Some notes on “The Little Ice Age”

Without taking a stance here on the question of human-caused global warming, let me simply observe that the climate of the Earth is, and always has been, variable.  The fact that we speak about average and mean temperatures implies pretty strongly that, over shorter periods (“shorter” in geological terms, though not in terms of brief human lifespans), they rise and fall.

You may or may not have heard of the “Little Ice Age,” which began around 1300 AD and continued, albeit in three major phases, until AD 1870.

But there it was.

And a recent doctoral dissertation out of Denmark examines the effect of the cold winters that began to afflict the Vikings of Greenland in or near AD 1300, and the measures that they took to survive.

The Little Ice Age probably wasn’t caused by factory emissions and auto exhaust, by the way.