Part 2. Catastrophic Climate Change in the Seventeenth Century — Lessons from the Past

PART 2. “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century” by Geoffrey Parker

A Book Report by S. Thomas Bond, Resident Farmer & Watershed Volunteer, Lewis County, WV

There were just three areas on earth that managed to prosper in the Little Ice Age.  One of them was Japan.  It had just undergone a series of terrible wars (called the Warring States Era) which resulted in consolidation into one nation.  The previous reduction of population by these wars, and the fact the winner of the contest, Hideyoshi, separated the military (samuri) from villages and brought them into garrisons and rationalized tax collection ended that.  When Hideyoshi died, Tokugawa defeated all other warlords and began what a European observer called “The greatest and powerfullist tyranny that was ever heard of in this world.”  Rapid economic and demographic growth followed.
 
The second was the New England colonies. Land was available on the frontier, and the two industries prospered.  One was the slave trade, carried out far to the south, which established fortunes that can be traced to some of today’s wealthy U. S. families.  The other was cod fishing.  The ocean never froze, and miserable as the fishermen must have been at times, this food source was much in demand.  People were conspicuously healthier than in England, half lived to be 70, and where both parents survived they brought up 6 children.  Immigration was intense, since there was no war there.  In Virgnia, 6000 came from 1607 to 1624, to add to this colony of only 1200.  Long after, the population grew only slowly.   The Indian natives of North America were not fortunate.  They had no immunity to the new diseases the colonists brought, and their population crashed.
 
The third that prospered was French Canada.  Conditions along the St. Lawrence and around the Great Lakes resembled New England.  Land was available and the natives succumbed to European diseases. The French government carefully chose couples that seemed likely to have a high reproductive capacity.  Some 70 percent of the women were married before they were 20 and half the families produced at least four children, one fourth ten or more.  After 1650, parish registers listed three or four births for each death.  The French government rewarded fecundity handsomely – if a father supported ten children, he received 300 livres, and if 12 or more, 400 livres.  As in New England, the rapid increase in colonists failed to offset the decline in the native population.
 
In the Epilogue, Parker contrasts the reception of the idea of the present climate change in the 1970′s and since.  There was a world wide food shortage in the 1970′s. Climate change was almost universally accepted when the first international Conference on Climate and History came out with a mandate to “insert climatic consideration into the formulation of rational regional policy alternatives.”  In 1974 the United Nations “World Food Conference” issued a series of recommendations for food security, including balancing population and food supply, reducing military expenditure to increase food production and creating a world-wide early warning system on food and agriculture.
 
In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, involving several hundred scientists from 25 countries announced that the present climate change conditions are produced by mankind through use of fossil fuels and deforestation, particularly in the tropics.  This prompted strong reaction in some quarters, primarily the hydrocarbon industries and the palm oil and other agricultural industries in the tropics.  In 2003 Senator James Inhofe, elected from Oklahoma by oil money, and became the Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee of the Senate, declared global warming to be “greatest hoax ever  perpetrated on the American people.”
 
Today denial of climate change puts one in the same class as those who deny that tobacco causes cancer, but we have congressmen doing all they can to prevent it from entering into national planning activities.  Small nations and nations that do not have a lot of heavy industry, the ones to be most affected, accept the science.  Larger, more industrialized nations have the most active deniers. 

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