Vorarlberg in den Krisenjahren 1816 und 1817: Gründe und Auswirkungen

The earthquake that struck the Japanese port city of Kobe on January 17, 1995, was the most severe quake ever to strike a modern urban area. It has become the most studied, analyzed, and discussed natural disaster in history. What I propose to add to this dialogue is an economist's overview of what he saw in Kobe 19 months after the event and what he learned during the ensuing 6 months.

Reviewed by: A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America by Sam White Adam R. Hodg (bio) A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America. By Sam White. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 361. $29.95 cloth) I have found that one of the most challenging parts of teaching colonial American history is finding ways to make that foreign past relatable and relevant to students. Sam White's A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America, is a thought-provoking study that emphasizes the roles of climate and climatic change in the stories of Spanish, English, and French colonization during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, presents material that can help one overcome that obstacle. An insightful work that draws connections between the past and present, A Cold Welcome "is [End Page 379] a history of North America's first colonies written from the vantage point of global warming, produced with the help of new tools to reconstruct the climates of the past, and conscious of the challenges posed by climate change" (p. 4). White's exploration of "another age when climatic change and extremes threatened lives and settlements" casts new light on the "forgotten century" of American history between Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean and the Separatists' landing at Plymouth (p. 5). By revealing how "the Little Ice Age helps explain how so many expeditions, all across the continent and over the course of almost a century, would so often face disaster," he enriches our understanding of North America's "creation story from hell" seemingly dominated by disease, starvation, violence, and death (p. 251). Focusing on the founding of Santa Fe, Jamestown, and Quebec, as well as discussing dozens of other expeditions and settlements, most of which utterly failed by any metric, White reveals how European colonizers struggled in the face of volatile and extreme climate conditions in North America, even though the Little Ice Age also affected Europe during this time, although to a lesser degree. Adverse climate conditions—especially harsh winters and dry summers—not only jeopardized European expeditions and settlements, but they also affected European interactions with Native American communities as desperately hungry and/or cold colonizers often lashed out at Indians to alleviate their hardships. Moreover, the challenges posed by the Little Ice Age affected imperial rivalries by, for example, weakening Spain's resolve to defend its early claims in North America and thereby opening a window of opportunity for the French and English to gain a foothold in the Americas. To tell this environmental history of colonial North America, White analyzes a diverse array of sources. His deeply researched and well-documented study includes references to a variety of historical documents, including archival materials held in Italy and Spain, as well as published sources originally composed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, Dutch, and Turkish. White pairs [End Page 380] these documents with climatological studies, including both paleoclimatologists' studies of such physical remains as tree rings and ice cores as well as historical climatologists' analyses of written records–and archaeological findings in the areas of zooarchaeology, palynology, and bioarcheology. Just as impressive as the interdisciplinary resources base is White's effective handling of diverse data and concepts, as he presents accessible and engaging discussions of classical and modern climate theories, among other complex topics. Overall, A Cold Welcome is a strong addition to the literature on colonial America. A beautifully written book, it deftly weaves together information derived from diverse sources to deepen our understanding of colonial American history as well as provide teachers with fresh material to integrate into their lessons. Sam White should be commended for producing an eminently readable book that tells the story of the Little Ice Age's role in colonial North American history both chronologically and geographically, and one that insightfully draws together the distant past and present. A Cold Welcome should find a wide audience among scholars of early America and lay readers alike. Adam R. Hodg ADAM R. HODGE is assistant professor of history at Lourdes University in Sylvania, Ohio. He is author...

