On this episode, AccuWeather Founder & Executive Chairman Dr. Joel N. Myers and AccuWeather Network Chief Meteorologist Bernie Rayno take an interesting look at a devastating weather event that lasted almost five centuries. Find out what caused the Little Ice Age, and whether it was witchcraft.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Welcome to Invisible Iceberg.
00:05On today's show, we take an interesting look at a devastating weather event that lasted
00:10almost five centuries.
00:13It's called the Little Ice Age.
00:15Plus, there are many beliefs on what caused the Little Ice Age, including witchcraft.
00:21We'll explore the myths and the truths behind the cause, and we'll reveal if another Little
00:27Ice Age can happen again today.
00:29It all starts now on Invisible Iceberg.
00:39What caused the cooling of the Little Ice Age that lasted from the start of the 14th
00:43century into the 1800s?
00:46Was this period of global cooling, especially in Europe and North America, caused by sunspots?
00:52Did a change in the ocean currents cause more volcanic eruptions and lower temperatures?
00:58Or was it, as many believed at the time, something far more sinister?
01:04It's just one of the fascinating stories in the book Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and
01:08Weather Shaped History.
01:09Joining us right now is Accuweather founder and executive chairman and author of the book
01:13Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, Dr. Joel Myers.
01:18Good to have you.
01:19It's a pleasure to be here with you again, yes.
01:21This is a very interesting story.
01:24We're going to talk about the Little Ice Age, and we're going to talk about the witch
01:27trials.
01:28I think both concepts are pretty much most Americans and most people have heard of, never
01:35really thought they were related, but they are.
01:38We'll get to that in a second.
01:40Let's talk about the Little Ice Age.
01:43What do we need to know about that?
01:45Well, it was an extraordinarily cold period that lasted actually 550 years, from about
01:521300 to 1850.
01:56Some reports show the average temperature of the Earth was down 5, 6 degrees Fahrenheit
02:01on average over many decades.
02:04Of course, it was unevenly distributed, so in the northern hemisphere, in many of the
02:09populated areas, temperatures averaged 4, 6, 8, 10 degrees below normal in some of those
02:15periods.
02:16That can be devastating to crop production, to output from cows.
02:21They don't give up much milk when they're shivering and cold, and of course, protection
02:26from the cold, extremely cold winters.
02:30We didn't have modern heating, had to burn more wood, and there wasn't insulation like
02:36there is today, so it was devastating.
02:39It would be like the climate of Montreal moving to New York City for centuries.
02:45I thought that was an interesting part of the book, if you just think about that, how
02:49you're just displacing cities hundreds of miles to the north.
02:54As a comparison.
02:55As a comparison.
02:56I mean, it's a way to think about it.
02:58What are the theories that caused this?
03:02We don't know as much as we should.
03:05We know that there was a big minimum of sunspot activity at the beginning, extraordinary,
03:13almost no sunspots for almost a hundred years, at sort of the beginning of this, so there's
03:21no actual causal relationship, but it may just be coincidence, but on the other hand,
03:28we do know that while the solar constant, the amount of energy coming from the sun is
03:34rather constant, that when there's more sunspots, and there are actually cold spots on the sun,
03:40the other part of the sun gives off more energy, and so there's been a correlation
03:44with lack of sunspots with cooler temperatures.
03:51Whether that was the prime factor here, maybe there was volcanic eruptions that put dust
03:55into the atmosphere that reflected energy back into space, solar energy back into space.
04:01Maybe there were changes in ocean currents, which we don't have any information on from
04:06that time period, that can be rather dramatic.
04:09How was it coined the Little Ice Age?
04:12Who came up with that?
04:13Well, it didn't happen until the late 30s, I think it was a Dutch meteorologist or archaeologist
04:20looking at the temperature records coined that phrase, but that's not that far, that's
04:27over a hundred years after it was over.
04:28When I'm reading in your book, I'm looking at it right now, the average drop in North
04:33America was 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit over hundreds of years.
