Here are notes from the 15-minute to the 30-minute mark:
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“With brutal swiftness, over the course of only a decade, the average global temperature dropped to a level some 4 degrees colder than today.”
From Norway to New Zealand, glaciers began their rapid advance. In England, the Tames froze frequently.
A catastrophe descended on Europe.
From Russia to Ireland, just as the crops were planted it started to rain. And it rained. And it rained. And it rained.
Many of the crops planted on marginal land simply washed away due to soil erosion. The drenching rains persisted for five long years.
The Little Ice Age was not only cooler, it was a period of more frequent, and intense, storminess. Once fertile croplands became water-logged mud pits, littered with flattened crops.
There was little, or nothing, to eat. By the end of the 6th year, over 1.5 million people have died throughout Europe from starvation and from famine-related diseases.
Crime skyrocketed. The desperate assaulted anyone with food.
With their tall stalks, the grains made easy targets during the Little Ice Age.
Throughout Europe, crop failures persisted for centuries. Famine after famine produced a harvest of death. In 1601, one famine in Russia killed over 500,000. It was not uncommon for families to kill their children, or at least some of them, in order to reserve food for the rest.
The
story of Hansel and Gretel is representative. Parents who did not have enough to eat took their children into the forest and abandoned them there.
The Bubonic plague was made much worse during the Little Ice Age because people were already weakened by lack of food.
Europe’s infected masses began dying by the millions. The stench of decaying bodies filled the air. Church bells tolled day and night for funerals. By the time the epidemic ended, 25 million people – one third of the population – had perished.
People concluded the erratic climate was the evil handiwork of their neighbors, whom they accused of witchcraft. Thousands of people were burned to death or otherwise killed as witches.
The Church fed the frenzy. Pope Innocent VIII issued a decree blaming Europe’s cold destructive climate on witches. Foul weather and witch hunts went hand-in-hand.
According to some historians, some 50,000 climate-destroying witches – both men and women – were burned at the stake.
In Greenland, where the Vikings had established colonies during the Medieval Warm Period. Greenland was so named because it actually may have been green at the time, with lush vegetation and trees, almost a paradise, but the Little Ice Age brought their paradise to a chilling end.
The waters around Greenland became chocked by ice, and temperature-sensitive cod, which by the had become the colonists main food source, fled to warmer waters.
The Greenlanders began to starve. Then the sea ice became even thicker, so that supply ships from Europe could not make it through.
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I stopped taking notes at the 30-minute mark. See more tomorrow.
Horrifying account of the Little Ice Age – Segment 3
by
Robert May 9, 2018
Here are notes from the 30-minute to the 45-minute mark:
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What caused the Little Ice Age?
Today, climatologists are still debating what natural processes triggered it. What caused the abrupt climate shift that doomed the Vikings and devastated millions more in the medieval world?
There is no clear consensus, and no lack of theories.
Dr. Richard Seager of Columbia University thinks we were getting less radiation from the sun. But some scientists question that theory because the sun’s output declined by only one-half percent during the Little Ice Age.
Others point to volcanic activity, because deposits of sulfur found in Greenland ice cores indicate that five major volcanic eruptions occurred each century during the Little Ice Age. “Each of the eruptions had the explosive power of Krakatoa in 1883.” Today, such eruptions occur only rarely.
The sulfur rises into the stratosphere where it mixes with water droplets and carbon dioxide to create a cloud that reflects sunlight back into space and cools the earth’s surface.
Other scientists think the cooling has to do with cold water deep in the world’s oceans connected to “the oceanic conveyor belt.” They think the Little Ice Age occurred when natural forces somehow disrupted that flow.
Between 1645 and 1715, temperatures in the northern hemisphere dipped by an additional 3 degrees F. Climatologists trace that additional cooling to the sun, which was weakened during the Maunder Minimum when there were fewer sunspots on the sun. This lead to less radiation reaching the earth.The 70-year surge of cold triggered by the Maunder Minimum triggered the rapid advance of the alpine glaciers, swallowing up the villagers homes and farmlands.
Decade after decade, the cold destroyed many of the cereal crops the people in Europe relied on to survive, and the lethal famine persisted.
But agricultural innovators in England and the Netherlands fought back. With great ingenuity they developed small-holding agriculture, agriculture where they planted such crops as turnips and clover, which they would sell to people who raised cattle. They began to focus on crops that were much more resistant to cold and damp.
The potato also helped, because the durable tuber could survive the colder temperatures and storminess that continued to devastate the peasant’s cereal crops. But Europeans had a hard time accepting the potato. Its leaves were poisonous, it was buried in the ground, and it was covered by dirt. From kings to common men, the potato was known as “the devil’s plant”.
Eating the potato was a sin
Many heeded the clergy’s warning that to eat a potato was a sin.
Millions chose to go hungry rather than alter their diets.
But finally, wars across Europe brought invading armies who burned the peasant’s rye and barley to the ground. This forced them to eat the lowly potato, which had not burned because it was underground. The potato literally saved the peasant’s lives.