Reviewed by: The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 by Dagomar Degroot Thomas Wozniak The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720. By dagomar degroot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-108-41041-0. $29.99 (paper). “Earth’s climate is a fantastically complex jigsaw puzzle, and every part contributes to the whole” (p. 26). In his book “The Frigid Golden Age,” Dagomar Degroot, associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, offers a detailed analysis of the relations between the period called the “Little Ice Age” and the rise of the Dutch Republic. Degroot is one of the co-founders of the Climate History Network, an organization of scholars who study past climate changes. His book starts with the long-term focus of previous scholarship on the Low Countries and offers an overview of the current state of research. The volume is subdivided in three parts with the keywords commerce, conflict, and culture. After a short and insightful introduction about “Crisis and Opportunity in a Changing Climate” (pp. 1–21), in chapter 1, Degroot defines his understanding of “The Little Ice Age” (pp. 22–51). Therefore he describes the key engines of atmospheric and oceanic circulations such as North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) etc., and their influence on the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. Having thus clarified the preconditions, he turns to the consequences [End Page 630] of climatic changes in the three areas mentioned above: commerce, conflicts, and culture. One of the most important sources of this book are ship’s logbooks as these contain a remarkable amount of information on weather conditions. In part I “Commerce and Climate Change,” Degroot describes in two chapters the influence of the climate on trade connections. In chapter 2 “Reaching Asia in a Stormy, Chilly Climate” (pp. 55–108), he shows that traveling by sea was more important to the Dutch republic’s coastal provinces than to most other European regions. In chapter 3 “Sailing, Floating, Riding, and Skating through a Cooler Europe” (pp. 109–151), Degroot gives an impressive overview on how diverse the Dutch transportation system was, using different kinds of waterborne travel and road nets. The Dutch farmers, engineers, sailors, and laborers found creative solutions to travel even in harsh weather conditions, since movement was essential to their economy and culture. The second part of the book deals with “Conflict and Climate Change” especially during the Eighty Years’ War, when different periods of Cooling and Warming affected the Wars of Independence (pp. 154–195). Degroot is able to show that climate change was a catalyst but rarely a cause of military victories and defeats. During the Anglo-Dutch Antagonism in the years 1652–1688 (pp. 196–249) frequent westerlies allowed English warships of unprecedented size to win more than twice as many battles, yet after a change in environmental conditions easterly gales and winds (“the Protestant wind”) helped the Dutch invasions across the English Channel. Nevertheless “no wars were ever won or lost solely because of climate change” (p. 247), but forecasts of wind directions were useful for choosing times for sea battles. In the third part, Degroot describes the consequences of single extreme events induced through climate change and their cultural expressions in painting, technology, and text production. In chapter 6 “Tracing and Painting the Little Ice Age” (pp. 253–276), he states that Dutch winter landscapes were not quite the straightforward representation of the Little Ice Age that they appear to us nowadays, however they reveal how Dutch artists thought about weather and how they perceived the consequences of climate change. In the last chapter “Texts, Technologies, and Climate Change” (pp. 277–299), Degroot stresses that relationships between climate change and culture can be difficult to pin down. In his “Lessons from Ice and Gold” (pp. 300–309) he concludes that the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic was framed by the Grindelwald [End Page 631] Fluctuation and the Maunder Minimum, two severe cold phases. The reasons why the Dutch prospered in this time were complex, and...

