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

by Brian Fagan

  Poor cereal crops made 1846 a year of widespread food shortages in Europe, forcing countries to bid against one another for cargoes of food imports from the Mediterranean and North America. France and Belgium paid high prices, England was outbid, and Irish relief suffered. Private merchants bought up stocks avidly for Ireland, but they were the worst kind of traders, who sold grain in tiny lots at enormous prices to relief organizations and those few individuals who could afford it. Official indifference compounded the problem. High British government officials knew less of Ireland and its economics than they knew about China. Irish peasants were told to eat grain instead of potatoes, but at the same time the government did nothing to curb the export of grain from the starving country. Free-trade doctrines prevailed, whereby the exporting of grain would provide money for Irish merchants to purchase and import lowpriced food to replace the potato. No one in the impoverished west of Ireland knew anything about importing food, nor did the infrastructure exist to get it there.

  By late September, the situation was desperate. People were living off blackberries and cabbage leaves. Shops were empty. Troops were sent to protect wagons carrying oats for export. Even if the exported food had been kept in the country, the people would not have been much better off, for they had no money to buy it. Proposals for public works to employ the hungry were stalled in Whitehall, then delayed by protests over task work and low wages. Even the government's payments to the destitute workers were irregular because of a shortage of silver coin. The fields, combed by emaciated families, contained not even a tiny potato. Children began to die. The weather turned cold at the end of October, and fifteen centimeters of snow fell in County Tyrone in November. Adding to Ireland's troubles, the North Atlantic Oscillation flipped into low mode, bringing the most severe winter in living memory.

  Ireland's winters are normally mild and the poor normally spent them indoors, where peat fires burned. This time they had to work out of doors to survive. By November, over 285,000 poor were laboring on public relief works for a pittance. Many died of exposure. Thousands more poured into towns, abandoning their hovels in ditches and near seashores. Inevitably, farm work was neglected, with few tilling the soil, partly because the peasants feared, with reason, that landlords would seize their harvests for rent. A Captain Wynne visited Clare Abbey in the west and confessed himself unmani,:d by the extent of the suffering: "witnessed more especially among the women and little children, crowds of which were to be seen scattered over the turnip fields like a flock of famished crows, devouring the raw turnips, mothers half naked, shivering in the snow and sleet, uttering exclamations of despair, while their children were screaming with hunger."18 Even the dogs had been eaten.

  Magistrate Nicholas Cummins of Cork visited Skibbereen in the western part of the country, entered a hovel that appeared deserted, and found "six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead ... huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed to be a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive-they were in fever, four children, a women and what had once been a man." 19 Within minutes, Cummins was surrounded by more than two hundred starving men and women. Rats were devouring corpses lying in the streets. The government in London argued that relief was the responsibility of "local relief committees." None existed, and food was plentiful in Skibbereen market. But the poor had no money to buy it.

  Disease followed inevitably in the wake of hunger. Rural hospitals and clinics were few, the medical infrastructure grossly inadequate, the workhouses overwhelmed with dying victims. Patients lay on the ground. The government provided tented hospitals and other relief measures, but too little too late. Ten times more people died of fevers than of starvation itself, just as they had in Europe in 1741.

  Despite a glorious summer and healthy crops, the famine continued into 1847. A shortage of seed potatoes meant that only about a fifth of the normal hectarage was planted, so the harvest, although superb, was inadequate to feed the people. Nor could the poor buy food, now a third cheaper than the year before: there was no employment to be had, nor wages to be earned. The British government, believing firmly in the sanctity of the free market, pursued the ideology of minimal intervention that dominated many European governments of the day. Ministers believed that poverty was a self-imposed condition, so the poor should fend for themselves. They were motivated mainly by fear of social unrest and a concern not to offend politically powerful interests such as corn merchants and industrialists. A financial crisis in England caused by sharply falling grain prices and wild speculation in railway shares gave the government an excuse to provide no more relief funding for Ireland, where corpses lay by roadsides because no one was strong enough to bury them. People died at the gates of workhouses, landlords were assassinated by their desperate tenants. As violence broke out, the authorities called in the military. By the end of 1847, 15,000 troops were billeted in a country pauperized by starvation and fever, where employment was nonexistent.

  The spring of 1848 was cold, following heavy snow in February. People were optimistic that the cold winter would prevent the reappearance of blight and made every sacrifice to plant potatoes everywhere they could. The weather was favorable through May and June but turned cool and very wet in July. The blight struck almost overnight. By August, the extent of the new disaster was becoming apparent as heavy rain also damaged wheat and oat crops. The failure of the 1848 potato crop was as complete as that of 1846. Thousands defaulted on their rents and were evicted from their lands by landlords, who were themselves heading toward insolvency because of overwhelming debt. Everyone who could scrape together the money contemplated emigration. Not only the poor left, but farmers, some of considerable property, whom the country could ill afford to lose. The countryside was becoming deserted. Thousands of hectares of land around Ballina in County Mayo in the northwest looked like a devastated battlefield. In Munster, the landlords could not deal with the abandoned farms. Paupers squatted on empty arable land, too weak to cultivate it, living in ditches. Trade ground to a standstill all over the country. Shops were boarded up and "thousands are brought to the workhouse screaming for food and can't be relieved."20 Nearly 200,000 people crowded into workhouses designed for 114,000. Jails became a refuge. Desperate young men committed crimes so they could be sentenced to transportation. Barrister Michael Shaughnessy reported that many poor children "were almost naked, hair standing on end, eyes sunken, lips pallid, protruding bones of little joints visible." He asked: "Am I in a civilized country and part of the British Empire?"21