04:38That doesn't sound like a lot, but over a long period, that's significant, explain.
04:48It is, because not only over the period, but that's over the whole Northern Hemisphere.
04:52Now, half of the Northern Hemisphere is in the tropics, 30 degrees north, because the
04:56way the shape of the world is.
04:58So there were places in Europe and North America that were, on average, four, five, six degrees
05:06Fahrenheit colder.
05:08On average, that meant there were some winters, it was 15 or 20 degrees colder, like nothing
05:15we've ever seen.
05:16And when you look back at the records, just from a speculative standpoint, did it end
05:21quickly or is it just a gradual warming as we finally got out of that period?
05:26Well, of course, there's up and downs.
05:28If you look at the graphs, I mean, there were a lot of variation from year to year, from
05:32decade to decade.
05:34I mean, this is a 550-year period, so as you can imagine.
05:37But the temperature tended to go down through most of that period and then sort of bottomed
05:43out in the 1800s.
05:45And then it started up, actually, in the late 1800s, before there was the Industrial Age.
05:52So the temperatures were actually already rising and on an upward trend.
05:56And then, of course, as the burning of fossil fuels added significant CO2 to the atmosphere,
06:01particularly over the last 50 or 60 years, that warming has accelerated and it's been
06:07a hockey stick.
06:08Thank you, Joel.
06:09We'll chat with you again in just a few moments.
06:13Here with more perspective on the Little Ice Ages, Dr. Dagmar de Groot.
06:17He's an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University.
06:22And Mr. Groot, thank you for joining us here today.
06:25Well, thank you so much, Bernie.
06:27It's a pleasure.
06:28Let's talk about the impacts and what it was like, the weather in Europe.
06:33You had these what were called years without summer in the wake of major volcanic eruptions
06:39when there was just a lot of dust in the air.
06:411816 was probably the best known, wasn't the only one.
06:46And during these years without summer, Europe could get really cold.
06:50Temperatures could go down by more than one degree Celsius, at least in parts of northern
06:54Europe.
06:56But temperature wasn't the only thing.
06:58There were also changes in precipitation caused in part by the response of atmospheric
07:05circulation, so the movement of the air across much of the northern hemisphere to these modest
07:11global cooling trends.
07:13So you might have really bad droughts in some years during the Little Ice Age or really
07:18bad pluvials, which means there's a lot of rainfall in other years.
07:22What about the change in weather in North America during this time?
07:27Well, in some respects it was similar.
07:29It seems to have been a regional cooling trend that was a bit more modest than what we had
07:35in Europe, with periods of profound drying as well.
07:38And there's been studies that show that European attempts to colonize North America, for example,
07:44were undermined by cooling and drought, but also that indigenous peoples across North
07:50America were able to respond in diverse and ingenious ways, sometimes by migrating, sometimes
07:56by choosing different types of food or building trading connections with each other, sometimes
08:01actually by exploiting indigenous technologies like the snowshoe to outmaneuver European
08:08colonizers.
08:09With all of this cold, how did it affect crops and livestock, which were such a big part
08:15of society back then?
08:17Yeah, there were profound impacts.
08:19It depends on the crops you're looking at.
08:24But in particular years, in those years without summer, harvest could fail dramatically.
08:30And if you had multiple failures in contemporary societies, there wasn't enough grain often
08:36stockpiled in order to make up the difference.
08:40So food prices would increase, and when food prices rose, you could have lack of food for
08:46many people, starvation, even famine.
08:50So you've got harvest failures connected to extreme weather, the worst weather of the
08:55Little Ice Age, which in turn seems to have been a cause of depopulation.
09:00And well-documented cases are the Ottoman Empire, or Ming China, or Finland, parts of
09:08North America, and sort of the list goes on, where cooling and drought in particular seems
09:14to have caused profound subsistence crises.
09:18Some peoples did benefit.
09:19The Dutch, for example, were able to transport large amounts of grain.
