After years of saying the Little Ice Age was just a European, or Northern Hemisphere event, now apparently it was more global. It’s just that it was caused by volcanoes and white guys.
Climate crisis: what lessons can we learn from the last great cooling-off period?Michael Marshall, The Guardian
The ‘little ice age’ of the 14th to the 19th centuries brought cold winters to Europe and unusual weather globally. Studying how humans adapted could be valuable.
The story isn’t entirely settled, but researchers are increasingly confident about the initial trigger: volcanoes.
“You have these eruptions that are happening in clusters,” says Degroot. A 2015 study used data from ice cores to identify 25 major eruptions from the past 2,500 years. Between 1200 and 1400, there were huge eruptions of the Samalas volcano in Indonesia, Quilotoa in Ecuador and El Chichón in Mexico.
But the volcanoes reasoning is a bit hand-wavy and vague, so Michael Marshall knows he needs other reasons. He considers the sun as a ball-of-pure-light for a few paragraphs, ignoring that it might have [...]