Chapter 6: Insurance industry

The Battle Rages On

This paper examines the structure of glacial cycles, with a particular focus on the definition and complexity of cold stages in the stratigraphical record. The Middle and Late Pleistocene cold stages correspond to the classic orbitally-driven 100 ka glacial cycles. Closer examination of the global glacier-climate record also reveals that cold stages are structured within larger glacial cycles beyond the classic 100 ka pattern. ‘Mega’-glacial cycles closely correspond to 400 ka eccentricity cycles and the last two such cycles were bounded by MIS 19, 11 and 1. The last of these mega-cycles encompasses the Saalian Complex Stage in Europe, as well as the last cold stage (Weichselian Stage and equivalents) and has significant implications for how cold stages are defined. The irregular pacing of quasi-100 ka glacial cycles is likely to represent an internal mechanism related to ice-sheet evolution through cold stages and their interaction with ocean and atmospheric circulation. Internal climate drivers also explain short-term climatic fluctuations within cold stages such as Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and various other short-term interstadial-stadial transitions, such as the during the Late-glacial and the Younger Dryas Stadial, for example. Since the effects of global climate change are not manifested uniformly through time and space, such climatic effects result in diachronous boundaries in the geological record as well as spatial variability. This is especially characteristic of the Quaternary record where sediments and landforms record climate change over relatively short time intervals. This complexity, inherent in climate stratigraphy upon which the Quaternary stratigraphical record is built, poses challenges for regional and especially global correlations. In many studies cross-correlation within glacial cycles is achieved via the marine or ice-core records, especially for the last glacial cycle. However, whilst useful as records of time through the Quaternary, these records do not always reflect other processes on Earth. For example, it is now known that glacier behaviours around the world do not conform closely with the marine isotopic records, the latter being dominated by fluctuations in the Laurentide Ice Sheet over North America, overprinted by local factors. Whilst orbital forces caused by the Earth’s interaction with other planetary orbits in our Solar System are pivotal in modulating and pacing climate change, the most important driver of the magnitude of climate change that we see in the Quaternary are largely internal factors. It is the coincidence of these drivers with orbital parameters that explain the structure and characteristics of glacial cycles. Whilst similarities between global climate patterns between glacial cycles are apparent, such as the saw-tooth pattern of change observed in marine isotope records, the complexity within these cycles differs within every cycle.  Thus, every glacial cycle is unique. This means that stratigraphical frameworks for subdividing, ordering and correlating structural elements of Pleistocene cold stages will also be unique for each glacial cycle and requires careful consideration and definition. This is especially important for correct correlation of intra-cold stage climatic stratigraphical events across regions and ultimately for comparison with global climate temporal frameworks such as the marine or ice-core records.  

Spectres of the Anthropocene.

Climate change and human activities in Europe have altered erosion and riverine sediment transport for thousands of years. The Danube River basin, the second largest watershed in Europe, provides a unique study area to examine these impacts on fluvial discharge through available reconstructed climate data during the ‘Little Ice Age’ cold interval, as well as documented timing of deforestation and large dam emplacement. Suspended sediment flux of the Danube watershed and its variability in response to both climatic adjustments and human influences is analyzed at the sub-basin scale using a numerical modeling approach ( HydroTrend 3.0). The system is examined over three time periods under conditions corresponding to: (1) modern day, (2) pre-dam and (3) the ‘Little Ice Age’. Modeled results indicate that modern-day suspended sediment flux is approximately 60% and 80% lower than that simulated under pre-dam and ‘Little Ice Age’ conditions, respectively. Disregarding the effects of modern-day dams, sediment flux has decreased 46% since the ‘Little Ice Age’, largely due to declining rates of deforestation since the mid to late twentieth century. High-resolution (decadal) analyses based solely on climate change, i.e. assuming no human impact, suggest that suspended sediment flux should be approximately 5% higher today than during the ‘Little Ice Age’, despite a 10% decrease in water discharge.This supports the view that human influence is the dominant forcing agent in modifying, and even reversing, natural processes on the Earth’s surface. Results also suggest that a 4°C increase in average European annual temperatures, as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the end of this century, could result in increased sediment flux by 16–63% in individual basins.

The boreal forest is the second largest biome in the world containing 33% of the Earth's forest cover ([FAO 2001][1]) of which approximately 25% is natural. It is circumpolar and shares similar taxa across its range. It has approximately 20 300 identified species. Along with the tropics, the

