Climate Catastrophe In The 17thC – Geoffrey Parker
April 9, 2021
tags: lia
By Paul Homewood
I reviewed this book a few years ago, but it is worth running again:
As the name suggests, this concentrates on the period when the Little Ice Age was at arguably its nadir, the 17thC, and describes how it affected not just Europe, but many other parts of the world.
Amazon’s blurb sets the scene:
Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides – the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s. Parker also deploys scientific evidence concerning climate conditions of the period, and his use of ‘natural’ as well as ‘human’ archives transforms our understanding of the World Crisis. Changes in the prevailing weather patterns during the 1640s and 1650s – longer and harsher winters, and cooler and wetter summers – disrupted growing seasons, causing dearth, malnutrition, and disease, along with more deaths and fewer births. Some contemporaries estimated that one-third of the world died, and much of the surviving historical evidence supports their pessimism.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/climate-catastrophe-in-the-17thc-geoffrey-parker/
