The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850

Rating:
Summary: Interesting History, Lousy Science
Review: Fagan rambles, digresses and frustrates but manages to captures a great deal of information about the weather's impact on Western Civilization during the last 2300 years. The evidence that local climate may change quite rapidly is compelling. He jumps to unsupportable conclusions about what this evidence implies about future world climate. As a professional meteorologist I find his history interesting; he should leave the science to others.

Rating:
Summary: Historians Meet the Weathermen
Review: Hasn't the weather been amazing lately? I mean, lately over the past hundred years, since we left the ice age? If you don't think of the weather on this scale of climate, it would be a good idea to take a look at _The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300 - 1850_ (Basic Books) by Brian Fagan. The weather has been amazing during our most recent century, but it is always more or less unpredictable, and has always fascinated people. However, the particular conditions of the Little Ice Age were peculiar, indeed, and we haven't seen anything like them for more than a century.

There are plenty strange events described in Fagan's book, things like glaciers which no longer threaten us. It is best, however, at giving a broad view of the Little Ice Age and how it affected history. Fagan does not make the mistake of "climatic determinism," carefully showing how human behavior, economics, as well as climate produced historic changes, but his links to the weather is convincing because he accepts weather as only a partial explanation. His explanations, for instance, of weather's involvement in the Viking retreat, the French Revolution, and the Irish Potato Famine are excellent.

Fagan's book makes clear that climate has affected civilization, and that humans have not always handled its changes well. His book is not a polemic about the current warming, but he acknowledges that the carbon dioxide levels and coal burning may have been among the mechanisms that produced it. Since we understand such changes only imperfectly, and since they are best shown in computer models upon which corporations can cast doubt, a surprising number of people think that global warming is not a real phenomenon. Fagan shows that the warming is real, and that our weather these days is greatly different from the Ice Age before. More importantly, he shows that people responded to the changes of the past in often lamentable ways; if ever learning from history was vital to prevent repeating it, we would do well to look at past mistakes.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable but poorly organized.
Review: I enjoyed the theories that Fagan brought across in this book, but I felt that the writing was somewhat lacking in certain aspects. I feel that this book was poorly organized. He jumped around from time period to time period quite often, and then went back to another time period without need. I think if he chose to write this in a more chronological order his points would have come across much more clearly. Still, it has a wealth of valuable information if you can decipher it.

Rating:
Summary: Dilettante's work
Review: I have seldom read in a book that claims to be scientific so much superficial rubish. Fagan has incursioned, once again, in the difficult field of climatology and has done the accustomed bad job of a person who does not understand the complex mechanisms of the atmosphere. Popularizers like him who try to capitalize on the attraction of themes dealing with climate variation are littering a discipline that used to be respectable.

Rating:
Summary: Informative, but not persuasive
Review: I read this book as research for a novel I've working on set in a near future Earth in the grips of global warming. Like most people, I've taken global warming for a given, and I went into these pages looking for evidence to back-up this world view.

I found the evidence of climate change presented in this book to be fascinating, thought-provoking stuff. It's impossible to argue against the evidence that our world is warming--although, curiously, the evidence in this book left me in doubt that the warming is man-made, or that global warming won't bring surprising benefits! After all, the Europe gripped by glaciers and crop failures brought on by colder climate, carefully documented in this book, didn't seem like a great place to live. On the other hand, the warmer world of Medieval times, when Iceland wasn't icy and Greenland was actually green, sounds like a pretty good deal.

I think the chapters on the Medieval warm period did the most to muddy the argument against global warming of anything I've ever read. If the world was so much warmer a thousand years ago, and if the climate rapidly shifted from warm to cool without mankind's intervention, why can't the world warm again for reasons completely beyond our control? It seems shortsighted to assume that the temperature of the Earth 100 years ago was the

Rating:
Summary: Circumstantial but persuasive and lots of neat facts
Review: I really liked this book but its not perfect. There's a bit of weather theory here, and lots of concrete information, but its never really organized in a way to prove the author's point. Its a bit of a mishmosh. But the concrete facts are great. Fagan describes glaciers consuming entire villages in the middle ages, sea ice blocking formerly reliable ocean routes, and more. I think his research proves that climate changes should be taken VERY SERIOUSLY because, as he documents, the effects can be relatively rapid and profound.