However, in France, the population refused to have anything to do with the potato. French peasants clung blindly to tradition. Decade after decade they lived on the brink of starvation.
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I stopped taking notes at the 45-minute mark. See more tomorrow.
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Horrifying account of the Little Ice Age – Segment 4
by
Robert May 10, 2018
Here are notes from the 45-minute to the 57-minute mark:
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In France, the weather was colder than it had ever been. Two bad harvests in a row and the cold had combined to put the French peasants in a situation where they
knew they were not going to be able to make it through the next year. It became a major factor in the French Revolution, the uprising that set France on the road toward democracy.
The Little Ice Age was also felt with devastating force in Ireland. For 200 years, Irish peasants had been growing the potato. But by 1840, they had whittled it down to just one kind of potato – the lumper – the most user-friendly potato of them all. The lumper was very easy to cultivate and to propagate. But, it was also a very low-quality potato, watery, and susceptible to disease.
Six million Irish depended on the lumper as their only source of food. But when a mysterious blight descended on the potato crop, the nation’s life blood descended into an inedible mass of black goo.
The Irish potato famine lasted for five years. Starving children gnawed on weeds. Weakened by malnutrition, thousands died of cholera and typhus. Emaciated mothers cradled dead babies as they begged for money to buy coffins.
It is estimated, and the estimate is probably conservative, that 1.5 million Irish peasants died during the Irish potato famine, known as “The Great Death.”
If there was any good news to be had from the Little Ice Age, it may have helped produce one of the world’s finest instruments, the Stradivarius violin. The trees that Stradivari used have been dated to the Maunder Minimum. During warmer years, trees grow fast, adding thick rings. During cool years, growth is slow and rings are thin.
According to Dr Lloyd Burkle, a paleooceanographer at Columbia University, the cold of that period may have contributed to the denser wood that the Italian luthier (maker of stringed instruments) was able obtain.
And then there’s the question of alcoholic beverages. If not for the Little Ice Age, American party animals might be drinking wine instead of hard liquor and beer. When the Little Ice Age assailed the vineyards, it killed the grape vines that had thrived so well during the Medieval Warm Period.
“It was the northern Europeans who were deprived of grapes,” says food and wine expert Joseph H. Coulombe. Even though the canals froze in Venice, the production of wines in southern Europe was not seriously cut. Northern Europeans thus had no choice but to make their alcohol from the depleted supplies of their cereal crops.
When emigration to America began, the immigrants came almost exclusively from northern Europe, with virtually no immigration from the Mediterranean Basin. The English came, the Dutch, the Swedes, the Poles, the Irish, the Germans, the Scots, who by now had been drinking hard liquor and beer for many generations, and that’s the culture they brought with them.
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I stopped taking notes at the 57-minute mark. See more tomorrow.
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Horrifying account of the Little Ice Age – Segment 5
Here are notes from the 57-minute to the 1:08-minute mark:
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War
Victory or defeat often hinged on the frigid weather. Generals learned that the weather could be their most formidable enemy. Or ally.
The skeletons of more than 3,000 of Napoleon Bonapart’s forces have been found in a mass grave in Vilnius, Lithuania, victims of the Little Ice Age.
Napoleon’s lesson began in the fall of 1812 after he had invaded Russia with a mammoth force of 600,000 men.
Although he succeeded in capturing Moscow, he had failed to destroy the Russian army. Three-quarters of Napoleon’s men had already died of starvation.
As he ordered his remaining 130,000 soldiers to retreat for home, the frigid climate took a nightmarish turn. The temperature dropped down into the thirties
below zero.
Napoleon’s starving exhausted troops began dying by the thousands. Many froze to death as they slept. Many fought off the bitter cold, only to die of starvation. Only 40,000 soldiers, a fraction of those who started the campaign, made it back to Vilnius. But the city had very little food, and thousands more soldiers died of starvation. Thousands more died in make-shift field hospitals of gangrene and typhus.
Only about 5,000 of the 40,000 soldiers who trudged into Vilnius escaped the city alive.
The video also talks of the destruction of the Spanish Armada in temperatures below freezing … in early September. Some of the sailors actually froze to death, again, in early September. In all, the storm destroyed 56 of the armada’s 130 warships. Most of those that did make it back to Spain were so battered that they were dismantled for their wood.
A total of 21,000 Spaniards perished.
In 1776, the Little Ice Age again helped change the course of history.
It looked like the American revolution was lost. But on Christmas Eve, General George Washington led his troops across the Delaware River. Throughout the Little Ice Age, unlike now, the Delaware was often clogged with ice. And on this particular Christmas Eve, it was “choked” with ice. But after nine hours, Washington’s troops made it across the river and succeeded in their surprise attack. The success of that attack rescued the revolution.
Still to come: The notorious “Year without a summer.”
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I stopped taking notes at the 1:08-minute mark. See more tomorrow.
