Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences
It happened during the Ice Age
In recent weeks, catastrophic floods overwhelmed towns in Germany and the Netherlands, inundated subway tunnels in China, swept through northwestern Africa and triggered deadly landslides in India and Japan.
Heat and drought fanned wildfires in the North American West and Siberia, contributed to water shortages in Iran, and worsened famines in
Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.
Extremes like these are increasingly caused or worsened by human activities heating up Earth’s climate. For thousands of years, Earth’s climate has not changed anywhere near as quickly or profoundly as it’s changing today.
Yet on a smaller scale, humans have seen waves of extreme weather events coincide with temperature changes before. It happened during what’s known as the Little Ice Age, a period between the 14th and 19th centuries that was marked by large volcanic eruptions and bitter cold spells in parts of the world.
The global average temperature is believed to have cooled by less than a half-degree Celsius (less than 0.9 F) during even the chilliest decades of the Little Ice Age, but locally, extremes were common.
In diaries and letters from that period, people wrote about “years without a summer,” when wintry weather persisted long after spring. In one such summer, in 1816, cold that followed a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia ruined crops across parts of Europe and North America. Less well known are the unusually cold European summers of 1587, 1628 and 1675, when unseasonal frost provoked fear and, in some places, hunger.
“It is horribly cold,” author Marie de Rabutin-chantal wrote from Paris during the last of these years; “the behavior of the sun and of the seasons has changed.”
wwinters could be equally terrifying. People reported 17th-century blizzards as far south as Florida and the Chinese province of Fujian. Sea ice trapped ships, repeatedly enclosed the Chesapeake Bay and froze over rivers from the Bosporus to the Meuse. In early 1658, ice so completely covered the Baltic Sea that a Swedish army marched across the water separating Sweden and Denmark to besiege Copenhagen. Poems and songs suggest people simply froze to death while huddling in their homes.
These were cold snaps, not heat waves, but the overall story should seem familiar: A small global change in climate dramatically altered the likelihood of extreme local weather.