To understand how climate change will transform our future, you have to know how it shaped our past.
Today, the world is warming with alarming speed. Yet although the source of that warming is something entirely new - human greenhouse gas emissions - climate change is as old as the Earth itself.
After discovering signs of past climate change in everything from polar ice sheets to tree trunks, from ancient Egyptian papyri to Viking ruins, scholars now know that Earth has warmed and cooled modestly but meaningfully over the entire history of human civilization. In the thirteenth century, for example, the Sun's activity waned just as massive volcanic eruptions released cooling dust into the stratosphere. It was the beginning of what is now known as "Little Ice Age."
Across much of the world, the Little Ice Age reached its chilliest point in the seventeenth century. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of publications now argue that, by interrupting or shortening growing seasons, the Little Ice Age triggered or worsened social crises in most of the world's societies and communities.
Yet a few prospered during even the coldest decades of the seventeenth century, and none more than the Dutch Republic: the state that would become the present-day Netherlands. In The Frigid Golden Age, Georgetown University professor Dagomar Degroot shows how the Little Ice Age transformed environments around the Republic so that they were easier for the Dutch to exploit in commerce and conflict. He also reveals how the Dutch were resilient, even adaptive, in the face of weather that devastated neighboring countries. Merchants exploited harvest failures, military commanders took advantage of shifting wind patterns, and inventors developed technologies that helped them profit from the cold. Ultimately, the "Golden Age" of the Republic owed much to the remarkable flexibility of the Dutch in coping with a changing climate - and exploiting those who suffered.
The Frigid Golden Age is the first book to explore how a society thrived amid the Little Ice Age, and among the first to consider the experience of climate change at sea. It shows that the Dutch experience has much to tell us about how we might thrive - or falter - in the uncertain times ahead.
After discovering signs of past climate change in everything from polar ice sheets to tree trunks, from ancient Egyptian papyri to Viking ruins, scholars now know that Earth has warmed and cooled modestly but meaningfully over the entire history of human civilization. In the thirteenth century, for example, the Sun's activity waned just as massive volcanic eruptions released cooling dust into the stratosphere. It was the beginning of what is now known as "Little Ice Age."
Across much of the world, the Little Ice Age reached its chilliest point in the seventeenth century. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of publications now argue that, by interrupting or shortening growing seasons, the Little Ice Age triggered or worsened social crises in most of the world's societies and communities.
Yet a few prospered during even the coldest decades of the seventeenth century, and none more than the Dutch Republic: the state that would become the present-day Netherlands. In The Frigid Golden Age, Georgetown University professor Dagomar Degroot shows how the Little Ice Age transformed environments around the Republic so that they were easier for the Dutch to exploit in commerce and conflict. He also reveals how the Dutch were resilient, even adaptive, in the face of weather that devastated neighboring countries. Merchants exploited harvest failures, military commanders took advantage of shifting wind patterns, and inventors developed technologies that helped them profit from the cold. Ultimately, the "Golden Age" of the Republic owed much to the remarkable flexibility of the Dutch in coping with a changing climate - and exploiting those who suffered.
The Frigid Golden Age is the first book to explore how a society thrived amid the Little Ice Age, and among the first to consider the experience of climate change at sea. It shows that the Dutch experience has much to tell us about how we might thrive - or falter - in the uncertain times ahead.