Climate Change; Chaos; and The Little Ice Age - Crash Course World History 206 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi. I'm John Green. This is Crash Course World
History and today we're going to talk about
climate change.
Mr. Green, Mr. Green, that's not history;
that's science, and also, I don't think that's even happening.
Yeah, two things, Me From the Past: One, uh,
contemporary climate change is real. Uh, two,
this isn't the first time the world has experienced
disruptive climate change, believe it or not.
So, climate change, of course, can be a very
controversial topic, at least here in the
US, but we're not discussing today whether
contemporary climate change is caused by human
activity, although it is. We're talking about
history, and history is never controversial.
We know that climate change can happen because
it has happened. In fact, although we're living
in an age of global warming today, for most
of the early modern period, the globe experienced
cool temperatures. Some historians have called
this the Little Ice Age, which would make
a great animated movie. Someone should get
on that. Anyway, good job, historians, giving
something an evocative name for once. I'm
picturing a tiny little ice ball, like a snow globe.
Apparently, the Earth was regular-sized back
then, but anyway, the Little Ice Age lasted
from the thirteenth through the nineteenth
centuries and it was a period when average
temperatures were cooler than they are now.
This doesn't mean that it was always cold,
though; there were volatile shifts between
bitterly cold winters and wet summers and
long droughts. Also, weather conditions were
not always the same in all parts of the world,
kind of like how the winter of 2014 was terribly
cold in the United States but still one of
the warmest on record worldwide. Climate is
not weather.
So, we know temperatures were colder partly
because of science but also because of history.
Science has shown through the study of stuff
like tree rings and ice cores that it really
was colder back then. But we also know this
from history. I mean, records kept at the
time by monks, and wine-makers, and others
also reported cold weather and bad harvests.
Bad harvests are crucial to our understanding
of the Little Ice Age because they were catastrophic
events, bringing hunger and, in some cases,
starvation to millions of people. And because
they were so catastrophic, people wrote about
them, which leaves us a historical record.
Less food meant more disease and also more
crime. Poor harvests often led to civil unrest,
especially bread riots. For some, a sensible
strategy was to hit the road or, in the case
of the Norseman, hit the sea. In fact, sometime
during this period, their search for better
fishing grounds led them to America.
And humans also prove very innovative when
adapting to new climate extremes. One example
near to my heart is the Netherlands, where
people developed water control systems and
experimented with new agricultural technology
to make farms less vulnerable to terrible
weather events like floods.
But the Little Ice Age led to unpredictable
harvests around the world and without, like,
Spam to fall back on, a couple bad harvests
in a row was fatal.
So, the whole Little Ice Age was pretty bad
but the seventeenth century was the worst.
Some historians even refer to it as a period
of global crisis. I mean, here are just a
few examples of the political instability
in the seventeenth century: the English revolutions
of 1640 and 1689, Spain's European Wars and
debt problems, peasant and urban worker uprisings
in Italy, the fall of the Ming and the rise
of the Qing Dynasties in China, a succession
crisis in the Ottoman Empire, wars between
colonists and Native Americans that nearly
destroyed Britain's colonies, the Mughal Wars
of Succession, oh, and the Thirty Years War.
And that's not even to mention Shakespeare.
No Little Ice Age, no Shakespeare. That's
what I would argue. Totally a climate-dependant
writer. I would be just as good as him if
only we were in a period of climate change.
Now, obviously, we can't say that all of these
upheavals were caused by cooler temperatures,
but they did correlate with them, and in many
cases, weather contributed to them. Unrest
was often linked to food shortages and taxes.
The taxes were high and the food was short
because the harvests were bad.
Now, for many people in the seventeenth century,
the cause of the calamitous bad weather was
obvious: human sinfulness. As Welsh historian
James Howell wrote in 1647, "God Almighty
has a quarrel lately with all mankind, and
given the reins to the ill spirit to compass
the whole Earth." Others blamed bad weather
on witches, always a safe bet, or on natural
phenomena like eclipses, earthquakes, comets,
or sunspots. And they might not have been
totally wrong. Well, they were totally wrong
about the witches, but- but there were fewer
recorded sunspots, especially in 1617 and
1618, when the Thirty Years War began. Oh,
and there were twelve volcanic eruptions between
1638 and 1644, which produced dust veils that
might have made the whole planet cooler.
The weather in the middle of the seventeenth
century, right around the time of the English
Revolution, was especially bad, like in Massachusetts,
1642 was so cold that the bay froze, while
in Indonesia, the droughts caused rice harvests
to fail. Much of Africa faced droughts between
1640 and 1644 and in 1643, flooding in the
Low Countries was so bad that cows and chickens
ended up in trees. And Scandinavia recorded
its coldest winter ever in 1641. And these
changes in weather were profoundly disruptive
because much more than today, people depended
directly on agriculture, and thus the weather,
for their livelihoods.
Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
So, according to historian Thomas C. Smith,
"Farming, with its allied tasks, was the principal
occupation and nearly the sole source of income
for most families, and its rhythms defined
the annual cycle of work, rest and worship.
Severe annual variations in the harvest reverberated
through family life..." According to Geoffrey
Parker, a fall of two degrees Celsius during
the growing season, precisely the scale of
global cooling in the 1640s, reduces rice
harvest yields by between thirty and fifty
percent. "In latitudes north of the temperate
zone,' each fall of 0.5 degrees Celsius in
mean summer temperature decreases the number
of days on which crops ripen by 10 per cent,
doubles the risk of a single harvest failure,
and increases the risk of a double failure
six fold." Harvest failures led to food shortages
which led to everything from stunting via
malnutrition to rising food prices. A 30 percent
reduction in the grain harvest often doubled
the price of bread, whereas a fifty percent
reduction quintupled it. And when people have
to spend more on food, they don't have money
to spend on other stuff, which means the people
who make that other stuff are suddenly unemployed
and hungry. And then, hunger itself reduced
the amount of available food by diminishing
people's capacity to work, since a decrease
from 2,500 to 2,000 calories halves our ability
to work efficiently because the body's basic
metabolism still requires 1,500 calories.
And hungry people are also more susceptible
to disease. Add together floods, droughts,
harvest failures, and disease, and you get
a vicious cycle leading to population decline,
which is exactly what happened in the seventeenth
century.
Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, all of that is
pretty horrible, but human suffering in the
seventeenth century wasn't just caused by
cold and drought. There was also a lot of
war going on. And these wars between and within
states multiplied the effects of hunger as
soldiers looted wherever they went. Like the
Chinese even coined a word for soldiers' bad
behavior: binghuo, which means "soldier calamity".
And then, to add injury to injury, the costs
of most of these wars were borne by the peasants,
who suffered doubly as their taxes went to
pay for the king's wars, which brought soldier
calamity. These taxes were often on staples
like bread, and so they often led to bread
riots, which were not great for morale.
And yes, terrible weather could even contribute
to the fall of dynasties. The 1641 drought
in China was so bad that the Grand Canal began
to dry up for the only time in history, which
reduced rice shipments to China's capitol.
Unable to feed the people, the Ming emperor
surrendered to the Qing in 1644. Drought and
cold had also encouraged the Qing to overthrow
the Ming in the first place as poor harvests
in Manchuria convinced their leaders that
invading China was the only way to avoid catastrophe.
And then the Qing got to China and they were
like, "Where's all your food?" and they were
like, "Yeah, the whole planet is colder, not
just Korea." But then they were already there
so they decided to have a dynasty for a while.
I am your history teacher.
So, obviously, protests and rebellions were
public responses to the hunger and war, but
many people confronted the problem of hunger
by trying to reduce the number of mouths they
had to feed. They could do this by reducing
the number of births through postponed marriage
or, in more extreme cases, through infanticide.
And the most desperate resorted to suicide.
Now, we don't have many records of suicide
rates, but a Qing decree of 1688 forbidding
widows from killing themselves suggests that
it was widespread.
And speaking of widows, wars compounded the
problem by creating lots of them, like in
Europe, the Thirty Years War led to a rise
in the number of households headed by women.
Women also took the lead in reducing the number
of mouths to feed by delaying marriage. Like,
whenever bread prices rise, rates of marriage
fall.
And the last thing that I'll mention here
is that bad weather and poor harvests also
prompted migration. Like, in the first half
of the seventeenth century, perhaps one half
of all adult Scotsmen left Scotland. Many
Chinese left for the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.
So, we have a world that's dramatically different
because of the climate change of the Little
Ice Age. Women head more households, many
communities are more ethnically diverse, population
growth slowed dramatically, and there was
widespread political unrest and wars and starvation.
And, of course, looking at the history of
the Little Ice Age is relevant for us today
as we face a change in climate and the extreme
weather that comes with it.
Sometimes, we like to imagine that math and
science don't really have much to do with
the humanities, that, like, how we live in
the world isn't really shaped by our environment.
But, of course, it is. We are shaping our
environment. Our environment is also shaping us.
To end on a hopeful note, the agricultural
innovations that developed in the face of
tremendous weather-related challenges should
remind us that it is possible to adapt to
changing climates if we make the effort and
take the time. We don't know what the cast
iron plows of the future are going to be,
but we do know that we're going to need them.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
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