09:25So they often had access from it because they were getting that grain from many different
09:29parts of Europe.
09:30So if you've got extreme weather in one part that's causing a harvest failure, they could
09:34still import it from another part, and then they could still sell the grain for profits
09:40when these subsistence crises, these famines, these really bad times hit other parts of
09:46Europe.
09:47Is the climate warming that ended the Little Ice Age the same that is continuing to this
09:53day?
09:55Absolutely not.
09:56The climate warming that ended the Little Ice Age in the 19th century really preceded
10:02the widespread burning of fossil fuels, and that was quite modest.
10:07Up until the 20th century, not more than a few tenths of degrees Celsius.
10:11But warming really started to take off when we started burning more oil and more coal
10:17into the mid to late 20th century.
10:19What's happening now, the scale of it, the speed, the extent to which it's happening
10:25all over the earth at the same time, there's really no comparison, unfortunately, very
10:29unfortunately, with the Little Ice Age.
10:32And it's all we know.
10:33It's all driven by human activity.
10:35Dr. Dagomar de Groot, Associate Professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University.
10:41Dr. de Groot, thank you so much for joining us today.
10:44Thank you so much.
10:45A pleasure.
10:47Now, as we come, we're diving into weather and witches.
10:50And why did some believe witchcraft was to blame for the Little Ice Age?
10:55We've got the answers after the break.
11:03Welcome back to Invisible Iceberg.
11:05I'm Bernie Raynaud.
11:06We're back with Acua, the founder and executive chairman and author of the book Invisible
11:10Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, Dr. Joel Myers.
11:15You know, we talked about the Little Ice Age, and we talked about the misery and the
11:21problems that the population had, but it did have an unexpected effect, all that cold weather,
11:29didn't it?
11:30It did.
11:31And let's set the stage.
11:32You know, in modern society, around the world, there are places where there's droughts and
11:39crop failures and so on.
11:41But we have transportation.
11:44We have commerce.
11:46We can ship grains and food from places where crops were successful.
11:52But in that era, you know, the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850, there was much less
11:58commerce.
11:59There was no refrigeration or ways to preserve food.
12:04And it was like a communication.
12:05So people didn't know what was going on in other parts of the world.
12:08So when crops failed in a particular region of a country or the country as a whole, it
12:13was devastating, especially if there was nothing stored.
12:18People were starving.
12:21They perished from starvation.
12:23It was particularly cold, so there was more disease.
12:26People were weakened by the lack of food and malnutrition and made them more susceptible.
12:34They'd come down with more.
12:35And, of course, there was, with cold, there's more flus and all kinds of disease.
12:39So it was a miserable, horrible period in many parts of Europe and North America, really
12:46the northern hemisphere, outside the tropics.
12:49And of course, some things never change.
12:52Someone has to be blamed for this.
12:55Who got blamed?
12:57Well, in some parts of the world, particularly where there was not a strong government to
13:02suppress things, people were looking for a scapegoat.
13:08And witches, that's the era of witches, women who somehow caused the hail that wiped out
13:17the crop or the freeze or frost or whatever it was, somebody must be to blame for this.
13:25So that started way back in the 1400s.
13:30And I want to stop you there, because I think in this country, we think of the witch trials,
13:34we think of the Salem witch trials in the 1600s.
13:42But it started well before that, and it didn't start in the United States with the colonies
13:48at that point.
13:49200 years earlier, at the start, in the early days of the Little Ice Age, when it was cold
13:56and the crop failure started and all the impacts of that, the idea that there were
14:02witches causing that.
14:04And so, and it became official.
14:08The Catholic Church recognized that this is something real.
14:14The Pope actually issued a decree about witches, and there were official ways to interrogate
14:21potential witches to determine whether they were real witches and would be killed then.
14:29And there were, I think in Germany, over a thousand witches put to death.
14:35In France, over 2,700 documented.
14:38So probably tens of thousands of people in Europe and then eventually in the United States
14:44were killed because they were witches.
