representative of future generations," brought suit against numerous federal agencies and officials seeking a judicially mandated plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and a drawdown of excess atmospheric carbon.
James Goodwin | January 23, 2020
When the Trump administration released its recent proposal to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), it trumpeted the action as a long-overdue step to "modernize" the law's implementation by "simplifying" and "clarifying" its procedural and analytical requirements for federal agencies. If these words sound familiar, that's because they're the disingenuous claptrap that opponents of regulatory safeguards repeatedly trot out to camouflage their efforts to rig legislative and rulemaking processes in favor of corporate polluters. Put differently, those terms might as well be conservatives' code words to describe something that will cause more trips to the emergency room for urban children who suffer from asthma, more toxic contaminants in our drinking water, more irreversible degradation of fragile wetlands, and more runaway climate change.
Dave Owen | January 23, 2020
On Thursday morning, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and EPA released a final rule determining which aquatic features are covered by the Clean Water Act. Already, the press coverage is following a familiar pattern: farming lobbyists praise the rule as a major victory, and environmentalists condemn it as an abdication of clean water protection and water quality science. The former part of that pattern has always been interesting to me. It's true that the farm lobby has been a prominent and effective participant in debates about this rule and its predecessors. But I think much of its participation, and the resulting press coverage, has been misleading. This new rule does offer benefits to farmers (at a likely cost to water quality), but the benefits aren't likely to be nearly as great as the rhetoric would lead you to believe. The goal of this post is to explain the changes the new rule actually makes for farmers and the reason those changes are more modest than you might expect.
Katie Tracy, Robert Verchick | January 22, 2020
It's no secret that President Trump has harassed staff at federal agencies since his first moment in office. Days after his inauguration, he blocked scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from talking to the press and the public. He famously cracked down on federal labor unions and chiseled early retirees of their expected pension benefits. Now he's requiring hundreds of staff from USDA's Economic Research Service and the Bureau of Land Management to leave their homes in the Washington area and move to offices out West or risk losing their jobs.