When Europe Froze Over - Alternative View

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When Europe Froze Over - Alternative View
When Europe Froze Over - Alternative View

Video: When Europe Froze Over - Alternative View

Video: When Europe Froze Over - Alternative View
Video: Alternate Future of Frozen Europe Episode 2- Cold Wars 2024, March
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If somewhere the local temperature drops a couple of degrees, no one will pay attention to it. But when in the 17th century it became a little cooler on the whole Earth, life changed everywhere, so much so that it was impossible not to notice it. The world around us has changed, and people have also become different.

Endless winter

Everyone had to dress warmer. Fur and women's winter fashion appeared in cozy Western Europe. Princess Christiana from the German land of Palatinate, so as not to freeze, was published in a small sable cape. The cape was called a stole (from the title of the owners of the Palatinate - stoles).

Where it began to freeze, they played snowballs, made snow women, sledged along the rivers. King Louis XIV of France, who loved crowded balls and receptions, went on winter walks with the whole court.

Summer with heavy rains became shorter and colder. There were years of "no summer" when the entire crop was lost. Once France languished for 3 years in a row without wine. It turned out to be too bitter to drink, because the grapes ripened a month later.

Winter with frosts and snowfalls seemed endless to Europeans. The descendants of the Vikings left the "green country" of Greenland, where Eric the Red had brought them several centuries before. Cold winds and glaciers have frozen and blotted out the beautiful, lush green area of southwest Greenland that gave its name to the island.

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The Thames and Danube were frozen. Blizzards and snow drifts stopped life in Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris. The author of the famous epistolary, the socialite Marquis de Sevigne wrote to her daughter on the Cote d'Azur that Paris “is terribly cold. We drown all the time. The sun has changed and the seasons have become confused."

But from the south, the warm ancient Roman climate was leaving. In Padua, Italy, snow fell of "unheard of depth." The Adriatic Sea was frozen off the coast. The Bosporus was covered with ice, and people walked from Europe to Asia and back on foot. On the Arabian Peninsula, Mecca, in 1630, rains partially destroyed the Muslim shrine of the Kaaba.

King and Astronomer

The age-old cold snap had cosmic and earthly reasons. In the 17th century, the activity of the Sun decreased. The earth began to receive much less heat from it. As if by the irony of fortune, in France for more than half of this century, the "sun king" Louis XIV was sitting on the throne. Despite the cosmic nickname, he was more interested in earthly affairs. Like his subjects, he needed to choose warmer outfits.

And the Italian astronomer, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei took up space affairs in the same century. In 1609, he was the first to direct a telescope into the sky and discovered spots on the Sun. He, and then other astronomers, saw that the spots were gradually getting smaller.

As scientists of a later era established, the disappearance of spots means that the activity of the Sun decreases and it emits less energy. From 1645 to 1715, there were almost none, only 50 spots were observed. On Earth, this phenomenon was more pronounced in the Northern Hemisphere.

The earthly reasons for the cooling include the activation of volcanoes. The century began with the largest eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru in the history of South America in 1600. There are suggestions that its climatic consequences have affected even Russia. In the spring of the following year, the rain did not stop here for 10 days, which destroyed most of the crops. In late summer, a severe frost hit, destroying the entire small crop. Hunger began.

In the middle of the century, over 6 years, there were powerful eruptions of 12 volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire. In the 1670s, Etna in Sicily and Hekla in Iceland showed their strength to Europe. Clouds of volcanic ash and dust, rising to the stratosphere, carried by air currents, covered the Earth from the weakened Sun for years. They, too, did not allow the planet to warm up.

In Europe it became colder for a long time also because the Gulf Stream slowed down. This ocean current brings warm waters from America to European shores and adds 8-10 degrees of heat in France, Great Britain, Germany, and less in Scandinavia, although even the Barents Sea gets warm and does not freeze completely. The air heated by the current is carried by the westerly winds throughout Europe.

This huge, up to 110-120 kilometers wide, oceanic "river" has 20 times more water than all the land rivers of the world. It has a rather fast current - up to 2.6 m / s, and if the Gulf Stream flows more slowly, Europe will immediately feel it, as in the 17th century.

Then ice covered the coasts of England, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland. The ice situation interfered with the navigation of these coastal countries. In Northern Germany and Scotland, viticulture and winemaking disappeared.

A century of disasters

In the 17th century, a cold snap affected everything, but most of all - on agriculture, which was then the main thing in people's lives. Sown areas and yields were reduced. Hunger and high mortality for decades entered the life of entire nations.

There is a record of a French royal judge that two-thirds of the inhabitants of the villages around Paris died of hunger and disease. The abbess of the Port-Royal-de-Channe monastery near Paris, Angelica Arnault, thought that the general devastation must mean the end of the world. The English poet John Milton wrote that a world dominated by death reigned in his country.

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There were food riots in European countries. They shook France in the middle of the century. At the same time, in England in just 3 years - from 1647 to 1649 - there were 14 uprisings. Then the weather destroyed almost the entire crop for 5 years in a row. In what is now Switzerland and Germany, over 100 years there have been 25 major uprisings of desperate peasants.

In China, far from Europe, but also starving, where a quarter of the world's population lived, millions of people rebelled. Unable to withstand the socio-climatic and military tests, the Ming Empire collapsed. One of the emperors of the new Qing dynasty admitted that the population had declined by more than half. It was reported to him that many desperate people commit suicide.

In Europe, the largest state in this part of the world at that time - Rzeczpospolita (the federation of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) was on the verge of destruction. Russia and Turkey experienced shocks.

The cold and hungry age brought long interstate and internal wars. In 100 years, there have been only 3 peaceful years in Europe. There were no more wars, but they, except for the Hundred Years (1337-1453), lasted longer. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) engulfed most European countries.

The two longest wars of Louis XIV lasted 9 and 13 years. It was also difficult for him to win because the average height of his soldiers, descendants of several starving generations, was just over one and a half meters.

Historians explain the long wars, in particular, by the fact that in the harsh conditions it was more difficult or even impossible for the opposing countries to gather enough forces to win. In addition, epidemics of plague, Turnip, cholera, typhoid took millions of lives of extremely weak people. In some countries, more than half of the population died, losses reached 75%. According to the darkest statistics, the global centennial crisis has killed almost a third of the world's population.

Weather forecast

In this century, in contrast to the 17th century, we expect a warmer. Climate change experts predict probable or possible temperature increases of 1-3 degrees by the middle of the century and even 2-5 degrees by the last decade. But the rise in temperature does not mean that there will be fewer extreme weather events now, unlike the cold 17th century.

Relatively recently - in 1997 and 2002 - in Central Europe there were floods, called "millennial" for the scale. They caused more than $ 40 billion in damage. In 2003, 70 thousand people could not stand a two-week heat wave in Western Europe.

The most expensive hurricane in US history, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, caused $ 80 billion in damage. More than 2 thousand people died.

However, this is only one problem for one country. All in all, that year in the world of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, temperature fluctuations dangerous for people and other large and small natural disasters happened almost 500. Their number is steadily increasing. In 2013, there were 880 major natural disasters.

Human intervention cannot exclude them from the life of the Earth. Education and training of the population for extreme situations, an early warning system for threats, quick and effective emergency assistance can only mitigate the consequences. However, preventing volcanic eruptions, changing the speed and direction of ocean currents above human strength, and we can only observe spots on the Sun.

Climatic changes on the planet continue with almost no human intervention. The Earth is now warming up. Last year was the hottest year since 1880, when global weather observations began.

Victor GORBACHEV