  The final casualty figures from An Ghorta Mor, "The Great Hunger," will never be known. The 1841 census records 8,175,124 people living in Ireland. In 1851, the number had fallen to 6,552,385. The Census Commissioners of the day calculated that, with a normal rate of increase, the total should have been just over 9 million. Two and a half million people were lost, a million to emigration, the remainder, mostly in the west, to famine and associated disease. These estimates are probably conservative. A combination of highly unpredictable climate, overdependence on a single crop, and official indifference killed over a million people in a Europe that, thanks to greatly improved infrastructures, was becoming increasingly isolated from the ravages of hunger.

  Thus the Little Ice Age ended as it began, with a famine whose memory resonated through generations. Ireland changed radically as a result. The population continued to decline for the remainder of the nineteenth century due to emigration, delayed marriages, and celibacy. Emigration rates remained high, reaching a peak in 1854. Ninety thousand people still left annually in the 1860s, a level reached by no other country until Italy after the 1870s. By 1900 Ireland's population was half the prefamine level, making it unique among European nations. The population decline did not reverse until the 1960s.

  Blight mostly disappeared by 1851, but the destruction wrought by the famine continued. The lasting physical ef
fects among the survivors included a high incidence of mental illness. Disease and mortality re mained high among the poor. Irish society now contained high proportions of the old and the very young, contributing to social conservatism and torpor. But the huge loss of population, tragic as it was, brought some long-term advantages. There was less competition for employment, while remittances from emigrants kept many stumbling farms in the west alive. The structure of Irish agriculture changed radically: land holdings became larger and more streamlined, and farming more commercial. Livestock replaced grain as farmers adjusted to the realities of a far smaller workforce.

  The living standards of the poor remained very low. In the west, many continued to subsist on potatoes. Crop yields dropped considerably, partly because of less intensive use of fertilizer, because of much waste land and occasional local outbreaks of blight. The Lumper gave way to more palatable potato strains. Peoples' diets gradually became more diverse as the market economy grew and railroads spread through the country. But they were still vulnerable to occasional food shortages that brought scenes like those of the 1840s, though never on the same scale. Death from starvation was unusual. But the poor harbored deep resentments against the wealthier farming neighbors, who shared little of their prosperity with their laborers. Memories of the Famine, fears of starvation and eviction, were profound political realities for the remainder of the nineteenth century. The psychological scars of the Famine and hate of the English still run deep in Irish society.

  An Ghorta M6r was not the last European famine. Catastrophic food shortages owing to crop failures and cold weather developed in Belgium and Finland in 1867/68. The politically driven Volga famine of 1921 and the terror famine of the Ukraine in 1932/33 dwarf the Irish disaster. But for sheer shame, the Great Hunger has no rivals.

  As the Irish starved, warming conditions in the far north kept pack ice away from Icelandic coasts. Warmer water brought by the Irminger Current led to a short boom in cod fishing off western Greenland between 1845 and 1851. Meanwhile, Europe was somewhat colder, as blocking anticyclones brought the easterly winds and harsh winters that plagued the Irish poor. By 1855, the North Atlantic Oscillation had switched again, and ice returned to Icelandic coasts. The prevailing westerlies over the North Atlantic strengthened, bringing a milder climate to Europe and the beginnings of sustained glacial retreats. The summer of 1868 was exceptionally hot, with a record temperature of 38.1 'C at Tunbridge Wells, south of London, on July 22 and many days with readings over 30°. The following winter was very mild, with a mean temperature closer to that of warmer and more oceanic Ireland. The warmer years continued through the 1870s, except for occasional cold Februaries and very wet summers from 1875 onward.

  Another cold snap in 1879 brought weather that rivaled that of the 1690s. December 1878 and January 1879 saw weeks of below-freezing temperatures in England, followed by a cold spring and one of the wettest and coldest summers ever recorded. In some parts of East Anglia, the 1879 harvest was still being gathered after Christmas. Coming at a time of general agricultural decline, when Britain's grain market was flooded with cheap North American wheat from the prairies, 1879s disaster caused a full-grown agricultural depression. Farmers in the northwest turned from grain to beef, but even livestock soon proved unprofitable when frozen beef entered the country from Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. Thousands of unemployed farm laborers left the land for the towns and emigrated to Australia, New Zealand, and other countries with greater opportunities. The late 1870s were equally cold in China and India, where between 14 and 18 million people perished from famines caused by cold, drought, and monsoon failure. Glaciers advanced in New Zealand and the Andes, and Antarctic ice extended much further north than in Captain Cook's time a century earlier. Sailing ships traversing the Roaring Forties along the clipper route from Australia to Cape Horn regularly sighted enormous tabular icebergs, with some seen as far north as the mouth of the River Plate, just 35° south latitude.