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Horrifying account of the Little Ice Age – Segment 6
by
Robert May 12, 2018
Here are notes from the 1:08-minute to the 1:16:20-minute mark.
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The notorious “Year without a summer.”
In the year 1815, earth witnessed one of its most spectacular natural disasters, the eruption of Mount Tambora, a 13,000-foot volcano thought to be extinct on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia. The top 4,200 feet (4/5ths of a mile) of the mountain was blasted skyward, spewing 36 cubic miles (150 cu km) of debris as much as 15½ miles into the atmosphere. Tambora ejected 100 times as much ash as did Mount Saint Helens in 1980.
Within minutes, 70,000 people on the island and a neighboring island died, then soared to 90,000 very soon after that.
That winter, Hungary noticed that its snow was brown. In parts of Italy that normally don’t get snow, the snow was red.
In 1816, the Arctic weather decimated Europe’s crops. Starvation ensued, and for the weakened survivors, disease became widespread. In Ireland alone, 100,000 people died of typhus directly related to the eruption. That summer, the fictional Frankenstein was born.
In France, rioting mobs attacked grain carts on their way to market. In England, the starving hoisted banners reading “bread or blood” as they looted and vandalized town after town. In Switzerland, desperate villagers seized Russian grain shipments at the border. Tens of thousands of Europeans starved to death. Just as many fled Europe, hoping to rebuild their lives in America.
But Tambora’s chilling influence had descended with equal ferocity on the United States.
In June, 14 months after the eruption, the skies over New England turned icy cold. Temperatures plummeted below freezing, and five days of snow fell in the northeast. Snow persisted sporadically throughout July and August. Ice formed on lakes in Vermont. Icicles a foot long clung to the eves of houses and hundreds of newly shorn sheep froze to death.
The cold destroyed thousands of America’s crops. Seventy-five percent of its corn was ruined. Across the northeast food shortages mounted, and agricultural prices skyrocketed, and birds fell dead out of the sky. People began referring to it as “Eighteen hundred and froze to death,” or else, “The Year Without A Summer.”
Many New Englanders gave up. They said “no more New England,” and moved west.
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I stopped taking notes at the 1:16:20-minute mark. See more tomorrow.
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Horrifying account of the Little Ice Age – Segment 7
by
Robert May 13, 2018
Here are notes from the 1:16:20-minute mark o the end.
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The Little Ice Age came to an abrupt end around 1850. The dramatic shift occurred over the course of perhaps only a decade.
The warming began when the sun started putting out more energy, says Dr Richard Seager of Columbia University. Others say warming was caused by a reduction in volcanic eruptions and by industrialization (human-caused global warming). Yet others blame the ocean. They believe the oceanic conveyor belt oscillates in strength.
If another little ice age should strike, what affect would it have on humanity?
Instead of answering this question right way, the video veers off into fear-mongering about how global warming could trigger the next ice age. Warming causes cooling, the voice-over contends. The ultimate in black-is-white, up-is-down claptrap. I think this part is silly, so I won’t bother to paraphrase it for you.
But regardless of the cause, what consequences would an abrupt cooling have on 21st century civilization?
“Dramatic changes in weather patterns will have incredible impact on human populations,” says Dr Teofilo E. Ruiz, professor of medieval history at UCLA.
“We could have conditions that will parallel the horrors that Europe faced in the Little Ice Age.”
In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a study to come up with, not a prediction, but a worst-case scenario. They call it “a low-probability event" with only a one- or two-percent chance of it actually happening. (I think the chances are far, far higher than that – closer to a 100 percent.)
Within a decade, the study found, nations would be rapidly drained of food, water and energy resources critical to national survival. In Europe, skirmishes would erupt among neighboring states over access to shared rivers and oil reserves. The chill would spawn a new world dis-order. The United States’ role as a global cop would become much bigger than today.
However, America will face its own crisis, the study found. As the cold dry climate persists, famine will intensify south of the border, leading to massive migration towards the United States. Perhaps millions of refugees from the Caribbean and Central America will head for the U.S. (I don’t agree with this one. I’m more inclined to think U.S. residents will try to head south.)
One of the most volatile flash points in the Pentagon scenario is China, where the cold climate will trigger famines that kill millions, and also drain the nation’s energy supplies. A civil war will erupt in the most populous nation on earth. At the same time, China’s army will threaten to invade Russia to seize its reserves of natural gas. And its Navy will confront the United States in the Persian Gulf over access to Saudi oil.
Many of the same effects described for China will also be true for India. “It’s not at all implausible that these are the conditions in which nuclear weapons might be used,” the study found.
Critics of the Pentagon report brand it as alarmist fantasy.
Unfortunately, the video ends with yet anther diatribe against humans, blaming us for an entirely natural event, an event that has repeated itself over and over again with absolutely no help from us.
I fear that none of our leaders have any inkling of what horrors are about to descend on our world.
What’s that old Chinese curse? “May you live in interesting times”?
I think I’d rather live in boring times, thank you very much.
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