Excerpt
In “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe,” Kelly and Ó Gráda ar- gue that European temperature estimates extending back into late medieval times contain no major breaks, cycles, or trends, that could be associated with a Little Ice Age (lia). They use a selec- tion of frost fairs and contracting glaciers, as well as disappearing British vineyards and Arctic colonies, to imply the irrelevance of climate forcing and sequential cooling. The arst sentence of their abstract in this issue’s table of contents, aptly, if skeptically, posits the existence of a cool lia period and its putative consequences for economic, political, and cultural history, far beyond the realm of climatology: “The supposed ramiacations of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures straddling several centuries in northwestern Europe, reach far beyond meteorology into eco- nomic, political, and cultural history.” Clearly, the issues sur- rounding the lia are complex.
This comment on their article points to several factors that challenge the hypothesis of a missing palaeoclimatic signal for the
lia. Avoiding semantical digressions and quibbles about the quality and suitability of Kelly and Ó Gráda’s evidence in support their ar- gument, we instead provide independent evidence of several tem- perature depressions that occurred between c. 1350 and 1900 in different regions of the globe. Nevertheless, we are well aware of the various sources of uncertainty that can emerge from the de- creasing quality and quantity of the proxy evidence in the passage of time, together with the methodological constraints involved in preserving the full-amplitude range and spatial extent of the high- to-low-frequency dynamics of climate in the past. Moreover, we are particularly sensitive to the complexity of linking climate vari- ability with human history; any straightforward comparison that supposes simple causal determination and disregards other contrib- uting factors, such as sociocultural and medical stressors, seriously risks exceeding the evidence.
In: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xliv:3 (Winter, 2014), 353–368