  The cold snap persisted into the 1880s, when hundreds of London's poor died of accident hypothermia. As late as 1894/95, large ice floes formed on the Thames in the heart of winter. Then prolonged warming began. Between 1895 and 1940, Europe enjoyed nearly a half-century of relatively mild winters. Only the winters of 1916/17 and 1928/29 were colder than usual, but they certainly never witnessed the prolonged subzero temperatures of the Little Ice Age.

  By this time, human activities were leaving their mark on global climate, not only through the discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere but through pollution. The coldest European winter of the twentieth century was 1963, with a winter mean of-2°C and a January mean of -2.1 C. Such air temperatures were cooler than many of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when Londoners held frost fairs on the frozen Thames. This time, the river waters never fell below about 10°C and ice never formed. A constant spew of industrial waste and other pollutants kept the water at artificially high temperatures. Climatologist Hubert Lamb remarks: "The progress of urbanization suggests ... the pastimes in future cold winters will be to skate on the Thames at Hampton Court-at the western limit of the metropolis-and then swim in it to Westminster pier!"22

  THE MODERN WARM PERIOD

  People in every generation ... have found their joys and happiness. Those in middle latitudes have thanked their gods for the green Earth, the lilies of the field and the golden corn, those in other latitudes for the beauty of the polar and mountain snows, the shelter of the northern forests, the great arch of the desert sky, or the big trees and flowers of the equatorial forest. How many of our present problems arise from not understanding our environment and making unrealistic demands upon it?"

  -Hubert Lamb,

  Climate, History and the Modern World, 1982

  In the year 2060 my grandchildren will be approaching seventy; what will their world be like?

  -Sir John Houghton, Global Warming:

  The Complete Briefing, 1997

  Nile writing this book, I found myself looking at paintings differently, from a climatic perspective. Look beyond the central theme of a painting and you can explore house interiors and country landscapes, find details of implements of tillage and cooking utensils, admire fine musical instruments and watch a kaleidoscope of changing gentlemen's and ladies' fashions. These fashions were perhaps influenced by persistent cold winters. Women's fashions "exposed the person" somewhat daringly in postrevolutionary France, but as the grip of cold weather increased, designers created warm underwear for their clients, including a "bosom friend," which warmed the chest and hid cleavage that a few years earlier had been daringly exposed.'

  Then there are the clouds. In a fascinatingly esoteric piece of research, Hans Neuberger studied the clouds shown in 6,500 paintings completed between 1400 and 1967 from forty-one art museums in the United States and Europe.2 His statistical analysis revealed a slow increase in cloudiness between the beginning of the fifteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, followed by a sudden jump in cloud cover. Low clouds (as opposed to fair-weather high clouds) increase sharply after 1550 but fall again after 1850. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century summer artists regularly painted 50 to 75 percent cloud cover into their summer skies. The English landscape artist John Constable, born in Suffolk in 1776 and a highly successful painter of English country life, on average depicted almost 75 percent cloud cover. His contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner, who traveled widely painting cathedrals and English scenes, did roughly the same.

  After 1850, cloudiness tapers off slightly in Neuberger's painting sample. But skies are never as blue as in earlier times, a phenomenon Neuberger attributes to both the "hazy" atmospheric effects caused by short brush strokes favored by impressionists and to increased air pollution resulting from the Industrial Revolution, which diminished the blueness of European skies.

  The changes were not mere artistic fashion but probably accurate depictions of increased cloud cover. The closing decades of the Little Ice Age brought the usual unpredictable cl
imatic shifts. The 1820s and 1830s saw warmer springs and autumns, with 1826 bringing the warmest summer between 1676 and 1976. In the exceptionally cold and wet August of 1829, by contrast, rain fell in the Scottish lowlands on twentyeight of the month's thirty-one days. Floods washed out bridges, ruined crops and changed river courses. In the same year, Lake Constance in Switzerland froze over for the first time since 1740; it would not do so again until the exceptional cold of 1963. The winter of 1837/38 was so harsh in Scandinavia that ice linked southern Norway with the port of Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark, and extended far west out of sight of land.

  The 1840s perpetuated the same unpredictable swings, with several cold winters and cool summers. Warmer summers such as 1846 saw long periods of calm, humid weather as anticyclone after anticyclone built over Europe. Heat waves extended from the west deep into Siberia, where the skipper of a Russian survey vessel on the Lena River had difficulty finding the main channel in the midst of a rapidly thawing, flooded landscape. Tree trunks and huge lumps of peat cascaded alongside as he found his way by listening to the roaring and rushing of the stream. Suddenly, the flood waters carried alongside the boat a perfectly preserved mammoth head, released from the permafrost that had refrigerated it for thousands of years since the Ice Age. The crew had just enough time to examine the hairy cranium with stunned astonishment before it vanished into the muddy torrent. After 1850, the climate warmed slowly and almost continually, as a new climatic player took the stage-humanity.