Climate change and society in the 15th to 18th centuries

Abstract

Scholars in many disciplines have used diverse methods and sources to establish that, between the 15th and 18th centuries, a “Little Ice Age” considerably cooled Earth's climate. In four particularly chilly periods—the Spörer Minimum, Grindelwald Fluctuation, Maunder Minimum, and Dalton Minimum—falling temperatures both caused and reflected changes in atmospheric circulation that altered regional patterns of precipitation. Many scholars have argued that weather in these cold periods provoked or worsened regional food shortages, famines, rebellions, wars, and outbreaks of epidemic disease, in ways that may have contributed to mass mortality across the early modern world. More recently, some scholars have contrasted the fates of societies or communities that were “vulnerable” to climate change with those that were “resilient” or even consciously or unconsciously adaptive in the face of the Little Ice Age. Overall, research that connects climatic and social histories has suggested that human decisions, political structures, economic arrangements, institutions, and cultures either magnified or mitigated the impact of climate change on the societies of the early modern world. This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Major Historical Eras

Revised records of atmospheric trace gases CO<sub>2</sub>, CH<sub>4</sub>, N<sub>2</sub>O, and <i>δ</i><sup>13</sup>C-CO<sub>2</sub> over the last 2000 years from Law Dome, Antarctica

“…-CO 2 from EDML (EPICA Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica) and the South Pole (Siegenthaler et al, 2005), Law Dome, East Antarctica 1996;MacFarling Meure et al, 2006;Rubino et al, 2013), DML (Dronning Maud Land; Rubino et al, 2016), and WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet; Ahn et al, 2012); δ 13 C-CO 2 from Law Dome (Francey et al, 1999;Rubino et al, 2013), WAIS (Bauska et al, 2015), and DML (Rubino et al, 2016);…”

“…The most likely explanation for this is a high level of impurities in Greenland ice reacting with acidity and/or hydrogen peroxide (Jenk et al, 2012;Tschumi and Stauffer, 2000). Law Dome, Antarctica, provides the best timeresolved ice core records due to the very high accumulation rate at this site (Etheridge et al, 1996;Goodwin, 1990), even more so than Greenland. Also, records from multiple Law Dome sites show no evidence of in situ production because they agree with records from colder sites in Antarctica (Rubino et al, 2016;Siegenthaler et al, 2005) and compare closely with each other, with air extracted from the firn, and with modern atmospheric records (Rubino et al, 2013).…”

“…Thus, it is possible that the extraction and analysis procedures have introduced different biases over time, influencing the measurements by variable amounts. However, except for minor developments over time (Etheridge et al, 1996;Francey et al, 1999;MacFarling Meure et al, 2006;Rubino et al, 2013Rubino et al, , 2016 the equipment used for extraction and analysis has not fundamentally changed.…”

Climate and society in long‐term perspective: Opportunities and pitfalls in the use of historical datasets

“…Previous critiques of this literature are mainly limited to assessing methodological flaws or sampling bias in studies on climate‐conflict relationships from the mid‐twentieth century onward (Adams, Ide, Barnett, & Detges, ; Buhaug, ; Buhaug et al, ; Gleditsch, ; Klomp & Bulte, ), while reviews of the literature linking climate and economy have focused entirely on the period after 1950 (Carleton & Hsiang, ). Some literature has reviewed the connections between climate and conflict, disease, and food production, going much further back in time (Degroot, ; Degroot, ; Webb, ; White, ), but this article represents a first systematic attempt to specifically critique the use and interpretation of historical datasets on human activity in research on the climate‐society nexus across a broad timespan. We first discuss the methods and results of the main studies in the three subdomains, followed by a bibliometric analysis of relevant articles published in highly‐ranked scientific journals.…”

People's history of climate change

“…Apart from focusing on climate change caused by natural factors, climate history studies of the distant past have mostly focused on the impact of climate variability at the aggregate societal level, and in the process they have neglected the everyday experiences and perceptions of climate change within a society. The experiences and perceptions of climate change vary within a society such as ordinary people's perception versus the elite perceptions, men versus women's experiences of climate change and so forth (Degroot, 2018;Diaz & Trouet, 2014;Endfield, 2007;Pfister & Brázdil, 2006;White, 2011). In other words, climate history studies of the distant past largely do not discuss how different groups within a society respond to the impact of climatic variability including climatic disasters and shocks.…”