Quaternary Climates

The climatic and geological changes that occurred during the Quaternary, particularly the fluctuations during the glacial and interglacial periods of the Pleistocene, shaped the population demography and geographic distribution of many species. These processes have been studied in several groups of organisms in the Northern Hemisphere, but their influence on the evolution of Neotropical montane species and ecosystems remains unclear. This study contributes to the understanding of the effect of climatic fluctuations during the late Pleistocene on the evolution of Andean mountain forests. First, we describe the nuclear and plastidic DNA patterns of genetic diversity, structure, historical demography, and landscape connectivity of Quercus humboldtii, which is a typical species in northern Andean montane forests. Then, these patterns were compared with the palynological and evolutionary hypotheses postulated for montane forests of the Colombian Andes under climatic fluctuation scenarios during the Quaternary. Our results indicated that populations of Q. humboldtii have high genetic diversity and a lack of genetic structure and that they have experienced a historical increase in connectivity from the last glacial maximum (LGM) to the present. Furthermore, our results showed a dramatic reduction in the effective population size followed by an expansion before the LGM, which is consistent with the results found by palynological studies, suggesting a change in dominance in Andean forests that may be related to ecological factors rather than climate change.

This paper traces the socio-economic impact of a unique phenomenon of little ice age in 17th Europe that took placed between 1300-1700 AD. Europe witnessed social, political, and economic crisis in 17th century. Various factors have been explained by Historians but the recent trends in Environmental history have shown that the crisis was also deepened by the phenomenon of "Little Ice Age". The Little Ice Age was characterized by a period of cooler temperatures, expanded glaciation, and significant variations in weather patterns across different regions. The phenomenon of little ice was established by studying dendrochronological evidence and sunspot created on the surface of the Sun that shows low solar activity that is also called Maunder Minimum. This paper also discusses whether Little ice age was the result of Natural causes or Human Induced Causes. The objective of this paper is to study and show how climate change can impact socio-economic and political sphere. This paper adopts the Historical methods to understand the cause and effect relationship.

Historical variations of surface temperature in relation to anthropogenic warming has been extensively studied to understand and explain changes in the contemporary climate and to estimate future impacts of climate．Inoue and others (in press) reported 228-year records of SST and salinity based on Sr/Ca and d18O analyses with monthly time resolution in Porites coral collected from Bicol, the south of Luzon, Philippines. From the record, we investigated the relationship between the reconstructed temperature and the volcanic eruptions in late 18th and early 19th centuries. There were three great famines during the Edo period (1603-1868), almost corresponding to the Little Ice Age in Japan. Of these, the two were Tenmei-famine in 1782-88 and Tempo-famine in 1833-1837(1839). Both famines killed more than one million people out of a population of 30 million at the time. Our reconstructed SST anomaly fluctuated between -1.5 degree and 1.0 degree. The age model may have the age error of 1 to 3 years before around 1885. Large minima occurred in 1785-1789, 1815-1819, 1822-25, 1827-1830, 1834-1835, and 1843-45. Although Laki eruption, Iceland in 1783 has not been described as large eruption in previous studies, their impact on climatic conditions around the Northern Hemisphere and the globe was widely reported. Local eruption of Asama, Japan in 1783 released volcanic ash over eastern part of Japanese islands, In addition, El Nino event, which often cooled down Japanese islands, occurred around those days. These factors could have been responsible for the coldest anomaly in 1785-1789 recorded in our coral samples. After Tambora eruption in 1815, sharp cooling of around 2.0˚C was observed in our coral sample and almost all over the world. However, this world-scale cooling event have no or little influence on the climate in Japanese islands based upon the historical documents and agriculture records. This indicates that there are areas that do not become exceptionally cold, even by major volcanic eruptions. Large eruption of Galunggung in 1822 brought appreciable degree of cooling anomaly in our coral record. Just after Agung exploded largely in 1843, reconstructed SST significantly dropped. This might be also influenced by another large eruption of Cosiguina in Nicaragua, central America. Cold climate was reported in Japan, New York in USA, Copenhagen, UK in 1840s. It was most likely global in scale in the northern hemisphere.