Rating:
Summary: Useful. Uneven. Ultimately Unresolvable.
Review: I'm amused by the observations of "professional meteorologists" and others who take offense at Brian Fagan's science. The Little Ice Age is more a storybook of hypotheses dressed out as plausible narratives than a scientific treatise. More importantly, it's an implicit paean to the sheer ingenuity of climatological researchers in building data sets--from tree rings, ancient ice cores, statisitical studies of cloud cover in European master paintings, and other hard-to-cull sources--to explore historical climate in general, and "the little ice age" in particular. Climatologists and meteorologists know all about the North Atlantic Oscillation (most of us have surely heard of El Niño, the Southern Oscillation) but few of us understand how the interaction of the NAO, currents, and the secular tendencies of air movements have helped create history. Most readers, I suspect, will be hooked early in the book by the tales of Viking sailors' westward explorations, facilitated by warming that allows them literally to skip along the retreating Arctic ice toward cod fisheries newly abundant in the warmer western waters. These and other stories of climate related history--droughts, famines, disease, conquest, and on and on--give the reader a fresh appreciation for the raw interconnectedness of, well, everything. (The Little Ice Age is, moreover, a useful companion to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, the admirers of which will find much to admire here.)

In addition to an occasional discursiveness that loses the reader in thickets of "climate" but little relationship to "thesis," Fagan also slips in his final observations on global warming and how it fits into the long pattern of weather from 1300 to the present. Unfortunately for his own argument--the rather conventional one that accepts the abnormality of contemporary variation in warming due to human, as opposed to natural cyclical, activity--Fagan stumbles over the fact that current temperatures are still only APPROACHING those of the period antedating the little ice age, c. 1000-1200. That is, before industrialization, six billion earthly inhabitants, all those carbon emissions, and the rest.

These shortcomings are, however, an acceptable price to pay. Fagan is an eminent antropologist, bringing to this book a wealth of cross-disciplinary data and much light on many topics. He is, moreover, a lively and entertaining writer who is, therefore, quite easy to recommend. And I do, heartily.

Rating:
Summary: Nice Enough Little Book
Review: If you're looking for a profound re-examination of climatic history, then this isn't it. The book is more a listing of (interesting) facts, with some insight into the way Europeans have lived in the past 700 years. It's certainly an interesting read, but the book is mostly a summary of other sources. This is a library book--not one to keep.

Don't listen to those who complain about the "bad science." There's very little science of any sort in the book, and his chapter about global warming is a standard summary of the situation.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely fascinating!
Review: In this fascinating book, Professor Fagan introduces something of a climactic history of Europe. The first chapter covers the Medieval Warm Period of 900 to 1300 AD, when Greenland supported a thriving dairy-producing economy, and when French vintners sought protection against the import of fine English wines! Also sprinkled through the book are references to a Mini-Ice Age that extended from 500 to 900 AD, and an earlier warm period extending from 100 to 400 AD.

The second chapter chronicles the traumatic ordeal that Europe experienced as the planet cooled and weather took on new, harsher patterns. The author then continues on to document the tribulations of Little Ice Age Europe, and the changes that the new environment spurred. In the final chapter, the end of the Little Ice Age is covered, along with the author's thoughts on Global Warming.

This book is absolutely fascinating. Most history books do not mention the climate, except as background. Professor Fagan, on the other hand, rightly shows how the climate can be a major factor. The book is easily read (and not academic in tone), and very informative.

I must admit that this book has changed some of my opinions on Global Warming, and given me a great deal to think about. I am fascinated by the apparent yo-yoing of global temperatures throughout history, and hope to find a book that looks at the subject over a longer timeframe. This is a great book, and I recommend it to everyone.

Rating:
Summary: Nice cover, great stories, lousy science.
Review: It is as always disappointing to read books cashing in on the public awareness of an issue when the author is blissfully unaware of what the issue actually is.

A writer in the non-fiction field has an obligation to understand the issues; it is not good enough to weave together a home made opinion (or is it from a Sierra Club brochure?) on climate science with bits of history. It's been tried before - see Christenson. Sold well, misled many.

The violent climate changes in a geological perspective and the pronounced ones during the past 10,000 years have impacted life on the planet in a myriad of ways. A fascinating topic. Carving out a 300 year long window of time is fine, but the fact that the author has not bothered to understand climate change on iota ruins the book for me.