Intricacies are not hidden, however, in the task of examining the multidimensional and interdisciplinary phenomena surrounding Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. The former is a documented span of years, approximately 1645 to 1715, during which sunspot activity was significantly lower than average. The latter, which roughly correlates with the former, is a global climate swing, the dating of which is more ambiguous.
Starting points for the Little Ice Age have been proposed around 1300 or 1350, but some scientists argue for a beginning around 1550. The age terminates around 1850 or 1870. In any case, the age was non-anthropogenic. Climatologists are unsure as to the significance of its correlation with the Maunder Minimum.
It is clear that the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum together correlate with a series of economic, social, political, and military instabilities. Kenneth Pomeranz, in his review of Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis, writes:
We can now be sufficiently precise about at least some past weather events that we can tie them to the sorts of political and social events that unfold in months and years, not just the more diffuse patterns of decades or centuries. This allows us to write histories in which both relatively large patterns of climate and specific human decisions matter.
The climatic instability of the years of the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum correlate to events like the Thirty Years’ War, the overthrow of Charles I in England, and political turmoil in Asia and Africa.
Historians hypothesize that wild non-anthropogenic swings in climate threatened the food supply: both crops and wild game would have been affected. Beyond the agriculture needed for human sustenance, goods produced for trade would have been in short supply, if they relied on weather-dependent components or processes (e.g., tobacco, cotton, silk, spices, leather, etc.).
Competition for the dwindling supply of resources could fuel or trigger political unrest. Yet the ability of humans to adapt and adjust allowed for some level of normalization even during these years of statistically outlying weather. Pomeranz notes that
By the 1680s most major polities had regained some reasonable level of internal stability, though bad climate would persist for another thirty years.
As adaptation, often in terms of technique or technology, allowed humans to acclimate, the political upheaval seemed to subside.
Internal unrest became much less of a problem, even before 18th-century warming took hold, as agricultural improvements spread, market integration advanced, plague and smallpox were much better contained.
Given that “political turmoil ceased well before the climate improved,” it may well be that, even though dramatic climatic instability is non-anthropogenic, the tendency to successfully adapt to climate change is truly human.
