Early this month I asked the contrarian question, “What if global warming is a good thing?”

I’ve always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis. For the earth will either get warmer or cooler, but it definitely won’t stay the same. Even if everyone were to agree that the globe really is warming, can we please see some scientifically-sound documentation that it is worse than the alternative? …

Answering that question might give some balance to the political debates on the issue.

Still waiting. But via Don Sequiturs I followed a link to a chapter from Brian Fagan’s 1999 book, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations. Chapter 10 is “The Little Ice Age:”

Only 150 years ago, Europe came to the end of a 500 year cold snap so severe that thousands of peasants starved. The Little Ice Age changed the course of European history. Dutch canals froze over for months, shipping could not leave port, and glaciers in the Swiss Alps overwhelmed mountain villages. Five hundred years of much colder weather changed European agriculture, helped tip the balance of political power from the Mediterranean states to the north, and con­tributed to the social unrest that culminated in the French Revolu­tion. The poor suffered most. They were least able to adjust to changing circumstances and most susceptible to disease and increased mortality. These five centuries of periodic economic and so­cial crisis in a much less densely populated Europe are a haunting reminder of the drastic consequences of even a modest cooling of global temperatures. …

Greenland ice sheets tell us there was a burst of warmer weather [in] the far north between A.D. 600 and 650, followed by a more pr longed warm period that began about 800 and climaxed between 1150 and 1300. Norwegian farmers grew wheat north of Trondheim at an unprecedented sixty-four degrees north. English vintners planted grapes as far north as Herefordshire in western England at altitude of 200 meters above sea level. Landowners in the Lammermuir Hills of southeastern Scotland grew crops at 425 meters above sea level, during a golden age of Scottish history when interclan war­fare was virtually unheard of. A burst of cathedral building spread across Medieval Europe in the twelfth century. Chartres Cathedral, built in a mere quarter-century after 1195, is a miracle in glass and stone, where ten thousand worshipers from the surrounding country­side once gathered on festival days to pour out their love for God. Chartres and its contemporaries, were celebrations of the bounty of the soil, of generations of prosperity. …

But the climate became more erratic during the thirteenth century. Alpine glaciers began to advance, and seasonal temperature changes became more extreme. As Arctic regions cooled, the thermal con­trast between the Greenland‑Iceland region and middle Atlantic lati­tudes steepened, causing greater storminess. Great westerly gales conspired with the prevailing high sea levels to cause vast destruc­tion. Powerful wind storms and surging sea floods inundated low-­lying North Sea coasts, drowning hundreds of thousands of people in some of the worst weather disasters ever recorded. The floods of 1240 and 1362 saw over sixty parishes in southern Denmark’s dio­cese of Slesvig “swallowed by the salt sea.” To add to the difficulties, tidal ranges increased after 1300, reaching a peak in 1400.

The Little Ice Age had begun.

On a related but different note, Michael Crichton and J.R. Dunn have written highly insightful essays about how environmentalism is a religion in its own right. See “Environmentalism as Religion” by Crichton and Dunn’s piece, “A Necessary Apocalypse,” in which he shows how gobal-warming environmentalism is not merely a religion, it is an apocalyptic religion. Its deity is Mother Earth (aka Gaia), for whom human beings are mortal enemies. NBC’s Matt Lauer inadvertantly gave away Gaiaism’s central article of faith thus:

Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives …The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home.

My second son was required to take ecology his junior year in high school; he related to me that the curriculum basically said there was nothing wrong with earth that the disappearance of humanity wouldn’t cure. More about this later.