From the Archives: Déjà Vu All Over Again – Climate Change
The consensus in the places that I hang out, in real life and on line, is that it is unseasonably cold and we are sick of it. It reminded of this blog post, which I wrote in February, 2014, when we were also sick of winter in these part.
Earlier this week I stood in a line that moved very slowly. As we waited, people began to tell weather stories–the natural consequence of five weeks of alternating snow and deep freeze. At first the stories focused on the efforts individuals had made to be in that line when the ticket office opened for a once a year event: digging out cars, walking through two feet of snow on un-shovelled sidewalks, etc. Then people moved on to tales of their experiences of the Big Chicago Snowstorm in 1967, or 1979, or 1999.
Just as I got to the head of the line, the snow began to fall again. A collective grumbling broke out. Then a voice from the back of the line said, “You know, winter used to always be like this.”
Whether that’s true depends on how you define “always”.
Over the life of our planet, glaciers have expanded and contracted more than twenty times at intervals of roughly a hundred thousand years, caused by tiny changes in the way the earth moves. “Brief” periods of interglacial warming* were followed by long periods of cold when ice covered the planet. Even those periods of warmth aren’t stable. In the most recent warm spell, following the Great Ice Age, we’ve experienced a number of dramatic climate changes, including:
The Medieval Warming Period
From roughly 800 to 1200 CE, Europeans enjoyed mild winters, long summers and good harvests. Warm centuries in Europe brought problems in other regions. Higher temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns created extended periods of drought in Central America, Central Asia, and South East Asia.
Cultural changes followed climate change. On the plus side: more stable food supplies help Europe take the first steps out of the “dark ages”,** favorable ice conditions allowed the Norse to travel pretty much everywhere, and reduced grazing land helped Genghis Khan to pull the Mongolian tribes together into an empire. On the down side: drought contributed to the end of the Chaco Canyon culture of modern New Mexico and Angkor Wat, favorable ice conditions allowed the Norse to travel pretty much everywhere, and reduced grazing land helped Genghis Khan to pull the Mongolian tribes together into an empire.***
Just to put things in context: the Medieval Warming Period was several degrees cooler than the recorded mean temperature since 1971.
The Little Ice Age
Between 1500 and 1850 CE (give or take 50 or 100 years) , things cooled off–at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Glaciers wiped out villages in the Alps. Rivers in Britain and the Netherlands froze deeply enough to support winter festivals. Even more amazing, in 1658, a Swedish army invaded Denmark by marching across the frozen Great Belt.
“Eighteen hundred and froze to death”
A violent volcano eruption in Indonesia on April 5, 1815, disrupted weather across the planet: more than twelve months of heavy rains in Europe, drought in North America and unseasonable cold everywhere.
I don’t know about you, but I suddenly feel a lot warmer.
* Brief in this case meaning 10,000 years or so.
**Short-hand for a more complicated discussion.
***Proving once again that plus or minus depends on where you stand.
Video of the Chicago Blizzard of 1967 courtesy of the Chicago Fire Department
In which I offer, and ask for, book recommendations
I recently received an email from a young, smart history bugg and aspiring writer of my acquaintance asking me if I could recommend a history book or two that had impressed me or influenced my writing.* I quickly put together a short list of books, focusing for the most part on books I had read with the same fascination as a novel–what we call Flashlight Reads over on the Non-Fiction Fans Facebook group. I kept going back to pull “just one more” off the shelf.
Here’s the list I came up with, in alphabetical order by last name:
Tanim Ansary. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
Sarah Gristwood. Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the War of the Roses
Sarah Gristwood. Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth Century Europe
David Howarth. 1066: The Year of the Conquest.
Steve Kemper. A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa.
Lynne Olson. Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood that Helped Turn the Tide of War.
E. P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class.
Pretty much anything by Barbara Tuchman
Holly Tucker. City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic and the First Police Chief of Paris
It’s a random list. Chosen quickly, and heavily weighted toward books I’ve read recently because those are the ones at the front of my brain. Even as I type, I’m tempted to cheat and add one or ten more.
I’m curious. What would your list look like?
* I didn’t even try to limit myself to one or two. To do that in any meaningful way you have to define your terms.
Madame Lenormand’s Fortune Telling Cards
Back in February I spoke at the Civil War Museum at Kenosha, Wisconsin, as part of their annual Civil War medicine weekend. I was a featured speaker, but the heart of the weekend was the 17th Corps Field Hospital–a Civil War reenactment unit from the Midwest that “heals the sick and treats the wounded ‘Under the Yellow Flag'” at events across the country from February through October. Like the best re-enactors, they are accurate and passionate. They are also skilled performers. I urge you to attend one of their events if you get the chance.
As I wandered through the re-enactors’ displays, I passed a woman seating at a small table in the corner. She was dressed in period appropriate-clothing, but her dress was more elaborate than any nurse would have worn and she had no exhibits laid out. “Read your cards?” she asked as I went by.
I needed to distract myself from the inevitable pre-speech jitters,* so I sat down, prepared to be intrigued by tarot cards yet again. To my surprise, I was treated to a history lesson along with my card reading. Instead of using tarot cards, the reader used Lenormand cards, named after Madame Lenormand, a famous nineteenth century French fortune teller. (At least some sources claim that Lenormand adapted the deck from a pre-existing parlor game, the “Game of Hope”.)
We don’t know much about Lenormand’s early life–her biographies are inconsistent and have the whiff of mythology. She is generally believed to come from Normandy–le normand. What we do know is that Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand (1772-1843) rose to fame during the Napoleonic era, reading the cards of notable figures who passed through Paris. According to one account, she once read Napoleon’s cards. Instead of telling him what he wanted to hear, she informed him that according to the cards he would ultimately be unsuccessful in his military conquests–a piece of fortune-telling integrity that landed her in jail for a time.
Lenormand successfully plied her trade in Paris for forty years, making enough good predictions for influential people to earn both a reputation and a small fortune.
As far as my reading went, that’s between me, the card reader and the cards.**
*Those jitters are crucial. They seem to be tied to the energy that makes the speech come alive. But they aren’t comfortable.
**I just realized that this is my second divination post in a row. Not a theme. Just a coincidence.