TOW #23: Lessons From the Little Ice Age by Geoffrey Parker

During the 17th century, the world experienced longer winter and shorter, cooler summers in what scientists now call a "mini" Ice Age. This period of cooling lasted from 1620-1690's. The effects were devastating to the human population, causing famine. floods and disease. But more interestingly were the political events tied with this climate change, including riots, rebellions, and catalysts to later major events in history.

In this article, Parker argues that climate change is closely linked with political and economical turmoil. He supports his argument with the use of statistics and logical reasoning. Parker writes, "In Japan, a mass rebellion broke out on the island of Kyushu following several poor harvests. Five years later, famine, followed by an unusually severe winter, killed perhaps 500,000 Japanese." By using statistics to illustrate the scale of the rebellions, Parker highlights just how bad the poor harvests that resulted from this drastic climate change were. Parker also uses logical reasoning to qualify his argument. He writes, "Climate alone did not cause all the catastrophes of the 17th century, but it exacerbated many of them." But admitting that climate change was not solely responsible for every bad thing that happened in the world at that time, he is avoiding the hasty generalization fallacy. However, he follows up to this to clearly outline how the poor harvests and floods because of the period of cooling led to less food, hungrier and sicker people, and desperate and angry citizens.

The audience of this article would probably be the American public, because almost every American, to some extent, is aware of the idea of Climate Change. Of course, the current trend is global warming rather than cooling, but Parker seems to foresee many of the same consequences. Overall, he is effective is showing that that we must be careful about the potentially disastrous effects of global warming, but he does not attempt to address any different effects it would have than global cooling or give any potential solutions.

Geoffrey Parker is a History Professor at Ohio State University and author of "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century".