Climate, weather and society in Ireland in the long eighteenth century: the experience of the later phases of the Little Ice Age

Abstract

This paper aspires to map the climate and weather experience of the population of Ireland during the later phases of the Little Ice Age (LIA). Comprising four sections, it begins with an examination of the impact of the Late Maunder Minimum spanning the challenging 1690s—the coldest decade of the LIA—and the amelioration in temperature that was a feature of the early decades of the eighteenth century. Though Ireland was not as severely impacted as other parts of western Europe at this time, the population experienced its share of weather-induced crises—severe cold, serious flooding, high winds and, on occasion, drought—accounts of which can be found in contemporary weather diaries and newspapers. Weather-induced harvest crises posed a still more formidable challenge, and part two of the paper seeks, by correlating these events with volcanic forcing, both to identify those episodes that can be ascribed to specific volcanic events, and to make a case for the inclusion of larger environmental forces in the historic reconstruction of the island's climate. Volcanic forcing is most readily illustrated in the case of the major Lakagígar eruption (1783–4), but the temporal correlations that can be drawn with famines and subsistence crises in 1740–41, 1755–6, 1766 and 1815 suggests that it was a more persistent factor. The population was insufficiently informed to make such connections, of course, and parts three and four of the paper focus on the impact of extreme weather events on people and on identifying how economic growth and the improvement to the kingdom's infrastructure enhanced their capacity to negotiate climatic and weather induced crisis into the early nineteenth century when, following a phase of reduced temperature—the so-called Dalton Minimum c. 1795–1825—the LIA can be said to have concluded.