14:48It just goes to show you how little people understood back then.
14:53There was certainly some knowledge about the weather, but not so much about long-term climate
14:57and how things can change.
14:59Yeah.
15:00Well, obviously ignorance and find a scapegoat to make people want to blame things that they
15:08don't understand.
15:09There must be a cause.
15:10And so it's amazing some of the things that humans have done to other humans based on
15:18superstition or whatever reason, and madness of crowds.
15:24You know, other people are doing it.
15:25So it must be true.
15:27Let's talk about the Salem Witch Trials.
15:29When was that period?
15:32That was in the 1600s.
15:33That's right.
15:341782 was the last witch.
15:39Yeah.
15:40That was isolated.
15:41So most of it did end before the revolution, long before the revolution.
15:45And since the Little Ice Age, temperatures have, for the most part, continued to warm.
15:51Yes.
15:52Actually, the warming started in the 1800s, long before the Industrial Age began.
15:59So temperatures were already rising, but they were very cold in the Little Ice Age.
16:03So they were back to what might be thought as more normal by the beginning of the 1900s.
16:10And they continued to warm.
16:11And then, of course, it's really accelerated in the last 50, 60 years due to human impacts
16:17of burning fossil fuels, cutting down the forests and all the other impacts.
16:22But mainly burning fossil fuels, causing an increase in CO2 content, which as the Earth
16:29is warm, too, more methane has escaped into the atmosphere.
16:34And of course, as the temperature warms, you have more water vapor.
16:38Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas.
16:40So all these things are operating in the same direction that cause warming.
16:45And that'll continue as we continue to burn fossil fuels.
16:51The increase of temperature as the CO2 increases from here, percentage-wise, will be less than
16:58it has been.
16:59But it's still going to continue.
17:01And of course, all these effects of methane and water vapor and cutting down forests,
17:07all are compounding and then they are melting of the ice to continue the warming that we're
17:11experiencing now, which we have to deal with.
17:15Well, we've all heard of the Ice Age, the Little Ice Age.
17:17We heard of the witch trials, and now we know that they're connected.
17:22Yes.
17:23I want to thank Akua, the founder and executive chairman and author of the book Invisible
17:26Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, Dr. Joel Myers, for joining us today.
17:31Thanks, Joel.
17:32You're welcome.
17:33And don't take righting a wrong when it comes to witches and weather.
18:04Welcome back to Invisible Iceberg.
18:05I'm Bernie Raynaud.
18:07When you think of witch trials, the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the 17th
18:11century probably comes to mind.
18:14In Salem, the coastal Massachusetts town, 19 people were executed, 14 women and five
18:19men after witchcraft hearings and trials in 1692.
18:24Severe weather floods and disease left colonial settlers scared and looking for scapegoats
18:29to blame for an often frightening and difficult life.
18:33But not as well known are the Connecticut witch trials.
18:36Four decades before the Salem trials, there was also an earlier witchcraft panic in New
18:41England.
18:42According to Connecticut Explored, the colony still under British rule had 43 witchcraft
18:48cases with 16 executions between 1647 and 1663.
18:54Not much documentation of the Connecticut witch trials remained, but many accused of
18:59witchcraft were said to have made a deal with the devil over God and gained supernatural
19:05powers.
19:06But three centuries later, an update.
19:09In November of 2023, the Connecticut General Assembly voted to absolve the witch trial
19:14victims who were killed.
19:16The resolution says procedures of the colonial courts and the public panic caused by superstition
19:22resulted in a miscarriage of justice.
19:25There is also an apology to the descendants of those indicted, convicted, and executed
19:30for witchcraft.
19:32Never too late to right a wrong.
19:34That's our show for today.
19:36For more information and get your copy of the book, Invisible Iceberg, When Climate
19:40and Weather Shaped History, by Dr. Joel Myers, go to InvisibleIceberg.com.
19:46If you have any questions or comments, send us an email at questions at AccuWeather.com.
19:52We look forward to seeing you next time.