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The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan, Basic Books, $26, ISBN

0465022715

“THE little ice age reminds us that climate change is inevitable,

unpredictable and sometimes vicious,” says Brian Fagan in a climate chronicle of

the past thousand years. Between 900 and 1300 temperatures over northern Europe

were positively balmy. Erik the Red’s colonists fattened cows in Greenland,

while the French tried to embargo England’s fine wines.

But by 1315, a succession of poor summers and harsh winters created Europe’s

worst-ever famine. The Greenlanders ate their cows right down to the hooves.

Fagan analyses a period of violent climate swings in The Little Ice Age. And

he is just as at home explaining the mechanics of the North Atlantic Oscillation

and its flips, changing the course of warm currents and affecting the weather,

as he is with their dire human consequences But this was no prolonged freeze,

periods of decimating cold alternated with torrid summers and frequent floods.

Using sources as diverse as tree-rings, wine yields, monastic tithes, ice cores

and cloud cover percentages in five centuries of paintings, Fagan shows in this

wonderful book how vulnerable human society is to climatic zigzags.

Rapid climate change is nothing new.