With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

If the Viking settlers had followed the ways of their Eskimo neighbors and
turned to hunting seals and polar bears, they might have survived. But
instead, they stuck to their hens and sheep and grain crops, and built
ever-bigger churches in the hope that God would save them. He did not.
When relief finally arrived, nobody was left alive in the settlement. Creeping
starvation had cut the average height of a Greenland Viking from a sturdy
five feet nine inches to a stunted five feet. The last women were so deformed
that they were probably incapable of bearing a new generation. We know all
this because their buried corpses were preserved in the spreading
permafrost.
The little ice age, first documented in the 1960s by the British climate
historian Hubert Lamb, is now an established part of Europe's history. It has
often been seen as just a historical curiosity—a nasty but local blip in a balmy
world of European climatic certainty But it is increasingly clear that what
Europe termed the little ice age was close to a global climatic convulsion,
which took different forms in different places.
Because it came and went over several centuries, the task of attributing
different climate events around the world to the influence of the little ice age
is fraught with difficulties. But reasonable cases have been made that it
blanketed parts of Ethiopia with snow, destroyed crops and precipitated the
collapse of the Ming dynasty in seventeenth-century China, and spread ice
across Lake Superior in North America. In the tropics, temperatures were
probably largely unchanged, but rainfall patterns altered substantially. In
the Amazon basin, the centuries of Europe's little ice age were so dry that
fires ravaged the tinderbox rainforests. In the Sahara, which often seems to