Although an increasing frequency of forest fires has been suggested as a consequence of global warming, there are no empirical data that have shown a climatically driven change in fire frequency since the warming that has followed the end of the 'Little Ice Age'. We present here evidence from fire and tree-ring chronologies that the post-'Little Ice Age' climate change has profoundly decreased the frequency of fires in the northwestern Québec boreal forest. A 300-year fire history (AD 1688-1988) from the Lake Duparquet area (48°28' N, 79°17' W) shows an important decrease, starting 100 years ago, in the number and the extent of fires. This decrease in fire frequency is also associated with a long- term increase in the mean ring width of northern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis L.) in the same area. Agreement between the standardized tree-ring chronology and fire years, together with a negative correlation with a drought index reconstructed for the AD 1913-1987 period, shows that the decrease in fire frequency may be related to a reduced frequency of drought periods since the end of the 'Little Ice Age'. The contradictory results between predicted and observed effects of warming on fire frequency call into question our present capability to generalize the effect of increasing CO2 levels on fire frequency.

Global Warming, the Ruddiman Thesis, and the Little Ice Age Daniel Headrick Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis is one of those books that appear once in a generation and define the field—in this case, the crisis of the seventeenth century—for years to come. It is also the culmination of a lifetime’s devotion to the scholarly study of that century in all its ramifications: political, social, cultural, environmental, and economic. Rather than comment on the entire book, I will, as a budding environmental historian, limit my comments to the first chapter, “The Little Ice Age.” In that chapter, Parker describes all the environmental anomalies that afflicted Earth in the seventeenth century—unseasonably cold weather, storms, volcanic eruptions, floods in some places, droughts in others—and their impact on harvests and on other aspects of human life. Rather than simply generalizing, he provides specific data from both human and natural archives, as well as quotations from the writings of people who lived through that terrible century. I had read Parker’s earlier works, especially Europe in Crisis and The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century.1 Yet I found much new information in Global Crisis, especially about the world outside of Europe, that buttressed my own views of the Little Ice Age. All that new data [End Page 157] was very welcome indeed, and I had no critique to level at Parker’s interpretation of the Little Ice Age. None, that is, until I stumbled across a sentence in the epilogue that reads: “Although humans appear to have played no part in precipitating the climate changes of the seventeenth century, they suffered and died from its consequences all the same” (p. 687). Actually humans did contribute to the climate changes of the seventeenth century, alongside such natural phenomena as the El Niño episodes, volcanic eruptions, and the lack of sunspots that Parker emphasizes. I base this statement on the work of William Ruddiman. William Ruddiman is a climatologist, now a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is best known for two books, Earth’s Climate: Past and Future, a textbook in paleoclimatology, and a popular book, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum. In these books and in numerous scholarly articles, he makes two arguments that I will oversimplify here.2 The first argument concerns the impact of humans on the natural cycles of the global climate. During a period scientists call the Pleistocene, from about 2.5 million until circa 8,000 years ago, Earth’s climate was largely determined by the amount of sunshine reaching the planet and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The amount of sunshine was a result of three factors: the tilt or angle between the Earth’s axis and its orbit; the shape of the orbit, which varied from slightly to very elliptical; and the precession or wobble of the Earth’s axis of rotation. Over the past 900,000 years the combination of these three factors caused the global climate to warm and cool in 100,000-year cycles. Meanwhile, the concentration of greenhouse gases also varied. The concentration of methane in the atmosphere is a function of the intensity of solar radiation: the more sunshine, the more vegetation grew and then decayed, releasing methane; that concentration followed a 22,000-year cycle until 5,000 years ago. The carbon dioxide cycle is more complex, as that gas is released by volcanic eruptions and the chemical reaction of rainwater with exposed rocks. That amount followed a 100,000-year cycle, with amounts increasing during ice ages until there was sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere, along with methane and sunshine, to cause interglacials, a period of warmer average global temperatures separating glacial (or cold) periods during an ice age. Eight thousand years ago, had these natural cycles not been [End Page 158] interrupted, the Earth’s climate was about to enter a cooling phase that would eventually lead to another ice age. Instead of a new ice age, we have enjoyed a period of comparatively steady climate called the Holocene. Ruddiman has argued that this turn of events was due to two human innovations, farming and herding, that...