Status Updates From The Little Ice Age: How Cli...

10% of the French population died of famine in 1693-4, exacerbated by requisitioning and stockpiling for Louis XIV’s military.

Very valuable point about the specter of hypothermia, in conjunction with malnutrition, which in elderly or young individuals can lead to heart attack in dwellings without central heating that fall below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. As many as 20,000 a year died of this in Britain as late as the 1960s and 1970s.

I wonder the extent to which the Little Ice Age’s passing in the 1800s and Alpine warming shaped the reframing of this region in the metropolitan European imaginary, as extensive glacial cover and attendant local poverty shaped racialized views of mountain dwellers that seem to disappear towards the start of the 20th century, at least per chapter 1 of Ilaria Scaglia, The Emotions of Internationalism.

Fascinating point about the extension of cod fisheries west, contextualizes the Columbus/conquistador “discovery” narrative by highlighting expansion west as an ongoing dynamic of the European economy (particularly as shaped by the Little Ice Age’s reconfiguration of cod geography). By 1550, more than 2000 Basques were fishing off the Labrador coast each summer.

Wow, Basque sailors were probably fishing and traveling off the coast of Labrador in the mid-1400s. They were at least in Greenland at the Norse Eastern Settlement.

Great insight on how the Little Ice Age was not experienced as a unilateral colder period, but instead as marked by greater climate instability, including sometimes hotter than normal summers.

Really interesting point about agriculture and animal rearing being interwoven. Flooding and rains that savaged crops during the famine period in 1315-16 also reduced hay, contributed to dir-offs among beasts of burden; made it harder to consequently fertilize and ploy fields, resulting in a famine feedback loop.

Some rather interesting bits. Didn’t know wine was ever produced in England.